Abstract
SIR GEORGE REID is known to be a versatile thinker, and he shows himself to be also a philosopher in an address on “The World of Matter and the World of Mind”delivered by him recently before the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. We live on a single globe among millions of similar bodies, and we have no direct evidence of life elsewhere in space. Yet,“if living things exist only on this globe, living things are the loneliest of all the objects which the telescope can reach, or the microscope reveal, or the mind of man conceive. Man would be the loneliest of all, for he stands alone even among the living things of his own planet.” Moreover, the achievements of man in the few thousand years of historic time are so brilliant in comparison with what was accomplished in the million years or so of geological man that Sir George Reid considers the argument derived from the remains of a physical structure resembling our own furnishes no conclusive proof that we are in body and soul the lineal descendants of fossilised ancestors. The principle of continuity breaks down when the evolution of mind is considered; if a Plato, Newton, or Darwin can be developed from a cave-dweller, “is not such an evolution a greater tax on human faith than the marvels of a direct creation can be?” Man, the intelligent centre of progressive life, is conscious of directive control: the will is merely the executive officer of the mind, and behind it there must be “some sort of pilotage.”
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Matter and Mind . Nature 89, 251 (1912). https://doi.org/10.1038/089251b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/089251b0