Psychotherapy (Centre Publishing Co.) Volume 3 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 Excerpt: ...were there before, and, as miracles are ruled out, the spiritual world owes its origin to the same sources with the world of organic matter. Even recently, Professor Ostwald,1 the great chemist, a liberal and far-seeing thinker, who lately came among us as lecturer at Harvard University, chosen as a representative of German physical science, has expressed the view that physical and chemical forces under favorable conditions of moisture may conceivably have bridged unaided the gulf which seems to separate the nonliving and the living. If this supposition could be granted and organic life assumed to be created in this fashion, no matter in how primitive a form, the secret of evolution might be claimed to be our own. The " potentiality" of the last and best man would be given, one would have to believe, with the first spark of organic life, and not only that but the entire history of organic life, including human life, would be contained or foreshadowed in the prehuman physical history of the world, and conscious life would be reduced to a refined interplay of chemical forces. Thus every factor in the final result would be "given" at the outset, and true "evolution," in the idealistic sense, would be impossible. "With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead, And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed; And the first Morning of Creation wrote What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read." (Omar Khayyam--Fitzgerald.) 1 "Die Philosophie der Natur." See also address at the opening of Emerson Hall, Cambridge, 1905. OF course, under any hypothesis something must have been "given." But according to the idealist theory life is the ultimate reality, while on the materialistic theory man is "simply a...