49 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Ascent 

 Assumptions 



sounds, and tastes with which experience 

 has associated them. In fact, the " ob- 

 jects " of our perception, as trees, men, 

 nouses, microscopes, of which the real world 

 seems composed, are nothing but clusters 

 of qualities which through simultaneous 

 stimulation have so coalesced that the mo- 

 ment one is excited actually it serves as a 

 sign or cue for the idea of the others to 

 rise. Let a person enter his room in the 

 dark and grope among the objects there. 

 The touch of the matches will instanta- 

 neously recall their appearance. If his 

 hand comes in contact with an orange on 

 the table, the golden yellow of the fruit, its 

 savor and perfume will forthwith shoot 

 through his mind. In passing the hand 

 over the sideboard or in jogging the coal- 

 scuttle with the foot, the large, glossy, dark 

 shape of the one and the irregular blackness 

 of the other awaken like a flash and con- 

 stitute what we call the recognition of the 

 objects. The voice of the violin faintly 

 echoes through the mind as the hand is laid 

 upon it in the dark, and the feeling of the 

 garments or draperies which may hang 

 about the room is not understood till the 

 look correlative to the feeling has in each 

 case been resuscitated. . . . We can- 

 not hear the din of a railroad train or the 

 yell of its whistle without thinking of its 

 long, jointed appearance and its headlong 

 speed, nor catch a familiar voice in a 

 crowd without recalling, with the name of 

 the speaker, also his face. JAMES Psychol- 

 ogy, vol. i, ch. 14, p. 555. (H. H. & Co., 

 1899.) 



246. ASSOCIATION, THE SPIRIT OF 



Power of Voluntary Societies Church 

 Country. New motives can be evoked and 

 put in action by the adopting of appropri- 

 ate means. The mere founding, for ex- 

 ample, of a voluntary society for any given 

 purpose evolves out of the primary ele- 

 ments of human character a latent force of 

 the most powerful kind, namely, the mo- 

 tive the sentiment the feeling the pas- 

 sion, as it often is, of the spirit of associa- 

 tion. This is a passion which defies anal- 

 ysis. The cynic may reduce it to a form 

 of selfishness and undoubtedly the identi- 

 fication of the interests, and the desires of 

 self with the society for which this passion 

 is conceived, lies at its very root and is of 

 its very essence. It is true, also, that it is 

 a passion so powerful as to need strong con- 

 trol without which control it generates 

 some of the very meanest emotions of the 

 heart. Out of it there has come, and there 

 comes again and again from age to age, a 

 spirit of hatred even against good itself, 

 when that good is the work of any one who 

 " followeth not us." It is a force, neverthe- 

 less, rooted in the nature of man, implanted 

 there as part of its constitution, and, like 

 all others of this character, given him for 

 a purpose, and having its own legitimate 

 field of operation. Nor is that field a nar- 



row one. The spirit of association is the 

 fountain of much that is noblest in human 

 character, and of much that is most heroic 

 in human conduct. For all the desires and 

 aspirations of self are not selfish. The in- 

 terests of self, justly appreciated and right- 

 ly understood, may be, nay indeed must be, 

 the interests also of other men of society 

 of country of the church, and of the 

 world. ARGYLL Reign of Law, ch. 7, p. 219. 

 (Burt.) 



247. ASSUMPTION NECESSARY TO 

 MAINTAIN A THEORY Spontaneous Gen- 

 eration ~Never Known Assumed in Order 

 to Dispense with a Creator. The origin of 

 the first Monera by spontaneous generation 

 appears to us as a simple and necessary 

 event in the process of the development of 

 the earth. We admit that this process, as 

 long as it is not directly observed or re- 

 peated by experiment, remains a pure hy- 

 pothesis. But I must again say that this 

 hypothesis is indispensable for the con- 

 sistent completion of the non-miraculous 

 history of creation, that it has absolutely 

 nothing forced or miraculous about it, and 

 that certainly it can never be positively re- 

 futed. It must also be taken into consid- 

 eration that the process of spontaneous gen- 

 eration, even if it still took place daily and 

 hourly, would in any case be exceedingly 

 difficult to observe and establish with ab- 

 solute certainty as such. This is also the 

 opinion of Naegeli, the ingenious investi- 

 gator, and he, in his admirable chapter on 

 spontaneous generation, maintains that " to 

 deny spontaneous generation is to proclaim 

 miracles." HAECKEL History of Creation, 

 vol. i, ch. 15, p. 422. (K. P. & Co., 1899.) 



248. ASSUMPTIONS OF MONISM 



Spontaneous Generation Never Proved 

 Mind to Be Evolved from Fire-mist Faith 

 Demanded in Philosophic Creed. It is 

 plain that we might here enter our dissent 

 from Haeckel's method, for he requires us, 

 before we can proceed a single step in the 

 evolution of man, to assume many things 

 which he cannot prove. What evidence is 

 there, for example, of the possibility of the 

 development of the rational and moral na- 

 ture of man from the intelligence and the 

 instinct of the lower animals, or of the 

 necessary dependence of the phenomena of 

 mind on the structure of brain-cells? The 

 evidence, so far as it goes, seems to tend 

 the other way. What proof is there of the 

 spontaneous evolution of living forms from 

 inorganic matter? Experiment so far nega- 

 tives the possibility of this. Even if we 

 give Haeckel, to begin with, a single living 

 cell or granule of protoplasm, we know that 

 this protoplasm must have been produced 

 bv the agency of a living vegetable cell pre- 

 viously existing; and we have no proof 

 that it can be produced in any other way. 

 Asrain. what particle of evidence have we 

 that the atoms or the energy of an incan- 

 descent fire-mist have in them anything of 



