The Metaphysical Foundation of Buddhism and Modern Science

plausible interpretation of such experience is that it is one of the natural
activities involved in the functioning of such a high-grade organism. The
actualities of nature must be so interpreted as to be explanatory of this
fact. This is one desideratum to be aimed at in a philosophic scheme.
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Such experience seems to be more particularly related to the activities
of the brain. But how far an exact doctrine can be based upon this
presumption lies beyond our powers of observation. We cannot determine
with what molecules the brain begins and the rest of the body ends.
Further, we cannot tell with what molecules the body ends and the
external world begins. The truth is that the brain is continuous with the
body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world.
Human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole of
nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region [Cf. Process and
Reality Pt. II, Ch. III, especially Sects. IV-XI, and Pt, Chs. IV and V.],
located within the body, but not necessarily persisting in any fixed
coordination with a definite part of the brain.
Section VII. The second error is the presupposition that the sole way of
examining experience is by acts of conscious introspective analysis. Such
a doctrine of the exclusive primacy of introspection is already
discredited in psychology. Each occasion of experience has its own
individual pattern. Each occasion lifts some components into primacy and
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