CHAP. IX MIND AS AN ORGAN OF WHOLES 225 



extraordinary self-regulation of organisms must, therefore, not be 

 put to the credit of Mind, which was essentially a later develop- 

 ment of Holism. 



Mind is traceable ultimately to inorganic affinities and organic 

 selectivities. The "tension" of a body in disequilibrium gradually 

 became covered with a vague "feeling" of discomfort, which had 

 survival value; instead of remaining a passive state it became 

 active as ad-tension or attention, and ultimately consciousness. 

 Interest became appreciable. Simultaneously the active individual 

 side of Mind developed as conation, seeking, experiment; and 

 from this double basis Mind grew with phenomenal rapidity in 

 the earlier species of the genus Homo. 



The individual self-conscious conative Mind is rightly stressed 

 by psychology as the Subject of experience, the Self, and ulti- 

 mately the Personality. In the universal system of order this 

 individual appears as a disturbing influence, as a rebel against 

 that order. But the rebel fights his way to victory, achieves plas- 

 ticity and freedom, and is released from the previous regular rou- 

 tine of Holism. Mind thus through its power of experience and 

 knowledge comes to master its own conditions of life, to secure 

 freedom and to control the regulative system into which it has 

 been born. Freedom, plasticity, creativeness become the keynotes 

 of the new order of Mind. 



This is, however, only one side of mental evolution. Pari passu 

 with this individual development the universalising conceptual- 

 rational side of Mind also develops rapidly; its regulative Reason 

 makes Mind a part of the universal order, and the individual and 

 universal aspects of Mind mutually enrich and fructify each other, 

 and on the level of human Personality result in the creation of a 

 new ideal world of spiritual freedom. This union of the "indi- 

 vidual" subjective Mind with the universal or rational Mind is 

 possible because the individual Mind has itself arisen in the hol- 

 istic regulative bosom. Pure individualism is a misleading ab- 

 straction; the individual becomes conscious of himself only in 

 society and from knowing others like himself; his very capacity 

 for conceptual experience results mostly from the use of the 

 social instrument of language. The- individual springs from uni- 

 versal Holism, and all his experience and knowledge ultimately 

 tend towards the character of regulative order and universality. 

 Thus knowledge assumes in the first instance the form of an 

 empirical order, as a system of common sense. Gradually the 

 discrepancies of this system are eliminated and knowledge ap- 

 proximates to science, to a scientific conceptual order, in which 

 concepts and principles beyond empirical experience are assumed 

 to underlie the world of experience. The scientific world-concep- 

 tion marks the triumph of the universal element in Mind, but only 



