The History of Augusta; First Settlements and Early Days as a Town, Including the Diary of Mrs. Martha Moore Ballard, 1785 to 1812

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ... by surrounding conditions. Again, in order that a being possess a capacity for education, it must have the ability to realize within itself what belongs to its species or race. If an acorn could develop itself so that it could realize, not only its own possibility as an oak, but its entire species, and all the varieties of oaks within itself, and without losing its particular individuality, it would possess the capacity for education. But an acorn, in reality, cannot develop its possibility without the destruction of its own individuality. The acorn vanishes in the oak tree, and the crop XIV--15 of acorns which succeeds is not again the same acorn, except in kind or species. The species lives, but the individual dies, in the vegetable world. So it is in the animal world. The brute lives his particular life, unable to develop within himself the form of his entire species, and still less the form of all animal life. And yet the animal possesses self-activity in the powers of locomotion, sense-perception, feeling, emotion, and other elementary shapes. Both animal and plant react against surroundings, and possess more or less power to assimilate what is foreign to them. The plant takes moisture and elementary inorganic substances, and converts them into nutrition wherewith to build its cellular growth. The animal has not only this power of nutrition, which assimilates its surroundings, but also the power of feeling, which is a wonderful faculty. Feeling reproduces within the organism of the animal the external condition; it is an ideal reproduction of the surroundings. The environment of the plant may be seized upon and appropriated in the form of sap, or in the form of carbonic acid, for the nourishment of that plant; but there is no...