74 SYMBIOSIS 



of a perfect communal life, and have proved that individuals 

 can be incited to the maximum of effort with the minimum of 

 personal advantage, and that the little states, based upon unsel- 

 fish sisterhood, are supremely fitted to survive in the struggle for 

 existence." What Mr. Leonard has entirely overlooked, is that 

 the good results emphasised by him are incompatible with any 

 other basis but that of cross-feeding. He speaks of the " dis- 

 solved " personality of the ants, which reminds us of the late 

 Professor W. James's suggestion that reality exists distributively. 



Professor James borrowed his idea as regards the distributive 

 existence of reality from Fechner, who, as we saw, regards the 

 earth as the grand matrix of all organic life and reality, and looks 

 upon the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms as indissolubly 

 inter-evolved and interlinked and forming with the inorganic 

 systems of our globe a purposefully inter-linked whole. We 

 found that there is indeed good reason to see a double concord 

 between man and the earth, and between man and the plant 

 an essential and orderly inter-linking of life, organic and 

 inorganic, in cosmic evolution. We found, on the other hand, 

 that a divorce from Symbiosis cuts off a species from this 

 essential order of Nature. There seems to be justification for the 

 view that such a divorce cuts off a species also from reality, 

 i.e., from its natural psychological and moral sources. We shall 

 thus indeed reach a similar view to that entertained by the 

 Stoics, namely, that the reason in man's soul is all of one stuff 

 with the Reason governing the universe the chain of trans- 

 mission being provided by Symbiosis. 



Reverting now to the science of Psychology, it was quite 

 recently stated by Dr. G. W. Cunningham in his Creative 

 Will that our aims and tendencies dig the channel in which 

 the stream of conscious experience flows, which is not a bad 

 metaphor to use, in so far as it at least calls to mind the need 

 of steady effort in the accomplishment of progressive Psycho- 

 genesis. Again it must be urged, however, that there must have 

 been throughout the ages some tendency or principle which kept 

 the aims and tendencies of organisms mainly on the path of 

 useful conduct conduct, that is, which in the widest sense avails 

 towards life. What a woe-begone entity our consciousness would 

 be, were it at the mercy of aims and tendencies irrespective of 

 such usefulness. Samuel Butler, who looked upon mind as the 

 cement in the succession of generations, insisted on the 



