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EDITORIAL GLEANINGS. 



Prop. W. F. Barrett, F.K.S., in an article on " Creative Thought" 

 (' The Quest,' vol. i. p. 616), has approached the philosophy of the 

 biological arena from the somewhat mystical standpoint. He writes : — 

 " May not a similar cause be at work in the many cases of protective 

 mimicry, as well as protective coloration, found in the animal king- 

 dom ? If we accept the usual biological explanation of protective 

 mimicry, the long intermediate stages required by natural selection 

 would render the creature not less but more conspicuous among its 

 kind, and therefore expose it to greater danger of capture and less 

 chance of survival. In fact I am convinced that biologists have too 

 long closed their eyes to the -psychic factor in evolution — the directive 

 power of the unconscious within the organism. Evolutionary pro- 

 cesses in nature are according to this view the expression of the 

 creative power of thought, using the term in the wider sense already 

 denned. But it is thought immanent, operative 'anal transcendent, 

 within the organism. And it is interesting here to recall the fact that 

 one hundred and fifty years ago, Swedenborg — who was a true seer 

 as well as a learned man of science — explicitly urged this very hypo- 

 thesis of an inherent directive force in the development of the forms 

 of life." A century later E. von Hartmann, in his well-known work 

 the Philosophy of the Unconscious, developed much the same view, 

 only he rejects all anthropormorphic ideas, or any form of conscious- 

 ness or personality in the Supreme apart from nature, whereas 

 Swedenborg's theology is the reverse of this. Von Hartmann with 



'■' " Thus in bis Economy of the Animal Kingdom, § 275, he writes : — 

 ' We must acknowledge, if we think of causes and origins, that such a 

 directive or formative force is not without but within the chick or embryo ; 

 and that it must exist within that substance that was first in the ovum, and 

 that has life or soul within it,' &c. In fine he tells us ' the infinite is in the 

 finite, as in receptacles.' Moreover, now that telepathy may be regarded as 

 a vera causa, every living cell in the organism (as Mr. Gerald Balfour has 

 conceived) is possibly in telepathic rapport with every other cell, and our 

 unitary consciousness may be the result of this rapport among the brain 

 cells. The wide philosophical implications of telepathy have not yet been 

 adecmately discussed." 



