186 The Evolution of Mind. 



one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may 

 abstract them. Some such other worlds may exist in the 

 consciousness of ant, crab and cuttle-fish."* To awake to 

 a realization of the world as we know it, the evolution of 

 our organs of special sense became necessary, and parijiassu 

 therewith, our nervous system. Effects always succeed 

 causes. Our organs are all effects, and consciousness in some 

 form the necessary antecedent. That eyes were made for 

 seeing and not seeing for eyes, seems to be the only rational 

 conclusion for an evolutionist to reach. It is easy to picture 

 to ourselves a God making an eye and then putting a soul 

 behind it to see through it. It is not possible to picture evo- 

 lution doing the same thing. An eye represents millions 

 of selections utterly useless and even injurious to a non- 

 seeing being. The fact that these accumulations have oc- 

 curred, is itself proof of a seeing power preceding eyes. 

 Natural selection does not operate by accumulating useless- 

 and injurious things. If there was, from the very start, 

 somethin'g present capable of seeing, every little change 

 aiding it in this, would become a benefit to the whole or- 

 ganism. What is true of the eye is equally true of the 

 ear and the organs of taste and smell. The very first step 

 taken toward any of these, could only have been preserved 

 because it answered the requirements of a pre-existing con- 

 sciousness, t The fortuitous production of things so perfect. 

 is not for a moment to be considered. They satisfy a de- 

 mand that preceded them. Within the eyeless, earless, 

 noseless, mouthless protoplasm, existed that which was psy- 

 chically capable of obeying the law of evolution by changing 

 from indefiniteness to definiteness, from incoherence to co- 

 herence, from homogeneity to heterogeneity. X The jumble 

 of physical forces played upon it, and produced within it a 

 chaos of impressions to which no definite attention was ap- 

 plied. Slowly, changes occurred, with ever increasing per- 

 fection, that brought out a distinction between light- waves 

 and sound-waves, between tastes and odors, between heat 

 and cold. Corresponding to the material integration into 

 a nervous system, was a psychic integration into an 

 ego ; and answering to the dissemination of motion was 

 the disappearance of conflicting tendencies of cells. Thus- 



*Mind, Vol. 4, p. 14. 



t Vide Prof. Cope on Catagenesis, in American Naturalist, Vol. 18, p. 972. 



% Spencer's First Principles of Philosophy, pp. 3!)4-.'5 ( .)(> (1873). 



