I4i6 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



ment, in which the simple feehngs of hfe-maintenance are over- ' 

 powered, we have manifestly the spring of what we may henceforth 

 rightly distinguish as Emotions, and which even before Darwin's A^ 

 fundamental "Expression of the Emotions" have been plainly 

 traceable from innumerable simple animals upwards, to peacock 

 and skylark, and from plain man to poet. 



More and more then, we see how our left-hand half-diagram, 

 Pwf, has ever been gaining and incorporating more and more from 

 the right. Baby does not really sense, move or feel definitely at first, 

 beyond "buzzing and booming confusion", as William James puts 

 it: and his later sense-experience and feeling is, very largely at least, 

 an acquirement from his more active life. In the more passive 

 animal types, it is therefore no wonder that we so often find regres- 

 sion rather than progress, and this carried to extreme in the parasite, 

 not despite but because of its optimum conditions of nutrition aud 

 safe protection from the active experiences of life. Evolution proper 

 is far more compatible with the active life; and through mastering 

 its difficulties, facing its dangers. 



How these advance the individual life, and stir it to that effort, 

 and even selective choice, to which we cannot refuse some beginning 

 of intelligence, and of which steps are traceable from a case-building 

 protozoon to an architect, has long been manifest. And similarly for 

 the emotional arousal by the reproductive urge. We cannot here 

 enter into the still far from settled questions of the rise of man's 

 psychologic nature, from simplest to highest recorded levels, though 

 in the next diagram we shall attempt this in outline. Yet that human 

 thought, up to its utmost creativeness, is deeply evolved from these 

 simple urges of self and sex, we have increasing evidence since our 

 own Evolution of Sex (1889) > ^^ so notably of late years from Freud's 

 and kindred studies of sex, starting from the pathological and 

 abnormal side, so with contemporary interest centred around the 

 theories and methods of psycho-analysis. But long before these, one 

 recalls from Paris student-life — than which we know of none more 

 strenuously intellectual — the not infrequent saying: "II faut faire 

 passer son sexe par son cerveau!" For here is surely a main secret 

 of the origin of effective and creative thought of all kinds. For this 

 master-urge is thus sublimated, and turned to intensifying and 

 widening the self-thought as well, and thus with unified outcome. 

 Each in its way is significant, yet advancing (or retarding) com- 

 munity culture and personal individuality together; as is manifest 

 from the ruthless outspokenness of Zola's Germinal to the all- 

 transcendant Paradise of Dante. As intermediate type, let us take 

 Schiller, to whom none will deny idealism: yet he reminds us that 

 "while philosophers are disputing about the government of the 

 world, hunger and love are performing the task". And Goethe — a 

 true naturalist and evolutionist — says the like in a well-known verse. 



