Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/97

81 adequate proof. All the facts can be explained equally well without them. The 'mathematical point' is to be avoided in discussions on time, for it is a limit that can never be fully reached in experience.

This paper aims to set forth Darwin's ideas on the relation of brain and mind, and to answer the question: What evolves in 'mental evolution'—mind, body, or both mind and body? If mind only, how can it influence organic evolution? If body only, how does its evolution carry with it the evolution of mind? If both, what is the course of mental evolution? Darwin held the relation between mind and body to be one of interaction and interdependence; and that mental development is a progressive differentiation, accompanied by, and causally interrelated with, the development of the body. Cartesianism is a statement of what may be called the static relationship of mind and body; it endeavors to account for a particular mind and a particular body at a particular time. Upon this foundation Darwin built a new structure. He saw that living beings were not only maintaining their individual interactions of brain and mind, but that their interactions were changing and progressing—progressing in a definite direction, moving onward, under the laws of inheritance, from the lower to the higher, from the simpler to the more complex. To the facts of a given moment he added the facts of a period of time; to the laws governing the individual, the laws governing the species; and to the concept of the mere existence of a living being, the concept of the development of that being, and the evolution of the series of which it forms, by inheritance, a causally related link. Darwin's philosophical position may thus be summed up in true words as Cartesianism plus Evolution.

The older view of education as exclusively intellectual is giving place to a view which conceives it as chiefly ethical. To this change two main causes have contributed: (1) the growing tendency to substitute society for the individual as the educational unit, and (2) the new insight, which a more scientific psychology has provided, into the unity and continuity of the mental life. The social estimate of education is based upon the social efficiency of the individual, and regards, not what a man knows, but only what he does and what he is. Psychology, moreover, has taught us that, as the individual life cannot be separated from the larger life of society, so the intellectual powers and their functions are not duly appreciated, so long as they are separated from the 'active powers.' Thus we have learned