The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams
PECULIARITIES OF THE SPECIES HOMO SAPIENS
again he is separated from all the species. And now he ceases again to be traditional. He is supplementing tradition by science and analysis. Tradition has been a phase in his development which has lasted only a few score thousand years.
Primitive human thinking was like the thinking of children and uneducated people to-day. Something was imagined and either liked and sought, or disliked and avoided. Things were grouped in the mind to see how they looked and felt together. Countervailing ideas. were evoked to alleviate, distort or suppress disagreeable realizations. Thinking was more like reverie and had little use for words until it had to be told. It has only been very slowly that an acuter observation, an exacter definition, a more logical process has come to the aid of these primitive methods, and now begins to supersede them.
The great period of Hellenic thought between the sixth and the fourth centuries B.C. marks the transition from what Jung, in his Psychology of the Unconscious, calls Undirected Thinking to Directed Thinking. Plato has recorded and immortalized for us the birth-cries of logical thought Aristotle was the Father of Natural History and Philosophy. From that period onward, the earlier mythological method of expression, dream-like in its quality, gave way slowly but surely to philosophical analysis and openeyed scientific classification. We are still in the closing centuries of that phase of transition. Only now does it become possible to present the ordinary human being with a picture of the universe that is generally valid and divested of fabulous interpretations.
KEK
The bulk of mankind is stil] thinking mythologically. Only now is it possible to replace dogma by rational direction,
In The Outline of Ffistory, the expansion of man’s picture of the universe is traced. Step by step we see how man passed from a picture of the universe centring upon his family and his tribe and having a radius of a few score miles, a little fear-girt picture, filled with the projection of his personal reaction to his father and his associates, to broader concepts, to the picture of the city, the nation, the state or the empire. His mythology in that story of the past retreats before the advancing realism of his thought, his sympathies,expand, his sense of fellowship replaces an animal hostility to strangers and to unfamiliar types. Throughout that story there go on a concurrent improvement of his means of transport and a steady development of his methods of expression, record and communication. In spite of hates and brutalities, of an inherent disposition to distrust, of the crazy egotism of the ordinary individual in a Position of power, of a troublesome inheritance of greed, cowardice, sloth, and self-protective illusion —in spite of all these things, this advance continues steadily. We live in a clearer and a cleaner light than the men of the past. The average person is more lucid and less obsessed. An ever-increasing proportion of human beings realize sane and comprehensive pictures of the universe. Loyalties grow wider and more rational. It is a process of mental personal expansion to which the only visible limit is our planet and the entire human species.
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