i 4 4 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



instance of the concept as such. Thus with the aid of 

 dialectic on the one side and false analogy on the other, 

 abstract thought confronts experience, as it were, with a 

 number of alternatives, whereas the reality presents itself 

 rather as something that moves continuously from one 

 alternative to another. In this relation the legalistic type 

 of mind commits its worst errors, and again the remedy 

 is the closer correlation of the concept with experience. 

 For the bare alternative, A is B, or A is not B, is substituted 

 such a concept as is symbolised by a curve in which every 

 variation of B to the limit of zero is contemplated, and 

 advanced thought in most departments may be rendered 

 by systems of such curves. The economy of thought 

 begins with the discrete, but the back stroke of experience 

 drives it to make its account with the continuous. 



Another family of fallacies derives from the relation of 

 whole and parts in the organic order. In this order a 

 whole is never a mere sum of parts, but involves such 

 mutual actions and modifications among them as will upset 

 our calculations if we seek to reason from the parts as self- 

 subsistent entities. The crudest form of fallacy here is to 

 take the sum of parts for the whole. A slightly more 

 refined error is to take the organic character as an extra 

 part added to the others, possessed of mysterious efficacy 

 and acting in an ill-defined manner among the rest. Thus 

 the behaviour of living beings has been partially resolved 

 into a complex interaction of mechanical forces. One 

 school in consequence assumes that it has only to pursue 

 the same methods further in order to make the analysis 

 exhaustive. Others crystallise the differences between 

 mechanical and vital processes into a separate substance 

 which interacts with body and perhaps has its seat in some 

 problematical region of the brain. Others again infer 

 somewhat prematurely, that the characteristic phenomena 

 of life are hidden from our intelligence and can only be 

 felt and perhaps made a subject for poetry or rhetoric, but 

 never for systematic study. If we let ourselves be guided 

 by experience, what we find is that the behaviour of living 

 beings diverges from the mechanical model in that it is 

 constantly adapted to the requirements of the whole. To 



