646 GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY 



flies are active by day. And similarly in innumerable other cases. 

 No doubt plant life raises a difficulty. Here there is a diversity 

 at least as great as that which we find in the animal world, and 

 here again there is as striking a differentiation of special environ- 

 ment. Can we refer this to anything psychical or subjective, or 

 must we here at last fall back solely on "fortuitous" variation of 

 structure and natural selection? This is a perplexing and in some 

 ways a crucial question. On the whole, it seems safest to assume 

 with Aristotle a certain continuity between life and mind, the psych- 

 ical and the organic. Anyhow, the higher we ascend the scale of 

 life, the more the concept of subjective initiative and adaptation 

 forces itself upon us; and, till the chemical theory of life which 

 Professor Loeb awaits is forthcoming, the principle of continuity 

 forbids us to dogmatize as to the limits within which subjective 

 selection is confined and beyond which tropisms take the place of 

 conations. 



Passing now from the subjective factor in experience to the ob- 

 jective factor, we are confronted by a new problem in the recru- 

 descence of atomistic or sensationalist psychology that we find 

 amongst us to-day. "Atomism in psychology must go wholly," 

 it was said some twenty years ago by a writer much given to dicta. 

 But atomism has not gone; on the contrary, in certain quarters 

 it is advocated more strenuously than ever. It is easy to see the 

 causes for this, but hard to justify it. These causes lie partly in 

 the influence of analogy, partly in a natural tendency to imitate. 

 The order of knowledge, it is said, is from exteriora to interiora, 

 and accordingly the whole history of psychology and its entire 

 terminology is full of analogies taken from the facts of the so-called 

 external world. The ancient species sensibiles, the impressions of 

 Locke and Hume, the adhesions, attractions, and affinities, in a 

 word, the mental chemistry of Brown and Mill, are instances of 

 this. Again, the tendency of the moral sciences to imitate the 

 methods of the more advanced physical sciences is shown in the 

 dominance of mathematical ideals from Descartes up to Kant, 

 as in the Ethics of Spinoza, the theological demonstrations of Clarke, 

 and the formalism of the Leibnitz-Wolffians. When a gifted mathe- 

 matician and physicist in our own day, W. K. Clifford, turned 

 his attention to the facts of mind, he at once broached a psycho- 

 logical atomism of the extremist type. It is, indeed, only natural 

 that the wonderful grasp which the atomic theory has given of 

 the physical world should have provoked anew the emulation of 

 psychologists to proceed on similar lines. Moreover the structure 

 of the brain when superficially regarded as a congeries of iso- 

 lated neurones encourages a like attempt. And yet the mo- 

 ment we regard the brain functionally, and not the brain merely, 



