TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1433 



monistic, than for ourselves. Yet in sleep at its fullest and deepest, 

 in which our consciousness has subsided into latency, do we not 

 return also to the deepest levels of our organic origins; so is not the 

 monistic view more nearly approachable here ? The extreme dualism 

 of mind and body in our most conscious and active hours, seems 

 here to have subsided into a silent and passive harmony. Again, 

 though we speak of sleep and waking, each as a whole, most of our 

 bodily organs never wake to consciousness at all, unless, indeed, in 

 pain, and though teeth are only too capable of this, their nervous 

 supply explains it: while hairs and finger-nails are similarly only 

 associated with sensitiveness at the like root-level. Yet that hair 

 has a certain part in the general consensus and coenasthesia of the 

 organism, many since Samson have experienced from its shearing; 

 for emotional intensity and its energy outflow seem thus lowered, 

 indeed in some severely so. The intensest of organic vitality, that of 

 birds, is accompanied with their higher differentiations of hair 

 structures, first to down, and then to feather: whereas the densely 

 consolidated and passive epidermic crusts we call scales are appro- 

 priate to the cold-blooded reptiles. Yet the comparative nudity of 

 our skin, however, is an obvious advantage as regards sensitiveness, 

 and thus not only to touch, but temperature, etc. And as regards 

 the epidermis, the development not only of the sense-organs, but of 

 the central nervous system itself, from its originative embryonic 

 surface-layer seems in every way natural. 



In short then, the organic and psychic life have not the sharpness 

 and distinctness of separation ascribed to them by the older psy- 

 chologists. The normal functioning of the sympathetic nervous 

 system, of involuntary muscle, the life of cartilage and bone, are all 

 unconscious to us; yet they are capable of giving us pain; so we 

 cannot deny them something of psychosis, however deeply dormant 

 and the like for all processes of life and development. So in all 

 manner of ways we are pressed to the view of biosis and psychosis 

 as everywhere associated throughout living nature. Long though 

 the ascent may have been from Protozoa to ourselves as at least 

 incipient Psychozoa, we have each gone through it in development; 

 and (dreams apart) we practically recapitulate much of this every 

 morning and reverse it in falling asleep every night, so far anticipat- 

 ing the normal and tranquil decline and death of old age; for what 

 older and truer observation of that than its gently falling asleep. 

 Normally, then, it is but disease and pain which are feared, rather 

 than death, which may even normally be welcomed as repose. 



Here now a criticism of contemporary psychology, at any rate 

 as we and other working biologists see it (or, as some may still say, 

 fail to see it). We confess to be but seldom attracted either by its 

 experimental or its intellectualistic papers, which often seem to us 

 too elaborately mechanistic, or too abstractly removed from our 



