606 PSYCHOLOGY 



ivists " (I shall use this last term), or something of like import, 

 looked upon nature as the " one," " the undefined," a moving labile 

 object (water, air, etc.). And it is characteristic of their views that 

 they did not because they could not go on to make distinc- 

 tions and differentiations in the lines of later more mature reflection. 

 The period of their thinking in the history of opinion corresponds 

 to the early adualistic or " projective " period in the individual's 

 personal development. The individual has a certain objective mass 

 of material, " protoplasmic " in a figure, in which the dual reference 

 to subject and object is not yet attained. The world, to such an 

 individual, is one of " first-appearance " not of matter and mind, 

 nor of anything else which gives an antithesis of poles of reference. 

 So the early thinking of the race was in this sense unreflective. The 

 process of its theoretical interest did not lay apart its material in 

 substantial categories; but it answered the question "what?" by 

 the assertion of the sort of predicates which were its possible object- 

 ive constructions at that stage. 1 



The positive character of this first period, however, shows the 

 transition motive to certain later dualisms: the character of anima- 

 tion, movement, change. In this respect, the Ionics suggest a further 

 movement in the child's development. The immature reflection of 

 the individual finds, in the perception of animation and capricious 

 movement, the road toward a solidified and concreted dualism. 

 Through this type of reflection the world-circle closes in somewhat 

 upon the personal centre. It neglects the fixed, changeless, inanimate 

 things of the world, as in so far unexistent or hypothetical. In re- 

 spect to them, the senses deceive. So in the thought of Heraclitus 

 and Parmenides the becoming or change principle played its role, 

 and the Greek mind began its career toward a form of dualism in 

 which the " fixed " was of logical or contrast value, mainly, not an 

 objective category. 



In this general epoch, the " projective," in the development of 

 Greek thinking, we must place also the vovs principle of Anaxagoras. 

 It was a principle in the line of the vitalistic or change hypothesis; 

 and it remained, indeed, only a postulate of order, movement, 

 immanence in the world. It was not a subjective, nor yet an object- 

 ive (a subjective) principle. So far as it implied a dualism, it was 

 one that predominant one in Greek thought of matter and 



1 This is not to say that the adult person himself for example, such a 

 thinker as Thales was not self-conscious, and did not deal practically with 

 the problem of self vs. things; but only that, in his reflection, he did not segre- 

 gate the elements of his one general experience in explicit dualisms, nor con- 

 sider the objects in the two spheres of practical experience as separate and 

 distinct. 



It may be explained here that I use the term " object" (and its adjective form 

 "objective") of any cognitive construction whatever anything that may be 

 known or thought about. 



