30 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



of modern science. Thus an American philosophical writer, 

 Professor Santayana, very candidly derides the belief which 

 "attributes to thought a power, by virtue of its intent, to bring 

 about what it calls for, as an incantation or exorcism might 

 do" ; this he tells us is merely "a superstition, clung to by the 

 unreconciled childishness of man". "The consequences of re- 

 flection are," in reality, "due to its causes, to the competitive 

 impulses in the body, not to the wistful lucubration itself ; for 

 this is mere poetry." Childish or not, the belief is at all 

 events pertinaciously clung to by most of mankind ; to abandon 

 it seems equivalent to denying a presupposition inevitably 

 present in all our deliberations and choices, and most mani- 

 festly present in the activities of philosophers who hope to in- 

 fluence the actions or even the beliefs of others by their rea- 

 sonings. For such reasoning rests upon the assumption that 

 the decision of the persons to whom it is addressed, and their 

 consequent behavior, can be determined by their perception of 

 the purely logical cogency of an argument. The philosopher, 

 for example, lays down the premises of a syllogism and, when 

 these are admitted, drags on even reluctant adversaries to the 

 acceptance of his conclusion. But the law that a rational be- 

 ing who fully understands the premises of a syllogism will 

 always feel constrained to admit the conclusion, does not 

 seem to bear any resemblance to any known or imaginable law 

 of mechanics or chemistry, or to be capable of any conceivable 

 deduction from such laws. Thus on the face of it, it looks as 

 if the philosopher who denies the 'efficacy of thought' in its 

 relation to the body, in the very act of doing so were utilizing 

 the assumption which he derides. I do not, however, mean to 

 argue the question here ; to do so would lead us pretty far into 

 philosophy. My purpose is merely to illustrate the issue in- 

 volved in our question about the unification of science. A 

 complete unification, it appears, would be a unification down- 

 ward, finding its ultimate and universal laws in mechanics; 

 and it would include in its scope all the movements of human 

 bodies. Those who assert the possibility of a rigorously com- 



