Page:Science and the Modern World.djvu/221

 another opportunity. Locke discovered that the philosophical situation bequeathed by Descartes involved the problems of epistemology and psychology.

Bergson introduced into philosophy the organic conceptions of physiological science. He has most completely moved away from the static materialism of the seventeenth century. His protest against spatialisation is a protest against taking the Newtonian conception of nature as being anything except a high abstraction. His so-called anti-intellectualism should be construed in this sense. In some respects he recurs to Descartes; but the recurrence is accompanied with an instinctive grasp of modern biology.

There is another reason for associating Locke and Bergson. The germ of an organic theory of nature is to be found in Locke. His most recent expositor, Professor Gibson, states that Locke’s way of conceiving the identity of self-consciousness ‘like that of a living organism, involves a genuine transcending of the mechanical view of nature and of mind, embodied in the composition theory.’ But it is to be noticed that in the first place Locke wavers in his grasp of this position; and in the second place, what is more important still, he only applies his idea to self-consciousness. The physiological attitude has not yet established itself. The effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature. The neurologist traces first the effect of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the