I4I2 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



water, like the earth it inhabits? Is not the poet true-sighted, when 

 he notes how root and shoot in their activity "clutch the earth, and 

 seek the blue!" If so, our passive view, our naively apsychic physio- 

 logy, here becomes active, and even something of psycho-physio- 

 logical ; and the like for thirst and hunger, for light-seeking and for 

 mate-seeking, throughout living nature. Still, this view does not in 

 the least affect the legitimate and necessarily strict experimental 

 thoroughness of physical and physiological inquiry, since life haj 

 ever to make the phj^siological best it can of such external condi^ 

 tions as it has, and of its internal conditions too as best it may; for 

 on all these adjustments and adaptations depend its survival and 

 its continuance. So physiology and psychology have each so far 

 their field; yet all the better for synthesis, when we also correlate 

 them, as fully as may be, into the unity of Life. 



Yet note stiU further, that instead of reducing our first hall- 

 diagram, Efo or Pwf, to its barest, we have rather to keep on in- 

 corporating into it all we can from the other and active side. For 

 our human environment, our place, embodies the past achievement- 

 heritage of our predecessors, the material and even psychic heritage 

 of every field, still more of garden and home; and all we reclaim or 

 plant or build will soon belong to our successors; as the like for 

 coral reef, for bee-hive or ant-hill, for rookery or beaver-dam. 

 Similarly something of the co-ordination of active functioning on the 

 right side is retained towards more efficiency upon the left; and 

 surely also its feeling deepened also. In fact is not this going on in 

 every individual development, and in communitj^ life as well? 



Hence if the above diagram be scrutinised, its order of beginning 

 — with Pwf or Efo, the passive side first, and thence passing to the 

 active side, of Fwp and Ofe — is seen to be too much a matter of 

 convenience for explanation, as with Locke's famous assumption of 

 the mind as like a sheet of white paper, on which outward sense- 

 impressions make their imprint. This arrangement also conveniently 

 follows the process and development of the reflex action, from 

 stimulus to response, like winking when something comes too near 

 the eye. But the organism is in active life from earliest develop- 

 ment; so much may be said for putting these halves in opposite 

 positions, the active first. Yet in fact the real diagram needs 

 to be one of indefinite succession, whichever we begin with — so 

 throughout life. 



Pwf — Fwp — Pwf — Fwp — Pwf — Fwp — Pwf — etc., with which we 

 must also keep in mind the interacting psychologic elements, and 

 in their also alternating order. Yet above we have still begun, and 

 ended, with Pwf; so as to express the first awaking impulse to nascent 

 life from the environmental side, and then the final predominance of 

 environment at life's close. 



The Efo and Pwf side of the diagram includes active functioning 



