Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/21

Rh those that dominate pure reflexes and those that determine instinctive actions, as having been acquired and consolidated under the guidance of individual experience, with the cooperation, to a degree which we cannot determine, of natural selection. And since the nuscular system works under the control of the nervous system and becomes moulded by the activities evoked in it by the nervous system, and since the muscles in turn largely mould the structure of the skeleton, we shall regard the structure of all the body as in a large measure the product of experience accumulated by transmission from generation to generation.” From such facts the Lamarckians among biologists have concluded that the same is true of all organic forms, all depend upon the interests of lower sentient realities for their existence; all organic forms arise in connection with these interests, and are due to changes in the nervous, the muscular, and skeletal structure correlated with the growing interests. A persistent interest will be correlated with a change in the organic or bodily form, and this form will be passed to the coming generations by heredity. But in the light of the dependence of the interests of a great spiritual reality upon men, who constitute elements of its environment, the growth and modification of the body in close correlation with the interests of men, as well as the inheritance of acquired characters, receives far more satisfactory explanation.

Thus change in organic form requires for its full explanation the interests of at least two persons in interaction. When a person speaks, definite organic forms, like words and sentences, or definite organic changes in brain and body, take place in relationship to all who hear. “Many definite organic changes result or are created for many different lives by one system of impulses expressing one interest. If no one hears, these definite organic forms do not come into existence. When such organic forms or changes do exist, they exist as discriminable aspects of the interacting interests of persons. Whatever may be properly said in biology and psychology, sciences which commonly study limited aspects of these interests abstracted from a wider and concreter reality, it is necessary in philosophy to say that the body and the brain, like language, depend upon persons and not the persons on them. Our organic bodies are functional in our lives; they are relative and dependent aspects of our lives; as leaves that nourish a fixed stem the organic forms though necessary are but passing aspects of abiding lives.

REFERENCE.

McDougall, Physiological Psychology, p. 156, 7.