82 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



The " something ' :1 that " acts " has the innate faculty of 

 producing some specific combination of muscular movements ; 

 the combination it produces in a special case depends on 

 the individuality of the stimulus present in that case, and 

 on the whole of past sensations in the widest sense. 



This is the result of an analysis of action unbiased by 

 dogmatism. 



e. THE " PSYCHOID ' 



This seems to be just the right place in our discussion 

 to give a name to the acting something which we have 

 discovered not to be a machine. We might speak of 

 " entelechy ' again, as we did in the theory of morpho- 

 genesis, but it appears better to distinguish also in 

 terminology the natural agent which forms the body 

 from the elemental agent which directs it. The words 

 " soul," " mind," or " psyche " present themselves, but one 

 of them would lead us into what we have so carefully 

 avoided all along, viz., pseudo-psychology. I may speak of 

 my " psyche >: which is no more than saying " Ego " but 

 there " are " no souls in this sense in the phenomenon 

 called nature in space. I therefore propose the very 

 neutral name of " Psychoid " for the elemental agent 

 discovered in action. " Psychoid " that is, a something 

 which [though not a " psyche ' can only be described in 

 terms analogous to those of psychology. In fact, there 

 can be no doubt that only the processes called " ab- 

 straction," " thinking," and so on, will enable us to 'under- 

 stand the correspondence of the two individualities in 

 our important principle : and the process of so-called 



