To
this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though
science can no longer give to force a name.
Man's function as a force of nature was to assimilate other
forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He
felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a
bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish
or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its
immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he
could conceive to have possible value in this or any other
existence. He waited for the object to teach him its use, or want
of use, and the process was slow. He may have gone on for
hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for Nature to tell him
her secrets; and, to his rivals among the monkeys, Nature has
taught no more than at their start; but certain lines of force
were capable of acting on individual apes, and mechanically
selecting types of race or sources of variation. The individual
that responded or reacted to lines of new force then was possibly
the same individual that reacts on it now, and his conception of
the unity seems never to have changed in spite of the increasing
diversity of forces; but the theory of variation is an affair of
other science than history, and matters nothing to dynamics. The
individual or the race would be educated on the same lines of
illusion, which, according to Arthur Balfour, had not essentially
varied down to the year 1900.
Pages:
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693