THE CONCEPT OF NATURE 137 



tions, because it appears so persistently and pervasively wherever these 

 explorations lead. 



Child remarks on the connection between neo-vitalistic hypotheses and 

 CORPUSCULAR theories of heredity and organic constitution which explain 

 the natures of living things by composing them of " invisible hypothetical 

 organisms." i Gross organisms, " macro-organisms," are speculatively re- 

 duced to collections or organisations of " micro-organisms " ; the constituents 

 of animals and plants are, as it were, gross organisms, which appeal directly 

 to sense and are dispersed through space and time, seen through the wrong 

 end of a telescope. If it is, as Child asserts, always possible to make the 

 hypothetical units behave as the facts demand, 2 and if human ingenuity can 

 deal resourcefully with its primary atomic conception of matter, corpuscular 

 theories may appear in and dominate both physics and biology because 

 separated bodies, animate and inanimate, moving through space and in 

 time, make an initial impress on the human mind and supply it with funda- 

 mental models of reality. 



The mind itself has been, with considerable persistence) atomistically 

 conceived. For associationist psychology the mind is composed of discrete 

 " ideas," connected by " association," in a manner parallel to the ultimacy 

 in matter of discrete corpuscles. Herbart, comments Merz, was impressed 

 by the inner life as a continual movement of ideas. Merz's further comparison 

 of the Herbartian psychology to a conceived plan of psychical mechanics ^ 

 irresistibly suggests a transference of the kinetic theory of matter to the 

 mind. If the " chemistry" of ideas as appropriately denotes associationists 

 in general as a " mechanical " theory of ideas appropriately describes Her- 

 bart,* conceptions concerning the structure of the mind have been as 

 rigorously determined as those concerning the constitution of matter or 

 organisms by that fundamental model — separated bodies adventuring in 

 voids. 



Psychological atomism has been more eclipsed or overshadowed (mainly 

 by the opposing notion of the continuum) than biological or physical atomism, 

 but it discloses the inveterate tendency of humans to insert corpuscularity 

 in the heart of reality. This atomising tendency is constantly manifested : 

 it has been suggested, for instance, at various odd moments, that consciousness 

 itself is a rapid series of gushes ; space and time are inveterately analysed 

 into points and instants. Psychological atomism, biological atomism, and 

 physical atomism may be essentially one mental procedure determined by 

 a fundamental analogical habit in the mind and by the provision of a 

 fundamental mental model in the enduring, individual body which appears 

 to be lodged in space and time. Recent thought parcels out energy into 

 separated units, just as matter has been conceptually broken up into infra 

 particles. Perhaps an inveterate mental habit, supported by resourceful 

 ingenuity, has again had its way. Perhaps it is so difficult to-day to establish 

 consistent theories of atomic structure because the same mental habit which 

 modelled the atom on the gross body insists on the same model for the 

 constituents of the atom. 



Reality may be, as it were, so homogeneous all through that the same 

 models of reality, essentially, would be presented to the mind whatever its 

 psycho-physical position in the universe. If the Brownian movement has 

 demonstrated the actual corpuscularity of matter, Voltaire's Micromegas, 

 placed amongst atoms as we are placed amongst grosser bodies, would 



^ Senescence and Rejuvenescence , pp. 10-12. 

 2 Loc. cit., p. 13. 



^ A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol, iii., 

 ch. ii. 

 « Ibid. 



