100 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
graphic picture of the pre-scientific* solutions offered to the problems of 
life, and the accompanying states of mind; on the one hand physical and 
moral torpor, apathy, despondency, resignation; on the other hand a de- 
liberate forcing of a state of abstraction from external reality, and a pro- 
duction of subjective effects by intense introversion of self-consciousness. 
This latter is illustrated amongst us by what with rich irony is called 
Christian Science. A lady Christian Scientist doctor was recently called 
in by a fond mother to treat a child for boils on the head. Turning up- 
ward her rapt face, she began by saying “I see no boils.” How perfectly 
evolutional and archaic this method is was emphasized for me by a recent 
spontaneous exhibition of it on the part of my youngest child, who had 
just refused his mother’s command to carry a box of matches to his 
father. 
The command being sharply reiterated with threat of dire punishment 
and the box extended to him, he screamed out, “But I can’t see any box 
of matches! I can’t see any box of matches!” 
Neither could he; for he was holding his eyes tight shut! 
But for those whose eyes actually open on the real horrors of our 
world, the impulse to the other archaic solution, the resignation, the Kis- 
met, the Calvinism has been so far almost irresistible. 
In our free-silver sister republic this summer I was witness to a scene 
whose piercing pathos no words of mine can adequately reproduce. 
At Guanajuato a funeral entered the Panteon. The hired hearse was 
a man who carried the hired coffin on his head. The funeral procession 
consisted of three persons; two graceful if barefooted, bareheaded, rag- 
ged little girls, sisters of the corpse, and then the poor mother, heart- 
broken, dazed, who paid the hearse her last poor little silver coin. The 
shallow grave was just being finished, and so thick is this ground with 
human remains that a horrid, loathsome, rotting skull, with patches of 
stinking flesh and hair, was thrown up at our feet. The very earth was 
putrid, and into this pit the hired hearse, opening the hired coffin, 
dumped the half-naked body of a beautiful girl. 
Not a single word was spoken. The grave-digger began shoveling in 
the fetid dirt. 
Looking from the face of the agonized mother to the hare dead feet 
still protruding from the earth, I felt an appreciation of Tolstoi’s solu- 
tion for the problem of this life — renunciation. What these our fellows 
can never have any hope of, that will we also reject, to share their lot 
with perfect unselfishness, brotherhood. Says Tolstoi: “The vocation 
of every man and woman is to serve other people.” 
He dwells with stress on the renunciation of our individual happiness. 
Wonderful is the clearness, simplicity, sweetness of his ideal. Must we 
accept also its hopelessness? 
