152 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



centres, are no stumbling-blocks to us. They are 

 supports along the path of inquiry, because we ac- 

 count for their persistence. Thought and feeling 

 have a common base, because man is a unit, not a 

 duality. But the exercise of the one has been active 

 from the beginnings of his history — indeed we know 

 not at what point backward we can classify it as 

 human or quasi-human — while the other, speaking 

 comparatively, has but recently been called into play. 

 So far as its influence on the modern world goes, 

 may we not say that it began at least in the domain 

 of scientific naturalism with the Ionian philosophers? 

 Emotionally, we are hundreds of thousands of years 

 old; rationally, we are embryos. 



In other words, man wondered countless ages 

 before he reasoned; because feehng travels along 

 the line of least resistance, while thought, or the 

 challenge by inquiry — therefore- the assumption that 

 there may be two sides to a question — must pursue 

 a path obstructed by the dominance of custom, the 

 force of imitation, and the strength of prejudice and 

 fear. It is here that anthropology, notably that 

 psychical branch of it comprehended under folk-lore, 

 takes up the cue from the momentous doctrine of 

 heredity; explains the persistence of the primitive; 

 and the causes of man's tardy escape from the illu- 

 sions of the senses, and the general conservatism of 

 human nature. " Born into life! in vain. Opinions, 

 those or these, unalter'd to retain the obstinate 

 mind decrees," as in the striking illustration cited in 



