ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 545 



more practical to range the whole of these researches 

 within that great realm of thought which starts with a 

 distinct recognition of conscious individual life as its 

 source and centre. As such, in fact, these researches 

 have been till quite recently carried on, and the main 

 lines of their recent development belong accordingly to 

 philosophic as distinguished from scientific or exact 

 thought. 



The three great facts, however, which even the exact 

 treatment of mental phenomena has impressed upon us 

 namely, the existence of centralised material systems, 

 termed " individuals," the discontinuity of their inner 

 life as viewed from outside, and the phenomenon of its 

 srowinf external manifestation have driven natural 



O O 



philosophers to form some explanation, or at least to 

 venture upon a definition of this hidden principle, 

 which shows itself in the highest forms of living matter, 

 and which, though discontinuous to the external observer, 

 acquires in the aggregate of human society a continuous 

 and ever growing reality and development. Two dis- 



The three 



physics. 



legitimate. As the crystal to 

 the mineralogist, the vibrating 

 string to the student of acoustics, 

 so also the animal, and even man, 

 is to the physicist only a piece of 

 matter. That the animal experi- 

 ence* pleasure and pain that with 

 the material life of the human 

 frame are connected the joys and 

 sorrows of a soul and the vivid 

 intellectual life of a consciousness ; 

 this cannot change the animal and 

 human body for the physical 

 student into anything other than 

 it is a material complex subject 

 to the unalterable laws which 

 govern also the stone and the 

 substance of the plant, a 'material 



VOL. H. 



complex whose external and in- 

 ternal movements are causally as 

 rigidly connected amongst each 

 other, and with the movements 

 of the environment, as the work- 

 ing of a machine is with the 

 revolution of its wheels (p. 4). ... 

 Thus the physiologist as physicist. 

 But he stands behind the scene, 

 and while he painfully examines 

 the mechanism and the busy doings 

 of the actors behind the drop- 

 scenes, he misses the sense of the 

 whole which the spectator easily 

 recognises from the front. Could 

 the physiologist not, for once, 

 change his position ? " (p. 5. 



2 M 



