The Unity of the Organism 



the corner-stone of my interpretation.* 



Furthermore, as a naturalist faithful to the mandate "neg- 

 lect nothing," I am in full accord with psychology's aban- 

 donment of the earlier supposition that a leading aim of 

 psychology must be to prove that some one psychic province 

 is all-dominant, the others being merely secondary and trib- 

 utary. 



Thus all forms of the theory that the psychic empire is 

 at bottom Intellect, the heaven-ordained monarch of which 

 is Unconditioned Ideation, are incompatible with our stand- 

 point. Something of the weight and variety of authorita- 

 tive sanction which are pitted against us here is indicated 

 by such names as Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, 

 and Herbart of the proximate past, and Wundt, Royce, 

 Howison and Bradley of the immediate past. 



And theories like those of Fichte, Schopenhauer, Hart- 

 mann, Nietzsche, and divers pale, fitful present-day lights, 

 which would accord to Will hegemony over the entire psychic 

 realm, are still less tolerable to us. 



Feeling has won its rightful place in psychology so recently 

 that there seems little danger of its pushing its claims to 

 position and power beyond reason. Except perhaps in the 

 form of sensationalism, or the theory that all knowledge ac- 

 tually does originate in sensations, psychology of the west- 

 ern world appears never to have attempted seriously the 

 deification f of Feeling as it has of Reason and Will. When 



* I count it as one of the pieces of good luck in my scientific career 

 that, through no merit of my own, a technical memoir of mine containing 

 an elaborate theory of the origin of the vertebral column has lain in 

 editorial keeping unpublished for a decade and a half. 



t It is possible, as my friend Professor G. M. Stratton suggests to me, 

 that the German philosopher Fr. H. Jacobi, came nearer doing this than 

 any one else. His teachings gave, however, a definite place to positive 

 knowledge, so that, according to Hoffding, his faith and his knowledge 

 constituted two distinct philosophies. What he wrote probably does not, 

 consequently, contradict the statement in the text. Jacobi seems not to 

 have exerted much influence on the main current of German philosophy 

 and life. 



