Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/375

I>K. WARp's KKFUTATION OK DUALISM. Hlil actions to composite phenomena of various kinds, imply a power of combining many separate impressions. These separate impressions are received by the senses by different parts of the body. If they go no farther than the places at which they are received, they are useless. . . . That an effectual adjustment may be made, they must all be brought into relation with one another. But this implies some centre common to them all through which they can pass ; and as they cannot pass through it simultaneously they must pass in succession, so that as the external phenomena responded to become greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity of the changes to which this common centre of communication is subject must increase, there must result an unbroken series of these changes then- must arise a consciousness " (i., 267, 8). When we supplement this by reference to the chapter on the Substance of Mind, and learn that the concepts of Mind and Matter are only mere symbols of some unknown and unknowable Power, and that whether Mind should be expressed in terms of Matter, or Matter in terms of Mind is " a question scarcely worth de- ciding," while at the same time " all phenomena" are most simply expressible in terms of Matter, Motion and Force, and on the other hand, "to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter " is " wholly impossible " we are driven to the conclusion that as regards this problem, at any rate, the Synthetic Philosophy is inextricably confused and con- tradictory. In Biological Evolution " the problem is merely to explain the diversity of living forms, and that not by the help of mechanical but of biological conceptions," and it appears that the greatest biologists do not even suggest a mechanical origin of life, and among the " factors of organic evolution " are constrained to recognise some that are ideological. And we find that in biology organism and environment are as strictly correlative as subject and object are in psychology, while in comparing the world of living things with inani- mate nature, it seems that in the latter there is a " uniform tendency to pass in the shortest and easiest way to physical quiescence, fixity and equilibrium " to follow, that is, the, line of least resistance and in the former we find " a steadily-increasing differentiation of structure and com- position, entailing a large storage of potential energy ". And the psychological aspect of this increasing differentiation brings us face to face with the principles of Self-conservation and Subjective Selection. Both of these involve feeling and activity, and are real and concrete, instead of being merely