Chapter XII: Summary and Conclusion

Extract

The termination of the world in a man appears to be the last victory of the intelligence. … An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. … Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its being a power to translate the world into some particular language of its own.—EMERSON, The Method of Nature, 1841.

Our story of evolution ended with a stirring in the brain-organ of the latest of nature’s experiments; but that stirring of consciousness transmutes the whole story and gives meaning to its symbolism.—EDDINGTON, Science and the Unseen World, 1929.

It may be worth while now to summarize in a page or two the view of world evolution as outlined above, a spiral structure of which man’s created language forms the final story. In this summary I adopt the organic hypothesis, which assumes that mind is a basic and permanent element in the world, self-determining and purposive in its nature, and the directing agency in the evolutionary process throughout its history. While the acceptance or rejection of this metaphysical hypothesis is not essential to the acceptance or rejection of the scientific exposition of the birth and structure of language given in the preceding pages, the choice of one or other hypothesis does, of course, make a rather complete difference in the diction and phraseology chosen to set out the specific exposition. To a mechanist many of the terms which I have used may appear altogether unwarranted or quite wrong.