226 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



on the basis of the freedom and control which the individual mind 

 has mainly achieved. Mind as an organ of the whole, while taking 

 its place in the universal order, has emancipated itself from the 

 earher routine of regulation and has assumed creative control of 

 its own conditions of life and development. Thus it creates its 

 own environment in society, language, tradition, writing, literature, 

 etc., instead of being dependent on an alien environment as on 

 the organic level. Again, Mind frees itself from the intolerable 

 burden of organic inheritance by inheriting merely the widest, 

 most plastic capacity to learn, and letting the social environment 

 and tradition carry on the onerous duty of recording the past. 

 While the animal is hidebound with its own hereditary characters, 

 the human Personality is free to acquire a vast experience in his 

 individual life. 



Mind has its conscious illuminated area and its subconscious 

 "field." In this field the forgotten experience of the individual 

 life as well as the physiological and racial inheritance exercises a 

 powerful influence. It is this influence that proves decisive for 

 our fundamental bias, our temperament, our point of view, and 

 our individual outlook on persons and things. It is of an intensely 

 holistic unanalysable character ; it is even possible that our neural 

 endowment carries with it more in the way of sensation and intui- 

 tion than appears from the special senses; that the sensitive basis 

 from which they have been differentiated has continued to develop 

 part passu with them and to-day forms a subtle holistic sense, a 

 capacity of psychical sensing or intellectual intuition which ex- 

 plains our holistic sense of reality as well as other obscure phe- 

 nomena, such as telepathy. So much for the influence of the past. 

 The future also becomes a potent influence on Mind. Through 

 its dual activity of conception and conation Mind forms "pur- 

 poses" which envisage future situations in experience and make the 

 future an operative factor in the present. Purpose marks the lib- 

 eration of Mind from the domination of circumstances and indi- 

 cates its free creative activity, away from the trammels of the 

 present and the past. Through purpose Mind finally escapes 

 from the house of bondage into the free realm of its own sover- 

 eignty. All through its great adventure its procedure is funda- 

 mentally holistic, and this can be shown by reference to the vari- 

 ous activities of Mind as analysed by psychology. Free creative 

 synthesis appears everywhere in mental functioning, and not least 

 in the region of Metaphysics, Ethics, Art and Religion, which, 

 however, fall outside the scope of this work. 



In previous chapters Mind has often been mentioned 

 as a factor in Evolution. In all the references only the 



