History of the Intellectual Development of Europe Volume II Part 17

THE NATURE AND RELATIONS OF MAN.

_Position of Man according to the Heliocentric and Geocentric Theories._

OF ANIMAL LIFE.--_The transitory Nature of living Forms.--Relations of Plants and Animals.--Animals are Aggregates of Matter expending Force originally derived from the Sun._

THE ORGANIC SERIES.--_Man a Member of it.--His Position determined by Anatomical and Physiological Investigation of his Nervous System.--Its triple Forms: Automatic, Instinctive, Intellectual._

_The same progressive Development is seen in individual Man, in the entire animal Series, and in the Life of the Globe.--They are all under the Control of an eternal, universal, irresistible Law._

_The Aim of Nature is intellectual Development, and human Inst.i.tutions must conform thereto._

_Summary of the Investigation of the Position of Man.--Production of Inorganic and Organic Forms by the Sun.--Nature of Animals and their Series.--a.n.a.logies and Differences between them and Man.--The Soul.--The World._

[Sidenote: The apparent position of man on the heliocentric theory.]

When the ancient doctrine of the plurality of worlds was restored by Bruno, Galileo, and other modern astronomers, the resistance it encountered was mainly owing to its antic.i.p.ated bearing on the nature and relations of man. It was said, if round our sun, as a centre, there revolve so many planetary bodies, experiencing the changes of summer and winter, day and night--bodies illuminated by satellites, and perhaps enjoying twilight and other benefits such as have been conferred on the earth--shall we not consider them the abodes of accountable, perhaps of sinful, beings like ourselves? Nay, more; if each of the innumerable fixed stars is, as our sun, a central focus of light, attended by dark and revolving globes, is it not necessary to admit that they also have their inhabitants? But among so many families of intelligent beings, how is it that we, the denizens of an insignificant speck, have alone been found worthy of G.o.d's regard?

It was this reasoning that sustained the geocentric theory, and made the earth the centre of the universe, the most n.o.ble of created things; the sun, the moon, the stars, being only ministers for the service of man.

[Sidenote: The fallacy of objections to that theory.] But, like many other objections urged in that memorable conflict, this was founded on a misconception, or, rather, on imperfect knowledge. There may be an infinity of worlds placed under the mechanical relations alluded to, but there may not be one among them that can be the abode of life. The physical conditions under which organization is possible are so numerous and so strictly limited that the chances are millions to one against their conjoint occurrence.

[Sidenote: Evidence furnished by Geology.] In a religious point of view, we are greatly indebted to Geology for the light it has cast on this objection. It has taught us that during inconceivable lapses of time our earth itself contained no living thing. These were those pre-organic ages to which reference was made in the last chapter. Then by slow degrees, as a possibility for existence occurred, there gradually emerged one type after another. It is but as yesterday that the life of man could be maintained.

[Sidenote: The transitory nature of living forms.] Only in the presence of special physical conditions can an animal exist. Even then it is essentially ephemeral. The life of it, as a whole, depends on the death of its integrant parts. In a waterfall, which maintains its place and appearance unchanged for many years, the const.i.tuent portions that have been precipitated headlong glide finally and for ever away. For the transitory matter to exhibit a permanent form, it is necessary that there should be a perpetual supply and also a perpetual removal. So long as the jutting ledge over which the waters rush, and the broken gulf below that receives them, remain unchanged, the cataract presents the same appearance. But variations in them mould it into a new shape; its colour changes with a clear or cloudy sky; the rainbow seen in its spray disappears when the beams of the sun are withdrawn.

So in that collection of substance which const.i.tutes an animal; whatever may be its position, high or low, in the realm of life, there is a perpetual introduction of new material and a perpetual departure of the old. It is a form, rather than an individual, that we see. Its permanence altogether depends on the permanence of the external conditions. If they change, it also changes, and a new form is the result.

[Sidenote: Characteristics of animal life.] An animal is therefore a form through which material substance is visibly pa.s.sing and suffering trans.m.u.tation into new products. In that act of trans.m.u.tation force is disengaged. That which we call its life is the display of the manner in which the force thus disengaged is expended.

[Sidenote: Matter and force.] A scientific examination of animal life must include two primary facts. It must consider whence and in what manner the stream of material substance has been derived, in what manner and whither it pa.s.ses away. And, since force can not be created from nothing, and is in its very nature indestructible, it must determine from what source that which is displayed by animals has been obtained, in what manner it is employed, and what disposal is made of it eventually.

[Sidenote: Force is derived from the sun.] The force thus expended is originally derived from the sun. Plants are the intermedium for its conveyance. The inorganic material of a saline nature entering into their const.i.tution is obtained from the soil in which they grow, as is also, for the most part, the water they require; but their organic substance is derived from the surrounding atmosphere, and hence it is strictly true that they are condensations from the air.

[Sidenote: Mode in which plants obtain material substance.] These statements may be sufficiently ill.u.s.trated, and the relation between plants and animals shown, by tracing the course of any one of the ingredients entering into the vegetable composition, and derived, as has been said, from the air. For this purpose, if we select their chief solid element, carbon, the remarks applicable to the course it follows will hold good for other accompanying elements. It is scarcely necessary to embarra.s.s the brief exposition of vegetable life now to be given by any historical details, since these will come with more propriety subsequently. It is sufficient to mention that the chemical explanations of vegetable physiology rest essentially on the discovery of oxygen gas by Priestley, of the const.i.tution of carbonic acid by Lavoisier, and of water by Cavendish and Watt.

[Sidenote: Action of a plant on the air.] While the sun is s.h.i.+ning, the green parts of plants, especially the leaves, decompose carbonic acid, one of the ingredients of the atmospheric air. This substance is composed of two elements, carbon and oxygen; the former is appropriated by the plant, and enters into the composition of elaborated or descending sap, from which forthwith organic products, such as starch, sugar, wood fibre, acids, and bases are made. The other element, the oxygen, is for the most part refused by the plant, and returns to the air. As the process of decomposition goes on, new portions of carbonic acid are presented through mechanical movements, the trembling of the leaf, breezes, and currents rising from the foliage warmed by the solar beams giving place to other cool currents that set in below.

The action of a plant upon the air is therefore the separation of combustible material from that medium. Carbon is thus obtained from carbonic acid; from water, hydrogen. Plant life is chemically an operation of reduction, for in like manner ammonia is decomposed into its const.i.tuents, which are nitrogen and hydrogen; and sulphuric and phosphoric acids, which like ammonia, may have been brought into the plant through its roots in the form of salt bodies, are made to yield up the oxygen with which they had been combined, and their sulphur and phosphorus, combustible elements, are appropriated.

[Sidenote: Composition and resolution of matter and force.] Every plant, from the humblest moss to the oak of a thousand years, is thus formed by the sun from material obtained from the air--combustible material once united with oxygen, but now separated from that body. It is of especial importance to remark that in this act of decomposition, force, under the form of light, has disappeared, and become incorporated with the combustible, the organizing material. This force is surrendered again, or reappears whenever the converse operation, combination with oxygen, occurs.

Vegetable products thus const.i.tute a magazine in which force is stored up and preserved for any a.s.signable time. Hence they are adapted for animal food and for the procuring of warmth. The heat evolved in the combustion of coal in domestic economy was originally light from the sun appropriated by plants in the Secondary geological times, and locked up for untold ages. The sun is also the source from which was derived the light obtained in all our artificial operations of burning gas, oil, fat, wax, for the purposes of illumination.

[Sidenote: Correlation of physical forces.] My own experiments have proved that it is the light of the sun, in contradistinction to the heat, which occasions the decomposition of carbonic acid, furnis.h.i.+ng carbon to plants and oxygen to the atmosphere. But such is the relation of the so-called imponderable principles of chemistry to each other, and their mutual convertibility, that that which has disappeared in performing its function as light may reappear as heat or electricity, or in the production of some mechanical effect.

[Sidenote: The nature of food.] Food is used by all animals for the sake of the force it thus contains, the remark applying to the carnivora as well as the herbivora. In both cases the source of supply is the vegetable kingdom, indirectly or directly. The plant is thus indispensable to the animal. It is the collector and preserver of that force the expenditure of which const.i.tutes the special display of animal life.

From this point of view, animals must therefore be considered as machines, in which force obtained as has been described, is utilized.

The food they take, or the tissue that has been formed from it, is acted upon by the air they breathe, and undergoes partial or total oxydation, and now emerges again, in part as heat in part as nerve-force, in some few instances in part as light or electricity, the force that originally came from the sun.

[Sidenote: Cycle through which matter and force pa.s.s.] There is, therefore, a cycle or revolution through which material particles suitable for organization incessantly run. At one moment they exist as inorganic combinations in the air or the soil, then as portions of plants, then as portions of animals, then they return to the air or soil again to renew their cycle of movement. The metamorphoses feigned by the poets of antiquity have hence a foundation in fact, and the vegetable and animal, the organic and inorganic worlds are indissolubly bound together. Plants are reducing, animals oxydizing, machines. Plants form, animals destroy.

Thus, by the light of the sun, the carbonic acid of the atmosphere is decomposed--its oxygen is set free, its carbon furnished to plants. The products obtained serve for the food of animals, and in their systems the carbon is re-oxydized by the air they respire, and, resuming the condition of carbonic acid, is thrown back into the atmosphere in the breath, ready to be decomposed by the sunlight once more, and run through the same cycle of changes again. The growth of a plant and the respiration of an animal are dependent on each other.

[Sidenote: The duration of matter and imperishability of force.]

Material particles are thus the vehicles of force. They undergo no destruction. Chemically speaking, they are eternal. And so, likewise, force never deteriorates or becomes lessened. It may a.s.sume new phases, but it is always intrinsically unimpaired. The only changes it can exhibit are those of aspect and of distribution; of aspect, as electricity, affinity, light, heat; of distribution, as when the diffused aggregate of many sunbeams is concentrated in one animal form.

It is but little that we know respecting the mutations and distribution of force in the universe. We cannot tell what becomes of that which has characterized animal life, though of its perpetuity we may be a.s.sured.

It has no more been destroyed than the material particles of which such animals consist. They have been trans.m.u.ted into new forms--it has taken on a new aspect. The sum total of matter in the world is invariable; so, likewise, is the sum total of force.

[Sidenote: Theory of Averroes.] These conclusions resemble in many respects those of the philosophy of Averroes, but they are free from the heresy which led the Lateran Council, under Leo X., to condemn the doctrines of the great Spanish Mohammedan. The error of Averroes consisted in this, that he confounded what is here spoken of under the designation of force with the psychical principle, and erroneously applied that which is true for animals to the case of man, who is to be considered as consisting of three essentially distinct parts--a material body, upon which operate various physical forces, guided and controlled by an intelligent soul.

In the following paragraphs the distinction here made is brought into more striking relief.

[Sidenote: Anatomical mode of determining position in the animal series.] The station of any animal in the organic series may be determined from the condition of its nervous system. To this observation man himself is not an exception. Indeed, just views of his position in the world, of the nature of his intellect and mental operations, can not be obtained except from the solid support afforded by Anatomy.

[Sidenote: The uselessness of the metaphysical sciences.] The reader has doubtless remarked that, in the historical sketch of the later progress of Europe given in this book, I have not referred to metaphysics, or psychology, or mental philosophy. Cultivated as they have been, it was not possible for them to yield any other result than they did among the Greeks. A lever is no mechanical power unless it has a material point of support. It is only through the physical that the metaphysical can be discovered.

[Sidenote: Necessity of resorting to Anatomy and Physiology.] An exposition of the structure, the physical forces, and the intellectual operations of man must be founded on anatomy. We can only determine the methods of action from the study of the mechanism, and the right interpretation of that mechanism can only be ascertained from the construction of its parts, from observations of the manner in which they are developed, from comparisons with similar structures in other animals, not rejecting even the lowest, and from an investigation of their habits and peculiarities. Believing that, in the present state of science, doctrines in psychology, unless they are sustained by evidence derived from anatomy and physiology, are not to be relied on, I have not thought it necessary to devote much s.p.a.ce to their introduction. They have not taken a part in the recent advances of humanity. They belong to an earlier social period, and are an anachronism in ours. I have referred to these points heretofore in my work on Physiology, and perhaps shall be excused the following extract:

"The study of this portion of the mechanism of man brings us therefore in contact with metaphysical science, and some of its fundamental dogmas we have to consider. Nearly all philosophers who have cultivated in recent times that branch of knowledge, have viewed with apprehension the rapid advances of physiology, foreseeing that it would attempt the final solution of problems which have exercised the ingenuity of the last twenty centuries. [Sidenote: Solution of psychological questions.] In this they are not mistaken. Certainly it is desirable that some new method should be introduced, which may give point and precision to whatever metaphysical truths exist, and enable us to distinguish, separate, and dismiss what are only vain and empty speculations.

[Sidenote: Uncertainty of metaphysics.] "So far from philosophy being a forbidden domain to the physiologist, it may be a.s.serted that the time has now come when no one is ent.i.tled to express an opinion in philosophy unless he has first studied physiology. It has. .h.i.therto been to the detriment of truth that these processes of positive investigation have been repudiated. If from the construction of the human brain we may demonstrate the existence of a soul, is not that a gain? for there are many who are open to arguments of this cla.s.s on whom speculative reasoning or a mere dictum falls without any weight. Why should we cast aside the solid facts presented to us by material objects? In his communications throughout the universe with us, G.o.d ever materializes.

He equally speaks to us through the thousand graceful organic forms scattered in profusion over the surface of the earth, and through the motions and appearances presented by the celestial orbs. Our n.o.blest and clearest conceptions of his attributes have been obtained from these material things. I am persuaded that the only possible route to truth in mental philosophy is through a study of the nervous mechanism. The experience of 2500 years, and the writings of the great metaphysicians attest, with a melancholy emphasis, the vanity of all other means.

"Whatever may be said by speculative philosophers to the contrary, the advancement of metaphysics is through the study of physiology. What sort of a science would optics have been among men who had purposely put out their own eyes? What would have been the progress of astronomy among those who disdained to look at the heavens? Yet such is the preposterous course followed by the so-called philosophers. They have given us imposing doctrines of the nature and attributes of the mind in absolute ignorance of its material substratum. [Sidenote: Necessity of the interpretation of structure.] Of the great authors who have thus succeeded one another in ephemeral celebrity, how many made themselves acquainted with the structure of the human brain? Doubtless some had been so unfortunate as never to see one! Yet that wonderful organ was the basis of all their speculations. In voluntarily isolating themselves from every solid fact which might serve to be a landmark to them, they may be truly said to have sailed upon a sh.o.r.eless sea from which the fog never lifts. The only fact they teach us with certainty is, that they know nothing with certainty. It is the inherent difficulty of their method that it must lead to unsubstantial results. What is not founded on a material substratum is necessarily a castle in the air."

[Sidenote: Intellectual relations of man depend on his nervous system.]

Considering thus that scientific views of the nature of man can only be obtained from an examination of his nervous system, and that the right interpretation of the manner of action of that system depends on the guiding light of comparative anatomy and physiology, I shall, in the following exposition, present the progress of discovery on those principles.

[Sidenote: The rudimentary nervous system is automatic.] In those low tribes of life which show the first indications of a nervous system, its operation is purely mechanical. An external impression, as a touch, made upon animals of that kind, is instantly answered to by a motion which they execute, and this without any manifestation of will or consciousness. The phenomenon is exactly of the same kind as in a machine of which, if a given lever is touched, a motion is instantly produced.

[Sidenote: Two elementary forms of nerve structure.] In any nervous system there are two portions anatomically distinct. They are, 1st, the fibrous; 2d, the vesicular. It may be desirable to describe briefly the construction and functions of each of these portions. Their conjoint action will then be intelligible.

[Sidenote: Structure of a nerve fibre.] 1st. A nerve fibre consists essentially of a delicate thread--the axis filament, as it is called--enveloped in an oil-like substance, which coagulates or congeals after death. This, in its turn, is inclosed in a thin investing sheath or membranous tube. Many such fibres bound together const.i.tute a nerve.

[Sidenote: Function of a nerve fibre is conduction.] The function of such a nerve fibre is indisputably altogether of a physical kind, being the conveyance of influences from part to part. The axis filament is the line along which the translation occurs, the investing material being for the purpose of confining or insulating it, so as to prevent any lateral escape. Such a construction is the exact counterpart of many electrical contrivances, in which a metallic wire is coated over with sealing-wax or wrapped round with silk, the current being thus compelled to move in the wire without any lateral escape. Of such fibres, some convey their influences to the interior, and hence are called centripetal; some convey them to the exterior, and hence are called centrifugal. No anatomical difference in the structure of the two has, however, thus far been discovered. As in a conducting wire the electrical current moves in a progressive manner with a definite velocity, so in a nerve filament the influence advances progressively at a rate said to be dependent on the temperature of the animal examined.

It seems in the cold-blooded to be much slower than in the hot. It has been estimated in the frog at eighty-five feet per second; in man at two hundred feet--an estimate probably too low.

The fibres thus described are of the kind designated by physiologists as the cerebro-spinal; there are others, pa.s.sing under the name of the sympathetic, characterized by not possessing the investing medullary substance. In colour they are yellowish-gray; but it is not necessary here to consider them further.

[Sidenote: Structure of a nerve vesicle.] 2nd. The other portion of the nervous structure is the vesicular. As its name imports, it consists of vesicles filled with a gray granular material. Each vesicle has a thickened spot or nucleus upon it, and appears to be connected with one or more fibres. If the connexion is only with one, the vesicle is called unipolar; if with two, bipolar; if with many, multipolar or stellate.

Every vesicle is abundantly supplied with blood.

[Sidenote: Function of a nerve vesicle.] As might be inferred from its structure, the vesicle differs altogether from the fibre in function. I may refer to my "Physiology" for the reasons which have led to the inference that these are contrivances for the purposes of permitting influences that have been translated along or confined within the fibre to escape and diffuse themselves in the gray granular material. They also permit influences that are coming through many different channels into a multipolar vesicle to communicate or mix with one another, and combine to produce new results. Moreover, in them influences may be long preserved, and thus they become magazines of force. Combined together, they const.i.tute ganglia or nerve centres, on which, if impressions be made, they do not necessarily forthwith die out, but may remain gradually declining away for a long time. Thus is introduced into the nervous mechanism the element of time, and this important function of the nerve vesicle lies at the basis of memory.

It has been said that the vesicular portion of the nerve mechanism is copiously supplied with blood. Indeed, the condition indispensably necessary for its functional activity is waste by oxydation. Arterial vessels are abundantly furnished to insure the necessary supply of aerated blood, and veins to carry away the wasted products of decay.

Also, through the former, the necessary materials for repair and renovation are brought. [Sidenote: Physiological condition of nerve action is nerve waste.] There is a definite waste of nervous substance in the production of a definite mechanical or intellectual result--a material connexion and condition that must never be overlooked. Hence it is plain that unless the repair and the waste are synchronously equal to one another, periodicities in the action of the nervous system will arise, this being the fundamental condition connected with the physical theories of sleep and fatigue.

The statements here made rest upon two distinct forms of evidence. In part they are derived from an interpretation of anatomical structure, and in part from direct experiment, chiefly by the aid of feeble electrical currents. The registering or preserving action displayed by a ganglion may be considered as an effect, resembling that of the construction known as Ritter's secondary piles.