2 70 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



as mind and body. Leibniz has assumed a pre-established 

 Harmony as existing between them and in other respects in 

 the universe; Berkeley and some of the Cartesians have 

 assumed that all interaction takes place in God, the divine 

 medium and cause of all happening in the universe. 



(d) Finally, there is the view, of which Spinoza's may be 

 taken as the type, that the universe is but one Substance, 

 of which both the physical and the mental series are particu- 

 lar and related modes of activity; the causality which con- 

 nects them may therefore be supposed to reside in the 

 underlying Substance which unites them both. This view 

 is not entirely unlike the immediately preceding one; for 

 the God of Berkeley and others may be taken to corre- 

 spond to the divine Substance of Spinoza's universe. 



These are the main types of views which have been held on 

 this, perhaps the most difficult subject in all philosophy; and 

 to me all of them seem to contain some elements of truth 

 and value. The holistic conception will not only assist us 

 to regard this subject from a new point of view, but it will 

 do justice to the efforts of those who have laboured at this 

 problem before. 



In the first place, then, I may point out that the term 

 " interaction " does not seem well-chosen to describe the 

 relations of two such disparate entities as the physical 

 and the mental. Interaction seems to assume a common 

 platform of action, action on more or less the same level. 

 But we have seen that the structures of matter, life and 

 mind are on quite different levels of organisation and 

 inwardness. The one acts inside the other and through 

 the other. To use a metaphor, the mesh of the one is 

 much finer than that of the other; the lower is transparent 

 to the higher structure, which therefore penetrates it and 

 represents an inner activity which was not there before. 

 Action through or inside, " peraction " or '' intro-action," 

 would therefore be nearer the mark than '' interaction " 

 in describing the action of elements in wholes with respect 

 to each other. Mind in " volition " is an inner self- 

 direction of the structure of Body, as I explained in 



