VI - A Whole Presupposed of its Parts

Summary

I define life as the principle of Individuation, or the power that unites a given all into a whole which is presupposed by all its parts.

S. T. Coleridge.

Que voulez-vous? La perfection absoluefait toujours plaisir.

Jules Lemaitre.

“The organism”, says Professor Ritchie, “over any length of time is essentially a coming and going between the different parts. This interchange is what keeps it all together as a unit and spreads it out into its environment. The organism is the way it behaves and it behaves as a whole.” One consequence is that the whole so unified does one main thing at a time. That we would follow now. The statement is not applicable to all types of the integrated individual's behaviour. Its proper field, speaking physiologically, is the neuro-muscular. There we can have no surer evidence of the integration of the individual than the doing of one main thing at a time. And what then is a main thing? It is always one of those acts we call intentional. It may be extensive as muscles go, or quite limited. It is a motor act of such a kind that any other concurrent with it has minimal accompaniment by mind, while it itself has full accompaniment. It can even drain mind off into ‘itself’. There are of course motor acts of which quite usually we are unaware; the ordinary snapping of the eyelids is such. But there are a host of motor acts, more complex and more varied, of which we are on some occasions fully aware, at others less aware, and sometimes not aware.