220 The Unity of the Organism 



Having completed a reconnoissance of the field in which 

 we are to work, of its expanse, its contents, and its main 

 subdivisions, we are prepared to. take up the task proper. 

 Approaching it from our standpoint, one naturally sur- 

 mises that between the organism's neural unity as manifested 

 by its reflexes studied in the last chapter, and its psychical 

 unity known to psychology and to be considered presently, 

 a vital unity of still higher order exists. By unity I mean a 

 unity so intimate, so reciprocating, so mutually constitutive 

 that the term parallelism, with the meaning given it in much 

 of recent psychology, is wofully inadequate for it. Such a 

 unity, if it exists, must be sought by inspecting the entire 

 gamut of psychic life, from the simplest responses to stim- 

 uli on up through simple reflex responses, the tropisms, the 

 primal affective and emotive responses, through the perceiv- 

 ing, the imagining, the conceiving, the reasoning operations, 

 to the very highest constructive human mental achievings. 



Likeness Between Tropistic and Higher Psychic Activity 



An important move, starting from the highest phase of 

 rational mind, has been made toward recognizing the nature 

 of this unity. This move is the more significant for our 

 enterprise in that the investigator who has made it is neither 

 an elementalist nor an organismalist, but an eminent sub- 

 jective idealist. Josiah Royce is the student who has per- 

 formed this service. Stated in a single sentence, the ad- 

 vance he has made toward discovering the union consists 

 in the recognition of certain fundamental resemblances be- 

 tween some of the very highest operations of man's mind 

 and the pure tropistic operations of lower animals. 



Royce's contribution to this subject is contained in his 

 Outlines of Psychology, and nowhere else so far as I know. 

 From the preface of this book I gather the following, partly 

 by way of quotation and partly from obvious inference. 



