Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/382

 370 EDMUND MONTGOMEEY : change, the ancient puzzle of the One and the Many, or of the enduring substance and its varying affections, has at last found its scientific solution. With it Experientialism has received a foundation which no speculation can henceforth subvert. The most vulnerable point of the Experience- philosophy has always been its inability to account through the manifold of sense, or through cumulative experiences or processes of any kind, for the systematised and enduring identity and unity of knowledge. Lately the transmissibility of acquired mental faculties has come to be an acknowledged fact, which practically solves the question. But it was not scientifically understood how the particular and transitory incidents of experience can become integrant parts of a unitary consciousness. This hitherto altogether unintelligible synthesis left room for a Transcendentalist triumph, by which Experientialism in the midst of its most prosperous era was suddenly and effectually checked, so far as philosophical reasoning is concerned. The insistence upon this one ultimate inexplicability left no solid basis for the natural science of mind or body. For it is absolutely impossible to explain a living or, indeed, a self-efficient totality of any kind by means of the aggregation of elementary constituents or forces. To students of nature it had, however, long ago become quite clear that only the understanding of Organisa- tion could possibly furnish the clue to the mystery here involved. Consequently, it is reasoning grounded on organic facts, as explained in former numbers of this Journal, which is here measured against Transcendental postulation. With the elucidation of the Identity-problem the most important part of the task is accomplished. Memory, syn- thesis, simultaneous presentation, and all other faculties and operations involved in experience are surely likewise more intelligibly accounted for by organic processes than merely by spiritual assumptions. It is nothing new to look upon memory as organic and not as spiritual retention. I say spiritual and not mental reten- tion, because mind, as such, consists avowedly altogether of transitory mental states, of a mere phenomenal play in time, and can consequently retain nothing in itself. Now try to imagine a spiritual principle gathering up from time mental phenomena, and timelessly preserving the same in unconscious spiritual latency, till again called forth not by a spiritual operation but very obviously by the compulsory force of their natural connexions with other mental phenomena, upon which occasion they are forthwith reconverted into perishing natural occurrences. These are the necessary