The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

THE PRESENT PHASE OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION

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The Possibility of One Collective Human Mind and Will

The progressive development of human inventions, the onset of power production and the present rapidly extending and unifying economic organization of mankind, are subjects that cannot be properly dealt with in a general review of Life; they belong in part to general history and in part to descriptive economics. But here we may say a few words upon the subject of the development of that conscious unification of the human species which is now going on very rapidly. And again we face something quite unparalleled elsewhere in the entire realm of biology.

Other species of animal seem to have an individual conscious existence limited strictly to their individual experiences, but with the dawn of tradition the human mind began to extend itself in time and space beyond the individual range. The difference between the human mind and the mind of a chimpanzee is infinitely greater than the difference of the bodies or brains of the two ; it is as different as a bird is from a snake . it moves in more dimensions. At present a human mind, fully developed by education and inquiry, reaches so far and so wide that individual experience is a mere point of departure for its tremendous ramifications. What it has of its very own is altogether dwarfed by what it has in common with other individuals of the species. Just so far as a human mind is well informed and soundly instructed, so far is it able to understand, that is to say to identify itself with, other well-informed and soundly instructed minds. By means of books, pictures, museums and the like, the species builds up the apparatus of a super-human memory. Imaginatively the individual now links himself with and secures the use of this continually increasing and continually more systematic and accessible supermemory. The human mind neither begins nor ends therefore with the abruptness of an animal mind. As it grows up, it takes to itself more or less completely the growing mental life of the race, adds a personal interpretation to it, gives it substance and application, and in due course fades out as an individuality, while continuing in its consequences as a contribution to the undying flood. From the point of view of the species, the consciousnesses of men are passing trains of thought and impulse. They are now as much part of a larger life

as the perception of the sunlight on this sheet of paper and of the singing of a bird outside are parts of the life of the writer of this sentence. They are material and enrichment. It is not a metaphor, not an analogy ; it is a statement of fact that this larger comprehensive life is going on.

In this work we have traced a long process of synthesis from the single cell to the multicellular organism and from the ccelenterate to the ccelomate. We have seen the interdependence of individuals in space increase with the development of colonial and gregarious forms and of individuals in time with the growing care and intimacy of parent for young. The higher forms of interdependence have involved great extensions of mental correlation. We have shown how human social economy is based almost entirely upon the mental modifications of the individual and how little it owes to instinct. This mental modification is steadily in the direction of the subordination of egotism and the suppression of extremes of uncorrelated individual activity. An inflation of the persona has gone on, so that the individual has become tribal, patriotic, loyal, or devotee. Homo Sapiens accommodates this persona, by which he conducts his individual life, to wider and wider conceptions.

The more intelligent and comprehensive man’s picture of the universe has become, the more intolerable has become his concentration upon the individual life with its inevitable final rejection. No animal, it would seem, realizes death. Man does. He knows that before his individuality lies the probability of senility and the certainty of death. He has found two alternative lines of accommodation.

The first is a belief in personal immortality, in the unendingness of his conscious self, After this life, we are told, comes the resurrection—and all necessary rejuvenescence. This idea is the essential consolation of several of the great religions of the world. We have already discussed its credibility.

The second line of accommodation is the realization of his participation in a greater being with which he identifies himself. He escapes from his ego by this merger, and acquires an impersonal immortality in the association ; his identity dissolving into the greater identity. This is the essence of much religious mysticism, and it is remarkable how closely the biological analysis of individuality brings us to the mystics. The individual, according to this second line of thought, saves himself by losing himself.

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