in motion. Even from this standpoint of the biblical history of creation, we might first analyse these changes of system C which are predetermined by its arrangement as conceivable (hence before we had to regard them as wholly or partially realised in consequence of the inspiration of the living breath), and then we might connect these processes methodically with the manifestations of the ‘living soul’ occasioned by the inspiration.”
But this is what Avenarius did in his general theory of knowledge. He first investigated his fellow-men themselves and their movements and sounds in a purely mechanical way, purely according to their mechanical significance, but from a methodological point of view; in this way he obtains his vital-theory of the changes in system C, and then, but not sooner, he assigns to them their so-called “psychical” values, the E-values.
“On the other hand”—Avenarius continues in the same place—“it agrees both with the uniform plan upon which system C is based and with the construction of system C, which is then independent of the possession of a consciousness, that under certain conceivable circumstances, not to be foreseen by the ‘created beings,’ system C is so arranged and disposed as to be capable of maintaining itself under diminution of its vital maintenance-value, whether the ‘created being’ is in other respects a higher or a lower one. And this means . . . it must correspond even to the standpoint of the biblical narrative of creation, that we should be able to think of all purposive practical or theoretical behaviour as following one and the same scheme. So it is, e.g., when the brainless frog substitutes a more remote movement, when the one first made and most familiar to him fails of its result; or when a chained fox, after first trying in vain to reach with his fore-feet the food which lies too far off, turns round and gets it with his hind-feet; or when the child passes to continually new and more complicated movements to attain the same end; or when a speculative thinker, after first trying, but always failing, to prove the proposition ‘God is the unconditioned, upon which all conditioned must be based,’ finally converts the proposition into the thesis, ‘The unconditioned upon which all conditioned is based, I call God’; or when the mathematician, in order to make his ‘space-intuition’ (or more accurately his ‘estimates of mathematical spatial images’) in a corresponding degree infallible, passes from the objects given by intuition to the objects given by definition, which objects the mathematician himself chooses and determines.”
