Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/339

321 conceived as obeying the law of all phenomena, viz, that of causality. The following is a tentative classification: (1) The phenomena which are produced with great frequency or constantly, but which are for us as if they did not exist. Cases of this sort abound among physiological and psychological phenomena, e.g., in hysteria, magnetic and hypnotic movements, hypotaxia, catalepsy, and exteriorization of sensibility; (2) All the phenomena which nature in the ordinary course of her operation produces rarely or never, but which are subject to laws affecting certain possibilities. These are not hidden, in the sense that the others are. When they occur, we have no trouble in observing them; but their existence is usually denied as an impossibility, and so they stand in need of special means of realization.

The author holds that the theory of composite consciousness accounts for the growth of the race in civilization and power. This consciousness is derived from ancestors by inheritance. The fact that all ancestral experience is not represented in the individual is due to cancellation, by the stronger overlying or obliterating the weaker, by something akin to chemical attraction and repulsion.

The author's thesis is that "consistent evolution requires three changes in current evolution—the final and unquestioning rejection of inorganic matter, liberation complete and absolute from a fixed environment, and whole-hearted adoption of the organic in place of the physically isolated individual." For, grant an inorganic matter to which life is altogether foreign, at some time there must have been a creative act whereby the lifeless matter came to live, although life is unnatural to such matter. Physical and organic must be one and the same, or else life must be transitory, having a beginning and an end, and strange to the conditions environing it. The environment must evolve along with the individual, otherwise the individual would evolve away from, or out of its environment. And as individual organs are not individually sensitive, so individual bodies are not conscious individually, but the cousciousnessconsciousness [sic] of individuals is in itself the consciousness, the thinking, of society.

The author discusses various facts regarding living matter, such as the peculiar action of certain fungi upon the formation or destruction of organic chemical crystalline bodies. He comes to the conclusion that if by '