Philosophical and Scientific Thought

Abstract

Lower animals living under simple, constant and favourable conditions adapt themselves to immediate circumstances through their innate reflexes. This usually suffices to maintain individual and species for a suitable period. An animal can withstand more intricate and less stable conditions only if it can adapt to a wider range of spatial and temporal surroundings. This requires a farsightedness in space and time which is met first by more perfect sense organs, and with mounting demands by a development in the life of the imagination. Indeed an organism that possesses memory has wider spatial and temporal surroundings in its mental field of vision than it could reach through its senses. It perceives, as it were, even those regions that adjoin the directly visible, seeing the approach of prey or foe before any sense organ announces them. What guarantees to primitive man a measure of advantage over his animal fellows is doubtless only the strength of his individual memory, which is gradually reinforced by the communicated memory of forebears and tribe. Likewise, what essentially marks progress in civilization is that noticeably wider regions of space and time are drawn within the scope of human attention.