Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/119



It is the defect of the eighteenth century scientific scheme that it provides none of the elements which compose the immediate psychological experiences of mankind. Nor does it provide any elementary trace of the organic unity of a whole, from which the organic unities of electrons, protons, molecules, and living bodies can emerge. According to that scheme, there is no reason in the nature of things why portions of material should have any physical relations to each other. Let us grant that we cannot hope to be able to discern the laws of nature to be necessary. But we can hope to see that it is necessary that there should be an order of nature. The concept of the order of nature is bound up with the concept of nature as the locus of organisms in process of development.

In connection with the latter portion of this chapter a sentence from Descartes’ ‘Reply to Objections. . . against the Meditations’ is interesting: — “Hence the idea of the sun will be the sun itself existing in the mind, not indeed formally, as it exists in the sky, but objectively, i.e., in the way in which objects are wont to exist in the mind ; and this mode of being is truly much less perfect than that in which things exist outside the mind, but it is not on that account mere nothing, as I have already said.” [Reply to Objections I, Translation by Haldane and Ross, vol. ii, p. 10.] I find difficulty in reconciling this theory of ideas (with which I agree) with other parts of the Cartesian philosophy.