Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/31

15 passed by necessary upward gradation from the stage of perceptive intelligence to that of the imaginative, and from the imaginative to the rational. This process, it is thought, can be traced in the race and also in the individual. Hence it may be said that "the problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby a mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception, and a faith in the goodness, beauty, and intelligence of the world." Upon the question raised by applying this process to the history of the race, I have already made comment, and shall here notice the psychological theory or application of the idea of a process or progress to the mental states of the individual. With this limitation of the point it may first be made clear against what views of the faculties of the individual mind, this theory of mental evolution has taken the field.

(1) The conception that the mental states should be arranged in an ascending scale, according to their capacity to apprehend reality, comes into sharp contrast with the view that the mind is an aggregation of faculties having no inherent relation. This pigeon-hole view of mind has perhaps never been maintained literally by any thinker. So long since as the time of Plato it was clearly perceived that the consciousness of man is a unity of some kind, and not a mere gathering of independent powers. "It would be a singular thing, my lad," says Socrates to Theaetetus, "if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For, manifestly, these senses unite into one nature [], call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form through the organs of sense that we perceive sensible objects." Nevertheless a view implying only an external connection between faculties has been common enough in the history of thought. The independence of faith and reason, a mark, as we may perhaps say, of mediaeval thought, is not overcome even in Bacon and subsequent English thinkers. "Out of the unsound