24

DEVELOPMENT OF

[CHAP.

present purpose we may leave on one side the first half of this thesis, taking it as proved that man as we know him has-as a race-ascended from and through lower types of life to his present position as the crown and cope of the known organic world. We are concerned more immediately with his individual aspect, and this we will proceed to consider in some detail.

Each human individual commences life as a single organic cell, not yet so far differentiated as to present distinctive animal characteristics. The cell undergoes a complicated process of subdivision, multiplies, the daughter cells behave in like manner, their aggregate taking to itself a more and more specialised form until first the vertebrate and then the human embryo comes into existence. The latter grows, its sex becomes apparent, its various organs commence their functions. At the end of a certain time it is ready to be born into the external world as a fully-formed human infant. Through all these prenatal changes and transmutations the individual life has been continuous, the cell is not the embryo, the embryo is not the infant, but the life of

II.]

HUMAN INDIVIDUAL

25

the infant is one with the life of the embryo and the cell.

After birth further development is undergone. The infant grows, he shows signs of consciousness, then of self-consciousness, he gains the use and control of his limbs, he begins to understand something of himself. and his relationship to his environment, he becomes capable of sympathy, love, friendship, his bodily and mental powers increase; finally, through childhood, boyhood and youth, he passes to the stage of fully developed manhood. And through all these changes, as through those that preceded birth, the individual life is continuous. The man differs from the youth, the youth from the boy, the boy from the child, the child from the infant, but the life of the man is the same life that was in the infant. More than this he identifies it as such. Since the first dawning of memory he knows that he has been the same. "It is I myself and not another who have passed through these transmutations. I was that child, that boy, that youth-I who am now the grown man." Nor do the changes cease here. The man has all his experience to

[CHAP.

accumulate, and as the saying goes this process makes "a different man' of him. He is different at forty from thirty, at seventy from fifty, different, for as he constantly asserts, "I "I was so-and-so, and so-and-so, now I am something else"; yet the same, for the difference does not consist in another individual having come into existence, but in one individual having passed through a continuous series of developments.

This fact of self-identity through difference is so entirely familiar, so completely a part (or rather the ground,) of everyday experience, that the plain man simply takes it for granted, guides his actions in accordance with it, and seldom realises that there is anything peculiar or requiring explanation about it. Let us for the moment accept this point of view, and turn our attention to another less immediately obvious truth which a study of modern science brings very prominently to our notice. This is the increase of individuality apparent as we rise in the scale of organic life. It has already been observed that in the earliest stage of the human embryo, the future man is not even so far differentiated as to

II.]

INDIVIDUALITY TWOFOLD

27

be distinctively animal. This fact is reproduced on a larger scale. All students of biology are familiar with those lowly and curious organisms which throughout their life-history retain both animal and vegetable characteristics, so that it is impossible to classify them correctly in either of the great divisions of the organic world. In higher organisms we no longer find this confusion existing, save in the earliest stages of their life-history. The adult forms leave no doubt as to the division in which we must place them; and as organic complexity increases, so does the oneness and distinctness of the individual life to which it ministers. Taking for convenience and brevity's sake illustrations from the animal kingdom alone, compare the individuality of an oyster with that of an ant or a bee, that of a bee with that of one of the higher vertebrates, a dog or an ape, that of an ape with that of a man.

Individuality, it must be remarked, has a double aspect, the outward and the inward, the outward being that by which an observer distinguishes one individual from others of the same kind, the inward that by which each

28

ITS INNER ASPECT

[CHAP.

individual distinguishes and identifies himself. Taking man (as we perforce must do,) as our standard observer, we may notice that his difficulty in distinguishing one individual (of the same species,) from another, decreases in direct proportion with the degree of organic complexity attained. He would be sore put to it to identify an oyster, he would have little difficulty in identifying a dog or a horse; and it needs no argument to show that the oyster is almost, if not totally, deficient in that sense of self-identity which is the inner aspect of individuality, and which is possessed to a distinct extent by the higher animals and to an incomparably higher degree by man.1 The inner and the outer aspects develop together; and man, who possesses both in the highest known degree, is the most individual being with whom Science has to deal. That constitutes the great difficulty of Science with regard to him. For despite her attention to details, and her accumulation of minute separate facts, she is very highly abstract in her aims. She descends

1 See, however, on the sense of self-identity in the lower animals, the remarks made on p. 55 of the present work.