BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 653 



properties almost, if not quite, unpredictable. Water is thus a 

 useful illustration of an emergent, yet it is doubtful whether it is 

 profitable to speak of the autonomy of water or of hydrology. For 

 from our knowledge of the movements of particles in a gas we can 

 advance some way towards an understanding of their restricted 

 movements in the liquid state. It is a question of degree. But our 

 point is that the living differs from the not-living so much more 

 than water differs from a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, that we 

 should speak of the autonomy of Life. 



We cannot describe the behaviour of a migratory bird in terms of 

 protons and electrons and radiations. Even if we could, the descrip- 

 tion would not be what we wanted, for we cannot make sense of the 

 bird's behaviour without considering it as a "historic being", as a 

 creature that enregisters the past. 



Moreover, we must not think of electrons and protons and ether- 

 waves as being in some special way "bedrock". All that we daresay 

 is that they are the lowest common denominators at present avail- 

 able for the analytic description of the physical aspects of things. 

 Already we are beginning to hear hints that the electron may not 

 be the last word in atomic micro-analysis. Electrons and protons 

 seem to be the stuff out of which the worlds have been spun, but 

 we must not be too sure that they are irreducibles, or that they are 

 more of the nature of bedrock than, say, an animal's purposive 

 self-preservative behaviour. 



Our point is that electrons and protons and radiations are those 

 aspects of reality which are disclosed by particular methods of 

 scientific analysis. They are the species of fish that are caught in 

 the sea of reality by using a particular kind of net and a particular 

 size of mesh. But there are other sizes of mesh, and fishes may be 

 caught without nets at all. Scientific method is not the only right 

 of way to reality. 



MIND AND BODY. — As to the autonomy of mind, it is logically 

 a postulate. Natural Science deals with the measurable, but we 

 cannot measure our measure. By no dialectic sleight of hand can we 

 build up mind out of materials that mind has furnished or mirrored. 

 By no verbal jugglery can we get the inner rill of mental life out of 

 the stream of metaboHsm. 



But apart from these and similar arguments, it is a large fact of 

 Natural History that the more intimately we know animals, the 

 more does "Mind" seem to count. And perhaps the largest fact of 

 Organic Evolution is just the gradually growing freedom of mmd, 

 as we work upwards from simple creatures to the intelligent birds 

 and mammals. Not merely does the mental aspect become a more 

 prominent feature in the life of the creature, till it comes to look 

 like a conscious control of behaviour, as we know it in ourselves; 



