Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/22

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More concrete, more ultimate,'more fixed and independent than the human form are the various systems of interests, the spiritual realities or persons, the social whole upon which it depends and of whose interacting interests the organic form is an abstract aspect. Commonly, however, this order of dependence is reversed, and this more easily describable organic form is taken both by laymen and by students of biology as the concrete, the obvious, the unquestioned reality, from which we must start in the effort to understand life and its interests.

The various persons of the social whole live in an immediately experienced relationship to one another. Because the different lives -of our fellowmen come to be associated by us with the separate organic bodies of a perceptual world, we should not permit ourselves to regard realities immediately experienced together to be sundered from one another or made at all subordinate to those separate bodies regarded as independent realities. When we perceive a passing automobile, our visual sensations are correlated by us with the activity of the visual centres in the back of the brain. We have in like manner learned to associate the auditory sensations involved in the experience with the auditory centres at the sides of the brain. Because we associate these and other sensations involved in this case of perception with parts of the brain separated spatially, temporally, and materially by us, we are not led to sunder the unitary process of perception of which these sensory elements are aspects. Neither should we, because we associate persons with different material bodies and brains, sunder the unity among persons so commonly experienced by us in our inter-communication with others. A preoccupation with the spatially, temporally, and materially separated words of a discourse or the similarly separated notes of a musical composition, does not lead us to disrupt the complex but unitary interests that we experience as we appreciate these. Even so, a preoccupation with the spatially and materially separated brains and bodies of interacting persons, forms that presuppose or depend upon persons, should not lead us to disrupt in our thinking the complex unity in which the interests of different persons are in their interaction immediately experienced, nor should we seek to make dependent upon these separate and vanishing organic forms the enduring realities or persons upon which they depend. As the activity of different brain centres of a person engaged in the unitary process of perceiving objects presupposes, or would not go on without, the unitary process, so the activity of different brains of persons living in an immediately experienced interaction