300 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [it. il 



through croo'ked streets without losing the way. But in 

 these respects the most sagacious of us are hut hunglers 

 compared with primitive men or with dogs and foxes. Few 

 things are more striking than the unerring instinct with 

 which the Indian makes his way through utterly trackless 

 forests, seldom stopping to make up his mind, and taking in 

 at a single glance whole groups of signs which to his civilized 

 companion are inappreciable. The loss of this power of co- 

 ordination, like the decrease in the range of the senses, is 

 undoubtedly due to disuse, the circumstances of civilized 

 life affording little or no occasion for the exercise of these 

 faculties.-^ 



But although in these respects the correspondence in space 

 does not seem to have been extended with the progress of 

 civilization, yet in those far more indirect and complicated 

 adjustments which, as involving time-relations of force and 

 cause, depend largely on the aid of the cerebrum, the civil- 

 ized man surpasses the savage to a much greater extent 

 than the savage surpasses the wolf or lion. " By combin- 

 ing his own perceptions with the perceptions of others as 

 registered in maps," the modern '* can reach special places 

 lying thousands of miles away over the earth's surface. A 

 ship, guided by compass and stars and chronometer, brings 

 him from the antipodes information by which his purchases 

 here are adapted to prices there. From the characters of 

 exposed strata he infers the presence of coal below ; and 

 thereupon adjusts the sequences of his actions to coexist- 

 ences a thousand feet beneath. Nor is the environment 



^ In the course of tlie recent interesting discnssion and correspondence in 

 Nature concerning the " sense of direction " exhibited in barbarians and lower 

 animals, it was observed that a party of Samoyeds will travel in a direct line 

 fron vne point to another over trackless fields of ice, even on clondy nights, 

 when there is accordingly nothing whatever that is visible to guide their 

 course. It would be too much to assert that this faculty is utterly lost in 

 civiliz?d man, so that a temporary recurrence to the conditions of barbaric 

 life might not revive it ; but even if retained at all, it is certainly kept quite 

 in abeyancj. 



