THE UNITY OF MENTAL SCIENCE 579 



the culmination of humanism, it follows that we must regard all 

 that all of us have so far done as only a prelude, that much of our 

 work must be done over again, that the history of philosophy, instead 

 of being philosophy itself, is to be subordinated as psychological 

 material for a truer and far more comprehensive natural history of 

 mind, and that the best of us are only morning stars which will pale 

 and be forgotten as day advances. . 



If the germs of soul are as old as life itself, and if its types are as 

 distinct and as persistent as those of morphology, then, though we 

 can no more define it than we can life, must we not draw the mo- 

 mentous inference that consciousness alone is a very partial and 

 inadequate organ of experience, and at best only one culminating 

 stage, like a submarine plant's leaves and blossoms that alone reach 

 the surface? Does not experience by its very nature tend to lapse 

 below the threshold of consciousness, and just in proportion as it 

 becomes complete does it not sink beyond the reach of subject- 

 ive analysis? Nay, more; does it not so strongly tend to become 

 automatic that to become perfect it must lose even the power to 

 be transmitted by instruction, but only by heredity? If so, must 

 we not supplement the methods of internal by those of external 

 observation, subjective by objective, and deductive by empirical 

 researches? Just as history is now studied more as the daily life of 

 the average man and as the play of but half-understood economic 

 racial and telluric forces, and less as the mere records of battles and 

 the acts of kings and courts, so must not psychology more and 

 more centre in the study of love, pity, fear, anger, pride, conscience, 

 beauty, love of power and wealth, sympathy, and all those social 

 instincts that make our life their sport? Should we not find helpful 

 biological suggestion in the example of Bateson and his growing 

 circle of followers, who would go back to facts baldly recorded 

 to lay broader foundations for their pyramid, instead of steepening 

 its angles to a tower, or inverting it, and be content in some fields 

 with a merely descriptive psychology that masses facts, not ignor- 

 ing those that now seem most trivial, registering reflexes that, per- 

 haps, appear but once in a lifetime, vascular and other somatic 

 resonances that seem meaningless, in the hope that ultimately we 

 may be able to infer something about the psychic states that once 

 animated them and do something to restore the great volume and 

 variety of lost soul and life that mechanism, missing links, and 

 extinct species, animal and humany have taken out of the world? 



For myself, if I were challenged by some advocate of a psychology 

 without a soul to improvise a working hypothesis of what soul may 

 be like, I might boldly begin by assuming it to have been more 

 potent in the past than it is in the present, but ever tending to vanish, 

 as heat, which once made the earth incandescent, does to dissipate 



