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This is the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford May 14, 1929. The reviewer can best indicate something of the trend of thought of the lecturer by the following quotations:
“Instead, on the one hand, of adopting Spencer's procedure of attempting to describe the apparently complex in terms of the apparently simple; instead, on the other hand, of resting content with the supposition that entirely new principles emerge as we pass from lower-level to higher-level systems of activity within the Universe, I propose to ascertain whether some of those ‘higher’ principles are not, however vaguely, already recognizable at lower levels. I propose, in fact, to consider how far our knowledge of the mental world is helpfully applicable to the material world, how far conceptions and attitudes which have been specially employed and developed by Psychology may also prove—or have also proved—useful and common to other Sciences.”
“Psychology has long insisted on this standpoint. There was a time when, more physico, the belief was held that in its mental development the infant first experienced separate elementary ‘sensations’ of whiteness, softness, warmth, etc., and that by combining these he ultimately obtained the ‘perception’ of an object, say of its mother's breast. But we now realize that the percept of the whole object is given, with meaning however vague, from the start; that with growing experience it acquires even fuller meaning; and that from such maturer percepts the