298 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



of chemical compounds, interacting upon one another in various 

 ways. From the physiological standpoint the man is a living 

 organism blindly fulfilling its biological destiny. From the 

 psychological standpoint he is a person, the subject of purposive 

 knowledge and volition. The man as mere physical body or 

 organism is an evident fiction or abstraction from reality, 

 though a very necessary one for our imperfect knowledge. As a 

 conscious individual personality he is at least far less of a fiction. 



The physical sciences, biology and psychology, go on their 

 several ways, accumulating knowledge which each science in- 

 terprets according to its own working hypotheses and subject to 

 the limitations of these hypotheses. Each lower science also 

 hands on what is relatively speaking raw material to the higher 

 one. The attempt to resolve the higher into the lower, as by 

 making mind dependent on body, is, however, foredoomed to 

 failure. 



To sum up, the relation of body to mind is not that psychical 

 phenomena are the mere accompaniments of physical processes 

 in the body nor that there is interaction between body and an 

 incorporeal mind or soul but that body is conscious personality 

 looked at incompletely or abstractly. In other words, conscious 

 personality is the truth of the body and its environment ; and the 

 physical causes which seem at first sight to determine the mind 

 are only superficial appearances. This is merely another way of 

 saying that however little we understand it in detail our world 

 is a spiritual world. 



We are not thereby committed to the absurd position that 

 the personality of the universe is a man's own individual per- 

 sonality coming into existence at a certain date and disappear- 

 ing again at a certain other date. Just as biological facts have 

 taught us that the life of each individual cell or organism is only 

 part of a wider life, so have ethical and religious facts shown 

 that the individual personality in its full realisation is the ex- 

 pression of divine personality, which alone can be the ultimate 

 truth of all existence. The individual personality, including 

 his ideas of the world and his ideals of conduct, is evidently a 

 " product of his time " — the expression of a wider personal life 

 which he only realises in living it and living it whole, confident 

 in his participation in it and ready to give up his mere individual 

 interests or even his life itself should his duty lead him to 

 do so. 



