IX MIND AS AN ORGAN OF WHOLES 227 



well-known meanings and activities of Mind have been 

 assumed, and my procedure in making use of the factor of 

 Mind in anticipation of its full discussion is therefore not 

 so objectionable as it might appear from a purely theoretical 

 point of view. The successive phases of the whole so tele- 

 scope into each other that it is impossible to treat each 

 phase in a water-tight compartment, and any attempt to 

 do so would only result in a distorted view of the subject 

 as a whole. In dealing with matter we had to anticipate 

 the coming development of life; in dealing with life we had 

 to anticipate the beginnings of the future development of 

 Mind. So far from there being a disadvantage in this 

 overflow of these concepts into each other's domain, a truer 

 picture of reality results from such a treatment, which 

 softens the contours of the somewhat too hard and artificial 

 distinctions popularly drawn between them and helps to 

 disclose the underlying unity which pervades them all. 

 It is, however, advisable now to look at the factor of Mind 

 more closely, to define its characters, and to study its 

 functions as an organ and expression of Holism. 



It will be readily recognised that the problem of Mind 

 is not for us the same as it is for the psychologist. Psychol- 

 ogy treats of the mind in man and the higher animals as 

 a distinct phenomenon by itself, which it analyses and 

 explores in its various elements, and which it studies as a 

 separate department or rather compartment in the total 

 domain of science. For the psychologist the question of 

 boundaries is, therefore, essential; he must demarcate his 

 area of Mind from other areas in the total world of knowl- 

 edge. He must at all costs vindicate the claims of psychol- 

 ogy as a separate science, distinict from the rest. And 

 having with more or less success differentiated the scope of 

 his science from those of other sciences, he then proceeds 

 to explore the details of his science in the manner which 

 is well known to us from the methods and procedure of the 

 great masters of psychology. It is just here in the settle- 

 ment of boundaries, in the demarcation of the domain of 

 psychology from other domains in science, that the funda- 



