Psyche's Lamp; A Revaluation of Psychological Principles as Foundation of All Thought (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION To manifest itself in action is not a peculiarity distinctive of life; it is a character common to all known existence. . The whole universe is resolvable into motion, that is, ' into action; it is dynamic, and no ' being, ' no static existence, is discoverable. There is in this respect no distinction between the inorganic and the organic, the living and the non-living, the animate and the inanimate. Those distinctions are not grossly apparent, and were not primitively drawn by human thought; they are a matter of interpretation. Both the moon and my friend Jones appear to me as extended solid bodies which move; I ascribe the movements of Jones to certain powers and dispositions which are not directly observable; and I ascribe the movements of the moon likewise to certain powers and dispositions which are not directly observable. The movements of living objects, like those of inorganic objects, take place in relation to external conditions; both are reactions to that relation. It is not until we come to analyse the way in which organic and inorganic objects move that distinctive differences become apparent. Those differences are marked and manifest, so that scarcely any observer, whether scientific or no, ever commits the mistake of confounding a living with an inorganic object. But, strangely enough, when it comes to defining, or even roughly describing, those differences, human thought has invariably entered into a region of the utmost confusion, vagueness, and incongruity, substituting theories and interpretations of the causes of those differences for the observable facts. While primitively it failed to draw any clear distinction between the two kinds of reaction, it would appear to have become so ...