3o6 NATURAL SCIENCE. 



JUNE, 



impression is not given, as such, in the percept but is only disclosed 

 by psychological analysis. The sense-impression is that which 

 remains when we have stripped from the percept all that gives it 

 perceptual validity. If the phenomenal universe, therefore, is the 

 world of perception, I am disposed to reverse Professor Pearson's 

 statement, and to say that " we see in the phenomenal universe not 

 sense-impressions and changes of sense-impressions but objective 

 bodies in objective motion." 



In a word, the mistake which Mr. Pearson appears to me to 

 make is that he attempts to combine the abstract results of psycho- 

 logical analysis with the abstract results of physical analysis. And 

 since the results of these two modes of enquiry are reached by what 

 I indicated above as divergent abstraction, they do not readily 

 coalesce. The better plan is, I think, to keep the results separate, 

 just as the geometrician and the molecular physicist keep separate 

 their conception of continuous surface on the one hand, and discrete 

 particles on the other. 



Passing to the chapter on Life, we find that Mr. Pearson wisely 

 abandons the attempt to give a brief definition of the distinction 

 between living and lifeless, holding that consciousness and the 

 phenomena of the will give us little or no assistance in the matter. 

 " The distinction between the inorganic and the organic," he says, 

 "cannot be defined by saying that the one is mechanical and the 

 other is not. We are ultimately obliged, in order to define life, to 

 take secondary characteristics — to describe the structure by which 

 we conceptualise the organic corpuscle, the motions which are 

 peculiar to it, and the environment in which alone we perceive life 

 to exist." Some of these characteristics are then enumerated. They 

 suffice, it is held, to mark off the organic from the inorganic, " and 

 the distinction thus drawn appears to be absolutely rigid. There is, 

 at the present time, so far as we know, no generation of living from 

 lifeless substance." By saying, however, that the distinction is 

 absolutely rigid, and that there is no generation of living from lifeless 

 substance, Mr. Pearson does not mean to exclude the passage of 

 the non-living into the living at some period of evolution. Nay, 

 further, he expressly adopts this view. He indicates the three 

 possible hypotheses with regard to the origin of life on this earth ; 

 first, that life might have arisen from the operation of some ultra- 

 scientific cause (special creation) ; secondly, that its germs might 

 have been introduced in the crevice of a meteorite ; thirdly, that 

 living matter might have been generated by a special union of 

 inorganic corpuscles under a suitable environment (spontaneous 

 generation), and he adopts that hypothesis which we have placed 

 last. 



With respect to the origin of consciousness, Mr. Pearson is not 

 very explicit ; but he somewhat scornfully rejects the view, held in 

 some form by several thinkers, and recently urged by the present 



