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PART V. WORKING STAGE. 



easily offered; but the difficulty is to fix unmistakably on the 

 source of the evil, which only the widest and most searching 

 examination may be able to disclose. Cholera, plague, con- 

 sumption, insanity, and certain deficiency diseases, have been 

 in this manner more or less successfully traced to their causes, 

 and this has invariably entailed much circumspect drawing on 

 a copious memory, though, of course, not without detailed 

 attention to the circumstantial facts of the disease. In the 

 physical sciences the use of the imagination is for this reason 

 increasingly required, since gravitation, heat, light, electricity, 

 magnetism, radiation, chemistry, and now astronomy, begin to 

 melt into one another and to interpret each other, and since 

 so much is invisible owing to diminutiveness or bulkiness and 

 demands recourse to analogy for the purpose of determining 

 the nature and causes of objects and processes. Thus, to 

 venture on one illustration from geology, where the factors are 

 frequently difficult to trace and where the instructed imagination 

 proves to be a valuable auxiliary. "It is believed that the 

 accumulation of a sheet of ice, several thousand feet in thickness, 

 will depress that part of the earth's crust on which it rests. 

 On the other hand, the part of the crust which lies immediatly 

 to the south of the ice-sheet will well upwards, it is believed, 

 in the form of a wave, giving rise to such an elevation as is 

 occurring in Scandinavia now. Still further south, beyond the 

 wave of elevation, there is a secondary trough or depression." 

 (A. Keith, The Antiquity of Man, 1920, p. 45.) Also, once we 

 ascertain that man is primarily a specio-psychic being, the ex- 

 planation of innumerable human facts will be sought in the 

 multitudinous cultural forces in operation, and this can only be 

 accomplished by passing mentally in review apposite data and 

 reconstructing situations in the imagination. 



For instance, here and there sundry writers have lightly 

 touched on the cultural nature of man; but through failing to 

 develop the conception, they have left the subject in a rudiment- 

 ary condition impotent to affect current theories. On this ac- 

 count it was relatively easy for Darwin, and those who followed 

 him, to overlook the real inwardness of the cultural factor. 

 If man possessed this, that, and the other quality, why, it was 

 reasoned, characters resembling these could be detected scattered 

 throughout the animal kingdom, 'and if culturists spoke of 

 human progress, it was not difficult to confuse cultural with 

 biological progress, and even to deny progress by citing ex- 

 ceptional or petty instances suggestive of the absence of 

 progress. A proper use of the imagination would have quickly 

 shown that, first, a relevant comparison could only be instituted 

 between man and some one particular animal species, not 

 between man and all animal species. Furthermore, by patiently 

 analysing the wealth of human culture as regards means of 

 communicating feelings and thoughts to one's fellow creatures, 



