Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/25

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If a man’s body is but a dependent aspect of his life, and presupposes not only his own life but the life of a superhuman spiritual reality which lives largely in efforts at adjustment to his growing interests and needs, the same may be said, of all organic forms, animal and plant, they are growing and passing aspects of the interests of a great spiritual reality which lives in interaction with and dependence upon lesser spiritual realities such as we associate with animal and plant forms.

If these organic forms, the concrete realities of the biologist, are abstract, then the earth with its soils and the sun with its heat and light, upon which organic forms depend, the concrete realities of the astronomer, are doubly abstract. They are taken in abstraction both from the organic forms upon which they really depend, and, like these organic forms, they are taken in abstraction from the interacting interests without which neither the organic or the inorganic would exist. And so the inorganic commonly seems far more removed than the organic from the truly concrete or psychological realities.

As the habits forming at any given time in a person’s life depend for support on the habits formed in prior periods of that life, so the habits which in the lives of spiritual realities give rise at any time to our experience of organic forms depend upon the supporting energies of habits which have been formed in prior periods of time and such as give rise to our experience of the earth and the sun. These inorganic bodies not only live, they are the energetic core of living, psychological realities.

As in remote ages the interests of spiritual or psychological realities grew in interaction with one another great changes took place in the internal content of their lives, changes not designed but an automatic accompaniment of their growing interests. Some of these changes we now describe abstractly as geological changes in the environment of animals and plants. But the conditions which accompanied these changes tended to stimulate new needs in animals and plants by blocking old interests and necessitating their reorganization. After periods of incubation, so to speak, when new interests and changes in internal contents, habit structures, etc., had taken place in the lives of both the lower and the higher spiritual realities, there resulted the possibility of the appearance to us of new organic forms, mutations, new species. From the abstract, biological point of view, should the new forms fail to permit of the satisfactory adjustment of animals and plants to the new environment, these new forms would cease to arise, or, speaking figuratively, we say they were selected out by the environment.