Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/45

 monadism or panpsychism that nothing can strictly be treated as being at all, which does not possess a self. Our doctrine extracts the logical principle of this argument, as distinct from a certain sentimental bias in favour of a spiritual society. Consider, for instance, Plato's Ideas, which our realist has taken as typical of the most real and most important of all physical facts. Consider, if this is really their place, the task they have to fulfil, as Plato indeed continually represents it—the function of conciliation of all contraries, the resolution of all problems, the completion of all fragmentariness, the systematisation of all abstractions into a more than organic concreteness.

Indispensable conditions of the fulfilment of such a function are unquestionably, at the very least, retention to let no element drop out, compresence to maintain explicit unity, continuity to make every part permeate every other, and concrete or focussed being to transcend space and time. And all this means mind. There can be no concrete