30 THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE : 



Not till we know the law of ourselves, in fact, shall we know the law 

 of the emerald and the orange, or of Nature generally ; and the law of 

 ourselves is not learnt, except subordinately, by intellectual investigation ; 

 it is mainly learnt by life. The relation of gravity to vitality is learnt not 

 so much by outer experiment in a laboratory as by long experience within 

 ourselves from the day when as infants we cannot lift ourselves above the 

 floor, through the years of the proud strength of manhood scaling the 

 loftiest mountains, to the hour when our disengaged spirits finally over- 

 come and pass beyond the attraction of the earth ; and just as the sense 

 of weight which first appears as a quite external sensation is thus at 

 last found to stand in most pregnant relation with our deepest selves, so 

 of the other senses which feed the individual life the senses of light, of 

 warmth, of taste, of sound, of smell. Taste, which begins as it were on 

 the tip of the tongue, becomes ultimately, if normally developed, a sense 

 which identifies itself with the health and well-being of the whole body ; 

 the pleasure of taste becomes vastly more than a mere surface pleasure, 

 and its discrimination of food more than a mere regard for the nutrition 

 of the ordinary corporeal functions. The sense of Light, which begins 

 in the material eye, grows and deepens inwardly till the consciousness of 

 it pervades the whole body and mind with a kind of inward illumination 

 or divine Reason, showing the places of all things and enfolding the sense 

 of beauty in itself. The sense of Warmth in the same manner is related 

 to and leads up to Love ; and Sound, in the voices of our friends or the 

 divine chords of music, has passed away from being an external phenome- 

 non and has established itself as the language of our most tender and 

 intimate emotions. 



All the senses thus as they develop and deepen are found to unite in 

 the very focus of individual life. Slowly, and through long experience, 

 their relation to each other, their very meaning unfolds, or will unfold ; 

 and as this process takes place the man knows himself one, a unity, of 

 which the various faculties are the different manifestations. Then further 

 through his less localised feelings or more glorified senses the individual 

 finds his relation to other individuals. Through his loves and hatreds, 

 through his senses of attraction, repulsion, cohesion, solidarity, order, 

 justice, charity, right, wrong and the rest these feelings, each like the 

 others deepening back more and more as time goes on he gradually dis- 

 covers his true and abiding relationship to other individuals and to the 

 divine society of which they all form a part and so at last, if we may 

 venture to say so, his relationship to the absolute and universal. At 

 present, since our most important relation to each other is conceived of 

 as one of rivalry and Competition, we of course think of the objects of 

 Nature as being chiefly engaged in a Struggle for Existence with each 

 other ; but when we become aware of all our senses and feelings, and of 

 ourselves as individuals, as having relation to the Absolute and universal, 

 proceeding from it, as the branches and twigs of a tree from the trunk 



