i8 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



with a zone of activity or influence surrounding it and shad- 

 ing gradually off into indefiniteness. Next conceive of an 

 effect as similarly surrounded. It is easy in that way to 

 understand their interaction, and to see that cause and effect 

 are interlocked, and embrace and influence each other 

 through the interpenetration of their two fields. In fact the 

 conception of Fields of force which has become customary in 

 Electro-Magnetism is only a special case of phenomenon 

 which is quite universal in the realms of thought and reality 

 alike. Every " thing " has its field, like itself, only more 

 attenuated; every concept has likewise its field. It is in 

 these fields and these fields only that things really happen. 

 It is the intermingling of fields which is creative or causal 

 in nature as well as in life. The hard secluded concrete 

 thing or concept is barren, and but for its field it 

 could never come into real contact or into active or creative 

 relations with any other thing or concept. Things, ideas, 

 animals, plants, persons: all these, like physical forces, have 

 their fields, and but for their fields they would be unintelli- 

 gible, their activities would be impossible, and their relations 

 barren and sterile. The abstract intelligence, in isolating 

 things or ideas, and constituting them apart from their 

 fields, and treating the latter as non-existent, has made the 

 real world of matter and of life quite unintelligible and 

 inexplicable. The world is thus in abstraction constituted 

 of entities which are absolutely discontinuous, with nothing 

 between them to bridge the impassable gulfs, little or great, 

 which separate them from each other. The world becomes 

 to us a mere collection of disjecta membra, drained of all 

 union or mutual relations, dead, barren, inactive, unintelli- 

 gible. And in order once more to bring relations into this 

 scrap heap of disconnected entities, the mind has to conjure 

 up spirits, influences, forces and what not from the vasty 

 deep of its own imagination. And all this is due to the 

 initial mistake of enclosing things or ideas or persons in hard 

 contours which are purely artificial and are not in accord- 

 ance with the natural shading-off continuities which are or 

 should be well known to science and philosophy alike. One 



