FROM PASSIVE TO ACTIVE ADAPTATION 211 



The fourth approach is through philosophy with the endeavor 

 to find an adequate ground for and explanation of the cosmic 

 process culminating in free intelligence. Most biologists and 

 sociologists assume that this process is one and continuous, to be 

 described and explained in the terms of exact science, but Huxley, 1 

 Wallace, 2 Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor McDougall 3 and scores of 

 others protest that not chemical affinity, natural selection nor 

 any other known law or laws has explained the transition from 

 the inorganic to the organic, from matter to mind, from instinc- 

 tive activity to that which is conscious and purposeful, from 

 determinism to free choice. Positivists, on their part, assure us 

 that though the rationale of this process is not yet clear in all its 

 details, yet that the only way of ever even approximating the 

 desired goal is by means of the assumptions and methods used by 

 them. But the fact still remains that mind and matter appear to 

 be entirely different and that in the realm of the psychical no one 

 has yet solved the mystery of man's consciousness of, or at least 

 belief in, uncaused freedom, except to hold that it is a ser- 

 viceable illusion. 



Professor Ward claims to have explained the transition from 

 matter to mind and from instinctive to intelligent behavior but 

 at best he has merely described the process and analyzed the 

 elements that have entered into it, and this, too, in language 

 that in places reads more like poetry than science. Spencer in 



1 " Force and matter are paraded as the Alpha and Omega of existence. . . . 

 All this I heartily disbelieve. ... It seems to me pretty plain that there is a 

 third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which ... I cannot see to be 

 matter, force, or any conceivable modification of either." Evolution and Ethics, 

 p. 130. 



2 " The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the existence 

 in man of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under 

 favorable conditions. On the hypothesis of this spiritual nature superadded to 

 the animal nature of man, we are able to understand much that is otherwise mys- 

 terious or unintelligible in regard to him, especially the enormous influence of ideas, 

 principles, and beliefs, over his whole life and actions." Darwinism, p. 474. 



3 Professor McDougall, in his latest book, Body and Mind, shows how com- 

 pletely inadequate is monism, either materialistic or spiritualistic, to explain cosmic 

 evolution, and how far short it comes, and so, too, all theories of psycho- 

 physical parallelism, of enabling us to understand such phenomena as unity of 

 consciousness and attention, adopting as his own theory what he calls " animism " 

 very like the " vitalism " of Driesch. 



