mere sum of the component parts but can be an actually new entity not wholly predictable from the component parts and known only through actual experience with the specific product.  Hydrogen and oxygen, it is true, can form simple mixtures, but when they make an actual chemical integration we get a new specific type of substance, water, behaving and dividing according to its own laws and properties in a way not wholly predictable from just what we know of hydrogen and oxygen as such.  Analogy prompts us to see in plants and animals products of physics and chemistry and organization, although the peculiarity of the product makes us recognize certain specificities of life not contained in the theory of mere physics and chemistry.  All the facts of experience prompt us to see in mentation a biological function, and we are no longer surprised to find this product of integration so different from the nature and functions of all the component parts.  All the apparent discontinuities in the intrinsic harmony of facts, on the one hand, and the apparent impossibility of accounting for new features and peculiarities of the new units, are shown to be a general feature of nature and of facts:  integration is not mere summation, but a creation of ever-new types and units, with superficial discontinuities and with their own new denominators of special peculiarities; hence there is no reason to think of an insurmountable and unique feature in the origin of life, nor even of mentally integrated life; no need of special mystical sparks of life, of a mysterious spirit, etc.; but—­and this is the important point—­also no need of denying the existence of all the evidence there may be of facts which we imply when we use the deeply felt concepts of mind and soul.  In other words, we do not have to be mind-shy nor body-shy any longer.

The inevitable problem of having to study other persons as well as ourselves necessarily leads us on to efforts at solution of other philosophical problems, the problem of integrating materialism and idealism, mechanism and relative biological determinism and purpose, etc.  Man has to live with the laws of physics and chemistry unbroken and in harmony with all that is implied in the laws of heredity and growth and function of a biological organism.  Yet what might look like a limitation is really his strength and safe foundation and stability.  On this ground, man’s biological make-up has a legitimate sphere of growth and expansion shared by no other type of being.  We pass into every new moment of time with a preparedness shown in adaptive and constructive activity as well as structure, most plastic and far-reaching in the greatest feat of man, that of imagination.  Imagination is not a mere duplication of reality in consciousness and subjectivity; it is a substitute in a way, but actually an amplification, and often a real addition to what we might otherwise call the “crude world,” integrated in the real activities of life, a new creation, an ever-new growth, seen in its most characteristic form in choice and in any new volition.  Hence the liberating light which integration and the concepts of growth and time throw on the time-honored problem of absolute and relative determinism and on the relation of an ultra-strict “science” with common sense.