Appendix - Page 2

view of the ostensibly real universe. Let me try to give you
the chief things I had. I had man definitely placed in the great
scheme of space and time. I knew him incurably for what he was,
finite and not final, a being of compromises and adaptations. I had
traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by
step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had
seen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix
of to-day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the
purposes of the ear and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke
out the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and natural
water. I had worked out the development of those extraordinarily
unsatisfactory and untrustworthy instruments, man's teeth, from the
skin scutes of the shark to their present function as a basis for
gold stoppings, and followed the slow unfolding of the complex and
painful process of gestation through which man comes into the world.
I had followed all these things and many kindred things by
dissection and in embryology--I had checked the whole theory of
development again in a year's course of palaeontology, and I had
taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale of the
stars, in a course of astronomical physics. And all that amount of
objective elucidation came before I had reached the beginnings of
any philosophical or metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I
believed, how I believed, what I believed, or what the fundamental
stuff of things was.

Now following hard upon this interlude with knowledge, came a time
when I had to give myself to teaching, and it became advisable to
acquire one of those Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and so
foolishly despised, and that enterprise set me to a superficial, but
suggestive study of educational method, of educational theory, of
logic, of psychology, and so at last, when the little affair with
the diploma was settled, to philosophy. Now to come to logic over
the bracing uplands of comparative anatomy is to come to logic with
a lot of very natural preconceptions blown clean out of one's mind.
It is, I submit, a way of taking logic in the flank. When you have
realised to the marrow, that all the physical organs of man and all
his physical structure are what they are through a series of
adaptations and approximations, and that they are kept up to a level
of practical efficiency only by the elimination of death, and that
this is true also of his brain and of his instincts and of many of
his mental predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking
apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mysteriously different
and better. And I had read only a little logic before I became aware
of implications