FROM PASSIVE TO ACTIVE ADAPTATION 211 
The fourth approach is through philosophy with the endeavor 
to find an adequate ground for and explanation of the cosmic 
process culminating in free intelligence. Most biologists and 
sociologists assume that this process is one and continuous, to be 
described and explained in the terms of exact science, but Huxley,! 
Wallace,? Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor McDougall * and scores of 
others protest that not chemical affinity, natural selection nor 
any other known law or laws has explained the transition from 
the inorganic to the organic, from matter to mind, from instinc- 
tive activity to that which is conscious and purposeful, — from 
determinism to free choice. Positivists, on their part, assure us 
that though the rationale of this process is not yet clear in all its 
details, yet that the only way of ever even approximating the 
desired goal is by means of the assumptions and methods used by 
them. But the fact still remains that mind and matter appear to 
be entirely different and that in the realm of the psychical no one 
has yet solved the mystery of man’s consciousness of, or at least 
belief in, uncaused freedom, — except to hold that it is a ser- 
viceable illusion. 
Professor Ward claims to have explained the transition from 
matter to mind and from instinctive to intelligent behavior but 
at best he has merely described the process and analyzed the 
elements that have entered into it, — and this, too, in language 
that in places reads more like poetry than science. Spencer in 
1 “Force and matter are paraded as the Alpha and Omega of existence. . . . 
All this I heartily disbelieve. ... It seems to me pretty plain that there is a 
third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which . . . I cannot see to be 
matter, force, or any conceivable modification of either.’ — Evolution and Ethics, 
Pp. 130. 
2 “ The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the existence 
in man of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under 
favorable conditions. On the hypothesis of this spiritual nature superadded to 
the animal nature of man, we are able to understand much that is otherwise mys- 
terious or unintelligible in regard to him, especially the enormous influence of ideas, 
principles, and beliefs, over his whole life and actions.” — Darwinism, p. 474. 
* Professor McDougall, in his latest book, Body and Mind, shows how com- 
pletely inadequate is monism, either materialistic or spiritualistic, to explain cosmic 
evolution, and how far short it comes, — and so, too, all theories of psycho- 
physical parallelism, — of enabling us to understand such phenomena as unity of 
consciousness and attention, adopting as his own theory what he calls “‘ animism ’’— 
very like the “ vitalism ”’ of Driesch. 
