GEORGE THOMAS WHITE PATRICK 137 



of organization, more and more complex organisms 

 giving rise to higher and higher forms of activity, till 

 the human mind itself appears as the highest value. 

 And yet, I suppose, we have no right to think that it 

 is the highest value, for social organization, love, 

 sympathy, and justice are values whose meaning the 

 mind itself is beginning rightly to understand. It can 

 even envisage for the future a form of social organi- 

 zation in which love and sympathy may be ideally com- 

 bined with justice. Plato, to be sure, would have us 

 believe that love and justice are ideal, eternal values, 

 whose kinship the soul recognizes and whose form it 

 hopes to imitate. Is there any reason why the ideal 

 values may not be eternally real and yet in a time 

 series such as ours gradually realized? Such a con- 

 ception of the world would certainly be both religious 

 and idealistic. 



The organismic philosophy and the organismic psy- 

 chology of the present day rest upon the superlative 

 importance of organization in the world movement. 

 This raises the question of the causes of organization, 

 the organizing power in the universe. A purely 

 physico-chemical theory, assuming chance collisions and 

 fortuitous configurations of atoms, has often been 

 proposed. But the role of chance is steadily declin- 

 ing in modern science, and purely physico-chemical 

 theories of the world are losing much of their pres- 

 tige as the sphere of mathematics is widened. Other 

 sciences are challenging the right of physics and 

 chemistry to the prerogative position which they have 

 held during the later decades of the last century and 

 the earlier ones of this century. 



Science does not yet understand the causes of pro- 



