Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/360

 hope to have you willingly follow. But fortunately we can argue here ex exemplo. It will be sufficient for our purpose to establish the reality of a single thread of such a priori or self-active knowing. And this it is simplest to do in the case of such a constituent element in our experience as, for instance, Time or Space. For these elements, as we all know, are the “containing” conditions of the whole of our sense-perceptive life; indeed, of the whole physical world, upon whose decay and destructibility all our fears of death, and of extinction through death, are founded. It will be most pertinent, moreover, to confine ourselves to the single element of Time alone, as it is in this that we find nearest at hand the medium of union between the physical and the psychic series in our experience, and thence the means for connecting both with the unity of our real self.

We return, then, to the strict concomitance of the two series, as all that can in exact science be meant by the functional relation between the brain and the sense-perceptive consciousness. And we ask, Must one stop with this mere parallelism of the physical and the psychic? — must we rest in it as an obstinate and impenetrable fact? That we must, is the ordinary dictum of the proclamatory “new” or “objective” or “physiological” psychology — the two “parallel” series are there, and nobody can get