TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1417 



Indeed, what clear-thinking poet would deny these life-urges as 

 thought-arousing for his own development, but rather confess it 

 more frankly than do ordinary men ? 



THINGS AND THOUGHTS.— Hence, though we cannot explain 

 consciousness and its outcomes in terms of brain anatomy and 

 histology, we know enough of their correlation to be convinced of 

 their productive interaction : since from simplest to highest evolution 

 we see material and outward things affecting and arousing sense, 

 instinct, intelligence, and feeling; and conversely the emotioned 

 urge of life physiologically effecting changes of things, both within 

 and without. Biology and Psychology are thus ever interacting 

 throughout life, and as Bio-psychosis and Psycho-biosis — Body- 

 mind and Mind-body; and their associated study is profitable, even 

 necessary, beyond the- surely passing — specialisations upon either, 

 in artificial isolation from the other. Physiologists, with their 

 legitimate specialisms, have usually kept the bodily life together; 

 and psychologists have made attractive presentments of their aspect 

 of life with but little reference to the other: yet let us be impartial, 

 and take both, reconciling and co-ordinating them as far as we may. 

 Too crude attempts at this reconciliation have already been made; 

 witness the utilitarian philosophers, and the hedonistic psychology 

 of past economists. Yet their extremes of hedonism, serviceable 

 though these may have been in recalling pure psychologists to 

 physiology, and vice versa, fall short of the evolutionary inter- 

 action of things and thoughts, thoughts and things, in these pages 

 so repeatedly pled for, though still to be further outlined. Yet 

 before setting about this, a vivid personal experience may at once 

 illustrate the argument, and relieve its form of presentment. 



An Actual Dream. — After long and perplexed thinking — of how 

 it has come to be that Life, and its evolutionary developments and 

 expression, still so generally fail to interest either the experts of the 

 physical world or the scholars of the humanities — came sleep, and 

 then dream. In the vast hall of a great building its organ is taking 

 shape. Its main pipes, stops, and swells are already in place: the 

 musician is at his keyboard, and the audience encouragingly streams 

 in. But they are gesticulating in active debate with each other; and 

 as they come nearer, he finds with astonishment they are deaf, and so 

 wonders what interests them here. For most, he finds the interest 

 of the organ is as a great and complex machine ; or, for a few others, 

 an unusual form of architectural fa9ade: but neither discern its real 

 nature, much less its possibilities. A scholarly group open and 

 scrutinise the music-books; but when he hopefully turns to them, he 

 finds it is their strange notation and printing which interests them ; 

 and that they conceive of such characters, such books in hbraries 

 as all that music has to offer ; for they too are deaf. 



