Convalescent

“ What would our critic think if any one should undertake to judge Mr. Spencer, either as a sociologist or a general scientist, solely by his fundamental postulate that all evolution is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous? ”

“ And here, as the best mode of determining what are the traits which distinguish vitality from non-vitality, we shall do well to compare the two most unlike kinds of vitality, and see in what they agree. Manifestly, that which is essential to Life must be that which is common to Life of all orders. And manifestly, that which is common to all forms of Life, will most readily be seen on contrasting those forms of Life which have the least in common, or are the most unlike. ”

“ What is an indispensable condition for an evolution of this sort? It must be the absence of all uneasiness, the growth of a serene confidence and trust, the obliteration of envy, jealousy, and every kind of unreasonableness. ”

“ Thus the person of Concealment is very indistinct and therefore does not compel us to attend to its improbability, in the following beautiful lines of Shakespear:
"—She never told her love;
But let Concealment, like a worm i' th' bud,
Feed on her damask cheek."—
But in these lines below the person of Reason obtrudes itself into our company, and becomes disagreeable by its distinctness, and consequent improbability. ”

“ The lowest level, representing the past of the race, is primitive like a savage, and infantile, like a child; it is instinctive, unalterable, and universal; it knows no restraint, no culture, and no prudence. ”

“ We all know that the savage thinks of each striking phenomenon, or group of phenomena, as caused by some separate personal agent; that out of this conception there grows up a polytheistic conception, in which these minor personalities are variously generalized into deities presiding over different divisions of nature; and that these are eventually further generalized. This progressive consolidation of causal agencies may be traced in the creeds of all races, and is far from complete in the creed of the most advanced races. ”

“ The definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, is a formula which fails to call up an adequate conception. And it fails from omitting the most distinctive peculiarity—the peculiarity of which we have the most familiar experience, and with which our notion of Life is, more than with any other, associated. ”

“ And so in studying savages and early races whose mental development corresponds in some degree to that of children, we have to guard against this automorphism, as Mr. Spencer terms it; that is to say, the tendency to estimate the capacity of others by our own, which appears almost completely to incapacitate some people from dealing with the subject. ”

“ One can be natural, with a difference, which difference means a thought for the other. There is a selection possible in one's words and actions before another—nay, there is a manner of doing and feeling which almost forestalls the necessity of a selection at all. I like the expression employed by a certain sister after nursing her small brother through a difficult illness, "We were always Castilian," she said. ”

“ So that science and the knowledge of the uncultured are alike in the nature of their previsions, widely as they differ in range; they possess a common imperfection, though this is immensely greater in the last than in the first; and the transition from the one to the other has been through a series of steps by which the imperfection has been rendered continually less, and the range continually wider. ”

“ In Diversion, as in many other Particulars, the upper Part of Life is distinguished from the Lower. Let the Great therefore answer for the Employment of their Time, to themselves, or to their spiritual Governors. ”

“ I have made numerous composites of various groups of convicts, which are interesting negatively rather than positively. They produce faces of a mean description, with no villainy written on them. The individual faces are villainous enough, but they are villainous in different ways, and when they are combined, the individual peculiarities disappear, and the common humanity of a low type is all that is left.
The remaining portraits are illustrations of the application of the process to the study of the physiognomy of disease. ”

“ If a body that is united with a temperament has the probability of subsisting for a protracted time, and of retaining its compound substance, it is called ‘permanent,’ or ‘perfect;’ if not, ‘imperfect,’ or ‘wanting permanence.’”—Lower down: “And there can be no temperament so equalised that the elements in it should be exactly of the same quantity and mode. ”

“ It would indeed be strange and lamentable if the divorce between feeling and conviction—to adopt a popular classification—was not simply incidental to change, but was also an inexpugnable part of fundamental aspects of human life. ”

“ A single touch, by introducing into the body some morbid matter, may set up an immensely involved set of functional disturbances and structural alterations. The whole tenor of a life may be changed by a word of advice; or a glance may determine an action which alters thoughts, feelings, and deeds throughout a long series of years. In those still more involved combinations of changes which societies exhibit, this truth is still more conspicuous. ”

“ Here, then, are confessedly adopted, as bases of classification, the most manifest characters of the emotions; as discerned subjectively, and objectively. The mode of diffusion of an emotion is one of its outside aspects; the institutions it generates form another of its outside aspects; and though the peculiarities of the emotion as a state of consciousness, seem to express its intrinsic and ultimate nature, yet such peculiarities as are perceptible by simple introspection, must also be classed as superficial peculiarities. ”

“ Spencer's view is. Looking at conduct objectively he sees, as we advance from lower to higher forms in nature, an ever-increasing and improving adaptation, first to the preservation of individual life, and next to the preservation of the life of progeny. ”

“ This double process, of which the effects are already appreciable, must go on to an extent of which we can as yet have no adequate conception. The habitual concealment of our feelings diminishing, as it must, in proportion as our feelings become such as do not demand concealment, the exhibition of them will become more vivid than we now dare allow it to be ”

“ On the other hand, distinguished personages, great scholars, orators, men of action, exhibit a complexity, sometimes truly remarkable, of certain convolutions. I say expressly certain convolutions, for all these folds, arranged according to a certain plan, common to all men, have not the same value from the physiological point of view. ”

“ If we omit the phenomena of Dissolution, which are changes from the special to the general, all changes which matter undergoes are from the general to the special—are changes involving a decreasing generality in the united groups of attributes. This is the progress of things. The progress of thought, is not only in the same direction, but also in the opposite direction. The investigation of Nature discloses an increasing number of specialities ”

“ Must we not say that habits not only modify emotions in the individual, and not only beget tendencies to like habits and accompanying emotions in descendants, but that when the conditions of the race make the habits persistent, this progressive modification may go on to the extent of producing emotions so far distinct as to seem new? ”

“ We now come to another supposed analogy, on which great stress is laid by the evolution school, and especially by Mr. Spencer. Individuals of the same family are found to be marked by striking peculiarities of structure, ancestral traits, which appear and disappear and then appear again, in successive generations. This is obviously a case where the "appropriate conditions" are all comprehended in the connection of life with life. ”

“ Soon after her son-in-law and his father died, she became so much THE Severence that fashionable people forgot her origin, regarded her as the true embodiment of the pride and rank of Severence—and Severence became, thanks wholly to her, a synonym for pride and rank, though really the Severences were not especially blue-blooded. ”

“ Among the more engaging subjects of interest and curiosity which within quite recent years have been discussed by our more philosophic students, and which we shall have to note further on, is the inquiry as to the range and degree of what we call mental development among savages generally, or in any particular portion of them favored by condition and opportunity. ”

“ As the several circumstances that determine the early or late recognition of uniformities, are circumstances that determine the number and strength of the impressions which these uniformities make on the mind; it follows that the progression conforms to a certain fundamental principle of psychology. We see à posteriori, what we concluded à priori, that the order in which relations are generalized, depends on the frequency and impressiveness with which they are repeated in conscious experience. ”

“ The comparative degrees {157} of importance, of obtrusiveness, of absolute frequency, of relative frequency, of simplicity, of concreteness, are every one of them factors; and from their unions in proportions that are never twice alike, there results a highly complex process of mental evolution. But while it is thus manifest that the proximate causes of the succession in which relations are reduced to law, are numerous and involved ”

“ When it comes to the question of their physical or mental inferiority, a cursory inspection is all that is required to show they are far below the average. There is a great want of symmetry of body and mind—evidence of degeneration. ”

“ It must be remarked, however, that while length and complexity of life are, to a great extent, associated—while a more extended correspondence in the successive changes commonly implies increased correspondence in the simultaneous changes ”

“ That germ or stock, if my conjecture is right, is, in its essence, nothing more or less than an early theory of conception, which presented itself to savage man at a time when he was still ignorant of the true cause of the propagation of the species. This theory of conception is, on the principles of savage thought, so simple and obvious that it may well have occurred to men independently in many parts of the world. ”

“ Such traits belong to the evolutional development of the individual; they tend to become modified by the clash with new experiences, or, when incompatible with the knowledge and habits acquired by new experiences, to become repressed—when not incompatible they may persist late into adult life. ”

“ The old division of temperaments into phlegmatic or lymphatic, sanguine, choleric, and nervous or melancholy, is a fairly good foundation for preliminary observation, especially as each of the four subdivides itself easily into two types—the hard and soft—reforms itself easily into some cross-divisions, and refuses to be blended into others. ”

“ Spencer's objections apply to existing savages, we may consider them over-weighed by the evidence, and we may believe in a naïve savage curiosity about the world and desire for explanations of the causes of things. ”

“ Progress from these forms of organisation to still higher forms is similarly characterized by increase of the aggregative tendency or diminution of the separative, and similarly exhibits the necessary antagonism between the development of the individual and the increase of the race. ”

“ Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:—Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have been most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes. ”

“ In the second place, we may note the emotional differences between the lower and the higher human races—may regard as earlier and simpler those feelings which are common to both, and as later and more compound those which are characteristic of the most civilized. In the third place, we may observe the order in which the emotions unfold during the progress from infancy to maturity. ”

“ Mental Complexity.—How races differ in respect of the more or less involved structures of their minds will best be understood, on recalling that unlikeness between the juvenile mind and the adult mind among ourselves which so well typifies the unlikeness between the minds of savage and civilized. In the child we see absorption in special facts. ”

“ And indeed, as we here see, the word fittest has to cover cases in which there may be less ability than usual to survive individually, but in which the defect is more than made good by higher degrees of fertility. ”

“ Another natural prejudice, of most extensive prevalence, and which had a great share in producing the errors fallen into by the ancients in their physical inquiries, was this: That the differences in nature must correspond to our received distinctions: that effects which we are accustomed, in popular language, to call by different names, and arrange in different [pg 530] classes, must be of different natures, and have different causes. ”

“ Unfortunately for the coincident evolution argument involved in human beings, the peculiarities introduced, which become the subject of inheritance, do not make for the development, but rather for the degeneracy, of the race. Even such peculiarities as six toes can scarcely be said to add any special feature of advantage to man in his struggle against his environment. ”

“ Hence, in studying the degrees of mental variability shown us in the daily lives of the different races, we must ask how far variability characterizes the whole mind, and how far it holds only of parts of the mind. ”

“ She could neither make the normal level higher nor yet bear patiently with the normal lower level; the great moments would not become perpetual and the small moments grew more irritating and more humiliating. ”

“ It would, however, be strange indeed, if the complex process of social evolution, even in its present stage, were not marked by some of the indications of a retrograde movement. The age in which we live has undoubtedly its peculiar follies and foibles, which are but thrown into relief by the qualities that more generally distinguish it. ”