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It is not plausible that the earth, when in its gaseous state, was the habitation of any feeling beings, and it is actually impossible that it harbored feeling beings as they exist now. Feeling accordingly must have originated, and the question how feeling originates is a problem that suggests itself naturally to the psychologist as well as the philosopher.
#Vital energy a unique form of energy.#
The kinetic energy liberated in our actions, in brain-activity as well as muscular motions, is produced from the potential energy stored up in our tissues. This energy, qua energy, is the same energy which we meet everywhere in nature. All kinds of energy are interconvertible. Yet we must bear in mind that the vital energy displayed in animal organisms is a special and indeed a unique form of energy. It is as different from other forms of energy as is, for instance, electricity from molar motion.
#Physiology and psychology not applied mechanics.#
In former times physics and chemistry were considered as applied mechanics, and physiology as applied chemistry. This position, however, is wrong and had to be abandoned. Mechanical, chemical, physiological, and psychical processes exhibit radically different conditions. The student of mechanics, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, each one of them attempts to solve a different problem. They accordingly deal with different sets of abstractions. The processes which constitute the subject-matter of the physiologist's and psychologist's work are different from those of the mechanical philosopher and of the chemist. The abstraction of the so-called purely mechanical excludes such processes as chemical combinations; it is limited to molar mechanics only. The term molecular mechanics is an attempt at widening the domain of mechanics. But the terms of neither molecular nor molar mechanics contain anything of the properly physiological nature observed in vegetal and animal life. The latter is a very complicated process which may briefly be described as assimilation of living forms. The laws of molar and molecular motions are not annulled, yet they are superseded; they remain, yet some additional important traits appear. Different conditions and complications show different features and the characteristics of organised life are not the molar or molecular mechanics of their motions but their properly physiological features.
Mechanical laws accordingly cannot explain physiological action, and still less have they anything in common with ideas, or thoughts, or feelings. Accordingly, the attempt to apply mechanics to any other than mechanical considerations is prima facie to be rejected. We must never forget that all our scientific inquiries deal with certain sides of reality only.
#The higher view of the whole.#
The abstractions of the mechanical philosopher as well as those of the physiologist and psychologist are one-sided aspects only of reality. Yet it is quite legitimate to take a higher standpoint in order to classify our notions so that the general views comprise the special views and to determine the relations among the several in their kind most general views. In this way we can shape our entire knowledge into an harmonious world-conception representing the whole as a whole. This I tried to do when, following the precedent of Fechner and Clifford, I proposed the problem of the origin of actual feelings from the non-feeling elements-of-feeling, the former depending upon a special combination or form of action of the latter, and the latter being a universal feature of reality.
#The additional feature in a stone's fall.#