PROBLEMS OF GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 645 



which Zollner and Haeckel have championed, and which Kant long 

 ago declared would be the death of natural philosophy, or physics 

 proper. For hylozoism in so many words attributes to matter 

 a certain sensibility incompatible with the absolute inertia essen- 

 tial to matter in the proper sense of the word. Such sensibility 

 implies a psychical factor operative throughout organic life; whereas, 

 if biology is to be reduced to physics in the strict sense, such a 

 factor is then and there altogether excluded. Philanthropy and 

 misanthropy, likes and dislikes of all softs, even-thing we call 

 conative, in short, will fall into line with other physical " polarities," 

 or tropisms, and psychology and biology so far from working 

 together must each give the other the lie. Either way, then, it 

 is important to consider how far psychology can explain the be- 

 wildering variety of forms under which life now appears. Struc- 

 ture and function are undoubtedly correlative, but which is the 

 determining factor? At one extreme we have the answer suggested 

 by the conception of oreAexa, or formative principle, which we 

 find in Aristotle, Leibnitz, Lamarck, and other vitalists; at the 

 other we have the answer of Lucretius, Loeb, and the neo-Dar- 

 winians. According to the one, function is primary and determines 

 structure; according to the other, structure is primary and de- 

 termines function. In the first what I have called subjective selec- 

 tion, the selection of environment by the individual, would be 

 important; in the other, natural selection and "the physics of 

 colloidal substances " would be even-thing. For the one, subject- 

 ive initiative will be real and effective; for the other, it will 

 be illusory and impotent. Among ourselves subjective selection 

 shows itself in the choice of a career, and in the acquisition of the 

 special knowledge and skill which entitle a man to be called an 

 expert, or a connoisseur. It would surely be regarded as extrava- 

 gant to maintain that human proficiencies in all their manifold 

 variety were the outcome solely of physical conditions and natural 

 selection, and that they were altogether independent of subject- 

 ive initiative and perseverance. The spur of competition may 

 be necessary to urge a man to seek new openings and to try new 

 methods, but the enterprise and the inventiveness are due, none 

 the less, to his spontaneity and originality. Xow it seems to me 

 reasonable to assume that the like holds in varying degree among 

 lower forms of life, that here, too, it is through subjective selection 

 that the poet's words are fulfilled : 



" All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace." 



So, and not by calling the one negatively, the other positively 

 heliotropic, I would explain the fact that the owls and the moths, 

 for example, are active by night, while the hawks and the butter- 



