88 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft.i^ 



order to realize with vividness how completely human life has 

 come to mean the higher psychical life, let us try to imagine 

 what life would be without the cerebrum and cerebellum 

 Yet from the biological point of view these systems of ganglia 

 though nearly, are not quite, absolutely essential to human 

 life; since the less complex acts and impressions are still 

 coordinated after they have been destroyed by disease, and 

 since infants, born without any brain save the medulla and 

 basal ganglia, have been known to live for a short time. Such 

 a deprivation of the higher relational activities naturally 

 seems to us almost equivalent to deprivation of life. 



We may now more thoroughly appreciate the force of the 

 distinction between the provinces of biology and of psy- 

 chology, which was stated in the earlier part of this chapter. 

 We see that while life, physical and psychical, is the con- 

 tinuous adjustment of inner to outer relations, nevertheless 

 in the lowest forms of life, unaccompanied by mind, the 

 outer relations to which adjustment is made are exceedingly 

 general, and the correspondence is simple, direct and homo- 

 geneous. But as we pass to forms somewhat higher, we find, 

 along with this simple correspondence maintained by the 

 whole organism, a number of more complex, indirect, and 

 special correspondences, for the establishment and main- 

 tenance of which there is differentiated a particular relational 

 structure. As the correspondence increases in complexity, 

 in indirectness, and in speciality, the maintenance of it is 

 confined more and more to this specialized nervo-muscular 

 structure ; and the enormously heterogeneous series of ad- 

 justments which eventually goes on becomes distinguished 

 from the relatively homogeneous series of adjustments which 

 has all along been going on, as psychical life in contrast with 

 physical life. Thus by a regular process of evolution it 

 happens that, while at the outset the psychical life is but 

 a slight extension of the correspondence which constitutes 

 the physical life, at the end the correspondence which con« 



