Ixxvi INTRODUCTION 



that there are others limited to some living bodies only, such 

 as respiration, circulation, sexual reproduction, intelligence, 

 etc. Each of these " faculties " begins at a certain point 

 in the animal scale. Subsequent to that point it develops 

 with tolerable regularity in its progress towards perfection ; 

 anterior to that point it is completely wanting. 



§ 8. Psychology. 



Of the various philosophical questions agitated among the 

 group of materialists in the latter half of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, none occurred more frequently than this : " Can matter 

 think ? " A man is made of matter ; a man can think : 

 hence matter must be able to think. A syllogism of this kind 

 was at the basis of the question. Yet it was found very hard 

 to admit that matter can think. The question was mainly 

 agitated among the men of science and the materiahstic 

 philosophers : the spiritualistic philosophers got out of the 

 difficulty by inventing a new entity, to which they gave the 

 name of soul, spirit or mind, and saying that it is this entity 

 which thinks. 



Of course, by this facile method, there need never remain 

 any diflS.culty in any possible sphere of inquiry. All things 

 are susceptible of " explanation " by the invention of a 

 factitious entity of non-material qualities. Lamarck, how- 

 ever, knew too much to slide out of the idfficulty by such 

 discredited methods. Holding his views, it was inevitable 

 that one of his earliest psychological problems must have 

 been the old question : " Can matter think ? " He put it 

 squarely to himself, and decided that matter did not think ; 

 thought was only an " effect." Although probably the whole 

 subject remained rather vague in his mind, as it is in his 

 writings, he scarcely could have got farther in his time. 



Lamarck's psychology is of the kind that is spoken of at 

 the present day as physiological psychology. He did not 

 indeed employ the experimental method introduced by Helm- 

 holtz, Fechner and Wundt ; but he based his psychology 



