zxx THE DARWIN CENTENARY. [April 23, 



him to reflect with curiosity upon the possible psychic life of micro- 

 organisms, to stand perplexed before a case of dual personality, to 

 note the resemblances and the differences which mark the mental 

 life of the lowest and of the highest races of men, to contrast with 

 these the evidences of intelligence betrayed by creatures which stand 

 lower in the scale of life, cannot but be impressed by the fact that 

 given manifestations of mind occur under given conditions, that 

 mental phenomena are to be assigned unequivocally a place in the 

 evolution of things. For him, the mind of a man, or the mind of a 

 brute, is not an explained fact, for his science leads him as yet but 

 a very little way ; but it is an explicable fact, a theoretically explic- 

 able fact. He stands with confessed ignorance in the presence of 

 many mysteries ; but it is the fundamental assumption of his science 

 that they are not hopeless mysteries; they are the mysteries of in- 

 complete knowledge. 



It will readily be seen even by a layman tliat this psychology is 

 not the psychology of the pre-Darwinian thought. The old psy- 

 chology has not merely grown, as all sciences may be expected to 

 grow under the hands of their builders. It has been revolutionized. 

 Mental phenomena are no longer phenomena at large, with no 

 definite relation to any system. They are brought down from the 

 empyrean and planted in the bosom of mother earth; where it, 

 must be confessed, they seem to find a soil adapted to them, and 

 where they show signs of a fertility in which they before appeared 

 conspicuously lacking. 



This modern view of the mind has been of far-reaching signifi- 

 cance for all the sciences which treat of man, individual and social. 

 Thus, the science of sesthetics regards as significant material the 

 sentiment of beauty in its lowest manifestations as well as in its 

 highest. It cannot permit the dictation of any one man, or accept 

 as final the esthetic judgment of any age or clime. It goes much 

 deeper, and recognizes a relative justification for judgments the 

 most diverse. Without denying progress, and without obliterating 

 the line between the actual and the ideal, it sees in the divers 

 standards of beauty which have been accepted or are accepted today, 

 aspects of the evolution of the higher emotions, each significant in its 

 place, having its role to play in the development of humanity, not to 



