Organic Connection Between Physical and Psychical 277 



rather as a life-sized sketch, as one may say, of the whole 

 living world, to facilitate the gigantic task of completing 

 the picture through the cooperation of numberless artists, 

 the completion to be accomplished by filling in the sketch 

 with the entire round of attributes, structural and func- 

 tional, presented by the natural lives of organisms. I have 

 dwelt somewhat at length on this matter elsewhere,* and can 

 refer to it here only as a background for what I wish to say 

 about psychical specificity. 



Two extracts must suffice. "No biological phenomenon 

 is adequately interpreted or dealt with experimentally, until 

 it has been considered with reference to the place that the 

 organism to which it pertains holds in the system of classi- 

 fication." And further: "What I affirm is that the inductive 

 evidence has now gone so far toward proving every sharply 

 differentiated species to contain some differentia in all the 

 main provinces of their structure and function, that to as- 

 sume the absence of such differentia in any given case is 

 unwarranted." 21 



I want to utilize these earlier general statements about 

 organic specificity, as a basis on which to rest a generaliza- 

 tion concerning the specificity of psychic attributes. So 

 enormous is the observational data available for illustration 

 here, that in lieu of presenting any of them I am going to 

 state in a wholly dogmatic fashion the generalization toward 

 which we are certainly being led by modern crucial researches 

 on animal behavior. Let us imagine ourselves possessed of an 

 approximately exhaustive descriptive knowledge of the be- 

 havior of the whole animal world, this knowledge being, how- 

 ever, unaccompanied by any knowledge whatever of the cor- 

 poreal nature of the animals. This behavior-knowledge 

 would fall naturally into categories larger and smaller, the 



* The Place of Description, Definition and Classification in Philoso- 

 phical Biology, in The Higher Usefulness of Science (Boston, 1918) ; 

 also The Scientific Monthly, November, 1916. 



