Mind and Reality #249558

The mind-stuff hypothesis lands us in a dilemma. Either our elementary atoms are as dead as those of Democritus; and then the whole problem of the evolution and the physiology of mind is unsolved: or they have such mental life that out of them complex consciousness can be built up but then they are Monads, minds of more or less clear consciousness. And in that case, following the reasoning by which the mind-stuff theory itself was reached, we are led naturally to the hypothesis that every atom of matter is a little mind; not an intensive element of sensation, but a complex of many elements in a conscious unity of some sort, an apperceptive individual.