CERTAIN UNSCIENTIFIC ASSUMPTIONS IN MAR- 

 SHALL'S THEORY OF CORRESPONDENCES 



By Melanchthon F. Libby 



Every friend of philosophy must regard with pride certain recent 

 efforts to establish dynamic relations between rationalistic idealism 

 and the scientific notation of reality which alone dominates the minds of 

 physicists, biologists and medical men. No one will feel much inclined 

 to put brakes on such a movement before it acquires momentum. At 

 the same time nothing can injure this movement more than a handling 

 of empirical contents which betrays ignorance of the contemporary 

 state of empirical research. 



Marshall 1 revives the view of Fechner, and many others, that con- 

 sciousness may be held to coincide with every kind of transfer of energy, 

 and restates this view not, he declares, as a play of fancy, but upon a 

 scientific basis derived from recent biology. He states that modern 

 biologists are teaching us that all protoplasmic matter has powers of 

 interaction, of "conductivity," similar to those observed in nervous 

 tissue. From this he reaches the suggestion that the " social body" is 

 organic in its nature, and that there is a social consciousness correspond- 

 ing therewith. In other words that the consciousness of a group is 

 something other than the resultant of the individual consciousness, 

 however related, of its members. From this we are led to further 

 interesting surmises regarding a universal consciousness. 



Now all this appeals to many of us immensely as a beautiful and 

 imaginative view of the world. It has many supports from analogy 

 and would offer a pleasing and symmetrical offset to certain individual- 

 istic facts. But are the facts upon which this view is revived really 

 of a nature to advance it beyond the position where the charming Fechner 

 left it in his Zend-Avesta? This is hardly an age for sophisticated 

 Hylozoism, dear as that -ism may be to poetic natures. If we say 



1 Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, Vol. I, No. 14, and sev- 

 eral later numbers. 



