INTRODUCTION xxv 



extended in the first part of the present work, the object of 

 which is to state as definitely as possible what is involved 

 in the evolution of self-conscious mind, and to show that 

 this evolution has in fact proceeded by successive stages 

 from the dawn of life to the rise of modern civilised thought. 



In all this part of the work the method was rigidly em- 

 pirical, or to use a descriptive, though not very desirable 

 term, phenomenological. In fact in the two earlier works 

 mentioned I confined myself almost entirely to a compari- 

 son of the actual content of each stage in development, 

 avoiding theories of the nature of life and mind, and cur- 

 rent controversies as to causation. The account should, I 

 thought, hold true whether mental process should ulti- 

 mately be resolvable into mechanical terms or not. It 

 should also be independent of any theory of the ultimate 

 nature of reality. There might or might not be an original 

 purpose in things, but there was certainly an evolved pur- 

 pose, and this purpose at its highest point of development 

 would acquire a superhuman, a quasi-divine power. The 

 genesis of this power could, I thought, be verified in experi- 

 ence, and that was a more solid ground than any meta- 

 physical analysis. In point of fact I was at first opposed to 

 anything like a theistic or teleological interpretation of 

 reality as a whole, as inconsistent with the mechanical 

 causation which I took to be the ultimate category of 

 science. 



There are, however, elements of fallacy in the purely 

 empirical view, or at least in the inferences which I drew 

 from it, which are set out here in Part II. Chap. III. and the 

 sense of this deficiency compelled me to take further 

 account of the questions of causation which had previously 

 been set aside. For this examination there was a starting 

 point in some results which I had reached in following up 

 another line of enquiry. To justify the empirical method 



