HOLISM AND EVOLUTION 



CHAPTER I 



THE REFORM OF FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS 



Summary. — In spite of the great advances which have been 

 made in knowledge, some fundamental gaps still remain; matter, 

 life and mind still remain utterly disparate phenomena. Yet the 

 concepts of all three arise in experience, and in the human all 

 three meet and apparently intermingle, so that the last word about 

 them has not yet been said. Reformed concepts of all three are 

 wanted. This will come from fuller scientific knowledge, and 

 especially from a re-survey of the material from new points of 

 view. The fresh outlook must accompany the collection of further 

 detailed knowledge, and nowhere is the new outlook more urgently 

 required than in the survey of these great divisions of knowledge. 



Take Evolution as a case in point. The acceptance of Evolu- 

 tion as a fact, the origin of life-structures from the inorganic, must 

 mean a complete revolution in our idea of matter. If matter 

 holds the promise and potency of life and mind it is no longer the 

 old matter of the physical materialists. We have accepted Evo- 

 lution, but have failed to make the fundamental readjustment in 

 our views which that acceptance involves. The old mechanical 

 view-points persist, and Natural Selection itself has come to be 

 looked upon as a mere mechanical factor. But this is wrong: 

 Sexual Selection is admittedly a psychical factor, and even Natural 

 Selection has merely the appearance of a mechanical process, be- 

 cause it is viewed as a statistic^ average, from which the real 

 character of struggle among the living has been eliminated. 



Nineteenth-century science went wrong mostly because of the 

 hard and narrow concept of causation which dominated it. It was 

 a fixed dogma that there could be no more in the effect than there 

 was in the cause ; hence creativeness and real progress became im- 

 possible. The narrow concept of causation again arose from a 

 wider intellectual error of narrowing down all concepts into hard 

 definite contours and wiping out their indefinite surrounding 

 ^'fields." The concept of "fields" is absolutely necessary in order 



