Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/742

724 rigid, habitual, instinctive, non-progressive behavior, best illustrated by the hymenoptera. Consciousizing is reaction to a present stimulus plus a sensibility to past processes. The terms consciousness and conscious state should be relegated to the realm of pure concept. By adherence to this dichotomy of pure concept on the one hand and process on the other, a self-consistent psychology is possible, and physiology will no longer feel itself called upon to build up an artificial system of new terms to explain behavior.

The subject proper of the essay is the noetic of evolution, the discussion of the concepts and principles implied by evolution, and on which it is based. It is treated under the following heads: (1) A just estimate has not yet been reached of the origin of evolutionary theory. Prior to both Darwin and Spencer, Geisteswissenschaften approached their problems by the genetic line of attack. (2) Progress has been made in distinguishing phenomenal from transcendent evolution. This is most clearly seen in ethics and theology. The progress in philosophy proper appears more doubtful. (3) Evolution and the sciences. Mental evolution, according to the extremists, must follow the same law as organic evolution. This is of doubtful application in the moral field and of questionable validity in philosophy. (4) The presuppositions of evolution: that is, the presuppositions of a noetic kind, the concepts and principles assumed by evolution and on which it depends. Advance has been made here, especially in the field of the mental sciences, but it has not been complete nor fully adequate. Enough progress has been made, however, to refute the thesis of "venturesome essays of a contrary type."

In the history of thought, beauty has been regarded by both philosophers and artists either as a deep metaphysical principle made magically manifest, or as an ordinary psychologic or material datum. But beauty can never be found as a psychological experience like a sensation or an image, nor as a transscendental existence like the Kantian categories. The mind never experiences a thing called beauty, but an object to which it afterwards attributes beauty. Hence, the mind which seeks to experience beauty must take the esthetic experience as a whole. Interest is the directive or selective principle of this experience, which constitutes our world, and our primordial and ultimate relation to our world is a value relation. This value relation is knowing. Mind, then, is a system of objects related by a highly complex arrangement of value relations to another complex called a body. Good and bad are converse modes of designating immediate cognition, which is the value relation and the essential constituent of interest. Beauty is neither in the mind nor in the