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[ Pg 145 ] CHAPTER VI . THE MIND - STUFF THEORY . The reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse time of it in this one , which is exclusively metaphysical . Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly . The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us , but theoretically they are very confused , and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing , until challenged , what internal difficulties they involve . When these assumptions have once established themselves ( as they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the phenomenal facts ) it is almost impossible to get rid of them afterwards or to make any one see that they are not essential features of the subject . The only way to prevent this disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make them give an articulate account of themselves before letting them pass . One of the obscurest of the assumptions of which I speak is the assumption that our mental states are composite in structure , made up of smaller states conjoined . This hypothesis has outward advantages which make it almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect , and yet it is inwardly quite unintelligible . Of its unintelligibility , however , half the writers on psychology seem unaware . As our own aim is to understand if possible , I make no apology for singling out this particular notion for very explicit treatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work . The theory of ' mind - stuff ' is the theory that our mental states are compounds , expressed in its most radical form . [ Pg 146 ] EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY DEMANDS A MIND - DUST . In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comes first , then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life , then forms of life that possess mentality , and finally those like ourselves that possess it in a high degree . As long as we keep to the consideration of purely outward facts , even the most complicated facts of biology , our task as evolutionists is comparatively easy . We are dealing all the time with matter and its aggregations and separations ; and although our treatment must perforce be hypothetical , this does not prevent it from being continuous . The point which as evolutionists we are bound to hold fast to is that all the new forms of being that make their appearance are really nothing more than results of the redistribution of the original and unchanging materials . The self - same atoms which , chaotically dispersed , made the nebula , now , jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions , form our brains ; and the ' evolution ' of the brains , if understood , would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed . In this story no new natures , no factors not present at the beginning , are introduced at any later stage . But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip in , something whereof the potency was not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos .
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