the energy, and the misery which during millions of years. have been working towards that result? The eye passes without pausing over each familiar detail, as if each were not a condensed fragment of the history of our race. On the bleached damask stand the silver teapot and electroplated toast-rack, the china service and glass butter-cooler, the bronzed urn and the morning's Times; but they call up no image of the plantations of China, the factories of Sheffield, the potteries of Staffordshire, or the epitomized nation of Printing-House Square. The very bread and milk, accepted as if they were the free gifts of Nature, carry the meditative mind back to an unassignable period, when some full-eared grass, itself the product of a slow development, aided by man's care, became the parent of the wheat we sow, and tempted man to cease restless wandering amid undrained swamps and uncleared forests in search of game, thus beginning Civilization, which was to replace the nomadic existence. With the agricultural life came the domestication of animals and their improvement; and the milk on our breakfast-table is an interesting example of a natural function which has been raised into a social function; the small quantity of milk given to the cow for the nourishment of its calf is exaggerated into the forty pints daily for the nourishment of several families.*

If these representants of man's struggle with material existence speak of a long past and an eventful history, the Times, as a representant of his spiritual struggles, tells a not less wondrous tale. The types from which this paper was printed are of modern origin; but how many centuries upon centuries have revolved while the Lan

* In the wild state a cow yields milk only during the brief period of calving. The milch-cow yields milk uninterruptedly for years. The Damarras have domesticated the cow, but they only get about three pints of milk daily.

guage was developed which comes to us like the air we breathe?

11. Everywhere we are confronted by the work of our ancestors, in the material world, which they wrought out of the morass and jungle; in the spiritual world, which they wrought out of the chaos of sensation. We cannot take a step but in the footsteps of the millions. who went before us; we cannot think a thought but the minds of millions have made it possible for us. The axe of the colonist clears the way. The intellect of the explorer distinguishes and classifies. What we know as Nature is this twofold product of ancestral toil of hand and eye, guided by the mind which hand and eye have educated. When we now look upon the pleasant landscape of nodding corn, trimmed hedge-rows, farmyards, parks, canals, bridges, and railways, and picture to ourselves the uncleared forests peopled by savages and wild beasts, we become aware that "Nature" represents man's transfigured Desire. His lower wants and higher wants, his nutritive and emotive needs, have been the agents of this transformation, subduing the stubborn forces to his pleasure. The Nature reflected in his world of Thought is also the representative of his Desire; and what are now cognitions were primarily emotions; the very objects of speculative contemplation being selected and created under the directive influences of some deep-seated want. The curiosity to know what is the real order in things, and what was the process of their evolution, - this passion of Philosophy which now bears so little traces of its utilitarian origin,-is but a higher stage of our primitive wants. We see only what interests us; and the primitive interests are physical. The animal tries each new object in reference to its edibility, or other possibility of sensual gratification. The infant draws everything to its mouth. The horizon of interest slowly

widens. The fields are measured long before Geometry arises; the stars are watched as landmarks in the sky long before Astronomy arises; and when these sciences. emerge, they develop independent interests, and are at once the stimulus and the gratification of wider wants. They change the face of things. We can never again. behold the heavens which appeared to the early navigators and to the Chaldean shepherds; that panorama has been replaced by one which is the consolidated thought of Hipparchus and Kepler, of Galileo and Newton (though we may never have heard of these men's labors). For it is the mind which sees, and the mind sees what it has been taught to see. We are never left to ourselves. From the first the child is told "what" things "are"; his attention is directed to the distinctions already established. At his mother's knee he learns the legends of a mythologic past; at his school-desk he spells the wisdom of a line of sages; in his library he fortifies himself with the results of research. The staple of his mental tissue is, for the most part, woven from threads separately wrought by others. His utmost effort is to see from the shoulders of the Present a little further into the Future. Every one is weak standing alone; he leans on others, and is strong. By himself he can do little; by their aid he yokes the streams and the winds, harnesses steam, and drives electricity. A radiation of the powers of all exalts the powers of each. A man of genius is one whose sympathies are unusually wide; to him the work of other men converges, and what they felt he feels; but he is dimly conscious that what thus comes to him is not his own creation; and hence the thrill of awed surprise with which he greets the dawning of a new idea upon his soul,

"Like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.”

12. Thus on all sides it appears that Nature embodies the transfigured desires of man, and the idealizing spirit of man. It is the work, the emotion, and the thought of Humanity. Watt and Arkwright have not more transfigured and intensified the available forces of Nature, than Wordsworth and Turner have transfigured and idealized her æsthetic aspects. It is in this sense we must interpret Comte's sayings, that the living are more and more dominated by the dead; and that between man and nature we must place Humanity.

Summing up the contents of this chapter, we say there are two ways in which Nature is reflected. There is the world of sense, which is the purely animal region. Here the Logic of Feeling is supreme; yet even here the world is permeated and moulded by Thought, if we understand by Thought simply the active side, the Grouping; and there is the same operation of Judgment in the construction of perceptions as in the construction of conceptions; but the Logic is that operating on Feelings, not on Signs. Rising out of this, and above it, is the purely human world, the world of ideas, in which sensations are replaced by symbols; and these, when separated and recombined by their own Logic, become Objects, Relations, Laws, which are then reflected back upon Nature, so as to appear there in the guise of unconscious existences, independent of all sentiences. The animal world is a continuum of smells, sights, touches, tastes, pains, and pleasures; it has no objects, no laws, no distinguishable abstractions such as Self and Notself. This world we can never understand, except in such dim guesses as we can form respecting the experiences of those born blind, guesses that are always vitiated by the fact that we cannot help seeing what we try to imagine them as only touching. But we know that our world is widely different from the animal world, because it is suffused with symbolical thought.

Our perceptions are never fairly isolated: the past and future are reflected in the present, the abstract mingles its symbol with the concrete feeling. If we see the bud, after we have learned that it is a bud, there is always a forward glance at the flower, and a backward glance at the seed, dimly associated with the perception. But what animal sees such things? What animal sees a bud at all, except as a visual sign of some other sensation?

It is not, however, the purpose of this Problem to dwell on this twofold aspect of Nature, but rather to specify the logical procedures by which our wealth of Thought has been accumulated, and may be increased, and how the infirmities of the mind are to be guarded against.