Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind

What is Cosmic Consciousness? The present volume is an attempt to answer this question ; but notwithstanding it seems well to make a short prefatory statement in as plain language as possible so as to open the door, as it were, for the more elaborate exposition to be attempted in the body of the work. Cosmic Conciousness, then, is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man. This last is called Self Consciousness and is that faculty upon which rests all of our life (both subjective and objective) which is not common to us and the higher animals, except that small part of it which is derived from the few individuals who have had the higher consciousness above named. To make the matter clear it must be understood that there are three forms or grades of consciousness, (i) Simple Consciousness, which is possessed by say the upper half of the animal kingdom. By means of this faculty a dog or a horse is just as conscious of the things about him as a man is ; he is also conscious of his own limbs and body and he knows that these are a part of himself. (2) Over and above this Simple Consciousness, which is possessed by man as by animals, man has another which is called Self Consciousness. By virtue of this faculty man is not only conscious of trees, rocks, waters, his own limbs and body, but he becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest of the universe.

It is as good as certain that no animal can realize himself in that way. Further, by means of self consciousness, man (who knows as the animal knows) becomes capable of treating his own mental states as objects of consciousness. The animal is, as it were, immersed in his consciousness as a fish in the sea; he cannot, even in imagination, get outside of it for one moment so as to realize it. But man by virtue of self consciousness can step aside, as it were, from himself and think : “Yes, that thought that I had about that matter is true ; I know it is true and I know that I know it is true.” The writer has been asked : “How do you know that animals cannot think in the same manner?” The answer is simple and conclusive— it is : There is no evidence that any animal can so think, but if they could we should soon know it. Between two creatures living together, as dogs or horses and men, and each self conscious, it would be the simplest

matter in the world to open up communication. Even as it is, diverse as is our psychology, we do, by watching his acts, enter into the dog’s mind pretty freely — we see what is going on there — we know that the dog sees and hears, smells and tastes — we know that he has intelligence — adapts means to ends — that he reasons. If he was self conscious we must have learned it long ago. We have not learned it and it is as good as certain that no dog, horse, elephant or ape ever was self conscious. Another thing : on man’s self consciousness is built everything in and about us distinctively human. Lan guage is the objective of which self consciousness is the subjective. Self con sciousness and language (two in one, for they are two halves of the same thing) are the sine qua non of human social life, of manners, of institutions, of industries of all kinds, of all arts useful and fine. If any animal possessed self consciousness it seems certain that it would upon that master faculty build (as man has done) a superstructure of language; of reasoned out customs, industries, art. But no animal has done this, therefore we infer that no animal has self consciousness.

The possession of self consciousness and language (its other self) by man creates an enormous gap between him and the highest creature possessing simple consciousness merely. Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. With this form, of course, both simple and self consciousness persist (as simple cosciousness persists when self consciousness is acquired), but added to them is the new faculty so often named and to be named in this volume. The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. What these words mean cannot be touched upon here ; it is the business of this volume to throw some light upon them. There are many elements belonging to the cosmic sense besides the central fact just alluded to. Of these a few may be mentioned. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence — would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important both to the individual and to the race than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come, what may be called, a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.

Only a personal experience of it, or a prolonged study of men who have passed into the new life, will enable us to realize what this actually is ; but it has seemed to the present writer that to pass in review, even briefly and imperfectly, instances in which the condition in question has existed would be worth while. He expects his work to be useful in two ways : First, in broadening the general view of human life by comprehending in our mental vision this important phase of it, and by enabling us to realize, in some measure, the true status of certain men who, down to the present, are either exalted, by the average self conscious individual, to the rank of gods, or, adopting the other extreme, are adjudged insane. And in the second place he hopes to furnish aid to his fellow men in a far more practical and important sense. The view he takes is that our descendants will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness, just as, long ago, our ancestors passed from simple to self consciousness. He believes that this step in evolution is even now being made, since it is clear to him both that men with the faculty in question are becoming more and more common and also that as a race we are approaching nearer and nearer to that stage of the self conscious mind from which the transition to the cosmic conscious is effected. He realizes that, granted the necessary heredity, any individual not already beyond the age may enter cosmic consciousness. He knows that intelligent contact with cosmic conscious minds assists self conscious individuals in the ascent to the higher plane. He therefore hopes, by bringing about, or at least facilitating this contact, to aid men and women in making the almost infinitely important step in question.

The immediate future of our race, the writer thinks, is indescribably hopeful. There are at the present moment impending over us three revolutions, the least of which would dwarf the ordinary historic upheaval called by that name into absolute insignificance. They are : (i) The material, economic and social revolution which will depend upon and result from the establishment of aerial navigation. (2) The economic and social revolution which will abolish individual ownership and rid the earth at once of two immense evils — riches and poverty. And (3) The psychical revolution of which there is here question. Either of the first two would (and will) radically change the conditions of, and greatly uplift, human life ; but the third will do more for humanity than both of the former, were their importance multiplied by hundreds or even thousands. The three operating (as they will) together will literally create a new heaven and a new earth. Old things will be done away and all will become new. Before aerial navigation national boundaries, tariffs, and perhaps distinctions of language will fade out. Great cities will no longer have reason for being and will melt away. The men who now dwell in cities will inhabit in summer the mountains and the sea shores ; building often in airy and beautiful spots, now almost or quite inaccessible, commanding the most extensive and magnificent views. In the winter they will probably dwell in communities of moderate size. As the herding together, as now, in great cities, so the isolation of the worker of the soil will become a thing of the past. Space will be practically annihilated, there will be no crowding together and no enforced solitude.

Before Socialism crushing toil, cruel anxiety, insulting and demoralizing riches, poverty and its ills will become subjects for historical novels. In contact with the flux of cosmic consciousness all religions known and named to-day will be melted down. The human soul will be revolutionized. Religion will absolutely dominate the race. It will not depend on tradition. It will not be believed and disbelieved. It will not be a part of life, belonging to certain hours, times, occasions. It will not be in sacred books nor in the mouths of priests. It will not dwell in churches and meetings and forms and days. Its life will not be in prayers, hymns nor discourses. It will not depend on special revelations, on the words of gods who came down to teach, nor on any bible or bibles. It will have no mission to save men from their sins or to secure them entrance to heaven. It will not teach a future immortality nor future glories, for immortality and all glory will exist in the here and now. The evidence of immortality will live in every heart as sight in every eye. Doubt of God and of eternal life will be as impossible as is now doubt of existence ; the evidence of each will be the same. Religion will govern every minute of every day of all life. Churches, priests, forms, creeds, prayers, all agents, all intermediaries between the individual man and God will be permanently replaced by direct unmistakable intercourse.

Sin will no longer exist nor will salvation be desired. Men will not worry about death or a future, about the kingdom of heaven, about what may come with and after the cessation of the life of the present body. Each soul will feel and know itself to be immortal, will feel and know that the entire universe with all its good and with all its beauty is for it and belongs to it forever. The world peopled by men possessing cosmic consciousness will be as far removed from the world of to-day as this is from the world as it was before the advent of self consciousness.

There is a tradition, probably very old, to the effect that the first man was innocent and happy until he ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That having eaten thereof he became aware that he was naked and was ashamed. Further, that then sin was born into the world, the miserable sense whereof replaced man’s former feeling of innocency. That then and not till then man began to labor and to cover his body. Stranger than all (so it seems to us), the story runs, that along with this change or immediately following upon it there came into man’s mind the feinarkable conviction which has never since left it but which has been kept alive by its own inherent vitality and by the teaching of all true seers, prophets and poets that this accursed thing which has bitten man’s heel (laming him, hindering his progress and especially making this halting and painful) should eventually be crushed and subjugated by man himself — by the rising up within him of a Saviour — the Christ. Man’s progenitor was a creature (an animal) walking erect but with simple consciousness merely. He was (as are to-day the animals) incapable of sin or of the feeling of sin and equally incapable of shame (at least in the human sense). He had no feeling or knowledge of good and evil. He as yet knew nothing of what we call work and had never labored. From this state he fell (or rose) into self consciousness, his eyes were opened, he knew that he was naked, he felt shame, acquired the sense of sin (became in fact what is called a sinner), and learned to do certain things in order to encompass certain ends — that is, he learned to labor.

For weary eons this condition has lasted — the sense of sin still haunts his pathway — by the sweat of his brow he still eats bread — he is still ashamed. Where is the deliverer, the Saviour ? Who or what ? The Saviour of man is Cosmic Consciousness — in Paul’s language — the Christ. The cosmic sense (in whatever mind it appears) crushes the serpent’s head — destroys sin, shame, the sense of good and evil as contrasted one with the other, and will annihilate labor, though not human activity. The fact that there came to man along with or immediately after his acquisition of self consciousness the inchoate premonition of another and higher consciousness which was yet, at that time, many milleniums in the future is surely most noteworthy though not necessarily surprising. We have in biology many analogous facts such as premonition of, and preparation for, by the individual of states and circumstances of which he has had no experience and we see the same thing in the maternal instinct in the very young girl. The universal scheme is woven in one piece and is permeable to consciousness or (and especially) to sub-consciousness throughout and in every direction. The universe is a vast, grandiose, terrible, multiform yet uniform evolution. The section which especially concerns us is that which extends from brute to man, from man to demigod, and constitutes the imposing drama of humanity — its scene the surface of the planet — its time a million years.

The purpose of these preliminary remarks is to throw as much light as possible on the subject of this volume, so as to increase the pleasure and profit of its perusal. A personal exposition of the writer’s own introduction to the main fact treated of will perhaps do as much as anything else could to further this end. He will therefore frankly set down here a very brief outline of his early mental life and give a short account of his slight experience of what he calls cosmic consciousness. The reader will readily see therefrom whence came the ideas and convictions presented in the following pages. He was born of good middle class English stock and grew up almost without education on what was then a backwoods Canadian farm. As a child he assisted in such labor as lay within his power. Tended cattle, horses, sheep, pigs ; brought in firewood, worked in the hay field, drove oxen and horses, ran errands. His pleasures were as simple as his labors. An occasional visit to a neighboring small town, a game of ball, bathing in the creek that ran through his father’s farm, the making and sailing of mimic ships, the search for birds’ eggs and flowers in the spring, and for wild fruits in the summer and fall, afforded him, with his skates and handsled in the winter, his homely, much loved recreations. While still a young boy he read with keen appreciation Marryat’s novels, Scott’s poems and novels, and other similar books dealing with outdoor nature and human life.

He never, even as a child, accepted the doctrines of the Christian church ; but, as soon as old enough to dwell at all on such themes, conceived that Jesus was a man — great and good no doubt, but a man. That no one would ever be condemned to everlasting pain. That if a conscious God existed he was the supreme master and meant well in the end to all ; but that, this visible life here being ended, it was doubtful, or more than doubtful, whether conscious identity would be preserved. The boy (even the child) dwelt on these and similar topics far more than anyone would suppose ; but probably not more than many other introspective small fellow mortals. He was subject at times to a sort of ecstasy of curiosity and hope. As on one special occasion when about ten years old he earnestly longed to die that the secrets of the beyond.

if there was any beyond, might be revealed to him ; also to agonies of anxiety and terror, as for instance, at about the same age he read Reynold’s “Faust,” and, being near its end one sunny afternoon, he laid it down utterly unable to continue its perusal, and went out into the sunshine to recover from the horror (after more than fifty years he distinctly recalls it) which had seized him. The boy’s mother died when he was only a few years old, and his father shortly afterwards. The outward circumstances of his life in some respects became more unhappy than can readily be told. At sixteen the boy left home to live or die as might happen. For five years he wandered over North America from the great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Upper Ohio to San Francisco. He worked on farms, on railways, on steamboats, and in the placer diggings of Western Nevada. Several times he nearly suffered shipwreck by sickness, starvation, freezing, and once on the banks of the Humboldt River, in Utah, fought for his life half a day with the Shoshone Indians. After five years’ wandering, at the age of twenty-one, he returned to the country where his childhood had been passed. A moderate sum of money from his dead mother enabled him to spend some years in study, and his mind, after lying so long fallow, absorbed ideas with extraordinary facility.

He graduated with high honors four years after his return from the Pacific Coast. Outside of the collegiate course he read with avidity many speculative books, such as the “Origin of Species,” Tyndall’s “Heat” and “Essays, ” Buckle’s “ History,” “ Essays and Reviews,” and much poetry, especially such as seemed to him free and fearless. In this species of literature he soon preferred Shelley, and of his poems, “Adonias” and “Prometheus” were his favorites. His life for some years was one passionate note of interrogation, an unappeasable hunger for enlightenment on the basic problems. Leaving college, he continued his search with the same ardor. Taught himself French that he might read Auguste Comte, Hugo and Renan, and German that he might read Goethe, especially “Faust.” At the age of thirty he fell in with “ Leaves of Grass,” and at once saw that it contained, in greater measure than any book so far found, what he had so long been looking for. He read the “ Leaves ” eagerly, even passionately, but for several years derived little from them. At last light broke and there was revealed to him (as far perhaps as such things can be revealed) at least some of the meanings. Then occurred that to which the foregoing is preface.

It was in the early spring, at the beginning of his thirty-sixth year. He and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom (it was in an English city). His mind, deeply. under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city; the next he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life ; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving thenceforward for always an after taste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain. He claims that he learned more within the few seconds during which the illumination lasted than in previous months or even years of study, and that he learned much that no study could ever have taught.

The illumination itself continued not more than a few moments, but its effects proved ineffaceable ; it was impossible for him ever to forget what he at that time saw and knew; neither did he, or could he, ever doubt the truth of what was then presented to his mind. There was no return that night or at any other time of the experience. He subsequently wrote a book (28a.) in which he sought to embody the teaching of the illumination. Some who read it thought very highly of it, but (as was to be expected for many reasons) it had little circulation. The supreme occurrence of that night was his real and sole initiation to the new and higher order of ideas. But it was only an initiation. He saw the light but had no more idea whence it came and what it meant than had the first creature that saw the light of the sun. Years afterwards he met C. P., of whom he had often heard as having extraordinary spiritual insight. He found that C. P. had entered the higher life of which he had had a glimpse and had had a large experience of its phenomena. His conversation with C. P. threw a flood of light upon the true meaning of what he had himself experienced.

Looking round then upon the world of man, he saw the significance of the subjective light in the case of Paul and in that of Mohammed. The secret of Whitman’s transcendent greatness was revealed to him. Certain conversations with J. H. J. and with J. B. helped him not a little. Personal intercourse with Edward Carpenter, T. S. R., C. M. C. and M. C. L. assisted greatly in the broadening and clearing up of his speculations, in the extension and co-ordination of his thought. But much time and labor were still required before the germinal concept could be satisfactorily elaborated and matured, the idea, namely, that there exists a family sprung from, living among, but scarcely forming a part of ordinary humanity, whose members are spread abroad throughout the advanced races of mankind and throughout the last forty centuries of the world’s history. The trait that distinguishes these people from other men is this : Their spiritual eyes have been opened and they have seen. The better known members of this group who, were they collected together, could be accomodated all at one time in a modern drawing-room, have created all the great modern religions, beginning with Taoism and Buddhism, and speaking generally have created, through religion and literature, modern civilization. Not that they have contributed any large numerical proportion of the books which have been written, but that they have produced the few books which have inspired the larger number of all that have been written in modern times. These men dominate the last twenty-five, especially the last five, centuries as stars of the first magnitude dominate the midnight sky.

A man is identified as a member of this family by the fact that at a certain age he has passed through a new birth and risen to a higher spiritual plane. The reality of the new birth is demonstrated by the subjective light and other phenomena. The object of the present volume is to teach others what little the writer himself has been able to learn of the spiritual status of this new race. It remains to say a few words upon the psychological origin of what is called in this book Cosmic Consciousness, which must not be looked upon as being in any sense supernatural or supranormal — as anything more or less than a natural growth. Although in the birth of Cosmic Consciousness the moral nature plays an important part, it will be better for many reasons to confine our attention at present to the evolution of the intellect. In this evolution there are four distinct steps. The first of them was taken when upon the primary quality of excitability sensation was established. At this point began the acquisition and more or less perfect registration of sense impressions — that is, of percepts. A percept is of course a sense impression — a sound is heard or an object seen and the impression made is a percept. If we could go back far enough we should find among our ancestors a creature whose whole intellect was made up simply of these percepts.

But this creature (whatever name it ought to bear) had in it what may be called an eligibility of growth, and what happened with it was something like this: Individually and from generation to generation it accumulated these percepts, the constant repetition of which, calling for further and further registration, led, in the struggle for existence and, under the law of natural selection, to an accumulation of cells in the central sense ganglia ; the multiplication of cells made further registration possible ; that, again, made further growth of the ganglia necessary, and so on. At last a condition was reached in which it became possible for our ancestor to combine groups of these percepts into what we to-day call a recept. This process is very similar to that of composite photography. Similar percepts (as of a tree) are registered one over the other until (the nerve center having become competent to the task) they are generalized into, as it were, one percept ; but that compound percept is neither more nor less than a recept — a something that has been received.

Now the work of accumulation begins again on a higher plane: the sensory organs keep steadily at work manufacturing percepts ; the receptual centers keep steadily at work manufacturing more and yet more recepts from the old and the new percepts ; the capacities of the central ganglia are constantly taxed to do the necessary registration of percepts, the necessary elaboration of these into recepts and the necessary registration of recepts ; then as the ganglia by use and selection are improved they constantly manufacture from percepts and from the initial simple recepts, more and more complex, that is, higher and higher recepts. At last, after many thousands of generations have lived and died, comes a time when the mind of the animal we are considering has reached the highest possible point of purely receptual intelligence ; the accumulation of percepts and of recepts has gone on until no greater stores of impressions can be laid up and no further elaboration of these can be accomplished on the plane of receptual intelligence. Then another break is made and the higher recepts are replaced by concepts. The relation of a concept to a recept is somewhat similar to the relation of algebra to arithmetic. A recept is, as I have said, a composite image of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of percepts ; it is itself an image abstracted from many images ; but a concept is that same composite image — that same recept — named, ticketed, and, as it were, dismissed. A concept is in fact neither more nor less than a named

recept — the name, that is, the sign (as in algebra), standing henceforth for the thing itself, that is, for the recept. Now it is as clear as day to any one who will give the least thought to the subject, that the revolution by which concepts are substituted for recepts increases the efficiency of the brain for thought as much as the introduction of machinery increased the capacity of the race for work — or as much as the use of algebra increases the power of the mind in mathematical calculations. To replace a great cumbersome recept by a simple sign was almost like replacing actual goods — as wheat, fabrics and hardware — by entries in the ledger. But, as hinted above, in order that a recept may be replaced by a concept it must be named, or, in other words, marked with a sign which stands for it — just as a check stands for a piece of baggage or as an entry in a ledger stands for a piece of goods ; in other words, the race that is in possession of concepts is also, and necessarily, in possession of language. i Further, it should be noted, as the possession of concepts implies the possession of language, so the possession of concepts and language (which are in reality two aspects of the same thing) implies the possession of self consciousness. All this means that there is a moment in the evolution of mind when the receptual intellect, capable of simple consciousness only, becomes almost or quite instantaneously a conceptual intellect in possession of language and self consciousness.

When we say that an individual, whether an adult individual long ago or a child to-day does not matter, came into possession of concepts, of language and of self consciousness in an instant, we, of course, mean that the individual came into possession of self consciousness and of one or a few concepts and of one or a few true words instantaneously and not that he entered into possession of a whole language in that short time. In the history of the individual man the point in question is reached and passed at about the age of three years ; in the history of the race it was reached and passed several hundred thousand years ago. We have now, in our analysis, reached the point where we each individually stand, the point, namely, of the conceptual, self conscious mind. In acquiring this new and higher form of consciousness it must not for a moment be supposed that we have dropped either our receptual intelligence or our old perceptual mind ; as a matter of fact we could not live without these any more than could the animal who has no other mind than them. Our intellect, then, to-day is made up of a very complex mixture of percepts, recepts and concepts.

Let us now for a moment consider the concept. This may be considered as a large and complex recept ; but larger and more complex than any recept. It is made up of one or more recepts combined with probably several percepts. This extremely complex recept is then marked by a sign ; that is, it is named and in virtue of its name it becomes a concept. The concept, after being named or marked, is (as it were) laid away, just as a piece of checked baggage is marked by its check and piled in the baggage-room. By means of this check we can send the trunk to any part of America without ever seeing it or knowing just where it is at a given moment. So by means of their signs we can build concepts into elaborate calculations, into poems and into systems of philosophy, without knowing half the time anything about the thing represented by the individual concepts that we are using. And here a remark must be made aside from the main argument. It has been noticed thousands of times that the brain of a thinking .man does not exceed in size the brain of a non-thinking wild man in anything like the proportion in which the mind of the thinker exceeds the mind of the savage. The reason is that the brain of a Herbert Spencer has very little more work to do than has the brain of a native Australian, for this reason, that Spencer does all his characteristic mental work by signs or counters which stand for concepts, while the savage does all or nearly all his by means of cumbersome recepts.

The savage is in a position comparable to that of the astronomer who makes his calculations by arithmetic, while Spencer is in the position of one who makes them by algebra. The first will fill many great sheets of paper with figures and go through immense labor ; the other will make the same calculations on an envelope and with comparatively little mental work.

The next chapter in the story is the accumulation of concepts. This is a double process. From the age, we will say, of three years each one accumulates year by year a larger and larger number, while at the same time the individual concepts are becoming constantly more and more complex. Consider for instance the concept science as it exists in the mind of a boy and of a middle aged thinking man ; with the former it stood for a few dozen or a few hundred facts ; with the latter for many thousands. Is there to be any limit to this growth of concepts in number and complexity ? Whoever will seriously consider that question will see that there must be a limit. No such process could go on to infinity. Should nature attempt such a feat the brain would have to grow until it could no longer be fed and a condition of deadlock be reached which would forbid further progress. We have seen that the expansion of the perceptual mind had a necessary limit ; that its own continued life led it inevitably up to and into the receptual mind. That the receptual mind by its own growth was inevitably led up to and into the conceptual mind. A priori considerations make it certain that a corresponding outlet will be found for the conceptual mind.

But we do not need to depend on abstract reasoning to demonstrate the necessary existence of the supra conceptual mind, since it exists and can be studied with no more difficulty than other natural phenomena. The supra conceptual intellect, the elements of which instead of being concepts are intuitions, is already (in small numbers it is true) an established fact, and the form of consciousness that belongs to that intellect may be called and has been called — Cosmic Consciousness. Thus we have four distinct stages of intellect, all abundantly illustrated in the animal and human worlds about us — all equally illustrated in the individual growth of the cosmic conscious mind and all four existing together in that mind as the first three exist together in the ordinary human mind. These four stages are, first, the perceptual mind — the mind made up of percepts or sense impressions; second, the mind made up of these and recepts — the so called receptual mind, or in other words the mind of simple consciousness; third, we have the mind made up of percepts, recepts and concepts, called sometimes the conceptual mind or otherwise the self conscious mind — the mind of self consciousness; and, fourth, and last, we have the intuitional mind — the mind whose highest element is not a recept or a concept but an intuition. This is the mind in which sensation, simple consciousness and self consciousness are supplemented and crowned with cosmic consciousness.

But it is necessary to show more clearly still the nature of these four stages and their relation one to the other. The perceptual or sensational stage of intellect is easy enough to understand, so may be passed by in this place with only one remark, namely, that in a mind made up wholly of percepts there is no consciousness of any sort. When, however, the receptual mind comes into existence simple consciousness is born, which means that animals are conscious (as we know they are) of the things they see about them. But the receptual mind is capable of simple consciousness only — that is, the animal is conscious of the object which he sees, but he does not know he is conscious of it ; neither is the animal conscious of itself as a distinct entity or personality. In still other words, the animal cannot stand outside of itself and look at itself as any self conscious creature can. This, then, is simple consciousness : to be conscious of the things about one, but not to be conscious of one’s self. But when I have reached self consciousness I am not only conscious of what I see, but I know I am conscious of it. Also 1 am conscious of myself as a separate entity and personality and I can stand apart from myself and contemplate myself, and can analyze and judge the operations of my own mind as I would analyze and judge anything else.

This self consciousness is only possible after the formation of concepts and the consequent birth of language. Upon self consciousness is based all distinctively human life so far, except what has proceeded from the few cosmic conscious minds of the last three thousand years. Finally the basic fact in cosmic consciousness is implied in its name — that fact is consciousness of the cosmos — this is what is called in the East the “ Brahmic Splendor,” which is in Dante’s phrase capable of transhumanizing a man into a god. Whitman, who has an immense deal to say about it, speaks of it in one place as “ ineffable light — light rare, untellable, lighting the very light — beyond all signs, descriptions, languages.” This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law ; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive ; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life ; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it ; a great deal of this is, of course, from the point of view of self consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true. Now all this does not mean that when a man has cosmic consciousness he knows everything about the universe.

We all know that when at three years of age we acquired self consciousness we did not at once know all about ourselves ; we know, on the contrary, that after a great many thousands of years of experience of himself man still to-day knows comparatively little about himself considered even as a self conscious personality. So neither does a man know all about the cosmos merely because he becomes conscious of it. If it has taken the race several hundred thousand years to learn a smattering of the science of humanity since its aquisition of self consciousness, so it may take it millions of years to acquire a smattering of the science of God after its acquisition of cosmic consciousness.

As on self consciousness is based the human world as we see it with all its works and ways, so on cosmic consciousness is based the higher religions and the higher philosophies and what comes from them, and on it will be based, when it becomes more general, a new world of which it would be idle to try to speak to-day. The philosophy of the birth of cosmic consciousness in the individual is very similar to that of the birth of self consciousness. The mind becomes overcrowded (as it were) with concepts and these are constantly becoming larger, more numerous and more and more complex ; some day (the conditions being all favorable) the fusion, or what might be called the chemical union, of several of them and of certain moral elements takes place ; the result is an intuition and the establishment of the intuitional mind, or, in other words, cosmic consciousness. The scheme by which the mind is built up is uniform from beginning to end : a recept is made of many percepts ; a concept of many or several recepts and percepts, and an intuition is made of many concepts, recepts and percepts together with other elements belonging to and drawn from the moral nature. The cosmic vision or the cosmic intuition, from which what may be called the new mind takes its name, is thus seen to be simply the complex and union of all prior thought and experience — just as self consciousness is the complex and union of all thought and experience prior to it.

It will be necessary, in the first place, for the reader of this book to have before his mind a tolerably complete idea in outline of mental evolution in all its three branches — sensuous, intellectual and emotional — up to and through the status of self consciousness. Without such a mental image as basis for the new conception this last (that is, cosmic consciousness) to most people would seem extravagant and even absurd. With such necessary foundation the new concept will appear to the intelligent reader what it is : A matter of course — an inevitable sequel to what preceded and led up to it. In attempting to give an idea of this vast evolution of mental phenomena from its beginning in far off geologic ages down to the latest phases reached by our own race anything like an exhaustive treatise could not, of course, be thought of here. The method actually adopted is more or less broken and fragmentary, but enough (it is thought) is given for the present purpose, and those who desire more will have no difficulty in finding it in other treatises, such as the admirable work of Romanes [134]. All the present writer aims at is the exposition of cosmic consciousness and a barely sufficient account of the lower mental phenomena to make that subject fully intelligible ; anything further would only burden this book to no good purpose.

The upbuilding or unfolding of the knowable universe presents to our minds a series of gradual ascents each divided from the next by an apparent leap over what seems to be a chasm. For instance, and to begin not at the beginning, but midway : Between the slow and equable development of the inorganic world which prepared it for the reception and support of living creatures and the more rapid growth and branching of vital forms, these having once appeared, there occurred what seems like the hiatus between the inorganic and organic worlds and the leap by which it was over-passed ; within which hiatus or chasm has heretofore resided either the substance or shadow of a god whose hand has been deemed necessary to lift and pass on the elements from the lower to the higher plane. Along the level road of the formation of suns and planets, of earth crust, of rocks and soil, we are carried, by evolutionists, smoothly and safely ; but when we reach this perilous pit stretching interminably to right and left across our path, we pause, and even so able and daring a pilot as Lester Ward (190. 300-320) can hardly induce us to attempt the leap with him, so wide and dark frowns the abyss. We feel that nature, who has done all — and much greater things — was competent to cross and did cross the apparent break, although we may not at present be able to place a finger in each one of her footprints. For the moment, however, this stands the first and greatest of the so-called bars to acceptance of the doctrine of absolute continuity in the evolution of the visible world.

Later in the history of creation comes the beginning of Simple Consciousness. Certain individuals in some one leading species in the slowly unfolding life of the planet, some day — for the first time — become conscious ; know that there exists a world, a something, without them. Less dwelt upon, as it has been, this step from the unconscious to the conscious might well impress us as being as immense, as miraculous and as divine as that from the inorganic to the organic. Again, running parallel with the river of time, we perceive a long, equable and gradual ascent stretching from the dawn of Simple Consciousness to its highest excellence in the best prehuman types — the horse, the dog, the elephant and the ape. At this point confronts us another break comparable to those which in order of time preceded it — the hiatus, namely, or the seeming hiatus between Simple and Self Consciousness : the deep chasm or ravine upon one side of which roams the brute while upon the other dwells man. A chasm into which enough books have been thrown to have sufficed (could they have been converted into stones or pig iron) to dam or bridge a great river. And which has only now been made safely passable by the lamented G. J. Romanes, by means of his valuable treatise on the “ Origin of Human Faculty” [134].

Only a very short time ago (and even yet by most) this break in the line of ascent (or descent) was supposed to be impassable by ordinary growth. It may be said to be now known to be so passable, but it still stands out and apart from the even path of Cosmic development before our vision as that broad chasm or gap between the brute and the man. For some hundreds of thousands of years, upon the general plane of Self Consciousness, an ascent, to the human eye gradual, but from the point of view of cosmic evolution rapid, has been made. In a race, large brained, walking erect, gregarious, brutal, but king of all other brutes, man in appearance but not in fact, the so-called alalus homo, was, from the highest Simple Consciousness born the basic human faculty Self Consciousness and its twin. On the Plane of Self Consciousness language. From these and what went with these, through suffering, toil and war ; through bestiality, savagery, barbarism ; through slavery, greed, effort ; through conquests infinite, through defeats overwhelming, through struggle unending ; through ages of aimless semi-brutal existence ; through subsistence on berries and roots ; through the use of the casually found stone or stick ; through life in deep forest, with nuts and seeds, and on the shores of waters with mollusks, crustaceans, and fish for food ; through that greatest, perhaps, of human victories, the domestication and subjugation of fire ;

through the invention and art of the bow and arrow ; through the taming of animals and the breaking of them to labor ; through the long learning which led to the cultivation of the soil ; through the adobe brick and the building of houses therefrom ; through the smelting of metals and the slow births of the arts which rest upon these ; through the slow making of alphabets and the evolution of the written word ; in short, through thousands of centuries of human life, of human aspiration, of human growth, sprang the world of men and women as it stands before us and within us to-day with all its achievements and possessions [124. 10-13].

Is that all ? Is that the end ? No. As life arose in a world without life ; as Simple Consciousness came into existence where before was mere vitality without perception ; as Self Consciousness leaping widewinged from Simple Consciousness soared forth over land and sea, so shall the race of man which has been thus established, continuing its beginningless and endless ascent, make other steps (the next of which it is now in act of climbing) and attain to a yet higher life than any heretofore experienced or even conceived. And let it be clearly understood that the new step (to explain which this volume is written) is not simply an expansion of self consciousness but as distinct from it as that is, from simple consciousness or as is this last from mere vitality without any consciousness at all, or as is the latter from the world of inorganic matter and force which preceded it and from which it proceeded. On the Plane of Self Consciousness. And in the first place it would be well to get a firm hold of the meaning of the words “self consciousness,” upon the definition of which an excellent writer and most competent thinker [200-255] has these remarks : “Self con-

sciousness is often referred to as a distinguishing characteristic of man. Many, however, fail to gain a clear conception of what this faculty is. Dr. Carpenter confounds it with the ‘ power of reflecting on their own mental states,’ while Mr. Darwin associates it with abstraction and other of the derivative faculties. It is certainly something much simpler than introspection, and has an earlier origin than the highly derivative speculative faculties. If it could only be seized and clearly understood, self consciousness would doubtless prove to be the primary and fundamental human attribute. Our language seems to lack the proper word to express it in its simplest form. ‘ Think ’ approaches this most nearly, and man is sometimes described as a ‘ thinking being.’ The German language has a better word, viz., besinnen, and the substantive Besonnenheit seems to touch the kernel of the problem. Schopenhauer says : ‘ The animal lives without any Besonnenheit. It has consciousness, i. e., it knows itself and its weal and woe ; also the objects which produce these ; but its knowledge remains constantly subjective, never becomes objective : everything that it embraces appears to exist in and of itself, and can therefore never become an object of representation nor a problem for meditation. Its consciousness is thus wholly immanent. The consciousness of the savage man is similarly constituted in that his perceptions of things and of the world remain preponderantly subjective and immanent. He perceives things in the world, but not the world ; his own actions and passion, but not himself.’ ”

Perhaps the simplest definition (and there are scores of them) would be : self consciousness is the faculty by which we realize. Or again : without self consciousness a sentient creature can know, but its possession is necessary in order that he may know that he knows. The best treatise so far written on this subject is Romanes’ book, already several times referred to The roots of the tree of life being deep sunk in the organic world, its trunk is made up as follows : Beginning at the earth level we have first of all the lowest forms of life unconscious and insensate. These in their turn give birth to forms endowed with sensation and later to forms endowed with Simple Consciousness. From the last, when the right time comes, springs self consciousness and (as already said) in direct ascent from that Cosmic Consciousness. It is only necessary in this place, as clearing the ground for the work to be done, to point out that the doctrine of the unfolding of the human being, regarded from the side of psychology, is strictly in accord with the theory of evolution in general as received and taught to-day by the foremost thinkers.

This tree which we call life and its upper part human life and human On the Plane of Self Consciousness mind, has simply grown as grows any other tree, and besides its main stem, as above indicated, it has, as in the case of other trees, thrown off many branches. It will be well to consider some of these. It will be seen that some of them are given off from the lower part of the trunk, as, for instance, contractility, from which great limb, and as a part of it, springs all muscular action from the simple movement of the worm to the marvelously co-ordinated motions made, in the exercise of their art, by a Liszt or a Paderewski. Another of these large lower limbs is the instinct of Self-preservation and (twin with it) the instinct of the continuance of the species — the preservation of the race. Higher up the special senses shoot out from the main trunk and as they grow and divide and again divide they become large and vitally important branches of the great tree. From all these main off-shoots spring smaller arms and from these more delicate twigs. Thus from the human intellect whose central fact is Self Consciousness, a section of the main trunk of our tree, spring judgment, reason, comparison, imagination, abstraction, reflection, generalization. From the moral or emotional nature, one of the largest and most important of the main limbs, spring love (itself a great branch dividing into many smaller branches), reverence, faith, fear, awe, hope, hate, humor and many more.

The great branch called the sense of sight, which in its beginning was a perception of the difference between light and darkness, sent out twigs which we call sense of form, of distance, and later the color sense. The limb named sense of hearing has for branches and twigs the apprehension of loudness, of pitch, of distance, of direction and as a delicate twig just coming into being, the musical sense.

The important fact to notice at present is that, true to the simile of the tree here adopted, the numerous faculties of which (viewed from the side of dynamics) man is composed are all of different ages. Each one of them came into existence in its own time, i. e., when the psychic organism (the tree) was ready to produce it. For instance : Simple Consciousness many millions of years ago ; Self Consciousness perhaps three hundred thousand years. General vision is enormously old, but the color sense probably only about a thousand generations. Sensibility to sound many millions of years, while the musical sense is now in the act of appearing. Sexual instinct or passion arose far back in geologic ages — the human moral nature of which human sexual love is a young and vigorous branch does not appear to have been in existence many tens of thousands of years. To make what has been and what remains to be said more readily and more fully intelligible it will be well to go into some little detail as to the time and mode of becoming and developing of a few faculties as a sample of the divine work that has been going on within us and about us since the dawn of life on this planet. The science of human psychology (in order to illustrate the subject of this volume) should give an account of the human intellect, of the human moral nature, and of the senses. Should give a description of these as they exist to-day, of their origin and evolution and should forecast their future course of either decay or further expansion. Only a very few specimen pages of such a work can be here set forth — and first a hasty glance at the intellect.

The intellect is that part of the mind which knows, as the moral nature is the part that feels. Each particular act of the intellect is instantaneous, whereas the acts (or rather states) of the moral nature are more or less continuous. Language corresponds to the intellect and is therefore capable of expressing it perfectly and directly ; on the other hand, the functions of the moral nature (belonging, i. e., deriving, as they do, from the great sympathetic nervous system — while the intellect and speech rest upon and spring from the Cerebro-Spinal) are not connected with language and are only capable of indirect and imperfect expression by its agency. Perhaps music, which certainly has its roots in the moral nature, is, as at present existing, the beginning of a language which will tally and express emotion as words tally and express ideas [28a. 106] . Intellectual acts are complex, and decomposable into many parts ; moral states are either absolutely simple (as in the case of love, fear, hate) or nearly so ; that is, are composed of comparatively few elements. All intellectual acts are alike, or nearly alike, in that regard ; moral states have a very wide range of degree of intensity.

The human intellect is made up principally of concepts, just as a forest is made up of trees or a city of houses ; these concepts are mental images of things, acts, or relations. The registration of these we call memory, the comparison of them one with another reasoning ; for the building of these up into more complex images (as bricks are built into a house) we have in English no good expression ; we sometimes call this act imagination (the act of forming a mental copy or likeness) — the Germans have a better name for it — they call it Vorstellung (the act of placing before), Anschauungsgabe (the gift of looking upon) and better still Einbildungskraft (the power of building up). The large intellect is that in which the number of concepts is above the average ; On the Plane Of Self Consciousness the fine intellect is that in which these are clear cut and well defined ; the ready intellect is that in which they are easily and quickly accessible when wanted, and so on. The growth of the human intellect is the growth of the concepts, i. e., the multiplication of the more simple and at the same time the building up of these into others more and more complex.

Although this increase in number and complexity is taking place constantly in every active mind during at least the first half of life, from infancy to middle age, and though we each know that we have concepts now that we had not some time ago, yet probably the wisest of us could not tell from observation made upon his own mind just by what process these new concepts came into existence — where they came from or how they came. But though we cannot perceive this by direct observation either of our own mind or that of another person, still there is another way by which the occult process can be followed and that is by means of language. As said above, language is the exact tally of the intellect : for every concept there is a word or words and for every word there is a concept ; neither can exist apart from the other. So Trench says : “You cannot impart to any man more than the words which he understands either now contain or can be made intelligibly to him to contain.” Or as Max Mueller expresses it : “Without speech no reason, without reason no speech.” Speech and the intellect do not correspond with one another in this way by accident, the relation between them is inevitably involved in the nature of the two things. Or are they two things ? Or two sides of one thing?

No word can come into being except as the expression of a concept, neither can a new concept be formed without the formation (at the same time) of the new word which is its expression, though this “ new word ” may be spelled and pronounced as is some old word. But an old word taking on another and a new meaning in reality becomes two words, an old and a new. Intellect and speech fit one another as the hand and the glove, only far more closely ; say rather they fit as the skin fits the body, or as the pia mater fits the brain, or as any given species in the organic world is fitted by its environment. As is implied in what has been said, it is to be especially noted that not only does language fit the intellect in the sense of covering it in every part and following all its turnings and windings, but it fits it also in the sense of not going beyond it. Words correspond with concepts, and with concepts only, so that we cannot express directly with them either sense impressions or emotions, but are forced always to convey these (if at all) by expressing, not themselves, but the impression they make upon our intellect, i. e., the concepts formed from the contemplation of them by

the intellect — in other words, their intellectual image. So that before a sense impression or an emotion can be embodied or conveyed in language a concept has to be formed (supposed more or less truly to represent it), which concept can, of course, be conveyed in words. But as a matter of fact ninety-nine out of every hundred of our sense impressions and emotions have never been represented in the intellect by concepts and therefore remain unexpressed and inexpressible except imperfectly by roundabout description and suggestion. There exists in the lower animals a state of matters which serves well to illustrate this proposition. These have acute sense perceptions and strong emotions, such as fear, rage, sexual passion and maternal love, and yet cannot express them because these have no language of their own, and the animals in question have no system of concepts with corresponding articulate sounds. Granted to us our sense perceptions and our human moral natures and we should be as dumb as are the animals had we not along with these an intellect in which they may be mirrored and by which, by means of language, they can be expressed. As the correspondence of words and concepts is not casual or temporary but resides in the nature of these and continues during all time and under all circumstrnces absolutely constant, so changes in one of the factors must correspond with changes in the other. So evolution of intellect must (if it exist) be accompained by evolution of language. An evolution of language (if it exist) will be evidence of evolution of intellect. What then is here proposed is to study (for a few moments) the growth of the intellect by means of an examination of language, i.e., to study the birth, life and growth of concepts which cannot be seen, by means of words which are their co-relatives and which can be seen.

Sir Charles Lyell, in the “Antiquity of Man” [113], pointed out the parallelism which exists between the origin, growth, decline and death of languages and of species in the organic world. In order to illustrate and at the same time broaden the present argument let us extend the parallel backward to the formation of the worlds and forward to the evolution of words and concepts. The accompanying table will serve this purpose as well as, or better than, an eleborately reasoned exposition, and will serve at the same time as a summary of the evolution argument which runs through this volume. On the Plane of Sell Consciousness I. Nebula of Astral System . Nebula of Solar System System of Jupiter . Saturn Uranus -j Neptune Mars I Earth L Etc. 2. Eohippus . 1 Mesohippus f Anchitherium .... (Eocene) !■ (Early Mio- -< (Miocene) Size of sheep Size of Fox J cene) ( Miohippus Equus Caballus . . ‘ ‘ Asinus “ Hemionus “ Quagga “ Zebra Dauw Planet 1st Moon . - 2d Moon I 3d Moon 4th Moon Face Horse Carriage Horse Eng. Dray Horse Eng. Hunter Arabian Shetland Pony Latin . . . , Greek Sanscrit Zend Armenian Lithuanian Old Sclavonic L Gothic

Pre-root-Aryan root, Spac ^ Latin, Specio, To see, look . . Greek, Skeptomai, I look “ Skeptikos, An enquirer “ Episkopes, An overseer Sanscrit, Pas, To see “ Spasa, A spy ‘ ‘ Spashta, Manifest “ Spas, A guardian O. H. G., Spehan, To look, spy [ “ “ Speha, A spy I" Italian Spanish Portuguese French Wallachian . Rhaetian Respect (noun and verb) Despise, Despicable Respective Spite, -ful Spectrum Speculate, -ation Suspect, Suspicious Specious, -ly, -ness Specific, -ation - Inspect, -ion, -or Speculus Species Spy (noun or verb) A short study of this tabular statement will make plain how orbs, species, languages and words branch, divide and multiply ; will make intelligible Max Mueller’s estimate that “ every thought that has ever passed through the mind of India” may be reduced to one hundred and twenty-one root concepts— that is, to one hundred and twenty-one root words [ii6. 401]; will make us agree with him that, probably, that number might be still further reduced. If we consider for a moment that this means that the millions of Indo-Europeans words now in use as well as many times the number long since dead and forgotten, nearly all sprang from about one hundred roots and that these in their turn probably from half a dozen, and at the same time remember that reason and speech are one, we shall obtain a glimpse of what the human intellect once was in comparison with what it is to-day ;

and likewise it becomes apparent at a glance that the evolution not only of species, languages and words is strictly parallel but that the scheme has probably a still wider, perhaps universal, application. As regards the present thesis the conclusion to be drawn from this comparison is that words, and that therefore the constituent elements of the intellect which they represent and which we call concepts, grow by division and branching, as new species branch off from older, and it seems clear that a normal growth is encouraged and an excessive and useless development checked by the same means in the one case as in the other — that is, by natural selection and the struggle for existence.

New concepts, and words expressing them, which correspond with some external reality (whether this is a thing, an act, a state, or a relation), and which are therefore of use to man, since their existence places him in more complete relation with the outer world, on which relation his life and welfare depend, are preserved by the process of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Some again which either do not correspond at all, or only imperfectly, with an objective reality are replaced by others which do correspond or correspond better with the reality which these aimed to express, and so in the struggle for existence fall into disuse and die out. For it is with words as with every other living thing, thousands are produced for one that lives. Towards whatever object the mind is especially turned it throws out words often with marvelous profusion. When some thousands of years ago, Sanscrit being still a living language and the sun and fire looked upon either as actual gods or at least as especially sacred, fire had (instead of a very few names as now) thirty-five and the sun thirtyseven [115, 437]. But much more remarkable examples are those drawn from Arabic, as, for instance, the eighty names for honey, the two hundred for serpent, the five hundred for lion, the one thousand for sword, and the

On the Plane of Self Consciousness five thousand seven hundred and forty-four words all relating to the camel, these being subjects upon which the Arab mind is strongly and persistently bent [115. 438]. So again Max Mueller tells us ; “ We can hardly form an idea of the boundless resources of dialects. When literary languages have stereotyped one general term their dialects will supply fifty, though each with its special shade of meaning. If new combinations of thoughts are evolved in the progress of society, dialects will readily supply the required names from the store of their so-called superfluous words. There are not only local and provincial but also class dialects. There is a dialect of shepherds, of sportsmen, of soldiers, of farmers. I suppose there are few persons here present who could tell the exact meaning of a horse’s poll, crest, withers, dock, hamstring, cannon, pastern, coronet, arm, jowl and muzzle. Where the literary language speaks of the young of all sorts of animals, farmers, shepherds and sportsmen would be ashamed to use so general a term. The idiom of nomads, as Grimm says, contain an abundant wealth of manifold expressions for sword and weapons, and for the different stages in the life of cattle. In a more highly cultivated language these expressions become burthensome and superfluous. But in a peasant’s mouth the bearing, calving, falling and killing of almost every animal has its own peculiar term, as the sportsman delights in calling the gait and members of game by different names.

Thus Dame Juliana Berners, lady prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell, in the fifteenth century, the reputed author of the ‘ Book of St. Albans,’ informs us that we must not use names of multitudes promiscuously, but we are to say : A congregcyon of people, a boost of men, a felyshyppynge of women, and a bevy of ladyes, we must speak of a herde of hartys, swannys, cranys, or wrennys, a sege of herons, or bytourys, a muster of peacockys, a watche of nyghtyngalys, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beerys, a gagle of geys, a skulke of foxes, a sculle of frerys, a pontyfycalate of prelates, a bomynable syght of monkes, a dronkenshyp of cobblers, and so of other human and brute assemblages. In like manner in dividing game for the table the animals were not carved, but a dere was broken, a gose reryd, a chekyn frusshed, a cony unlacyd, a crane dyspla)"ed, a curlewe unjointyd, a quayle wynggyd, a swanne lyfte, a lambe sholderyd, a heron dysmembryd, a pecocke dysfygured, a samon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd, and a breme splayed” [115. 70].

These instances will serve to show how the human intellect feels along the face of the outer world presented to it, attempting a lodgment in each cranny it finds, however slight and precarious may be the hold that it gets. For the mind of man from age to age ceaselessly seeks to master the facts of the outer world ; its growth indeed consists in tallying or covering these as ivy spreads over, tallies and covers the stones of a wall ; the twig that secures a hold strengthens and puts out other twigs ; that which does not secure a hold after a time ceases to grow and eventually dies. The main thing to notice for our present purpose is that just as in the case of the child learning to talk, the race began also with a few, or, as Geiger [91. 29] says, with a single word. That is to say, man began to think with very few or with a single concept (of course, at that time, and before, he had a large stock of percepts and of recepts [134. 193], otherwise he could have done little with his one or few concepts). From these few or that one the enormous number of concepts and words that have since come into existence have proceeded ; nor will the evolution of the entire human intellect from a single initial concept seem incredible or even very marvelous, to those who bear in mind that the whole complex human body, with all its tissues, organs and parts, is built up of hundreds of millions of cells, each one of which, however much it may differ in structure and function from those belonging to other organs and tissues than its own, is yet lineally descended from the one single primordial cell in which each one of us (and only a few years ago) had his origin

As we reach back into the past, therefore, we find language, and with it the human intellect, drawing into a point, and we know that within a measurable distance from where we stand to-day they must have both had their beginning. The date of that beginning has been approximately fixed by many writers and from many indications, and we cannot be far astray in placing it (provisionally) about three hundred thousand years anterior to our own times. Much more modern than the birth of the intellect was that of the color sense. We have the authority of Max Mueller [117. 299] for the statement that : “ It is well known that the distinction of color is of late date ; that Xenophanes knew of three colors of the rainbow only — purple, red and yellow ; that even Aristotle spoke of the tricolored rainbow ; and that Democritus knew of no more than four colors — black, white, red and yellow.” Geiger [91. 48] points out that it can be proved by examination of language that as late in the life of the race as the time of the primitive Aryans, perhaps not more than fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, man was only conscious of, only perceived, one color. That is to say, he did not distinguish any difference in tint between the blue sky, the green trees and grass, the

On the Plane of Self Consciousness brown or gray earth, and the golden and purple clouds of sunrise and sunset. So Pictet [126] finds no names of colors in primitive Indo-European speech. And Max Mueller [i 16 : 616] finds no Sanskrit root whose meaning has any reference to color. At a later period, but still before the time of the oldest literary compositions now extant, the color sense was so far developed beyond this primitive condition that red and black were recognized as distinct. Still later, at the time when the bulk of the Rig Veda was composed, red, yellow and black were recognized as three separate shades, but these three included all color that man at that age was capable of appreciating. Still later white was added to the list and then green ; but throughout the Rig Veda, the Zend Avesta, the Homeric poems and the Bible the color of the sky is not once mentioned, therefore, apparently, was not recognized. For the omission can hardly be attributed to accident ; the ten thousand lines of the Rig Veda are largely occupied with descriptions of the sky ; and all its features — sun, moon, stars, clouds, lightning, sunrise and sunset — are mentioned hundreds of times. So also the Zend Avesta, to the writers of which light and fire, both terrestrial and heavenly, are sacred objects, could hardly have omitted by chance all mention of the blue sky.

In the Bible the sky and heaven are mentioned more than four hundred and thirty times, and still no mention is made of the color of the former. In no part of the world is the blue of the sky more intense than in Greece and Asia Minor, where the Homeric poems were composed. Is it possible to conceive that a poet (or the poets) who saw this as we see it now could write the forty-eight long books of the Iliad and Odyssey and never once either mention or refer to it ? But were it possible to believe that all the poets of the Rig Veda, Zend Avesta, Iliad, Odyssey and Bible could have omitted the mention of the blue color of the sky by mere accident, etymology would step in and assure us that four thousand years ago, or, perhaps, three, blue was unknown, for at that time the subsequent names for blue were all merged in the names for black.

The English word blue and the German blau descend from a word that meant black. The Chinese hi-u-an, which now means sky-blue, formerly meant black. The word nil, which now in Persian and Arabic means blue, is derived from the name Nile, that is, the black river, of which same word the Latin Niger is a form. It does not seem possible that at the time when men recognized only two colors, which they called red and black, these appeared to them as red and black appear to us — though just what the sensations were which they so named cannot of course be now ascertained. Under the name red it seems they included with that color white, yellow and all intermediate tints ; while under the name black they seem to have included all shades of blue and green. As the sensations red and black came into existence by the division of an original unital color sensation, so in process of time these divided. First red divided into red-yellow, then that red into red-white. Black divided into black-green, then black again into black-blue, and during the last twenty-five hundred years these six (or rather these four — red, yellow, green, blue) have split up into the enormous number of shades of color which are now recognized and named. The annexed diagram shows at a glance the order in which the spectrum colors became visible to man.

It can be shown in an entirely independent manner that if the color sense did come into existence as here supposed the successive order in which the colors are said (following ancient documents and etymology) to have been recognized by man is actually the order in which they must have been so recognized and the scientific facts now about to be adduced must be admitted to be remarkably confirmatory of the above conclusions, while being drawn from sources entirely separate and distinct. On the Plane of Self Consciousness The solar or other light rays that excite vision are named red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. These rays differ the one from the other in the length and amplitude of the waves which compose them, and both the length and amplitude of the waves diminish in the order in which the names have just been given. But the force or energy of a light wave — that is to say, its power of exciting vision, is proportional to the square of its amplitude [180. 272, and especially 181. 136]. According to this law the energy — the power of exciting vision — of the red rays is several thousand times as great as the energy of the violet, and there is a regular and rapid decrease of energy as we pass down the spectrum from red to violet. It is plain that if there has been such a thing as a growing perfection in the sense of vision in virtue of which, from being insensible to color the eye became gradually sensible of it, red would necessarily be the first color perceived, then yellow, then green, and so on to violet ; and this is exactly what both ancient literature and etymology tell us took place.

The comparative modernness of the color sense is further attested by the large number of persons in all countries who are what is called color-blind — that is, persons who are at the present day entirely or partially without color sense. “Wilson’s assersion that probably one in five and twenty is color-blind long remained doubted because not proved in reference to suffciently large numbers. Till we had comparison methods, and principally Hohngren’s, no satisfactory data could be obtained. His in proper hands so quickly decides a case that tests have already been made in thousands of persons. Based on at least two hundred thousand examinations is the result that four per cent, of males are color blind in greater or less degree, and one-fourth of one per cent, of females.” [135. 242.] This would make one case of color-blindness to every forty-seven persons. The degree of universality of the color sense in a race is, of course, an important fact in estimating its degree of evolution as compared with other races. In this connection the following facts are of interest [122. 716]: “In Japan among 1,200 soldiers 1.58 per cent, were red-blind, and 0.833 per cent, green-blind. Among 373 boys i per cent, were red-blind ; among 270 girls 0.4 per cent. Among 596 men examined by Dr. Berry, of Kyoto, 5.45 per cent, showed defective color sense. Among the Japanese, as a whole, the percentage of color-blindness is less than in Europeans or Americans. Among 796 Chinese examined in various places no cases of color-blindness were found, but there was a tendency often seen to mix green and blue. This peculiarity was brought out with much greater emphasis by Dr. Fielde, of Swatow, China, who examined 1,200 Chinese of both sexes, using Thomp-

son’s wool tests. Among the 600 men were 19 who were color-blind, and among 600 women only i. The percentage of color-blindness among Chinamen is, then, about 3 per cent., and does not vary greatly from that of Europeans.” In color-blindness the general vision is not affected ; the individual distinguishes light and shade, form and distance, as well as do other persons. This also goes to show that the color sense is more superficial, less fundamental, and probably therefore acquired later than the other powers that belong to the function of sight. For a person could not lose one of the more fundamental elements of vision (the sense of visual form, for instance) and retain the other sight faculties unimpaired. Color-blindness is in fact an instance of what is called atavism, or relapse to a condition which was normal in the ancestry of the individual, but which does not properly belong to the species at the time in which he lives. The frequency of this relapse (estimated, as we have seen, to occur in one person out of every forty-seven) indicates that the color sense is comparatively modern ; for atavism is more frequent in inverse proportion to the length of time that has elapsed since the organ or function lost or improperly taken on (as the case may be) has (in the one case) normally existed in the race or (in the other) been discarded in the process of evolution.

The rationale of this law (which will be again referred to) is obvious : it depends upon the simple fact that the longer any organ or function has been in existence in a race the more certainly will it be inherited. The existence of color-blindness, then, in so large a percentage of the population shows that the color sense is a modern faculty. The relative visibility of the different colored light rays makes it certain that if the color sense was acquired it would undoubtedly have been so in the order in which philologists claim it actually was acquired, and the concurrence of these two sets of facts, the one drawn from natural philosophy and the other from etymology, together with the fact of colorblindness, is so striking that it seems impossible to refuse assent to the conclusions reached.

Another recently acquired faculty is the sense of fragrance. It is not mentioned in the Vedic hymns and only once in the Zend Avesta. Geiger [91. 58] tells us that the custom of offering incense with the sacrifice is not yet met with in the Rig Veda, though it is found in the more recent Yadshurveda. Among the Biblical books the sense of the fragrance of flowers first makes its appearance in the “ Song of Songs.” According to the descrip- On the Plane of Self Consciousness tion in Genesis there were in Paradise all kinds of trees “ that were pleasant to the sight and good for food,” no mention being made of pleasant odors. The Apochryphal book of Henoch (of the first century B. C., or even later), extant in Ethiopian, likewise describes Paradise, but does not omit to extol the delightful fragrance of the Tree of Knoweledge, as well as other trees, in the Garden of Eden. Besides this evidence it is said to be capable of proof from language that no such sense as that of fragrance existed in the early times of the IndoEuropeans. And it is also worth mentioning in this connection that no animal (although many of these so greatly surpass us in recognition by scent) possesses, so far as we know or can discover, any sense of fragrance, and that children do not acquire it until they are several years old — not, indeed, for several years after they have acquired, more or less perfectly, the sense of color ; thus corresponding in their mental development (as pointed out above) with the evolution of the general human mind, for the color sense probably came into existence in the race many thousand years before the sense of fragrance.

Instincts which are both human and animal, as the sexual and maternal, undoubtedly came down to man through long lines of descent and have been in possession of himself and his ancestors for millions of years ; but the human moral nature, though it is rooted in and has grown from these, is of comparatively recent origin. It not only does not go back behind the birth of self consciousness, but it is certainly very much more recent than this. Many that is. Self Consciousness, as has been said, must have come into being some three hundred thousand years ago when the first Alalus Homo uttered the first true word. In the individual to-day nia7i is born when the child becomes self conscious — at the average age of, say, three years. Among the Indo-European races not more than about one individual (so-called idiot) in a thousand grows to maturity without attaining to Self Consciousness. Self Consciousness having appeared in an individual, is only lost in great and rare crises — as in the delirium of fever and in some forms of insanity, notably mania ; on the other hand the human moral nature does not appear in the individual (on the average) until, say, half-way between three years old and maturity. Instead or one or two in a thousand, several times the same number in a hundred are born, grow up and die without a moral nature. Instead of being lost in great and rare crises it is constantly being temporarily lost. All these indications go to prove that the human moral nature is a

much more recent birth of time than is the human intellect, and that if we suppose the latter to be three hundred thousand years old we cannot suppose the former to be anything like that age. Primeval man, from whom we are all descended, has still upon the earth in these later days, two representatives — first, the savage ; second, the child. It would be true to say that the child is a savage and the savage a child, and through the mental state represented by these two, not only each individual member of the race, but the race itself as a whole, has passed. For, as in his intra-uterine evolution the individual man retraces and summarizes in a few brief months the evolution of the human race, physically considered, from the initial unicellular form in which individual life began through all intervening phases between that and the human form, resuming in each day the slow evolution of millions of years, so likewise does the individual man in his mental development from birth to maturity retrace and summarize the evolution of the psychical life of the race ; and as the individual physical man begins at the very bottom of the scale as a unicellular monad, so does the psychical man begin on the bottom round of the ladder of mind, and in his ascent of a few dozen months passes through the successive phases each of which occupied in its accomplishment by the race thousands of years. The characteristics of the mind of the savage and of the child will give us, when found, the characteristics of the primeval human mind from which has descended the average modern mind that we know, as well as the exceptional minds of the great men of history of the present day.

The chief differences between the primeval, the infantile and the savage mind on the one hand and the civilized mind on the other, is that the first (called for the sake of brevity the lower mind) is wanting in personal force, courage, or faith, and also in sympathy, or affection ; and that it is more easily excited to terror or anger than is the second or civilized mind. There are of course other differences than these between the lower mind and the higher — differences in intellect, and even in sense perceptions ; but these, though great in themselves, have not the supreme significance of the basic, fundamental, moral differences just mentioned. The lower mind then lacks faith, lacks courage, lacks personal force, lacks sympathy, lacks affection — that is (to sum up), it lacks peace, content, happiness. It is prone to the fear of things known, and still more to vague terror of things unknown ; it is prone to anger, rage, hatred — that is (to again sum up), to unrest, discontent, unhap- On the Plane of Self Consciousness piness. On the other hand, the higher mind (as compared with the lower) possesses faith, courage, personal force, sympathy, affection ; that is, it possesses (relatively) happiness ; is less prone to fear of things known and unknown and to anger and hatred — that is, to unhappiness.

The statement thus broadly made does not seem at first sight to mean very much, but in fact it means almost everything ; it contains the key to our past, our present and our future, for it is the condition of the moral nature (thus briefly adverted to) that decides for each one of us, from moment to moment, and for the race at large, from age to age, what sort of a place this world in which we live shall appear to be — what sort of a place it is indeed for each one of us. For it is not our eyes and ears, nor even our intellects, that report the world to us ; but it is our moral nature that settles at last the significance of what exists about us. The members of the human race began by fearing much and disliking much, by loving or admiring little and by trusting still less. It is safe to say that those earliest men of the river drift, and the cave men, their successors, saw little beauty in the outer world in which they lived, though perhaps their eyes, in most other respects, were fully as keen as ours. It is certain that their family affections (as in the case of the lowest savages of to-day) were, to say the least, rudimentary, and that all men outside their immediate family were either feared or disliked, or both. When the race emerges from the cloud-covered past into the light of what may be called inferential history, the view men took of the government of the universe, of the character of the beings and forces by which this government was carried on, of the position in which man stood to the governing powers, of his prospects in this life and after it, were (as in the case of the lower races of to-day) gloomy in an extreme degree.

Since that time neither the world nor the government of the world have changed, but the gradual alteration in the moral nature of man has made it in his eyes a different place. The bleak and forbidding mountains, the awe-inspiring sea, the gloomy forests, the dark and fearful night, all the aspects of nature which in that old time were charged with dread, have in the place of it become clothed with a new and strange beauty. The whole human race and all living things have put on (in our eyes) a charm and sacredness which in the old times they were far from possessing. The governing powers of the universe (obedient to the same beneficent influence) have been gradually converted from demons into beings and forces less and less inimical, more and more friendly, to man ; so that in all respects each age has interpreted the universe for itself, and has more or less discredited the interpretations of previous ages.

Which is the correct interpretation ? What mind, of all the vast diversity of the past and present, in all this long series, pictures to itself most correctly the outer world ? Let us see. Let us consider for a moment our spiritual genealogy, and dwell on its meaning. Our immediate ancestors were Christians. The spiritual proginator of Christianity was Judaism. Judaism, having its beginning in that group of tribes collectively called Terachite or Hebrew — Ibrim, those of the other side (i. e., of the Euphrates) — descended from the mythical Ab-orham or Abraham [137-91!] ; these tribes being themselves a twig of the great Semitic branch of the Caucasian race stock, sprang directly from Chaldean polytheism. Chaldean polytheism again in its turn was a development in direct descent of the Sun and Nature worship of the primitive undivided Caucasian family. The Sun and Nature worship again no doubt had its root in, and drew its life from, initial Fetishism, or the direct worship of individual earthly objects. In this long descent (although we apply different names to different parts of the continuous series, as if there were lines of demarcation between these different parts) there has been no break, and in all the thousands of years never such a thing as a new departure. In these spiritual matters the maxim “ Natura non facit saltum” holds as firmly as it does in physics and geology. The whole affair is a simple matter of growth strictly analagous to the unfolding of the branch from the bud, or of the plant from its seed.

As has been well said : “La religion etant un des produits vivants de I’humanite doit vivre, c’est-a-dire, changer avec elle ’’ [136 : 45]. And on last analysis it will be found that under the vast diversity of external appearance, from Fetishism to Christianity — underlying the infinite variety of formulas, creeds and dogmas resumed under these five heads — the essential element upon which all else depends, which underlies all and is the soul of all, is the attitude of the moral nature. And all changes in the intellectual form and outer aspect of religion are as obedient to the gradual change taking place in this as are the movements of the hands and wheels of the watch to the expansive force of its mainspring. The external world stands fast, but the spirit of man continually grows, and as it does so its own vast Brocken shadow (thrown out by the moral nature but shaped by the intellect), which it projects on the midst of the infinite unknown, necessarily (like a dissolving view) changes and changes, following the alterations in the substance (that is, the soul of man) which gives life and reality to the shadowy phantom which plain folk call their creed, and which metaphysicians call the philosophy of the absolute.

But in thus interpreting, from age to age, the unknown universe in which we live, it is to be observed that we are (on the whole) constantly giving a On the Plane of Self Consciousness better and better report of it. We attribute to our gods (as the ages pass) better and better characters, and we constantly expect at their hands better and better treatment, both in the present life and after death. That means (of course) that the quantity of trust or faith which we possess is steadily increasing and encroaching upon its opposite, fear, which is as constantly lessening. So equally it may be said of charity, sympathy, or affection, that the constant increase of that faculty is steadily changing to us the aspect of the visible world, just as the growth of faith is altering the image we form for ourselves of that greater world which is invisible. Nor is there any indication that this double process has come to an end or that it is likely to come to an end. The length of time during which the race has been possessed of any given faculty may be more or less accurately estimated from various indications. In cases in which the birth of the faculty took place in comparatively recent times — within, for instance, the last twenty-five or thirty thousand years — philology (as we have seen) may assist materially in determining the approximate date of its appearance. But for comparatively old faculties, such as the human intellect or simple consciousness, this means necessarily entirely fails us. We fall back, then, upon the following tests :

1. The age at which the faculty appears in the individual man at the present time. 2. The more or less universality of the faculty in the adult members of the race to-day. 3. The readiness, or the reverse, with which the faculty is lost — as in sickness. 4. The relative frequency with which the faculty makes its appearance in dreams. I. Of each of our mental faculties it may be predicated that it has its own normal or average age for appearing in the individual ; as, for instance, memory and simple consciousness appear within a few days after birth ; curiosity ten weeks after ; use of tools twelve months after ; shame, remorse, and a sense of the ludicrous — all of them about fifteen months after birth. Now it is to be noted that in every instance the time of appearance of a faculty in an infant corresponds with the stage at which the same faculty appears (as far as can be at present ascertained) in the ascending animal scale, just as in the case of later appearing faculties, their age of appearing in the individual corresponds with their period of appearance in the race ; for instance, memory and simple consciousness occur in animals as primitive as the echinodermata, while the use of tools is not met with below monkeys ; and shame and remorse and a sense of the ludicrous are almost if not entirely confined (among animals) to the anthropoid ape and the dog. So of purely human faculties, self consciousness, which appears in the individual at the average age of about three years, made its appearance in the race certainly more than a thousand centuries ago, while the musical sense, which does not appear in the individual before adolescence or puberty, cannot (to judge by the records) have existed in the race more than a very few thousand years.

2. The longer a race has been in possession of a given faculty the more universal will that faculty be in the race. This proposition scarcely needs proof. Every new faculty must occur first of all in one individual, and as other individuals attain to the status of that one they too will acquire it, until, after perhaps many thousand years, the whole race, having attained to that status, the faculty will have become universal. 3. The longer a race has been in possession of a given faculty the more firmly is that faculty fixed in each individual of the race who possesses it. In other words : the more recent is any given faculty the more easily is it lost. Authority for this proposition (which indeed it scarcely needs) will be quoted where it is stated in another connection. It is almost, if not quite, a selfevident proposition. 4. A study of dreaming seems to reveal the fact that in sleep such mind as we have differs from our waking mind, especially by being more primitive ; that, in fact, it would be almost strictly true to say that in dreams we pass backward into a prehuman mental life ; that the intellectual faculties which we possess in dreams are, especially, recepts as distinguished from our waking concepts ; while in the moral realm they are equally those faculties, such as remorse, shame, surprise, along with the older and more basic sense functions, which belonged to us before we reached the human plane, and that the more modern mental faculties, such as color sense, musical sense, self consciousness, the human moral nature, have no existence in this condition, or if any of them do occur it is only as a rare exception.

Let us now compare one with the other a few of the faculties which have been already mentioned in the light of the rules laid down. To do this will give us, more clearly than perhaps anything else could, a definite notion of the growth of mind by the successive addition of new functions. For this purpose let us take (as a few examples and to stand for all) simple conscious- On the Plane of Self Consciousness ness, shame, self consciousness, color sense, the human moral nature, the musical sense, cosmic consciousness. Simple consciousness makes its appearance in the human infant within a few days after birth ; it is absolutely universal in the human race ; it dates far back before the earliest mammals ; it is lost only in deep sleep and coma; it is present in all dreams. Shame, remorse and a sense of the ludicrous are all said to be born in the human infant at about the age of fifteen months ; they are all prehuman faculties and are all found in the dog and in apes, and they undoubtedly existed in our prehuman ancestors ; they are all almost universal in the race, being absent only in very low idiots ; they are all three common in dreams.

Self consciousness makes its appearance in the child at the average age of three years ; it is not present in any species but the human ; it is, in fact, that faculty, the possession of which by an individual constitutes him a man. It is not universal in our race, being absent in all true idiots ; that is, it is permanently absent in about one in each thousand human beings in Europe and America.* There must, however, be many members of low races, such as the Bushmen of South Africa f and native Australians, who never attain to this faculty. * As regards the absence of self consciousness in idiots the examination of the inmates of a large idiot asylum revealed the fact that the faculty was absent in fully ninety per cent. The patients examined were nearly all over ten years of age. Of course a few of them might attain to self consciousness later on. Dictionaries and works on idiocy [loi] define an idiot as “ a human being destitute of the ordinary mental powers ” ; but it would seem that “ a human being in whom, the usual age being past, in consequence of atavism, self consciousness has not been developed,” would be more accurate and better. While the definition of imbecile would be : “A human being, who, though self conscious, is, in consequence of atavism, to a large extent destitute of the ordinary mental powers.”

-|-For the mental status of Bushmen see Anderson [1-9, 216, 217, 218, 227, 228, 232, 291], who gives the facts from actual observation without speculation or theory ; he is a close observer and evidently a faithful reporter. See also some remarkable pages by Olive Schreiner [90-2, 4] in which she describes these same Bushmen (as does Anderson) from personal observation. Along with much else she states, for instance, that : “ These small people had no fixed social organization ; wandering about in hordes or as solitary individuals, without any settled habitation, they slept at night under the rocks or in wild-dog holes, or they made themselves a curious little wall of loose bushes, raised up on the side from which the wind blew, and strangely like an animal’s lair ; and this they left again when the morning broke. They had no flocks or herds and lived on the wild game, or when that failed them, ate snakes, scorpions, insects or offal, or visited the flocks of the Hottentots. They wore no clothing of any kind, and their weapons were bows and arrows, the strings of the bows being made from the sinews of wild animals, and the arrows tipped with sharpened bones or flint stones, poisoned with the juice of a bulb or dipped in the body of a poisonous caterpillar : and these formed their only property. They had no marriage ceremony and no permanent sex relations, any man or woman cohabiting during pleasure ; maternal feeling was at its lowest ebb, mothers readily forsaking their young or disposing of them for a trifle ; and paternal feeling was non-existent. Their language is said by those who

In our ancestry self consciousness dates back to the first true man. Thouands of years must have elapsed between its first appearance and its universality, just as thousands of years are now passing between the first cases of cosmic consciousness and its universality. A race, we are told, unclothed, walking erect,* * gregarious, without a true language, to a limited extent toolusing, destitute of marriage, government, or any institution ; animal, but in virtue of its relatively high moral nature (making it gregarious) and its highly developed receptual intelligence, king of animals, developed self consciousness, and by that fact became man. It is impossible to say how long ago it was when this event occurred, but it could not have been less than several hundred thousand years. This faculty is lost much more easily than is simple consciousness. We lose it in coma and also often in the delirium of fever ; in certain forms of insanity, as in mania, it is often lost for weeks and months at a time ; lastly, it is never present in dreams. The color sense has been already considered. It remains to say a few words from the present point of view. It comes into existence gradually in the individual — at three or four years there may be a trace of it. At eight years of age it was found by Jeffries [135-242] still absent in a large percentage of children. Twenty to thirty per cent, of schoolboys are said to be color-blind, while only four per cent, of adult males are so. Dr. Favre, of Lyons [135-243] reported in 1874 ^ the French Congress for the Advancement of Science, at Lille, “ some observations that seemed to him to prove that congenital color-blindness was curable ” [135-242], but it does not seem to have occurred to him that the color sense, being invariably absent in very

have closely studied it to be so imperfect that the clear expression of even the very simplest ideas is difficult. They have no word for wife, for marriage, for nation ; and their minds appear to be in the same simple condition as their language. The complex mental operations necessary for the^ maintenance of life under civilized conditions they have apparently no power of performing ; no member of the race has in any known instance been taught to read or write, nor to grasp religious conceptions clearly, though great efforts have been made to instruct them.” It seems impossible to believe that as a race these creatures are self conscious. * Walking erect. If the view here taken of mental, and human, evolution should be accepted it would throw some light on our remote past. One corollary from it would be that our ancestors walked erect for hundreds of thousands of years before they became self conscious — that is, before they became men and began to speak. The age at which infants begin to walk is (mentally) the age of the dog and the ape. From fifteen or eighteen months to three years of age the child passes through the mental strata which lie between these animals and self consciousness. During that time the child’s receptual intelligence becomes more and more perfect, the recepts themselves become more and more complex, nearer and nearer to concepts, until these last are actually formed and self consciousness is established. It would seem that something like a half million of years of evolution must have elapsed between the status of the highest anthropoid apes and that of man. Perhaps this may be a comforting reflection to those people who do not like the idea of having descended from some Simian form.

On the Plane of Self Consciousness young children, and making its appearance at a variable age, as the child advances toward maturity, color blindness would necessarily appear to the teacher, watching the development of the child and exercising its sense of sight upon colors, to be “ cured.” We have seen above that the color sense in the race cannot be many tens a thousands of years old. Color sense is absent in one human being out of every forty-seven. It is seldom present in dreams, and when it does occur, that is, when any color is seen in a dream, it is generally that color which for good reasons was first perceived by man, namely, red. The following occurrence illustrates (in a striking manner) the usual absence of the color sense during the partial consciousness which occurs in sleep. A man whose hair is white dreamed that he was looking in a glass and saw plainly that his hair was not only much thicker than he knew it to be in fact, but instead of being white, as he also knew it to be, it was black. Now he well remembered in his dream that his hair had never been black. It had, in fact, been a light brown. He wondered (it is worth mentioning here that wonder or surprise is a prehuman faculty, and is common in dreams) in his dream that his hair should be black, remembering distinctly that it had never been so.

The important thing to note about the dream under consideration is that, though it was clear to the dreamer’s mind that his hair had never been black, yet he did not remember that it had been brown. For some reason there was a difficulty in calling up before consciousness any color. The same man dreamed that he had wounded with a knife an enemy who had attacked him ; the bleeding was profuse but the blood was white ; he knew in his dream that it should not be white, but no image of its true color or of any color presented itself.

The human moral nature includes many faculties, such as conscience, the abstract sense of right and wrong, sexual love as distinguished from sexual desire or instinct, parental and filial love as distinguished from the corresponding instincts (man has both these instincts in common with the brutes as well as the higher feelings), love of our fellow men as such, love of the beautiful, awe, reverence, sense of duty or responsibility, sympathy, compassion, faith. No human nature is complete without these and others ; it is therefore a very complex function ; but for the purpose of the present argument it must be treated as if it were a simple sense. Now at what age does this human moral nature appear in individual man ? It is never present in quite young children. It is often still absent at puberty and even at adolescence. It is a late acquired faculty. It would probably not be far wrong to say that the average age for its appearance in the individual is somewhere about fifteen years. It would seem clear from a study of history that our human moral nature cannot be more than some ten or twelve thousand years old. For a careful consideration of the records that have come down to us from the early Romans, Hellenes, Hebrews, Egyptians, Assyrians and Babylonians would indicate unmistakably that as we go back into the past this faculty tapers down toward the vanishing point, and if it continues so to taper as we ascend the ages all of what we distinctively call our human moral nature would certainly have disappeared by the time we had got back the number of centuries mentioned — ten or twelve thousand years.

In what proportion of the men and women of civilized countries does the human moral nature fail to appear ? There are so many men and women who have a partial moral nature, so many who, having little or none, wear (as well as may be) the outer semblance of one ; the judging of men and women in this regard is so difficult — the problem is so veiled and so complicated— that it is impossible to give more than an opinion. But let any one who is curious read a few such books as those by Despine [66] and Ellis [76] — then view the men and women among whom he lives by the light thus supplied, and he will be forced to the conclusion that the proportion of the adults who have little or no, or an undeveloped, moral nature is far greater than of those who have little or no, or an undeveloped, color sense. We probably should not be far wrong if we said that at least forty men and women out of every thousand in America and Europe are in the position indicated. Then how many races of men are there still living upon the earth none or very few of the members of which have what could be called from the point of view of our civilization a human moral nature? Again, while self consciousness is lost, not of course always, but frequently, in insanity and fever, the moral nature is, we must all admit, subject to much more frequent lapses and absences and with far less cause.

Self consciousness appeared in the race, as we have seen, about three hundred thousand years ago. The above considerations would point to a very much later date for the appearance of the moral nature. And do not all records and historic indications, so far as they go, support this inference ? Finally, the musical sense (a faculty which is now in act of being born) does not appear in the individual before adolescence. It does not exist in more than half the members of our race. It has existed less (perhaps considerably less) than five thousand years. It is never, or almost never, present in dreams, even in the case of professional musicians. While self consciousness in insanity is lost, as said, occasionally, the musical sense in that condition might be said to be invariably lost — at least after an experience of On the Plane of Self Consciousness Cl c3 o <u OJ J- •*—1 (A fi 1-2 S Sii G VI O ^ as «« r! r! o G« G cj • — ^ as O u ^ . p's ^ 5; °-o bo c “ h ^ k ^ s «3 Vi j3 Cj Li twenty-five years, with about five thousand cases of lunacy, the writer cannot recall a case where the musical sense was retained, the person being insane.

The accompanying summary, in tabular form, of the main facts concerning the evolution of the faculties mentioned and some others, will make, it is believed, the whole subject more intelligible than any long exposition thereof. The figures in the table and text are not given as being exact, but for the sake of conveying a clear idea which it is thought will be correct enough for the present purpose. To sum up : as ontogeny is nothing else but philogeny in petto — that is, as the evolution of the individual is necessarily the evolution of the race in an abridged form, simply because it cannot in the nature of things be anything else — cannot follow any other lines, there being no other lines for it to follow — it is plain that organs and faculties (speaking broadly and generally) must appear in the individual in the same order in which they appeared in the race, and the one being known, the other may with confidence be assumed. When a new faculty appears in a race it will be found, in the very beginning, in one individual of that race ; later it will be found in a few individuals ; after a further time in a larger percentage of the members of the race ; still later in half the members ; and so on, until, after thousands of generations, an individual who misses having the faculty is regarded as a monstrosity. Note, too — and this is important — when the new faculty appears, especially if it be in the direct line of the ascent of the race, as in the case of Simple, Self, or Cosmic, Consciousness, it must appear first in a member, then in members, of the race who have reached full maturity. For an immature individual (other things being equal) cannot over-pass or go beyond a mature individual of the same race.

Thus, as the eons pass, has the great trunk of the tree of life grown taller and from time to time shot forth twigs which have grown to branches, and these again to noble limbs, which in their turn have put out twigs and branches, many of them of great size and in number uncountable. We know that the tree has not ceased to grow, that even now, as always, it is putting forth new buds, and that the old shoots, twigs and branches are most of them increasing in size and strength. Shall the growth stop to-day ? It does not seem likely. It seems more likely that other limbs and branches undreamed of to-day shall spring from the tree, and that the main trunk which from mere life grew into sensitive life, simple consciousness and self consciousness shall yet pass into still higher forms of life and consciousness. As in the evolution of an individual tree some branches flourish while others fail ; as in a forest some trees grow tall and stretch out wide branches while others are stunted and die out; as in the onward and upward progress of any species some individuals are in advance of the main body while others lag behind ; so in the forward march of the collective human mind across the centuries some individual minds are in the van of the great army, while in the rear of the column stagger and fall vast numbers of defective specimens.

In any race the stability of any faculty is in proportion to the age of the faculty in the race. That is, a comparatively new faculty is more subject to lapse, absence, aberration, to what is called disease, and is more liable to be lost, than an older faculty. To many this proposition will seem a truism. If an organ or faculty has been inherited in a race for, say, a million genera- ^tions, it seems, a priori, certain that it is more likely to be inherited by a given individual of that race than is an organ or faculty which originated, say, three generations back. A case in point is what is called genius. Genius consists in the possession of a new faculty or new faculties, or in an increased development of an old faculty or old faculties. This being the case, it seems to Galton [92] necessary to write a good sized volume to prove that it is hereditary. So far was that from being an obvious fact that even yet the heredity of genius is far from being universally accepted. But no one ever wrote a book to prove that either sight, hearing, or self consciousness is hereditary, because every one (even the most ignorant) knows without any argument that they are so. On the point in question Darwin says, speaking of horses : “ The want of uniformity in the parts which, at the time, are undergoing selection chiefly depends on the strength of the principle of reversion ” [67 :

288]. That is, parts or organs which are undergoing change by means of selection are liable to lose what has been gained by reverting to the initial condition. And again he says: “It is a general belief among breeders that characters of all kinds become fixed by long continued inheritance” [67: 289]. In another place he speaks of the “fluctuating and, as far as we can judge, never ending variability of our domestic productions, the plasticity of their whole organization” [67 : 485], and he attributes this instability to the recent changes these have undergone

under the influence of the artificial selection to which they have been subjected. And in still another place Darwin speaks of “the extreme variability of our domesticated animals and cultivated plants. But it is scarcely necessary to carry this argument further. Any one who is willing to give the matter a thought will admit that the shorter time an organ or faculty has been possessed by a race the more unstable must it be in the race, and, consequently, in the individual ; the more liable will it be to be dropped ; the more liable to be defective ; the more liable to vary ; the more liable to be or to become imperfect — as we say, diseased. And that, per contra, the longer time an organ or faculty has existed in any race, the more certain it is to be inherited and the more certain it is to assume a definite, typical character — that is, the more certain it is to be normal, the more certain it is to agree with the norm or type of the said organ or faculty. In other words, the less likely it is to be imperfect — what we call defective or diseased. This being allowed, it will readily be granted : ist. That the race whose evolution is the most rapid will (other things being equal) have the most breakdowns ; and, 2d, That in any given race those functions whose evolution is the most rapid will be the most subject to breakdowns.

If these principles be applied to the domesticated animals (which have, most of them, within the last few hundred generations, been much differentiated by artificial selection), they will explain what has often been looked upon as anomalous — namely, the much greater liability to disease and early death of these as compared with their wild prototypes. For that domestic animals are more liable to disease and premature death than wild, is admitted on all hands. The same principle will explain also how it is that the more highly bred an animal is — that is, the more widely it has been differentiated in late generations from a previous type — the more liable will it be to disease and premature death. Taking now these general rules home to ourselves — to the human race — we find them to mean that those organs and functions which have been the latest acquired will be most often defective, absent, abnormal, diseased. But it is notorious that in civilized man, especially in the Aryan race, the functions which have undergone most change in the last few thousand years are those called mental — that great group of functions (sensuous, intellectual, moral) which depend upon, spring from, the two great nervous systems — the cerebro-spinal and the great sympathetic. This great group of functions has grown, expanded, put forth new shoots and twigs, and is still in the act of producing new faculties, at a rate immeasurably greater than any other part of the human organism. If this is so then within this great con-

geries of faculties it is inevitable that we should meet with constant lapses, omissions, defects, breakdowns. Clinical observation teaches day by day that the above reasoning is solidly grounded. It presents lapses of all degrees and in unlimited varieties ; lapses in sense function, such as color-blindness and music deafness ; lapses in the moral nature, of the whole or a part ; in the intellect, of one or several faculties ; or lapses, more or less complete, of the whole intellect, as in imbecility and idiocy. But over and above all these lapses, and as a necessary accompaniment of them, we have that inevitable breaking down of function, once established in the individual, which we call insanity, as distinguished from the various forms and degrees of idiocy. For it is easy to see that if a function or faculty belonging to any given species is liable for any general cause to be dropped in a certain proportion of the individuals of that species, it must be also liable to become diseased — that is, to break down — in cases where it is not dropped. For if the faculty in question is by no means always developed in the individual — if it quite frequently fails to appear — that must mean that in many other cases in which it does appear it will not be fully and solidly formed. We cannot imagine a jump from the total nonappearance of a given function in certain members of a species to the absolute perfection and solidity of the same function in the rest of the members.

We know that species do not grow that way. We know that in a race in which we have some men seven feet high and others only four that we shall find, if we look, men of all statures between these extremes. We know that in all cases extremes presented by the race are bridged (from one to the other) by full sets of intermediary specimens. One man can lift a thousand pounds, another can only lift a hundred ; but between these are men the limit of whose strength fills up the whole gap between the hundred and the thousand pounds. One man dies of old age at forty years, another at one hundred and thirty years, and every year and month between forty years and one hundred and thirty years is the limit of some man’s possible life. The same law that holds for the limit of faculties holds also for the solidity and permanence of faculties. We know that in some men the intellectual functions are so unstable that as soon as they are established they crumble down — crushed (as it were) by their own weight — like a badly built house, the walls of which are not strong enough to sustain the roof. Such are extreme cases of so-called developmental insanity — cases in which the mind falls into ruins as soon as it comes into existence or even before it is fully formed ; cases of insanity of puberty and adolescence, in which nature is barely able to form or half form a normal mind and totally unable to sustain it, the mind, consequently, run-

ning down at once back into chaos. The hopelessness of this class of cases (as regards recovery) is well understood by all alienists, and it is not difficult to see why such insanities should and must be practically incurable, since their very existence denotes the absence of the elements necessary to form and maintain a normal human mind in the subjects in question. In the realm of insanity, properly so called — that is, excluding the idiocies — these cases occupy the extreme position at one end of the scale, while those persons who only become maniacal or melancholic under the most powerful exciting causes, such as child-birth and old age, occupy the other end. That is, we have a class in whom the mind, without a touch, crumbles into ruin as soon as formed or even before it is fully formed. Then we have another class in which the balance of the mental faculties is only overturned by the rudest shocks, and then only temporarily, since the cases to which I refer recover in a few weeks or months if placed under favorable conditions. But between these extremes the whole wide intermediate space is filled with an infinite variety of phases of insanity, exhibiting every possible condition of mental stability and instability between the two extremes noticed. But throughout the whole range of mental alienation this law holds, namely: that the latest evolved of the mental functions, whether intellectual or moral, suffer first and suffer most, while the earliest evolved of the mental and moral functions suffer (if at all) the latest and the least.

If the mind be likened to a growing tree, then it can be said that the lesser onsets of insanity shrivel its leaves — paralyze, or partially paralyze, their functions for a time, the leaves standing for the later formed and more fragile emotions and concepts, and especially for the later formed combinations of these ; that deeper attacks kill the leaves and damage the finer twigs ; that still more profound disturbances kill the finer twigs and injure the larger ; and so on, until, in the most profound and deep-rooted insanities, as in the developmental dementias, the tree is left a bare, ghastly trunk, without leaves or twigs and almost without branches. And in all this process of destruction the older formed faculties, such as perception and memory, desire for food and drink, shrinking from injury, and the more basic sense functions, endure the longest ; while, as has been said, the latest evolved functions crumble down first, then the next latest, and so on. A fact that well illustrates the contention that insanity is essentially the breaking down of mental faculties which are unstable chiefly because they are recent, and that it rests therefore upon an evolution which is modern and still in progress, is the comparative absence of insanity among negroes.

It has been said that the large percentage of insanity in America and Europe depends directly upon the rapid evolution in late millenniums of the mind of the Aryan people. Very few would claim that the negro mind is advancing at anything like the same rate. As a consequence of these different rates of progression we have in the Aryan people of America a much higher percentage of insanity than is found in the negro race. When the United States census of 1880 was taken it was found that among forty-three millions of white people there were eighty-six thousand insane — exactly one in five hundred — while among six and three-quarter million negroes only a little more than six thousand were insane, which is a proportion of only about one to eleven hundred. Doubtless if we had statistics of other backward and stationary peoples a similar state of matters would be found — all such facts as we have leading to the conclusion that among savages and semi-savages there exists comparatively little insanity. In conclusion the results arrived at in this chapter may be summed up as follows : 1. The stability of a faculty in the individual depends upon its age in the race. The older the faculty the more stable it is, and the less old the less stable.

2. The race whose evolution is most rapid will be the most subject to breakdown. 3. Those functions in any given race whose evolutions are the most rapid will be the most subject to breakdown. 4. In the more progressive families of the Aryan race the mental faculties have for some millenniums last past developed with great rapidity. 5. In this race the large number of mental breakdowns, commonly called insanity, are due to the rapid and recent evolution of those faculties in that race. As the faculties referred to in the last division of this volume, and many more, came into existence in the race, each in its own time, when the race was ready for it, let us assume, as we must, that growth, evolution, development, or whatever we choose to call it, has (as thus exemplified) always gone on, is going on now, and (as far as we can tell) will always go on. If we are right in such an assumption new faculties will from time to time arise in the mind as, in the past, new faculties have arisen. This being granted, let us assume that what in this book is called Cosmic Consciousness is such a nascent, such a werdende, faculty. And now let us see what we know about this new sense, state, faculty, or whatever it may be called. And, first, it may be noted that the new sense does not appear by chance in this man or that.

It is necessary for its appearance that an exalted human personality should exist and supply the pre-conditions for its birth. In the great cases especially is there an exceptional development of some or all of the ordinary human faculties. Note particularly, since that case is unmistakably known to us, the singular perfection of the intellectual and moral faculties and of the special senses in Walt Whitman [103 : 57-71]. It is probable that an approximation to this evolutionary excellence is necessary in all cases. Then certainly in some, probably in all, cases the person has an exceptional physique — exceptional beauty of build and carriage, exceptionally handsome features, exceptional health, exceptional sweetness of temper, exceptional magnetism.

The faculty itself has many names, but they have not been understood or recognized. It will be well to give some of them here. They will be better understood as we advance. Either Gautama himself, or some one of his early disciples, called it “Nirvana” because of the “extinction” of certain lower mental faculties (such as the sense of sin, fear of death, desire of wealth, etc., etc.) which is directly incident upon its birth. This subjugation of the old personality along with the birth of the new is, in fact, almost equivalent to the annihilation of the old and the creation of a new self. The word Nirvana is defined as “the state to which the Buddhist saint is to aspire as the highest aim and highest good.” Jesus called the new condition “the Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven,” because of the peace and happiness which belong to it and which are perhaps its most characteristic features. Paul called it “ Christ.” He speaks of himself as “ a man in Christ,” of “them that are in Christ.” He also calls it “the Spirit” and “the Spirit of God.” After Paul had entered Cosmic Consciousness he knew that Jesus had possessed the cosmic sense and that he was living (as it were) the life of Jesus — that another individuality, another self, lived in him. This second self he called Christ (the divinely sent deliverer), identifying it not so much with the man Jesus, as with the deliverer which was to be sent and which had been sent in his person, who was both Jesus (the ordinary self conscious man) and Messiah (the herald and exemplar of the new, higher race).

The duplex personality of men having cosmic consciousness will appear many times as we proceed and will be seen to be a constant and prominent phenomenon. Mohammed called the cosmic sense “Gabriel,” and seems to have looked upon it as a distinctly separate person who lived in him and spoke to him. Dante called it “Beatrice” (“Making Happy”), a name almost or quite equivalent to “ Kingdom of Heaven.” Balzac called the new man a “Specialist ” and the new condition “ Specialism.” Whitman called cosmic consciousness “My Soul,” but spoke of it as if it were another person ; for instance :

O soul repressless, I with thee and thou with me We too take ship O soul With laugh and many a kiss .... O soul thou pleasest me, I thee. Bacon (in the Sonnets) has treated the cosmic sense so emphatically as a distinct person that the world for three hundred years has taken him at his word and has agreed that the “ person ” in question (whatever his name may have been) was a young friend of the poet’s ! To illustrate the objectification of this purely subjective phenomenon (though it must be remembered that to the person with cosmic consciousness the terms objective and subjective lose their old meaning — and “ objects gross” and the “unseen soul” become “one”), it will not be amiss to quote a passage [173 : 5] from a poet who, though he is a case of cosmic consciousness, is not included in the present volume for the reason that the present writer has not been able to obtain the details necessary for that purpose. So mused a traveler on the earthly plane Being in himself a type of all mankind. From Self to Cosmic Consciousness For aspirations dim at first possessed Him only, rising vaguely in his dreams,