CLAUSE I
This answer does not pretend to exhaust the nature of man; another aspect is dealt with in Clause XII. It is usual to impart the latter mode of statement first; but premature dwelling on the more mystical aspect of human nature, with ignorance or neglect of the biological facts actually ascertained concerning it, only gives rise to troubled thought in the future when the material facts become known—often in crude or garbled form—and leads to scepticism.
The clause as it stands is a large and comprehensive statement, that will need much time for its elucidation and adequate comprehension. Its separate terms may be considered thus:—
Earth.—Children can gradually be assisted to realise the earth as an enormous globe of matter, with vast continents and oceans on its surface and with a clinging atmosphere, the whole moving very rapidly (nineteen miles each second) through space, and constituting one of a number of other planets all revolving round the sun. They may also be led to realise that from the distance of a million miles it would appear as an object in the sky rather like the moon; that from a greater distance it would look like any of the other planets; while from a vastly greater distance neither it nor any other planet is large or luminous enough to be visible—nothing butthe sun would then be seen, looking like a star. It is occasionally helpful to realise that the earth, with all its imperfections, is one of the heavenly bodies.
Being.—The mystery of existence may be lightly touched upon. The fact that anything whatever—even a stone—exists, raises unanswerable questions of whence and why. It is instructive to think of some rocks as agglomerations of sand, and of sand as water-worn fragments of previous rock; so that, even here, there arises a sense of infinitude.
Alive.—The nature of life and, consequently, of death is unknown, but life is associated with rapid chemical changes in complex molecules, and is characterised by the powers or faculties of assimilation, growth, and reproduction. It is a property we share with all animals and also with plants. Children should not be told this in bald fashion, but by judicious questioning should be led to perceive the essence of it for themselves. Soon after they realise what is meant by life, some of them will perceive that it has an enormous range of application, and will think of flowers as possessing it also: being subject like all living things to disease and death.
What plants do not possess is the specifically animal power of purposed locomotion, of hunting for food and comfort, with its associated protective penalty of pain.
Conscious.—Here we come to something specially distinctive of higher animal life. Probably it makesits incipient appearance low down in the scale, in vague feelings of pain or discomfort, and of pleasure; though it is not likely that worms are as conscious as they appear to us to be. In its higher grades consciousness means awareness of the world and of ourselves, a discrimination between the self and the external world—“self-consciousness” in its proper signification: an immense subject that can only be hinted at to children. They can, however, be taught to have some appreciation of the senses, or channels, whereby our experience of external nature is gained; and to perceive that the way in which we apprehend the universe is closely conditioned by the particular sense-organs which in the struggle for existence have been evolved by all the higher kinds of animal life,—organs which we men are now beginning to put to the unfamiliar and novel use of scientific investigation and cosmic interpretation. What wonder if we make mistakes, and are narrow and limited in our outlook!
Digression on the Senses
Digression on the Senses
Digression on the Senses
Our fundamental interpretative sense is that of touch—the muscular sense generally. Through it we become aware of space, of time, and of matter. The experience ofspacearises from free motion, especially locomotion;speedis a direct sensation; andtimeis the other factor of speed. Time is measured by any uniformly moving body—that isby space and speed together. Muscular action impeded, the sense offorceor resistance, is another primary sensation; and by inference from this arises our notion of “matter,” which is sometimes spoken of as a permanent possibility of sensation. Hardness and softness, roughness and smoothness, are all inferences from varieties of touch. Another sense allied to touch is that oftemperature, whereby we obtain primitive ideas concerning heat. Then there are the chemical senses of taste and smell; and lastly, the two senses which enable us to draw inferences respecting things at a distance. These two attract special attention; for the information which they convey, though less fundamental than that given by the muscular sense, is of the highest interest and enjoyment.
The ear is an instrument for the appreciation of aerial vibrations, or ripples in the air. They may give us a sense of harmony; and in any case they enable us to infer something concerning the vibrating source which generated them, so that we can utilise them, by a prearranged code, for purposes of intelligent communication with each other—a process of the utmost importance, to which we have grown so accustomed that its wonder is masked.
The eye is an instrument for appreciating ripples in the ether. These are generated by violently revolving electric charges associated with each atom of matter, and are delayed, stopped, and reflected invarious ways, by other matter which they encounter in their swift passage through the ethereal medium.
From long practice and inherited instinct we are able, from the small fraction of these ripples which enter our eyes, to make inferences regarding the obstructive objects from which they have been shimmered and scattered. It is like inferring the ships and boats and obstacles in a harbour from the pattern of the reflected ripples which cross each other on the surface of the water.
The precision and clearness with which we can thus gain knowledge concerning things beyond our reach, and the extraordinary amount of information that can be thus conveyed, are nothing short of miraculous: though, again, we are liable to treat sight as an everyday and commonplace faculty. We are not, however, directly conscious of the ripples, though they are the whole exciting cause of the sensation; our real consciousness and perception are of the objects which have invested the ripples with their peculiarities, have imprinted upon them certain characteristics, and made them what they are. The eye is able to analyse all this, as the ear analyses the tones of an orchestra.
Ancestors.—In the first instancehumanancestors may be considered, and a family tree drawn for any one child; from which he will learn how large a number of persons combine to form his ancestry. The tree canalso represent the converging effect of inter-marriages, so that ultimate descent from a common ancestor is not an impossibility, if the facts of biology and ethnology point in that direction—as it appears they do. The probable though remote relationship existing between all the branches of the human family may be suggested by an inverted tree descending from some remotest ancestor: for whom Noah is as good a name as any other.
Rose.—The doctrine of the ascent of man may be found in some cases to conflict with early religious teaching. If so, offence and iconoclasm should be carefully avoided; and if the teacher feels that he can conscientiously draw a distinction, between the persistent vital or spiritual essence of man, and the temporary material vehicle which displays his individual existence amid terrestrial surroundings, he may with advantage do so. The second or higher aspect of the origin of man is dealt with in Clause XII. The history and origin of the spiritual part of man is unknown, and can only be rightly spoken of in terms of mysticism and poetry: the history of the bodily and much of the mental part is studied in the biological facts of evolution.
The doctrine of the ascent of man, properly regarded, is a doctrine of much hope and comfort. Truly it is an unusual item in a child’s creed; but it is, I think, a helpful item: it explains much that would otherwise be dark, and it instils hope for thefuture. For in the light of an evolution doctrine we can readily admit—(1) that low and savage tendencies are naturally to be expected at certain stages, for an evanescent moment; and (2) that having progressed thus far, we may anticipate further—perhaps unlimited—advance for mankind.
The fact that each individual organism hastily runs through, or reduplicates, a main part of the series of stages in the life-history of its race, is a fact of special interest and significance; notably in connection with the trials and temptations of human beings during their effort to cleanse away the traces of animal nature. The severity of the contest is already lessening, and both the individual and the race may look forward to a time when the struggles and failures are nearly over, when the unruliness of passion is curbed, when at length we
“. . . hear no yelp of the beast, and the man is quiet at lastAs he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a heightthat is higher.”
“. . . hear no yelp of the beast, and the man is quiet at lastAs he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a heightthat is higher.”
“. . . hear no yelp of the beast, and the man is quiet at lastAs he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a heightthat is higher.”
“. . . hear no yelp of the beast, and the man is quiet at last
As he stands on the heights of his life with a glimpse of a height
that is higher.”
Gradual Processes.—The slowness and precariousness of evolution may be indicated; and the possibility of descent or degeneration, as well as of ascent and development, must be insisted on. A genealogical tree can be drawn laterally, to illustrate the origin of any set of animals—both those risen and those fallen in the scale—from some, possibly hypothetical, common ancestor. The dog on the one hand, and the wolf or jackal on the other, may serve as easyexamples of ascent and descent respectively, and of relationship between higher and lower species, or even genera, without direct or obvious connection. The horse and the bear may serve as examples of distant relationship; birds and reptiles as another; and we may point out that at each stage of inheritance some of the progeny may ascend a little in the scale, and some descend a little.
Presently the sponge of time may wipe out the common ancestry at the root of the lateral tree, and nothing be left but some of its ascending and some of its descending branches,—all suited to their environment and so continuing to live and flourish, each in its own way; but so apparently different, that relationship between them is a matter of inference, and is sometimes difficult to believe in. The example of the caterpillar and butterfly, however, of the tadpole and the frog, etc., can be used to remove incredulity at extraordinary and instructive transmutations—transmutations which in the individual represent rapidly some analogous movements of racial development in the history of the distant past. The degradation of certain free-swimming animals, such as ascidians, which in old age become rooted or sessile like plants, can be pointed to as typical, and, indeed, a true representation of what has gone on in a race also, during long periods of time. The rapid passage of the embryo through its ancestral chain of development should be known, at any rate tothe teacher; and in general the greater the teacher’s acquaintance with natural history, the more living and interesting will be the series of lessons that can occasionally be given on this part of the clause.
The popular misconception concerning the biological origin of man, that he is descended from monkeys like those of the present day, is a trivial garbling of the truth. The elevated and the degraded branches of a family can both trace their descent from a parent stock; and though the distant common ancestor may now be lost in obscurity, there is certainly in this sense a blood relationship between the quadrumana and the bimana: a relationship which is recognised and is practically useful in the investigations of experimental pathology.
Lower Forms of Animal Life.—The existence of single cells and other low microscopic forms (like amœbæ), and the analysis or dissection of a more complex structure (say rhubarb) into the cells of which it is in a sense composed, together with some indication of the vital processes occurring in similar but isolated cells (such as yeast or protococcus) which lead us to consider them as possessing life—of a form so fundamental that there is in some cases no clear discrimination between animal and vegetable—may be spoken of and exhibited in the microscope.
From a not very different-looking minute germinal vesicle, or nucleus of a cell, the chick is developed.
The lower forms of animal life, spoken of in the clause as ancestral, may be understood to go back to forms even as low as these,—indeed, to the lowest and minutest forms which in dim and distant ages can have possessed any of the incipient characteristics of life at all: down, perhaps, to some unknown process whereby the earthy particles began to coalesce under a vivifying influence. And as the race springs from lowly forms of cell life, so does the individual,—the body of each individual was once no more than a microscopic cell-nucleus or germinal vesicle. Therein was the germ of life: and the complex aggregate of cells we now possess has all been put together by the directive power latent in, or initially manifested by, that germ. So it is also with a seed—an apple pip, an acorn, or a grain of mustard seed.
But there are many forms of animal life not in the direct line of our ancestry—side branches, as it were, of the great terrestrial family. At present the earth is dominated by man, but at one time it was mastered by gigantic reptiles, larger than any land creature of to-day, the remains of which are occasionally found fossilised into stone and embedded in the rocks; fit to be collected and preserved in museums.
For millions of years the earth was inhabited by creatures no higher than these; the progress upwards has been slow and patient: time is infinitely long, and the great history of the world is still working itself out.
Still do lower forms exist side by side with higher; and many of them are suited to their surroundings, and in their place are beautiful and sane and perfect of their kind. But a few of the lower forms are lower because they have failed to reach the standard of their race, they are very far from any kind of perfection, they are at war with their environment; and for these, the only alternatives are extinction or improvement. In such a species as man the variety or range of achievement and of elevation is enormous. Among men and their works we find, on the one hand, cathedrals and oratorios and poems, and faith and charity and hope; on the other, slums and ugliness and prisons, and spite and cruelty and greed. And we must not forget that want of harmony with environment may in some cases be the fault, not of the individual, but of the environment: a fault which it is specially likely to possess when man-made. For every now and then is born an individual far above the average of the race, amid surroundings which he finds deadly and depressing. He may be despised and rejected by his fellows, and nevertheless may be the precursor or herald of a nobler future.
The problem, the main human problem, is how to deal with the earth now—now that we have at length attained to conscious control—so as to cease perpetuating the lower forms, and to encourage the production of the higher; by giving to all children bornon the planet a fair chance of becoming, each in its own way, a noble specimen of developed humanity.
Struggle and Suffering.—Children should realise the bleak and unprotected state through which their remote ancestors must have begun a human existence, the great dangers which they had to overcome, the contests with beasts and with the severities of climate, the hardships and perils and straits through which they passed; and should be grateful to those unknown pioneers of the human race, to whose struggles and suffering and discoveries and energies our present favoured mode of existence on the planet is due.
The more people realise the effort that has preceded them and made them possible, the more are they likely to endeavour to be worthy of it: the more pitiful also will they feel when they see individuals failing in the struggle upward and falling back towards a brute condition; and the more hopeful they will ultimately become for the brilliant future of a race which from such lowly and unpromising beginnings has produced the material vehicle necessary for those great men who flourished in the recent epoch which we speak of as antiquity; and has been so guided, since then, as to develop the magnificence of a Newton and a Shakespeare even on this island in the northern seas.