21888 CONFLICT IN NATURE AND LIFE: A STUDY OF ANTAGONISM IN THE CONSTITUTION FOR THE ELUCIDATION OF THE PROBLEM NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, I, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET. 1883. PREFACE. The development of the individual mind is not apt to be a uniform movement. It has critical stages when a new thought brings about a mental revolution. The writer may be permitted to illustrate by his own experience. He may recall as the first mental acquisition which necessitated new ways of looking at things, the idea that the brain is the organ of mind—that the mental faculties are dependent on physical conditions; as the second, the conception of natural law everywhere operative, which took the place of foreknowledge and predestination-these two allied forms of doctrine having been early forced upon his conviction by logical considerations on the old assumption of the government of the universe by personal supervision; as the third, the idea that mankind have made their own gods by magnifying and deifying human nature-this came with the shock of originality, to discover at leisure, however, that it was the common property of many thinking people, and that Xenophanes had explicitly taught it more than two thousand years ago; as the fourth, the doctrine of Evolution with the multiplicity of mental |