116 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



mental point of view, which is critical idealism, forbids us 

 to say so, at least as long as we are not metaphysicians. 

 Our statements regarding action refer to natural events in 

 space and to such events only : there are factors contrary 

 to mechanics in these natural events, but these factors are 

 " natural " factors too ; they belong to " physics " in the 

 sense of the ancients, though not to physics in the modern 

 sense. Our " psychoid " in this sense is a factor of ra 

 (fivcri/cd, an agent or factor of nature, looked upon as part of 

 Givenness. 



From our idealistic standpoint, as long as it is non- 

 metaphysical, " psychology ' and the " psychical J: belong 

 exclusively among the self-experiences of the Ego. 



The question now arises, if from such a point of view there 

 might not be room for a parallelism of quite a new type, very 

 strange perhaps at the first glance : a parallelism of " my 

 Ego " and " my psychoid ' : as a natural factor at work in 

 my body. Perhaps that would only be a parallelism of a 

 methodological sort that might be called doctrinaire. Let 

 us only note for the present that, for the sake of analytical 

 clearness, my Ego and my psychoid, as my object of reflec- 

 tion, may in fact be regarded as being in activity " parallel " 

 with respect to one another. A special chapter of our 

 future lectures will be devoted to the deeper elucidation of 

 the relations between idealistic philosophy and vitalism in 

 its most general sense. 



At any rate we must deny the claim of parallelism that 

 there is an unbroken mechanical chain of events in acting, 

 and we must deny " psycho "-physical interaction also, if 

 we wish not to become metaphysicians. By our non- 

 metaphysical point of view we avoid, of course, all the 



