256 Science Religion and Reality 



with Hume on one point — namely, that ahhough Hume analysed 

 consciousness, he omitted to note that consciousness must first be 

 there to be analysed. In other words, Hume made exactly the 

 same mistake in the psychological world as the nineteenth-century 

 mechanists did in the physiological world. " The inner life of 

 man is as a matter of fact a connected totality," said Merz, and to 

 see it so was to take what he called the " Synoptic view of the Inner 

 life." So Merz was led to regard the object of introspection as 

 the " Firmament of Thought," using thought in its widest sense. 

 " Disrupting the firmament of thought, which is one, into two 

 worlds, matter and spirit, which are different from one another, 

 has for one consequence the impossibility of putting together 

 again the worlds thus sundered. It hypostatises the external world, 

 which at times it regards as alone real, or as supereminently real. 

 It also does the same for the internal world." It introduces the 

 insoluble enigmas of object and subject. And so Merz proceeded 

 to develop his conception of the unitive nature of the ground of our 

 consciousness with many illustrations drawn from psychology and 

 other domains. Although he never developed at length a psycho- 

 physical doctrine on these lines, it obviously follows from his position 

 that we are to regard the idea of the body and idea of the mind as 

 two of the chief constellations in the firmament of thought. 



" There is a certain cluster of sensations," he says, " which is 

 always there and which accompanies us through life — that is our 

 physical body. We cannot get rid of it and a general sensation 

 of it is always with us forming a more or less prominent feature in 

 the flow of our thoughts and feelings. And on the firmament of 

 consciousness we observe other clusters of sensations similar to 

 what we call our body and we infer that these are connected in a 

 similar way with similar firmaments of experience." 



Moreover, these ideas are not severed from each other there, 

 they inextricably intertwine, and their separation, like all disruptions 

 in that sky, brings confusion in its train. 



In addition to discussing a possible biological philosophy which 

 unites biology and philosophy in a synoptic whole, I have tried to 

 show in this paper how mechanistic biology has arisen from being 

 at first the speculation of a few philosophers, till it stands at last on 

 a firm basis of experimental evidence and cannot be said to be in 

 danger from neo-vitalism and similar opinions. I have hoped also 

 to show that although mechanism in biology is perfectly justified 



