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Mind Considered From the Point of View of Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Julian S. Huxley
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Extract

The concept of evolution is of fundamental importance to any general scheme of thought: and one of the ways in which its importance is greatest is in defining the place of mind within any such scheme. If bodies and their contained brains have evolved, why not the accompanying minds? Indeed, to-day the question can only be properly put the other way round: how can the minds not have evolved? Mental evolution can only have failed to occur if we deny to mind the principle of continuity, which is one of our axioms on the physical side: only, that is to say, if the world ceases to be rational.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 7 , July 1927 , pp. 330 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1927

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References

1 This article is to appear as part of the opening chapter of a book entitled The Mind; a collective work (Longmans, Green & Co.), based upon a course of lectures given in 1927 in King's College, London.

1 It is of no value for our present purpose to pursue the question down into the single-celled Protozoa. Suffice it to say that they show among their simplest forms a total absence of all differentiation—reception, conduction, and action all being carried on by one and the same undifferentiated protoplasm; and that many of the more complex species show structures apparently comparable in function with a well-organized nerve-net. The Metazoa, of course, start again from scratch in the matter of a common nervous system for the whole organism.

1 Forced Movements, Tropisms and Animal Conduct. Philadelphia, 1918.