Evolution and Dissolution §93. An entire history of anything must include its appearance outof the imperceptible and its disappearance into the imperceptible. Any accountof an object which begins with it in a concrete form, or leaves off withit in a concrete form, is incomplete; since there remains an era of its existenceundescribed and unexplained. While admitting that knowledge is limited tothe phenomenal, we have, by implication, asserted that the sphere of knowledgeis co-extensive with the phenomenal -- co-extensive with all modes of theUnknowable which can affect consciousness. Hence, wherever we now find Beingso conditioned as to act on our senses, there arise the questions -- howcame it to be thus conditioned? and how will it cease to be thus conditioned?
Unless on the assumption that it acquired a sensible form at the moment ofperception, and lost its sensible form the moment after perception, it musthave had an antecedent existence under this sensible form, and will havea subsequent existence under this sensible form. And knowledge of it remainsincomplete until it has united the past, present, and future histories intoa whole.
Our daily sayings and doings presuppose more or less such knowledge, actualor potential, of states which have gone before and of states which will comeafter. Knowing any man personally, implies having before seen him under ashape much the same as his present shape; and knowing him simply as a man,implies the inferred antecedent states of infancy, childhood, and youth.
Though the man's future is not known specifically, it is known generally. that he will die and decay, are facts which complete in outline the changesto be gone through by him. So with all objects around. The pre-existenceunder concrete forms of our woollens, silks, and cottons, we can trace somedistance back. We are certain that our furniture consists of matter whichwas aggregated by trees within these few generations. Even of the stonescomposing the walls of the house, we are able to say that years or centuriesago, they formed parts of some stratum in the Earth. Moreover, respectingthe hereafter of the wearable fabrics, the furniture, and the walls, we canassert this much, that they are all decaying, and in periods of various lengthswill lose their present coherent shapes. This information which all men gainconceding the past and future careers of surrounding things, Science continuesunceasingly to extend. To the biography of the individual man, it adds anintra-uterine biography beginning with him as a minute germ; and followingout his ultimate changes it finds his body resolved into certain gaseousproducts of decomposition. Not stopping short at the sheep's back and thecaterpillar's cocoon, it identifies in wool and silk the nitrogenous mattersabsorbed by the sheep and the caterpillar from plants. The substance of aplant's leaves, in common with the wood from which furniture is made, itagain traces back to certain gases in the air and certain minerals in thesoil. And the stratum of stone which was quarried to build the house, itleads was once a loose sediment deposited in an estuary or on the sea-bottom.
If, then, the past and the future of each object is a sphere of possibleknowledge; and if intellectual progress consists largely, if not mainly,in widening our acquaintance with this past and this future; it is obviousthat the limit towards which we progress is an expression of the whole pastand the whole future of each object and the aggregate of objects. It is noless obvious that this limit, if reached, can be reached only in a very qualifiedsense: inference more than observation must bring us to it. This garden-annualwe trace down to a seed planted in the spring, and analogy helps us backto the microscopic ovule whence the seed arose. Observation, verifying forecast,extends our knowledge to the flowers and the seeds, and afterwards to thedeath and decay which, sooner or later, ends in diffusion, partly throughthe air, partly through the soil. Here the rise of the aggregate out of theimperceptible and its passage back into the imperceptible is indistinct ateach extreme. Nevertheless we may say that in the case of this organism,as of organisms in general, the account, partially based on observation butlargely based on inference, fulfils the definition of a complete historyfairly well. But it is otherwise throughout the inorganic world. Inferencehere plays the chief part. Only by the piecing together of scattered factscan we form any conception of the past or future of even small inorganicmasses, and still less can we form it of greater ones; and when we come tothe vast masses forming our Solar System, the limits to their existence,alike in the past and in the future, can be known but inferentially: directobservation no longer aids us. Still, science leans more and more to theconclusion that these also once emerged from the imperceptible through successivestages of condensation and will in an immeasurably remote future lapse againinto the imperceptible. So that here, too, the conception of a complete historyis in a sense applicable, though we can never fill it out in more than anindefinite way.
But after recognizing the truth that our knowledge is limited to the phenomenaland the further truth that even the sphere of the phenomenal cannot be penetratedto its confines, we must nevertheless conclude that so far as is possiblephilosophy has to formulate this passage from the imperceptible into theperceptible, and again from the perceptible into the imperceptible.
