vn MECHANISM AND HOLISM 157 



and difficulties of thought. Perhaps our basic categories 

 have been faulty or inadequate; perhaps the facts are all 

 right, and it is only our way of envisaging them, our view- 

 points and fundamental concepts, that play us false. The 

 difficulties may be of our own making, and should therefore 

 be of our own un-making and solving. Anybody who has 

 carefully followed our account of Holism in the two pre- 

 ceding chapters will at once appreciate the line of thought 

 which it naturally suggests as the way out of these diffi- 

 culties. The radical mistake made by both science and 

 popular opinion is the severance of an indivisible whole 

 into two interacting entities or substances, the view of life 

 and mind as separate entities from the body. Life and 

 mind are not new entities which interact with the physico- 

 chemical entities or structures. It is the assumption of 

 these entities and of their interaction with physico-chemical 

 entities of a different order which produces the contradic- 

 tions for thought and the problems for experience. The 

 assumption of these entities is based on a false view of 

 reality; it leads again to an assumed interaction which 

 does not exist in fact. Between them these two assump- 

 tions distort our whole perspective in experience and conjure 

 up for thought a number of contradictions which experience 

 shows not to exist in fact. Thought fails to understand 

 how mind and body interact in a human person; and yet 

 we see the phenomenon before our eyes all the time. 

 Thought fails to understand how the immaterial entity or 

 force of life can influence a physico-chemical structure which 

 obeys simply and solely the laws of energy. And yet we 

 see the phenomenon in a living organism all the time before 

 our eyes. It seems inevitable that our experience must be 

 right and our categories of thought must be wrong or 

 inadequate, and that the insoluble puzzles which arise 

 must be due to a misreading of the facts. But, I shall be 

 answered, if life and mind are fictitious and assumed 

 entities, which do not exist in fact, we are back again in 

 the old crude, crass materialism, and the Evolution of 

 which life and mind are the main products and organs 



