individual experience after birth. In other words, it begins its
separate life not as a matured creature, but as an infant which needs
for a time to be watched and helped.




V.

The Dawning of Consciousness.


Here we arrive at one of the most wonderful moments in the history of
creation,--the moment of the first faint dawning of consciousness, the
foreshadowing of the true life of the soul. Whence came the soul we no
more know than we know whence came the universe. The primal origin of
consciousness is hidden in the depths of the bygone eternity. That it
cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material
particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the
correlation of physical forces.[4] The Platonic view of the soul, as a
spiritual substance, an effluence from Godhood, which under certain
conditions becomes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is
doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our
knowledge. Yet while we know not the primal origin of the soul, we have
learned something with regard to the conditions under which it has
become incarnated in material forms. Modern psychology has something to
say about the dawning of conscious life in the animal world. Reflex
action is unaccompanied by consciousness. The nervous actions which
regulate the movements of the viscera go on without our knowledge; we
learn of their existence only by study, as we learn of facts in outward