CHAPTER V 



GENERAL CONCEPT OF HOLISM 



Summary. — The dose approach to each other of the concepts of 

 matter, life and mind, and their partial overflow of each other's 

 domain, raises the further question whether back of them there is , 

 not a fundamental principle of which they are the progressive 

 outcome. That is the central problem of this work. 



Two conceptions of genesis or development have prevailed. The 

 one regards all reality as given in form and substance at the begin- 

 ning, either actually or implicitly, and the subsequent history as 

 merely the unfolding, explication, evolutio, of this implicit content. 

 This view puts creation in the past and makes it predetermine the 

 whole future; all fresh initiative, novelty or creativeness is conse- 

 quently banned from a universe so created or evolved. The other 

 view posits a minimum of the given at the beginning, and makes 

 the process of Evolution creative of reality. Evolution on this 

 view is really creative and not merely explicative of what was given 

 before; it involves the creative rise not only of new forms or group- 

 ings, but even of new materials in the process of Evolution. This 

 is the view of Evolution to-day commonly held, and it marks a 

 revolution in thought. It releases the present and the future from 

 the bondage of the past, and makes freedom an inherent character 

 of the universe. 



Creative Evolution involves both general principles or tendencies 

 and concrete forms or structures; philosophy studies the former, 

 while science has more exclusively concentrated on the latter. Yet 

 both are necessary to reality; and any universal formula of Evolu- 

 tion must include both the general activity or tendency and the 

 concrete particular structure, as one cannot be deduced from the 

 other. Bergson made an attempt to deduce Evolution with all its 

 multitudinous forms from homogeneous, pure, undifferentiated^: 

 Duration. This was, however, not possible, and he had to call in the ■ 

 practical spatialising Intellect to infect Duration in order to makev 

 her productive; he thus made the Intellect play a one-sided and, 

 at the same time, excessive role in the shaping of the forms of the 

 universe. It would be a better procedure to take some natural 

 unit or sample section of Nature for our starting-point, and thus 

 to keep as close to her and her concreteness as possible. The last 



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