University of Virginia Library

DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE. AN ESSAY TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION. By L. T. Hobhouse, Martin White Professor of Sociology in the University of London. Macmillan & Co., London: 1913; pp. xxix, 383.

"Development and Purpose" is essentially the complement of Professor Hobhouse's well-known and valuable "Mind in

Evolution," published in 1901; if it were rather a continuation than the complement, many would be pleased, for the exposition already made practically guarantees a rich application, were it undertaken, to matters still further "away" in the realm of thought. The present volume lacks the multitude of scientific data and references which make "Mind in Evolution" so important for the study of psychology (as behavior or not as behavior, as the reader pleases), but it contains in their space many timely discussions, in some cases seemingly prophetic, of teleology in its relation to evolution.

The seventeen chapters of the book (there is also an extremely thoughtful Introduction and a full Index), are divided into two parts, one entitled "Lines of Development" and the other "The Conditions of Development." The reviewer's lazy cortex, and possibly those of other and more leisurely readers, is made glad by a complete chapter-synopsis or syllabus, occupying seven pages). So much of the whole treatise is suggested in the synopsis of the first three chapters that it is well to give them in full, as follows:

"I. The Nature and the Significance of Mental Evolution. (1) The biological view regards Mind as an organ evolved to adapt behavior to the environment, (2) and tends to reduce its action to a mechanical process. (3) Parallelism in the end reduces Mind to an epi-phenomenon [an important undoubted fact which has been often ignored by what are left of the Parallelists!] (4) The object of Comparative Psychology is to determine empirically the actual function of Mind in successive stages of development. (5) It involves a social as well as an individual psychology. (6) The statement of the higher phases also opens up philosophical questions, (7) and on the solution of these depends the final interpretation of the recorded movement.

"II. The Structure of Mind. (1) Mental operations are known in the first instance as objects of consciousness. (2) Mind is the permanent unity including consciousness and the sum of processes continuous with consciousness and determining it. (3) These processes involve, but are not identical with physical processes, constituting with them a psychophysical unity.

"III. The General Function of Mind and Brain. (1) The generic function of Mind, as of the nervous system, is correlation (2) The special organ for effecting fresh correlation is consciousness. (3) The deliverances of consciousness arise from stimuli acting upon structures built up by experience, (4) on foundations laid by heredity, (5) which supplies not only specific adaptations, but a background to the entire life of consciousness."

It would be hard to find a more concise, complete, and timely formularization of the seeming trend of present resultants in this particular direction than these sentences set forth for whomsoever will ponder each carefully-built statement and really understand what it means as part of a system. "Mind is the permanent unity including consciousness and the sum of processes continuous with consciousness and determining it. These processes involve, but are not identical with, physical processes, constituting with them a psychophysical unity,"—this quotation might almost serve as the motto of early Twentieth Century scientific philosophy. It seems to the present reviewer to have almost as much philosophy in it as Harold Höffding's well-known sentence has of psychology: ("the unity of mental life has its expression not only in memory and synthesis, but also in a dominant fundamental feeling, characterized by the contrast between pleasure and pain, and in an impulse, springing from this fundamental feeling, to movement and activity"). It might be the creed of the Neoidealism.

Hobhouse's discussion of mechanism in relation to teleology and to the universal harmony and reality is fairly representative of the drift of thought as set forth by recent English and French writers such as J. S. Haldane, Oliver Lodge and some of the prominent biologists, and by Henri Bergson: "An organic whole is therefore like a machine in being purposive, though unlike it in that its purpose is within." "A purposive process is one determined by its tendency to produce a certain result, purpose itself being an act [sic] determined in its character by that which it tends to bring about. As such it differs fundamentally from a mechanical cause." "The empirical and philosophical arguments point to the same general conclusion, that reality is the process of the development of Mind." As a guide to one's thinking, and as integrators of one's subconscious intuitions and resultants, such concise formulæ certainly have much value, especially when, as here, clearly and ably expounded in the text proper. Tufts College.

GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN.