Chapter IV: The Emergence of Organic Life: The Time-Picture Continued

Extract

All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and has taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. … Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is Man! Yet all duly arrive.—EMERSON, Nature, 1841.

The entire phenomenon of the organic world divides itself by its external behaviour into three well-defined classes, plant life, animal life, and man, each class with new and original characteristics of its own. To trace and mark these new characteristics as they emerge in their time-evolution upwards through plant and animal life to where the life-and-mind of the world eventually emerges from its unfreed and inconscious activity to its freed and conscious activity in the life and mind of man, is our next step.