COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY 77 



the current doctrines of the soul. The ages of psychic evolution 

 through which we have passed have not only cast their shadows down 

 the ranks of time to our own day, but their life is now coursing in 

 our mental pulses as literally as in our corporeal. He goes on to say : 



The best and only key to truly explain mind in man is in the animals he 

 has sprung from and in his own infancy which so faintly recapitulates them; 

 for about every property of the human mind is found in animal mind, as those 

 of higher animals are found in the powers of the lower. . . . The conscious 

 adult person is not a monad reflecting the universe, but a fragment broken off 

 and detached from the great world of soul, always maimed, defined by special 

 limitations, like, yet different from, all others, with some incommensurability 

 parting it off as something unique, well fitted to illustrate some aspects and 

 hopelessly unable to exemplify or even know other regions in the cosmos of 

 soul. 



But the trouble is that as soon as a professional philosopher ap- 

 proaches the problems of the cosmic past of mind he is clapped auto- 

 matically into some metaphysical pigeon hole, whose rigid and often 

 misshapen walls determine that every effort which he puts forth must 

 be molded by past tradition. The very assimilation of the newer data 

 of science, which are the philosopher's meat and drink, involves their 

 incorporation into a metaphysical system already thoroughly organized, 

 and so we read our metaphysics backward through the cosmic process. 



The naturalists, accordingly, are calling for a new Naturphilosophie 

 which shall be ' anti-metaphysical/ and yet every new such attempt on 

 their own part seems to present more serious metaphysical vices than 

 the preceding. It is obvious that the hope for an anti-metaphysical 

 philosophy is vain, for human philosophic systems flow into meta- 

 physics as the sparks fly upward. 



But what shall be the foundation of that metaphysic and the man- 

 ner of its building is the naturalist's own problem. Shall it be an 

 a priori system based upon ancient and mediaeval dialectic or shall it 

 be an organic growth whose roots sink deep into the soil of scientific 

 observation and induction ? This is a very burning question ; for while 

 we can have a practically efficient hod-man type of science without 

 metaphysics, there can be no hope of a future for any metaphysics 

 which is not built up and sustained by the progress of science. 



This, of course, can only mean that our metaphysics can not be 

 bound down by the rigid categories of formal logic (which is but a 

 crystallization of the past workings of the human mind) ; it too must 

 be alive with the lusty vigor of active growth. That such a meta- 

 physic is not unattainable is evident. Certain present tendencies are 

 nothing less than revolutionary in the direction of a really vital meta- 

 physic, and not a few men of science are making their contributions to 

 the same end. 



And herein lies the great hope and promise of an immediate fruit- 



