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Inquiries into Human Faculty
of the myriads of stars, whose physical constitution, where-ever it has as
yet been observed spectroscopically, does not differ much from that of our
sun. But we perceive around us a countless number of abortive seeds and
germs; we find out of any group of a thousand men selected at random,
some who are crippled, insane, idiotic, and otherwise born incurably
imperfect in body or mind, and it is possible that this world may rank
among other worlds as one of these.
We as yet understand nothing of the way in which our conscious selves
are related to the separate lives of the billions of cells of which the body
of each of us is composed. We only know that the cells form a vast nation,
some members of which are always dying and others growing to supply
their places, and that the continual sequence of these multitudes of little
lives has its outcome in the larger and conscious life of the man as a
whole. Our part in the universe may possibly in some distant way be
analogous to that of the cells in an organised body, and our personalities
may be the transient but essential elements of an immortal and cosmic
mind.
Our views of the object of life have to be framed so as not to be
inconsistent with the observed facts from which these various possibilities
are inferred; it is safer that they should not exclude the possibilities
themselves. We must look on the slow progress of the order of evolution,
and the system of routine by which it has thus far advanced, as due to
antecedents and to inherent conditions of which we have not as yet the
slightest conception. It is difficult to withstand a suspicion that the three
dimensions of space and the fourth dimension of time may be four
independent variables of a system that is neither space nor time, but
something else wholly unconceived by us. Our present enigma as to how a
First Cause could itself have been brought into existence—how the
tortoise of the fable, that bears the elephant that bears the world, is itself
supported—may be wholly due to our necessary mistranslation of the four
or more variables of the universe, limited by inherent conditions, into the
three unlimited variables of Space and the one of Time.
Our ignorance of the goal and purport of human life, and the mistrust
we are apt to feel of the guidance of the
