232 THE FACTORS OF THE MIND

verbal ability rather than of a verbal centre, of instincts,
habits, and even unconscious wishes rather than of this or
that neural mechanism, of general emotionality rather than
of neural energy or power. But I still try to keep these
concepts parallel, so far as may be, with what is presumably
the organization of the underlying physical basis, and con-
sistent, so far as possible, with existing knowledge of the
working of the nervous system,

(V) On the Philosophical Level.—As a philosopher, too, I
should again be willing to open up the possibility of mental
causation, and even to inquire whether there may not be
after all some justification for conceiving the individual or
his mind as an independent substance. But the substances
and the causes that I should then envisage would not be
the homely substances or causes that I ingenuously refer
to as a clinical psychologist or as a lecturer to teachers or
medical students.

This is not the place to embark on a full metaphysical
disquisition. A comment or two must suffice. In brief,
the philosophical theory that I should offer would not be
very far removed from the assumptions to which I seem
directly driven by the immediate exigencies of factorial
work. Roughly, it might be described as a modernization
of the old Platonic doctrine of stSrj or * ideas.'a Its main
principle would be that reality is best described in terms of
* forms,3 'structures,5 or Gestalten—things analogous to the
cognitive wholes that we perceive in our own personal
consciousness, but also possessing something of the causal
efficacy that we seem to find on the conative side of our
experience. And I should argue that, whether we are

1 Elsewhere I have drawn attention to the remarkable way in which some
of the most characteristic implications of factor-analysis, Gestalt psychology,
and quantum physics seem to have been anticipated in certain passages in
Pkto and Aristotle (cf. the NoU on Faculty Psychology, written for the
Consultative Committee of the Board of Education and published in the
Spens Report on Secondary Education, 1939, pp. 429 et seq*}. The analogies are
perhaps important as reminding educationists and others that modern psycho-
logical opinion is not, as is so often supposed by the layman, tending at the
moment in a materialistic or fatalistic direction, but is apparently com-
patible with the highest kind of idealism that has inspired social and educa-
tional efforts in the past.