116 PERSONALITY 



can also find no signs of consciousness in the 

 greater part of the organic activities of our own 

 bodies. Mere organic activity is evidently 

 blind or unintelligent. An organism as such 

 is in constant relation with its environment, 

 as we have already seen, but only in so far as 

 the environment enters into its organic life. 

 To this extent the action and reaction between 

 organism and environment is determined as 

 a part of organic activity. Apart from this, 

 however, the mere organism is at the mercy 

 of the physical environment : it is helplessly 

 swept hither and thither and learns nothing 

 from experience: the physical environment 

 appears to be foreign to it in just the same 

 sense as the environment of a portion of matter 

 is foreign to it. 



Biology as such does not give us any 

 rational account of the tossings about of the 

 organism in the sea of its apparent physical 

 and chemical environment. All that biology 

 can do is to reveal to us the blind organic 

 activity which is the one element of constancy 

 and intelligibility throughout these tossings ; 

 and the tossings themselves appear to us 

 as nothing more intelligible than the aimless 



