658 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



than soul? The personality, roughly defined, is the integration of thr 

 psychical life into an active unity; yet which in too many human 

 beings is still but adumbrated (or sometimes dissociated), and which 

 animals never or hardly ever reach. Animals remain individualities 

 or sub-personalities, and are often very attractive as such. But what 

 if there be evolving in Man a super-integrative, and so far untram- 

 melled, soul or spirit, above the normal personality, as that is above 

 the humdrum unawakened mind? And what if this be the element 

 of synthesis that gives its characteristic autonomy to religion — 

 which is ever sending out its tendrils towards the spiritual reality 

 of the universe, and so far realising it in life? For are we not dis- 

 cerning in evolution, and at all its levels, both cosmic and human, 

 and ever more widely and deeply — indeed as its supreme synthetic 

 and emotioned aspect — the harmony of Good, True, and Beautiful ? 

 If such be the psychic macrocosm, do not we — as each a microcosm— 

 at our best respond to its influences, and thus ourselves advance 

 to souls awakening to sympathy with all those thinkers, poets, 

 inspirers, and more, whom we most honour through history, who 

 have already expressed something of this harmony? So what clearer 

 unifying call, alike for individual development and collective 

 evolution, than "Thitherward"? 



THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL 



Dr. E. S. Russell, in his Study of Living Things, begins with the 

 simple uncritical and unsystematised but practical understanding of 

 life which has been acquired by mankind throughout its past, and 

 which we individually acquire from childhood onwards; and he 

 thence seeks to develop a scientific biology, which shall not be so 

 far divorced from the practical understanding of living things as 

 is the materialistic biology of the present day. For as we know 

 ourselves as living beings, so we recognise other organisms by their 

 activities comparable to our own ; so all with a principle of individual 

 ised activity essentially identical with that of our own conscious 

 and organic life: whereas the Cartesian treatment of living beings 

 on the same footing as inorganic bodies splits up the science of lif< 

 into a physics and psychology, and with too little regard of thr 

 latter, and yet less success with their clear reconciliation; even by 

 vitalistic theories invoking the addition of some immaterial agenc\ 

 to regulate the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes to 

 which physiology is reduced. Yet, biologically viewed, living things 

 manifest activities of a higher functional order than can be expressed 

 in physico-chemical terms, while psychology is needed for interpreta- 

 tion of behaviour: so that through the combination of these method^ 

 we must look for the development of a coherent and autonomous 



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