continuous with, and derive meaning from, the fact that they enter as constituent elements into a mental organization, the unity of an experience.

It is a twofold continuity, then, which has to be carried from one generation to the next. The link which joins the generations is neither living body nor thinking mind, neither brain nor soul, but a germ. The germ neither acts nor thinks, at least not in any ordinary meaning of those terms; it undergoes development, and it holds within it the potentiality of developing a living body and a thinking mind. We are led, therefore, it seems to me by logical necessity to the concept of life-not life the mere abstract idea of an attribute common to processes we class as living, but life the concrete idea of a reality of which living body and thinking mind, organic activity and personality, are modes.

The thesis, then, which I have endeavoured to establish is that recognition is knowing what we know already. It is the mark of our past experience which a present and entirely novel sense-presentation bears, and this mark is immediately apprehended as part of the presentation, and is not inferred from it. It implies prior cognition but it does not imply that a memory-image of the prior cognition is present in consciousness together with the recognition; and a fortiori it does not imply a mental process of comparison with a prior cognition or the perception or judgment of a relation of similarity. It is the resultant of learning by experience; the conditionate, not the condition. It is not by recognizing that we learn by experience, but having learnt by experience we recognize. Learning by experience is not dependent on repetition, and in experience there is, in fact, no repetition. Learning is the mental process by which the mind incorporates and assimilates experience. It is an activity which begins with, and continues throughout, experience. Recognition may be intelligent or instinctive. Both are of the same nature. Each is the immediate apprehension of entirely novel sense-presentations with the mark of prior cognition. In intelligent recognition we can by reflexion bring to the mind the factors of the process, and

so, in a manner and within a limited range, reconstitute the process. We can bring to mind memory-images of the prior cognition so far as the prior cognition falls within the memory range of the individual experience. This gives rise to the illusion that recognition is dependent on this reflective thought. We think we recognize after reflecting, whereas in reality we reflect after recognizing. In instinctive recognition, on the other hand, we cannot reconstitute by reflexion the prior cognition, because it does not fall within the individual's experience. It lies in the ancestral experience.

The problem of recognition is the same for intelligent as for instinctive recognition-how can new sense-presentation be known as what is already known? The solution suggested rests on a distinction between life and mind, or living body and thinking mind, and a comparison between the activity of each. They are distinct self-centred organic continuities; sentient experience enters each system, but the systems are tangential to one another. The mind is an organization of experience. All past experience has not only contributed to it but is incorporated within it, giving it character and individuality. New sentient experience can only enter by receiving the mould or mark of this organization. This constitutes recognition. Instinctive recognition raises a larger problem. How is mental continuity established and maintained between one generation and another, since generations are separated by a state in which there is neither living body nor thinking mind? The living germ has neither brain nor soul, but is the potentiality of the development of both. The solution suggested is the concept of life, not an abstraction from living process, but a pure, universal, concrete concept.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DIVERSITY IN UNITY OF BODY AND MIND

Propterea ad determinandum quid mens humana reliquis intersit, quidque reliquis praestet, necesse nobis est ejus objecti, hoc est, corporis humani naturam cognoscere.-SPINOZA.

IN conscious experience I am aware of two realities which in a sense are antithetical to one another, in a sense also are complementary to one another, and each of these realities in its full extension comprehends the other. I am aware of nature and of life. I recognize this twofold reality at every moment which I call "now." The recognition takes the form of an affirmation, an "I am" which admits of no negation. There is no intelligible form and no means of expression by which I can affirm the proposition " I am not.” Certainly I can conceive my non-existence. I do so, however, simply by suppressing in thought one of the antithetical realities in my conscious experience, and then conceiving the other self-subsistent. In imagination I can suppress life altogether and find no difficulty in presenting nature unaffected by its absence. When I make explicit the full implication of this twofold existence, which I affirm in every moment of experience, it seems to involve (1) Space or extension; (2) Time or duration; (3) Definite objects and actual events; (4) Myself, here and now, actually and actively participating, contemplating objects and controlling

events.

It seems to me, however, that I participate in a purely external way and that my activity though affecting the disposition of external reality is without any relation to its existence. On the other hand, an external and independent

reality seems absolutely to condition my activity so that if in thought I suppress this external reality there is nothing on which it can take hold and its self-subsistence is practically if not theoretically inconceivable.

Nature accordingly appears to me to be self-subsistent in a way that life is not. It is this one-sidedness of the antithesis, this emphasis on, or bias towards, the reality characterized by opposition to life, which unfits science to comprehend life itself. It could only comprehend life by including it within the objective system of nature, and this is impossible because the objective system is never without its relation to the subjective system. The known can never detach itself completely from the living subject for which it exists, and physical reality is never pure reality completely independent of psychical conditions. Science is always haunted by the spectre of a reality which it cannot comprehend because it is for this reality that it exists. At the same time that we recognize the impossibility of comprehending knowing itself in the ordered and orderly system of the known, we feel that the ideal of our science is balked by this very disability. Physical science while drawn irresistibly toward the objective aspect of reality is for ever finding itself vainly trying to include an elusive reality without which it is truncated and incomplete. This is where philosophy diverges from science. It is this elusive consciousness or life which philosophy seeks to systematize, not by bringing it under an objective order to which it is not amenable, but by taking it in its first intention as a comprehensive activity from which the subject-matter of the sciences is derived by abstraction or by schematization. The great difficulty of the task is that we have to work against the strong current which draws our mind away from attention to itself and its own activity towards the action which is the object of that activity. It is a most significant fact that whenever philosophy yields to this attractive force, when it adopts scientific method, it tends inevitably to take up a negative attitude towards the psychical reality which has called for its exercise and subordinates consciousness to an aspect or adventitious quality of physical reality.

The strong and ineradicable tendency in science to treat objective nature as fundamental and self-subsistent, and to reduce psychical nature to a dependent, conditioned, shadow-phenomenon, is in complete accord and perfect harmony with our nature. We feel that in science and in scientific method we are simply letting our mind follow the natural disposition and direction of its activity. In philosophy, on the other hand, we feel that we are struggling against the stream, striving to reverse the natural inclination of the mind. We have only to pause for a moment in our task, whatever it be, to be conscious how completely dominated we are by the overwhelming sense of the objective reality of the physical world of ordinary experience. We know that science completely transforms its aspect, presenting to us as apparent and evanescent what we had at first taken to be solid and substantial, replacing definite sensible objects with insensible atoms and molecules, not even letting us rest in these intelligible objects but resolving them into electrical charges, and yet however far we travel along the scientific road we are never allowed to lose our grasp of a definite objective reality. Philosophy raises strange doubts which even the plain man cannot wholly exclude, and if we follow its lead it seems to undermine our whole commonsense notion of reality until in the end all that we have ordinarily regarded as certain or self-evident is left without support and what was sure science is replaced with total theoretical scepticism. Yet nature is too strong for us, practically we are helpless. "Nature," says Hume, "by an absolute and uncontrollable necessity, has determined us to judge as well as to breathe and feel; nor can we any more forbear viewing certain objects in a stronger and fuller light, upon account of their customary connexion with a present impression, than we can hinder ourselves from thinking, as long as we are awake, or seeing the surrounding bodies, when we turn our eyes towards them in broad sunshine."

It is incumbent on us, therefore, as a first task in philosophy to understand what this bias towards the reality of the object denotes. Science is practical. It does not