Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/220

 THE HISTOEICAL METHOD. 209 mere materialism, the Darwinian theory of the origin of man renders it impossible for us to conceive of the continued exist- ence of the individual man after his physical death. We cannot attribute a soul to the ascidian or other aquatic pro- genitor; and if man has been developed by gradual changes out of such a being, there is no point in his history at which the independent existence of his soul can be conceived to begin. Therefore, however the metaphysical issue between materialism and idealism may be settled or left unsettled, at any rate, Evolution has eliminated the old belief in the immortality of the soul ; so that materialism wins on the only point of any practical importance to a plain man. If historical biology had achieved this result, I should recognise that it had invaded with tremendous effect our study of man and his destiny ; but the supposed achievement appears to me quite illusory. I admit that there is a certain difficulty in accepting the common conception of man's dual nature, owing to the gradual development of his physical organism out of a portion of organised matter to which soul cannot be attributed ; but this difficulty was always, I con- ceive, presented in full force by the known history of any individual organism, and I do not see that it is materially increased by the completest acceptance of a similar gradual evolution of the human species. The process by which the admittedly soulless organism grows into that supposed to be soul-possessing is indefinitely more rapid in the case of the individual ; but I do not see how this difference in rate of change affects the difficulty of conceiving how the connexion of immortal soul with the gradually changing material organism commences. I conclude, then, that the historical method, as applied to anthropology on the basis of Darwin's theory, leaves the metaphysical problem of the relation of mind and matter exactly where it was. It remains to consider how far our study of the nature of mind, so far as it is an object of em- pirical knowledge, of " subjective observation and analysis," is affected by investigation of its past history. This inves- tigation of the origin and growth of mental phenomena or faculties, as is well known, has occupied a large share of the attention of English psychologists since the middle of the last century ; and has attained results of undoubted interest. But the psychological importance of these results has often been misconceived, owing to a fundamental mistake of method to which no parallel can be found in the investiga- tion of the material world. In physics or physiology there is no danger of confounding the question as to the actual