DC MIND AS AN ORGAN OF WHOLES 231 



indeed something marvellous, almost something miraculous. 

 And in its way and on its own plane nothing more wonderful 

 or perfect has been reached in the evolution of the universe. 

 Mind with its uncertainties, its aberrations, its failures, 

 seems a mere bungling experiment compared with this 

 massive certainty and regularity. The irregularities and 

 eccentricities of Mind in man compare very unfavourably 

 with the unerring precision and regularity of organic activity 

 and functioning in all highly developed plants and animals. 

 Think of the well-ordered society which constitutes a big 

 animal or treel Compare the love-making and union and 

 reproduction in plants and organisms with the love-making 

 and union of hearts of humans! Compare the social 

 organisation of insects with our social disorganisation and 

 anarchy, our painful and uncertain social experiments and 

 expedients even in the most highly developed human 

 societies! No, organism has nothing to learn from Mind 

 in the way of regulation, co-ordination or inner control of 

 structures and functions. The self-balance of processes 

 and activities in organism surpasses anything our ingenuity 

 can understand or encompass. It is by reflections such as 

 these that the impression is borne in upon us that Mind is 

 no mere continuation and development of the organic 

 process, but largely a fresh experiment in the universe, an 

 experiment still in the making, and by no means in every 

 respect a successful one. Mind, in fact, is a new structure 

 still in process of making, and not a direct continuation or 

 expansion of what has gone before. It is a superstructure 

 on the basis of the pre-existing physical and physiological 

 structures, and it carries on the task of Evolution on some- 

 what new lines of its own, and initiated by itself. It has 

 not appeared suddenly and from the blue at any particular 

 point, though its advance may have partaken of the char- 

 acter of a mutation, or a series of mutations. Its primordial 

 roots probably lay in the beginnings of life itself, and in 

 the favouring bosom of life its embryonic structure.developed 

 until in time it could appear as an independent factor, with 

 a steadily growing power over life itself. But during all 



