Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/20

18 familiar song, when upon stimulation it is unconsciously sung. Very many illstrationsillustrations [sic] of this same truth are afforded by the regeneration of lost parts in both animals and plants. To illustrate this truth Von Hartman among many other examples refers to that of the salamander. “The four legs with their ninety eight bones, besides the tail with its vertebrae, were regenerated six times in three months; in some, the lower jaw, with all its muscles, vessels, teeth, etc., was regenerated. The eye was restored within a year if the optic nerve remained, and a part of the coats of the eye remained behind in the old orbit.” Similarly, the zoologist Eimer, after many experiments and observations made in the effort to discover the cause of organic development, and after testing and rejecting other hypotheses, says: “I hold it to be a kind of striving towards a goal, or teleology, in the face of which the recognition of a directing power conceived as personal, existing outside material nature and ruling all things, would seem to me fully justified.”

Further light will be thrown upon the relationship of our lives to the life and interests of the spiritual reality which in general automatcially [sic] supports our experience of the inorganic elements and- also of organic forms, if we now give more explicit attention to the spiritual realities that unconsciously and automatically stimulate and control, check and fulfil, the developing interests of the superhuman spiritual reality that are manifest to us in our awareness of the inorganic elements, their compounds, and all organic forms. Facts which show the dependence of organic forms upon our interests as they have developed are so numerous and so clear that the psychologist McDougall has concluded that we and our subhuman ancestors have slowly created our own bodies. After arguing for such a view McDougall writes: “If, therefore, we accept this view we shall regard the congenital neural dispositions, both