coveries, was "deeply impressed by discovering" this succession and could not explain it but "on the supposition that species gradually became modified." The subject was so "touched with emotion," as Mr. James would say (Varieties of Rel. Exp., p. 422), that it "haunted" Darwin; and still at forty-nine he writes: "There is a grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed in a few forms, or into one, and that.......... from so simple a beginning endless forms...have been and are being evolved" (Origin of Species, p. 370). I would like to call such an elated retrospect a time-trance in contradistinction to a space-trance such as Kant experienced on looking out into the endless expanse of the heavens. Both trances are fits of abstraction in which the difference of mental imagination disappears and the images fuse into unity.

In cases of the time-trance, the emotion of unity has the intellectual after-effect of a "supposition" of evolution. Darwin apparently testifies to this fusion of images when he writes at 35: "If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals. ...may partake of our origin in one common ancestor....we may be all melted together" (Darwin's Life, p. 368). At the same time he speaks of "the tree of life" or "coral of life" as a figure for the unity of all organic beings. And the haunting "supposition" was so "touched with emotion," so powerful a postulate, that Darwin spent a life-time to raise it from a working hypothesis to the rank of a scientific law.

If it were not for Goethe's Urpflanze and primal vertebra I would not know what more to say about the evolutionist type of mind. But the zootropic or cinematographic fusion of similar mental images as in Goethe, Henslow, in dreams and dreamy states (Binet, Psychol. of Reasoning, chap. IV) of mind have suggested to me further details concerning the matter.

We have to distinguish two kinds of fusion of similar images, the one a real, lasting fusion, the other a momentary, seeming one, probably.

First, there is going on within us a subconscious process, more or less automatic, similar to composite photography which stocks our memory with generic images. For these images man has invented names and in place of these images many a mind lacking them altogether uses the names as thought-symbols for reasoning.

Individuals further differ in two respects, first, in the extent of possible fusion. On the negative end of the series you may place Professor Wundt with hisAllgemeinbegriffe which will not fuse at all; about the middle, Plato with his ideal generic images or some other artist with his types of abstract concepts; and at the positive end. Goethe.

Individuals differ, secondly, in the orderly coordination of the generic images. Goethe's primal plant seems to be an instance of unusual fusion as well as of thorough systematic coordination by resemblance. In minds of the type preeminently fitted to systematize, the products of fusion seem to become so well coordinated according to resemblance that Darwin's tree of life as mental coordination of generic images functions better than a perfect pedigree of genera and species arranged in temporal succession. Attention may easily run along its branches and, if shifting fast enough, melt together even the opposite species in their genus. It functions better than a pedigree because it is a net-work of pedigrees. Not only the pedigree of the whole animal or the plant has a place in this system, but also its parts, the leaves, or the bones have theirs, and that part which has the longest pedigree fuses later than the rest and includes the fusion of the rest. It produces not only the primal leaf but also the primal plant because the pedigrees of the remaining parts are finally fused in the longest pedigree which is that of the leaf.

But with the material at hand I am not so very sure that even in regard to Goethe's case I am not already discussing the momentary and seeming fusion, the second kind as we differentiated above. In some evolutionists, probably the larger number, the fusion is not permanent; it does not produce generic images which are so individualized as to constitute a new species. Usually when generic images rise into waking consciousness, they appear immovable, seemingly unchangeable, static composite photographs, however much they are subject to subconscious changes that follow upon new sense-experiences. But in some minds they seem to appear in the field of attention with such rapidity that the onlooking subject perceives naught but the continuous change of the kinematograph. Witness Goethe seeing his primal plant grow while walking in the botanical garden of Padua. Most evolutionists, however, have no such command over their subliminal mind as genius has. And if we venture an explanation of dynamic thought along the line of fusion of images, we will have to assume that the process of momentary fusion is wholly subconscious in the average evolutionist. Then the subject would receive only conscious information that the fusion of a simple pedigree has been subconsciously accomplished; this information would come in a few wordsymbols expressing the evolution of the whole genus and the origin of all species of that genus from out of one primal specimen. Witness Goethe at Venice realizing the evolution of the genus "bone" out of one primal vertebra.

Although fully aware of the tentative character of the details of the explanation here offered, yet, until further biographical analyses say otherwise, I will hold that it takes two things to make a born evolutionist: (1) the time-trance, and (2) the highly developed faculty of systematizing which coordinates generic images by resemblance into a net-work of temporal succession.

That we are on the right track, at least regarding the time-trance and its momentary fusion of images, appears to me the more certain when we consider the trance in which Gotama Buddha discovered the "chain of causation," Dante the "eternal wheels" of creation, Jacob Böhme the "principia" and Goethe the "chain of buckets." In Faust's vision of the macrocosm we read:

"Here all things live and work and ever blending
Weave one vast whole from Being's ample range
Here powers celestial rising and descending,
Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange;

Their flight on rapture-breathing pinions winging,
From heaven to earth their genial influence bringing,
Through the wide whole their chimes melodious ringing."
(Act I, Scene 1. Miss Swanwick's translation.)

The very incoherency of these different images testifies to the fact that the poet saw them at least for moments fuse in his inner vision and that he does not accurately describe the psychic phenomenon when he compares the content of the vision with a drama. The dramatis personae play their several parts without ever changing or fusing into one another. In like manner one has inaccurately spoken of Hegel's Punch and Judy Show of concepts. Hegel's dialectics is not a drama if we understand by it a succession of interactions by personalities of a static character; but it is a drama if drama means the evolution and involution of moral or immoral forces. Although hypostatized, Hegel's concepts fuse with one another and with the rapidity of the kinematograph or kaleidoscope change like the zoological or botanical species in the evolutionist's mind.

Hegel has a natural liking for things that move and change, and a dislike for things static. That his mental imagery worked that way, is to my mind most clearly laid bare in his lines written on a tour through the Bernese Oberland in 1796. Delighted with the sight of the water

falls, he says that the onlooker, not able to fix his eyes on the ever changing, ever flooded out form of the waves, constantly perceives the same image and at the same time realizes that it is not the same (Rosenkranz's Hegel, p. 478). On the other hand, the glaciers and the rocks called forth no rapture, rather the reverse. These masses gave him nothing but the monotonous and at last tedious idea "Es ist so." Although he cannot help calling them "eternally dead," they do not call forth the time-trance in which he may look at things sub specie aeternitatis.

This delight in the fusion of things, in the Heraclitean universal flux seems most natural also to Mr. James; and most probably constitutes a metaphysical need or "craving" of his. It is only from this point of view that I am able to see a meaning in some appreciative lines on the Hegelian principle of negation, which is claimed to bring a propulsive force into our logic, and on the metaphysical program involved (Varieties, p. 459). "The objects of our thought now act within our thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them, and this other proves itself also to be actual. . . . The universe is a place where things are followed by other things that both correct and fulfil them." This program executed would give us a system of generalizations which would not differ from the Hegelian in its dynamic form.

THE EMPIRICIST WITH A SPIRITUAL VISION.

But such a system of experience would indeed differ from the Hegelian in its content, that is, the experience which the pragmatic metaphysician brings to his task.

Mr. James knows two kinds of experience: sense experience on the one side and emotional-volitional or spiritual experience on the other. His volume on Varieties of Religious Experience is devoted to a scientific description