It
disregards the part played by intuition, and it is blind to the
germs of truth which were destined to ripen into noble fruit.
Mother Earth, with air and sunshine, and starry heaven above,
nurtured men's thoughts and souls as well as their bodies.
There is more than an analogy between the childhood of the
race and the childhood of the individual. And just as the child
plunges us at times, by questions, into problems of the deepest
import, so is it with unexpected flashes of insight preserved for
us in the records, written or unwritten, of the earliest workings
of the human mind. "The soul of man" (says Caird), "even at its
worst, is a wonderful instrument for the world to play on; and in
the vicissitudes of life, it cannot avoid having its highest chords
at times touched, and an occasional note of perfect music drawn
from it, as by a wandering hand on the strings."
It is remarkable how, in spite of the enormous advances made
by civilised thought, our concepts and hypotheses, not
excepting those deemed most fundamental, are being constantly
modified. How much more would change prevail in ages when
structured knowledge had hardly come into existence. But
whether the pace of change be slow or rapid, the same impelling
cause is at work--man's determination to find fuller expression
for his intuitional experience. Animism developed into
mythology, mythology into gnomic philosophy, and this again
became differentiated into science, art, philosophy, and
theology.
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