ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 543 



It now only remains for me to sum up in a few words 49. 



Summary. 



the leading conceptions which the psycho-physical view of 

 nature has forced upon us. In the last chapter I showed 

 how the study of life has in the course of our century 

 more and more brought out the conviction that life is a 

 continuous, a ubiquitous, and a unique phenomenon ; 

 an exhaustive or even a working definition of life being 

 so far hardly possible. In this chapter we have learnt, 

 by following the psycho - physical lines of research, to 

 distinguish another and peculiar side of the higher forms 

 of living matter, that which is commonly called the 

 mental, inner, or self - conscious side. This appeared, 

 when viewed externally, as a discontinuous epi-pheno- 

 menon " eine Begleiterscheinung " of some very com- 

 plex physiological processes and anatomical arrangements 

 of living matter, and as such it exhibits a property with 

 which we are otherwise not familiar in the visible pheno- 

 mena of nature namely, discontinuity. Viewed exter- 

 nally, the inner phenomena, which we comprise under 

 the term " mind," appear and disappear, their continuity 

 being preserved in association with the permanence of 

 the external substratum or basis to which they are 

 attached, and internally regained by the indefinable pro- 

 perty of memory. But inasmuch as we have not only an 

 external but also an internal knowledge of at least some 

 of these epi-phenomena, we have had forced upon us an 

 entirely different view of this inner life, of mind. To 

 the inner view there exists in self-conscious beings a x 

 centre of relatedness a special kind of unity which we 

 call individuality or personality ; and this inner unity is 

 capable of being externalised or made objective in the 



