mc gee] THE TREND OF HUMAN PROGRESS A&7
advancing knowledge is leaped — and an arrangement or interpre- tation of things in. terms of motions or powers is superadded in turn ; then graphos becomes logos, observation is refined and grows into generalization, ratiocination is established, and the mind feels its power and begins the conquest of nature with the twin organs of hand and brain. (4) As knowledge grows, the numerical and formal and potential interpretations become too complex for convenient use ; but it is an easy step from the arrangement in terms of motion to arrangement in terms of sequence, and this step has been taken in the several sciences in at least some of their aspects, including anthropology save in certain aspects — for while every anthropologist now recognizes the bestial ancestry of mankind, the increasing capacity of the cranium, and other features pertaining to the biotic development of the human body, there are some who have not yet been led to note the concomitant and much more significant demotic devel- opment of intellectual man. The third and fourth modes of arrangement of things easily unite in that dynamic interpreta- tion which is the distinguishing feature of modern science, giving character to the New Astronomy, the New Chemistry, the modern biology vitalized by Darwin, the New Geology, and the anthro- pology of this Society. (5) There is another mode of interpreta- tion, spontaneously yet only half-consciously essayed by many observers, in which the mind is held to be a reflex of nature, at once the product of experience and the guide to the invariable procession of events in nature ; it is but the normal synthesis of the numerical, formal, potential, and sequential arrangements, and would seem, in combining these, to attain the acme in completeness of interpretation. It was formulated by Bacon as the key-note to his Novum Organum, the mentor of modern science, and after centuries of singular neglect has been reformu- lated and brought up to the present state of knowledge by one of our members in a new organon which time must test.
Regarding the successive modes of interpretation as stages in
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