644 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 



of actuality, which in absolute purity is predicated of the One? I 

 admit the utter disparity between the finite and the Infinite, but 

 may there not be degrees of reality, and may not the continuity 

 of these be infinite? Such degrees of reality our author recognizes. 

 He says: "Je mehr Realitat, d. h. je mehr Kraft, Reichthum und 

 innere Einstimmigkeit das einzelne Individuum hat . . . desto 

 mehr wird [es] von seiner Vereinzelung befreit. Es wird zu jenem 

 'iiberempirischen und iiberindividuellen.' Dies ist nicht ein 'Sich- 

 verlieren' derselben in Welt-ich, sondern ein Finden des wahren 

 oder postiven Ich in ihm." 1 If this progressive development is to 

 mean anything, it surely must imply an experienced efficiency, and 

 not merely a higher reality, of which there is no immediate ex- 

 perience, which, in truth, is never "found." How there can be 

 a finite actuality, which is yet not pure actuality; in other words, 

 how I can be for myself more than phenomenon and yet not abso- 

 lute reality, we cannot say. But our author, as I have already 

 observed, acknowledges that even the procession of phenomena 

 from the Absolute is unsagbar. But surely, if either way the pro- 

 blem of the One and the Many is insoluble, it is better to accept 

 that alternative which does not seem in direct conflict with our 

 actual experience. 



The third writer, too, finds a justification for his position in 

 philosophical views to which he refers as "elsewhere in part al- 

 ready set forth." I do not propose to follow him in search of these, 

 but only to question the possibility of explaining the initiation 

 of new forms of behavior by means of the biological doctrine of 

 tropisms. This question leads us to a new problem. The idea of 

 tropism is due, I believe, to the botanists. Certain plants flourish 

 only in the full sunshine, others only in the deepest shade: the 

 first the botanist would call positively, the second negatively, 

 heliotropic. In like manner certain animals seek the light, while 

 others shun it; and their behavior Loeb would describe in the 

 same fashion, that is to say, as due respectively to positive and 

 negative heliotropisms : and, like some botanists, he looks solely 

 to the physical and chemical properties of the several proto- 

 plasms concerned to explain this difference. Instincts, again, are 

 for him but complexes of tropisms; and so throughout. The strik- 

 ing diversities in the habitats and behavior of animals, equally 

 with the like diversities among plants, he regards as resting at 

 bottom on the physics of colloidal substances. A satisfactory de- 

 velopment of this branch of physics Professor Loeb is expecting 

 "in the near future." I very much doubt if there is a single phys- 

 icist who shares his confidence, and shall be surprised if this phys- 

 ics of the near future does not prove to be that sort of hylozoism 

 1 Lipps, op. cit. p. 343. 



