THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



have no further difficulty in accepting the idea of 

 the natural evolution of life on the surface of 

 this globe. In this case life would simply repre- 

 sent one point of aggregation, a focus of that one 

 faculty of nature, "feeling." It would simply 

 be a product of concentration, much as the forma- 

 tion of the entire sun or earth represents a prod- 

 uct of concentration of another faculty, gravita- 

 tion. This product of concentration may have 

 had its own peculiar chain of causation. Consid- 

 ering that we have found life only in connection 

 with definite chemical conditions which do not 

 admit of any white heat, there is nothing to pre- 

 vent us from assuming that its own laws of evo- 

 lution could not arise until the primitive heat of 

 the globe had been mitigated. 



Let us also mention at this point that Fechner 

 and more precisely Preyer, also considered the 

 possibility that the cell life known to us might 

 represent merely a product of adaptation to a 

 cooler atmosphere, while the concentration of 

 feeling in the primitive atmosphere of the sun 

 was conditioned on another chemical form of 

 adaptation useful in that other environment. But 

 in principle all this is immaterial, and we aprjly 

 the term "life" only to cell life between the stages 

 of the amoeba and man. This life, at all events, 



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