268 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



the disappearance of both in the Personality is not a fair 

 and honest way of meeting these difficulties. Surely, it 

 will be urged, body is a real, a substance on its own merits, 

 and not a mere abstract element in human Personality. 

 It will be pointed out that at an earlier stage I have treated 

 organism as a real whole, as a holistic structure; that the 

 human body is nothing but an organism and that it is not 

 fair in its human connection to condemn organism as hav- 

 ing no reality of its own apart from the Person to whom 

 it belongs. I have stated the objection because it opens 

 the way to the explanation I wish to suggest. A living 

 independent organism is in a different position from the 

 human body. The human body is organic, but cannot be 

 considered an independent organism, living in a sort of 

 symbiosis with another substance called mind. Let any- 

 body try to form an idea of a human body divorced from 

 all mental attributes and activities and supporting an 

 independent existence of its own, merely as an organism. 

 It would not be the human body, whose every organ and 

 activity has a mind-ward aspect and implies mental func- 

 tioning. Subtract mind, and the residue of body must 

 shrink and shrivel into an unimaginable scrap-heap of or- 

 ganic activities. Similarly it is impossible to conceive mind 

 as abstracted from the body. The disembodied soul is just 

 as impossible a concept as the disminded body. Thus it is 

 that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection has pro- 

 vided the risen soul with a '^ spiritual body " ^ the linea- 

 ments of which can only, however, be discerned by the eye 

 of faith. 



Assuming then that body and mind are not independent 

 reals and have meaning and reality only as elements in the 

 one real substantive whole of Personality, the question 

 arises how we have to conceive or understand their mutual 

 relations as elements in that whole. How does mind 

 influence body and vice versa in human Personality? All 

 language implies such influence; all experience implies and 

 assumes that mind has an influence on body, and body on 



* I Cor. XV. 44. 



