elatively independent system
capable of performing the necessary functions of daily life, that it rises
beyond itself and gradually unfolds to conscious psychical life in
increasing self-realisation. Edward von Hartmann has attempted to apply
this principle of the unconscious as a principle of all cosmic existence.
And wherever, among the younger generation of biologists, one has broken
away from the fascinations of the mechanistic theory, he has usually
turned to "psychical" co-operating factors.

Is there Ageing of the Mind?

Naturalism is also only apparently right in asserting that the mind ages
with the body. To learn the answer which all idealism gives to this
comfortless theory, it is well to read Schleiermacher's "Monologues," and
especially the chapter "Youth and Age." The arguments put forward by
naturalism, the blunting of the senses, the failing of the memory, are
well known. But here again there are luminous facts on the other side
which are much more true. It is no wonder that a mind ages if it has never
taken life seriously, never consolidated itself to individual and definite
being through education and self-culture, through a deepening of morality,
and has gained for itself no content of lasting worth. How could he do
otherwise than become poor, dull and lifeless, as the excitability of his
organ diminishes and its susceptibility to external impressions
disappears? But did Goethe become old? Did not Schleiermacher, frail and
ailing as he was by nature, prove the truth of what he wrote in his youth,
that there is no ageing of the mind?

The whole problem, in its highest aspects, is a question of will and
faith. If I know mind and the nature of mind, and believe in it, I believe
with Schleiermacher in eternal youth. If I do not believe in it, then I
have given away the best of all means for warding off old age. For the
mind can only hold itself erect while trusting in itself. And this is the
best argument in the whole business.

But even against the concrete special facts and the observable processes
of diminution of psychical powers, and of the disappearance of the whole
mental content, we could range other concrete and observable facts, which
present the whole problem in quite a different light from that in which
naturalism attempts to show it. They indicate that the matter is rather
one of the rusting of the instrument to which the mind is bound than an
actual decay of the mind itself, and t