THE SCIENCE OF LIFE 



things, the features of which are to an extent knowable 

 through our senses (sensorium) and organ of thought 

 (phronema). At the same time, we know that these 

 cognitive organs, and the knowledge they bring us, are 

 imperfect, and that there may be other features of 

 organisms that He beyond our means of perception 

 altogether. But it by no means follows from this that, 

 as our idealist opponents say, the organisms (and all 

 other things) exist only in our mind (in the images in 

 our cortex). Our pure monism (or hylozoism) agrees 

 with realism in recognizing the unity of being of each 

 organism, and denying that there is any essential dis- 

 tinction between its knowable phenomenon and its 

 internal hidden essence (or noumenon), whether the 

 latter be called, with Plato, the eternal "idea," or, with 

 Kant, the "thing in itself." Realism is not identical 

 with materialism, and may even be definitely connected 

 with the very opposite, dynamism or energism. 



As realism generally coincides with monism, so ideal- 

 ism is usually identical with dualism. The two most 

 influential representatives of dualism, Plato and Kant, 

 said that there were two totally distinct worlds. Nat- 

 ure, or the empirical world, is alone accessible to our 

 experience, while the spiritual or transcendental world 

 is not. The existence of the latter is known to us 

 only by the emotions or by practical reason; but we 

 can have no idea of its nature. The chief error of this 

 theoretical idealism is the assumption that the soul is a 

 peculiar, immaterial being, immortal and endowed with 

 a priori knowledge. The physiology and ontogeny of 

 , the brain (together with the comparative anatomy and 

 histology of the phronema) prove that the soul of man 

 is, like that of all other vertebrates, a function of the 

 brain, and inseparably bound up with this organ. Hence 

 this idealist theory of knowledge is just as inconsist- 

 ent with realistic biology as is the psycho - physical 



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