ON THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 545 



more practical to range tlie whole of these researches 

 within that great realm of thought which starts with a 

 distinct recognition of conscious individual life as its 

 source and centre. As such, in fact, these researches 

 have l^een till quite recently carried on, and the main 

 lines of their recent development l)elong accordingly to 

 philosophic as distinguished from scientific or exact 

 thought. 



The three great facts, however, which even the exact _ 5o. 



o ' Tlie three 



treatment of mental phenomena has impressed upon us [fressed by 

 — namely, the existence of centralised material systems, phys'cs. 

 termed " individuals," the discontinuity of their inner 

 life as viewed from outside, and the phenomenon of its 

 growing external manifestation — have driven natural 

 philosophers to form some explanation, or at least to 

 venture upon a definition of this hidden principle, 

 which shows itself in the highest forms of living matter, 

 and which, though discontinuous to the external observer, 

 acquires in the aggregate of human society a continuous 

 and ever growing reality and development. Two dis- 



legitimate. As the crystal to complex whose external aud in- 

 the mineralogist, the vibrating ternal movements are causally as 

 string to the student of acoustics, rigidly connected amongst each 

 so also the animal, and even man, other, and with the movements 

 is to the physicist only a piece of of the environment, as the work- 

 matter. That the animal expcri- ing of a machine is with the 

 ences pleasure and i)ain— that with revolution of its wheels (p. 4). . . . 

 the material life of the human Thus the i)hysiologist as physicist, 

 frame are connected the joys and But he stands behind the scene, 

 sorrows of a soul and the vivid and while he painfull}' examines 

 intellectual life of a consciousness ; the mechanism and the busy doings 

 this cannot change the animal and of the actors behind the drop- 

 human body for the jihysical scenes, he misses the sense of the 

 student into anything other than whole which the spectator easily 

 it is — a material conijilex subject recognises from the front. Could 

 to the unalterable laws which the physiologist not, for once, 

 govern also the stone and the cliange his position?" (p. 5.) 

 substance of tiie plant, a material 



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