90 



of the principle of Natural Selection he would not go as far 

 as Spencer in the rigid application of a mechanical definition, 

 but definitely accepted the psychological facts of comparison 

 and reflection as necessary for moral conduct. 1 Spencer, 

 however, only admits these factors as "incidents of the cor- 

 respondence between the organism and its environment". 

 Further, Darwin claimed to approach the question from the 

 standpoint of natural history, and by the utilisation of an 

 immense body of fact. Spencer, on the other hand, begins 

 with a metaphysical definition, in accordance with which 

 even natural history must be constructed. A remark of 

 Darwin's with reference to Spencer' s work seems to be very 

 apposite in this connection: "I find that my mind is so fixed 

 by the inductive method that I cannot appreciate deductive 

 reasoning: I must begin with a good body of facts and not 

 from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and 

 then as much deduction as you please. This may be narrow- 

 minded, but the result is that such parts of Herbert Spencer 

 as I have read with care impress my mind with the idea of his 

 inexhaustible wealth of suggestion but never convince me, 

 and so I find it with some others." 2 



5. EXTERNAL WORLD, AND CAUSALITY. 



Throughout the Association School and its modern rep- 

 resentatives, there has been followed, in the main, the fun- 

 damental attitude of regarding the psychological and the 

 physical (the latter including the physiological), as two sep- 

 arate orders of existence. The psychological phenomena 

 have been declared to be produced by the processes of the 

 physical (physiological). Consciousness has invariably been 

 relegated to the position of a product, whether explicitly or 

 implicitly, from the time of Hartley down. We shall, then, 

 at this point, very briefly consider, first, this 'extra-conscious' 

 world, and second, the causal relation which is assumed to 

 exist between this world and consciousness. 



What is the character (that is, the properties) of such a 

 physical world? Spencer, in common with all the Associa- 

 tionists, finding it necessary to meet objections from a theory- 

 of-knowledge standpoint, attempts, in the latter part of his 

 work, to show that this external world is a product of infer- 

 ence from psychological processes which, after all the pre- 

 ceding discussion, is somewhat surprising, since at first the 



l See pp. 32-35. 



2 Francis Darwin, "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin", D. Appleton 

 &Co., 1887, Vol. II, p. 371. 



