314 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY, [vt. ii. 



within the narrowest limits, up through higher stages in 

 which increasing nervous complexities give increasing varie- 

 ties of actions and possibilities of new combinations, the 

 process continues the same ; and it continues the same as 

 we advance from the savage to the civilized man. For vrhere 

 the life furnishes relatively few and little- varied experiences, 

 where the restricted sphere in which it is passed yields no 

 sign of the multitudinous combinations of phenomena that 

 occur elsewhere, the thought follows irresistibly one or other 

 of the few channels which the experiences have made for it, 

 — cannot be determined in some other direction for want of 

 some other channel But as fast as advancing civilization 

 brings more numerous experiences to each man, as well as 

 accumulations of other men's experiences, past and present, 

 the ever- multiplying connections of ideas that result imply 

 ever- multiplying possibilities of thought. The convictions 

 throughout a wide range of cases are rendered less fixed. 

 Other causes than those which are usual become conceivable ; 

 other effects can be imagined ; and hence there comes an in- 

 creasing modifiability of opinion. This modifiability of opinion 

 reaches its extreme in those most highly cultured persons 

 whose multitudinous experiences include many experiences 

 of errors discovered, and whose representativeness of thought 

 iis so far-reaching that they habitually call to mind the 

 various possibilities of error, as constituting a general reason 

 for seeking new evidence and subjecting their conclusions to 

 revision. 



"If we glance over the series of contrasted modes of 

 thinking which civilization presents, beginning with the 

 savage who, seized by the fancy that something is a charm 

 or an omen, thereafter continues firmly fixed in that belief, 

 and ending with the man of science whose convictions, firm 

 where he is conscious of long-accumulated evidence having 

 no exception, are plastic where the evidence though abun- 

 dant is not yet overwhelming, we see how an increase m 



