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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Life and Matter, by Oliver Lodge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Life and Matter
+       A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe'
+
+Author: Oliver Lodge
+
+Release Date: August 15, 2008 [EBook #26321]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIFE AND MATTER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Clarke and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
+generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+    "'Attraction' and 'repulsion' seem to be the sources of
+    _will_--that momentous element of the soul which determines the
+    character of the individual" (p. 45).
+
+    "The positive ponderable matter, the element with the feeling of
+    like or desire, is continually striving to complete the process of
+    condensation, and thus collecting an enormous amount of _potential_
+    energy; the negative imponderable matter, on the other hand, offers
+    a perpetual and equal resistance to the further increase of its
+    strain and of the feeling of dislike connected therewith, and thus
+    gathers the utmost amount of _actual_ energy.
+
+    "I think that this pyknotic theory of substance will prove more
+    acceptable to every biologist who is convinced of the unity of
+    nature than the kinetic theory which prevails in physics to-day"
+    (p. 78).
+
+In other words, he appeals to a presumed sentiment of biologists
+against the knowledge of the physicist in his own sphere--a strange
+attitude for a man of science. After this it is less surprising to find
+him ignoring the elementary axiom that "action and reaction are equal
+and opposite," _i.e._ that internal forces can have no motive power on
+a body as a whole, and making the grotesque assertion that matter is
+moved, not by external forces, but by internal likes and desires:--
+
+    "I must lay down the following theses, which are involved in Vogt's
+    pyknotic theory, as indispensable for a truly monistic view of
+    substance, and one that covers the whole field of organic and
+    inorganic nature:--
+
+    "1. The two fundamental forms of substance, ponderable matter and
+    ether, are not dead and only moved by extrinsic force, but they are
+    endowed with sensation and will (though, naturally, of the lowest
+    grade); they experience an inclination for condensation, a dislike
+    of strain; they strive after the one and struggle against the
+    other" (p. 78).
+
+My desire is to criticise politely, and hence I refrain from
+characterising this sentence as a physicist should.
+
+    "Every shade of inclination, from complete indifference to the
+    fiercest passion, is exemplified in the chemical relation of the
+    various elements towards each other" (p. 79).
+
+    "On those phenomena we base our conviction that even the _atom_ is
+    not without a rudimentary form of sensation and will, or, as it is
+    better expressed, of feeling (_aesthesis_) and inclination
+    (_tropesis_)--that is, a universal 'soul' of the simplest
+    character" (p. 80).
+
+    "I gave the outlines of _cellular_ psychology in 1866 in my paper
+    on 'Cell-souls and Soul-cells'" (p. 63).
+
+Thus, then, in order to explain life and mind and consciousness by
+means of matter, all that is done is to assume that matter possesses
+these unexplained attributes.
+
+What the full meaning of that may be, and whether there be any
+philosophic justification for any such idea, is a matter on which I
+will not now express an opinion; but, at any rate, as it stands, it is
+not science, and its formulation gives no sort of conception of what
+life and will and consciousness really are.
+
+Even if it were true, it contains nothing whatever in the nature of
+explanation: it recognises the inexplicable, and relegates it to the
+atoms, where it seems to hope that further quest may cease. Instead of
+tackling the difficulty where it actually occurs; instead of
+associating life, will, and consciousness with the organisms in which
+they are actually in experience found, these ideas are foisted into the
+atoms of matter; and then the properties which have been conferred on
+the atoms are denied in all essential reality to the fully developed
+organisms which those atoms help to compose!
+
+I show later on (Chapters V. and X.) that there is no necessary
+justification for assuming that a phenomenon exhibited by an aggregate
+of particles must be possessed by the ingredients of which it is
+composed; on the contrary, wholly new properties may make their
+appearance simply by aggregation; though I admit that such a
+proposition is by no means obvious, and that it may be a legitimate
+subject for controversy. But into that question our author does not
+enter; and even when he has conferred on the atoms these astounding
+properties, he abstains from what would seem a natural development: for
+his doctrine is that our power is actually less than that of the
+atoms,--that instead of utilising the attractions and repulsions, or
+"likes and dislikes," of our constituent particles, and directing them
+by the aggregate of conscious will-power to some preconceived end, we
+ourselves, on the contrary, are dominated and controlled by _them_; so
+that freedom of the will is an illusion.
+
+Freedom being thus disposed of, Immortality presents no difficulty; a
+soul is the operation of a group of cells, and so the existence of man
+clearly begins and ends with that of his terrestrial body:--
+
+    "The most important moment in the life of every man, as in that of
+    all other complex animals, is the moment in which he begins his
+    individual existence [coalescence of sperm cell and ovum] ... the
+    existence of the personality, the independent individual,
+    commences. This ontogenetic fact is supremely important, for the
+    most far-reaching conclusions may be drawn from it. In the first
+    place, we have a clear perception that man, like all the other
+    complex animals, inherits all his personal characteristics, bodily
+    and mental, from his parents; and further, we come to the momentous
+    conclusion that the new personality which arises thus can lay no
+    claim to 'immortality'" (p. 22).
+
+Others beside Haeckel have held this kind of view at one time or
+another; but, unlike him, most of them have recanted and seen the error
+of their ways. He is, indeed, aware that several of his great German
+contemporaries have been through this phase of thought and come out on
+the other side, notably the physiologist-philosopher Wundt, and he
+refers to them fairly and instructively thus:--
+
+    "What seems to me of special importance and value in Wundt's work
+    is that he 'extends the law of the persistence of force for the
+    first time to the psychic world.'
+
+    "Thirty years afterwards, in a second edition, Wundt emancipated
+    himself from the fundamental errors of the first, and says that he
+    'learned many years ago to consider the work a sin of his youth';
+    it 'weighed on him as a kind of crime, from which he longed to free
+    himself as soon as possible.' In the first, psychology is treated
+    as a _physical_ science, on the same laws as the whole of
+    physiology, of which it is only a part; thirty years afterwards he
+    finds psychology to be a _spiritual_ science, with principles and
+    objects entirely different from those of physical science.
+
+    "I myself," says Haeckel, "naturally consider the 'youthful sin' of
+    the young physiologist Wundt to be a correct knowledge of nature,
+    and energetically defend it against the antagonistic view of the
+    old philosopher Wundt. This entire change of philosophical
+    principles, which we find in Wundt, as we found it in Kant,
+    Virchow, du Bois-Reymond, Carl Ernst Baer, and others, is very
+    interesting" (p. 36).
+
+So it is: very interesting!
+
+Professor Haeckel is so imbued with biological science that he loses
+his sense of proportion; and his enthusiasm for the work of Darwin
+leads him to attribute to it an exaggerated scope, and enables him to
+eliminate the third of the Kantian trilogy:--
+
+    "Darwin's theory of the natural origin of species at once gave us
+    the solution of the mystic 'problem of creation,' the great
+    'question of all questions'--the problem of the true character and
+    origin of man himself" (p. 28) [_cf._ p. 19 above].
+
+It is a great deal more than that patient observer and deep thinker
+Charles Darwin ever claimed, nor have his wiser disciples claimed it
+for him. It is familiar that he explained how variations once arisen
+would be clinched, if favourable in the struggle, by the action of
+heredity and survival; but the source or origin of the variations
+themselves he did not explain.
+
+Do they arise by guidance or by chance? Is natural selection akin to
+the verified and practical processes of artificial selection? or is it
+wholly alien to them and influenced by chance alone? The latter view
+can hardly be considered a complete explanation, though it is verbally
+the one adopted by Professor Haeckel, and it is of interest to see what
+he means by chance:--
+
+    "Since impartial study of the evolution of the world teaches us
+    that there is no definite aim and no special purpose to be traced
+    in it, there seems to be no alternative but to leave everything to
+    'blind chance.'
+
+    "One group of philosophers affirms, in accordance with its
+    teleological conception, that the whole cosmos is an orderly
+    system, in which every phenomenon has its aim and purpose; there is
+    no such thing as chance. The other group, holding a mechanical
+    theory, expresses itself thus: The development of the universe is a
+    monistic mechanical process, in which we discover no aim or purpose
+    whatever; what we call design in the organic world is a special
+    result of biological agencies; neither in the evolution of the
+    heavenly bodies nor in that of the crust of our earth do we find
+    any trace of a controlling purpose--all is the result of chance.
+    Each party is right--according to its definition of chance. The
+    general law of causality, taken in conjunction with the law of
+    substance, teaches us that every phenomenon has a mechanical cause;
+    in this sense there is no such thing as chance. Yet it is not only
+    lawful, but necessary, to retain the term for the purpose of
+    expressing the simultaneous occurrence of two phenomena, which are
+    not causally related to each other, but of which each has its own
+    mechanical cause, independent of that of the other.
+
+    "Everybody knows that chance, in this monistic sense, plays an
+    important part in the life of man and in the universe at large.
+    That, however, does not prevent us from recognising in each
+    'chance' event, as we do in the evolution of the entire cosmos, the
+    universal sovereignty of nature's supreme law, _the law of
+    substance_" (p. 97).
+
+
+_Illegitimate Negations._
+
+With regard to the possibility of Revelation, or information derived
+from super-human sources, naturally he ridicules the idea; but in
+connection with the mode of origin and development of life on this
+planet he makes the following sensible and noteworthy admission:--
+
+    "It is very probable that these processes have gone on likewise on
+    other planets, and that other planets have produced other types of
+    the higher plants and animals, which are unknown on our earth;
+    perhaps from some higher animal stem, which is superior to the
+    vertebrate in formation, higher beings have arisen who far
+    transcend us earthly men in intelligence."
+
+Exactly; it is quite probable. It is, in fact, improbable that man is
+the highest type of existence. But if Professor Haeckel is ready to
+grant that probability or even possibility, why does he so strenuously
+exclude the idea of revelation, _i.e._, the acquiring of imparted
+information from higher sources? Savages can certainly have
+"revelation" from civilised men. Why, then, should it be inconceivable
+that human beings should receive information from beings in the
+universe higher than themselves? It may or may not be the case that
+they do; but there is no scientific ground for dogmatism on the
+subject, nor any reason for asserting the inconceivability of such a
+thing.
+
+Professor Haeckel would no doubt reply to some of the above criticism
+that he is not only a man of science, but also a philosopher, that he
+is looking ahead, beyond ascertained fact, and that it is his
+philosophic views which are in question rather than his scientific
+statements. To some extent it is both, as has been seen; but if even
+the above be widely known--if it be generally understood that the most
+controversial portions of his work are mainly speculative and
+hypothetical, it can be left to its proper purpose of doing good rather
+than harm. It can only do harm by misleading, it can do considerable
+good by criticising and stimulating and informing; and it is an
+interesting fact that a man so well acquainted with biology as
+Professor Haeckel is should have been so strongly impressed with the
+truth of some aspect of the philosophic system known as Monism. Many
+men of science have likewise been impressed with the probability, or
+possibility, of some such ultimate unification.
+
+The problem to be solved--and an old-world problem indeed it is--is the
+range, and especially the nature, of the connection between mind and
+matter; or, let us say, between the material universe on the one hand,
+and the vital, the mental, the conscious and spiritual universe or
+universes, on the other.
+
+It would be extremely surprising if any attempt yet made had already
+been thoroughly successful, though the attack on the idealistic side
+appears to many of us physicists to be by far the most hopeful line of
+advance. An excessively wide knowledge of existence would seem to be
+demanded for the success of any such most ambitious attempt; but,
+though none of us may hope to achieve it, many may strive to make some
+contribution towards the great end; and those who think they have such
+a contribution to make, or such a revelation entrusted to them, are
+bound to express it to the best of their ability, and leave it to their
+contemporaries and successors to assimilate such portions of it as are
+true, and to develop it further. From this point of view Professor
+Haeckel is no doubt amply justified in his writings; but,
+unfortunately, it appears to me that although he has been borne forward
+on the advancing wave of monistic philosophy, he has, in its
+specification, attempted such precision of materialistic detail, and
+subjected it to so narrow and limited a view of the totality of
+experience, that the progress of thought has left him, as well as his
+great English exemplar, Herbert Spencer, somewhat high and dry, belated
+and stranded by the tide of opinion which has now begun to flow in
+another direction. He is, as it were, a surviving voice from the middle
+of the nineteenth century; he represents, in clear and eloquent
+fashion, opinions which then were prevalent among many leaders of
+thought--opinions which they themselves in many cases, and their
+successors still more, lived to outgrow; so that by this time Professor
+Haeckel's voice is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, not as
+the pioneer or vanguard of an advancing army, but as the despairing
+shout of a standard-bearer, still bold and unflinching, but abandoned
+by the retreating ranks of his comrades as they march to new orders in
+a fresh and more idealistic direction.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+MEMORANDA FOR WOULD-BE MATERIALISTS
+
+
+The objection which it has been found necessary to express concerning
+Materialism as a complete system is based not on its assertions, but on
+its negations. In so far as it makes positive assertions, embodying the
+results of scientific discovery and even of scientific speculation
+based thereupon, there is no fault to find with it; but when, on the
+strength of that, it sets up to be a philosophy of the universe--all
+inclusive, therefore, and shutting out a number of truths otherwise
+perceived, or which appeal to other faculties, or which are equally
+true and are not really contradictory of legitimately materialistic
+statements--then it is that its insufficiency and narrowness have to be
+displayed.
+
+It will be probably instructive, and it may be sufficient, if I show
+that two great leaders in scientific thought (one the greatest of all
+men of science who have yet lived), though well aware of much that
+could be said positively on the materialistic side, and very willing to
+admit or even to extend the province of science or exact knowledge to
+the uttermost, yet were very far from being philosophic Materialists or
+from imagining that other modes of regarding the universe were thereby
+excluded.
+
+Great leaders of thought, in fact, are not accustomed to take a narrow
+view of existence, or to suppose that one mode of regarding it, or one
+set of formulae expressing it, can possibly be sufficient and complete.
+Even a sheet of paper has two sides: a terrestrial globe presents
+different aspects from different points of view; a crystal has a
+variety of facets; and the totality of existence is not likely to be
+more simple than any of these--is not likely to be readily expressible
+in any form of words, or to be thoroughly conceivable by any human
+mind.
+
+It may be well to remember that Sir Isaac Newton was a Theist of the
+most pronounced and thorough conviction, although he had a great deal
+to do with the reduction of the major Cosmos to mechanics, _i.e._ with
+its explanation by the elaborated machinery of simple forces; and he
+conceived it possible that, in the progress of science, this process of
+reduction to mechanics would continue till it embraced nearly all
+phenomena. (See extract below.) That, indeed, has been the effort of
+science ever since, and therein lies the legitimate basis for
+materialistic statements, though not for a materialistic philosophy.
+
+The following sound remarks concerning Newton are taken from Huxley's
+_Hume_, p. 246:--
+
+    "Newton demonstrated all the host of heaven to be but the elements
+    of a vast mechanism, regulated by the same laws as those which
+    express the falling of a stone to the ground. There is a passage in
+    the preface to the first edition of the _Principia_, which shows
+    that Newton was penetrated, as completely as Descartes, with the
+    belief that all the phenomena of nature are expressible in terms of
+    matter and motion:--
+
+    "'WOULD THAT THE REST OF THE PHENOMENA OF NATURE COULD BE DEDUCED
+    BY A LIKE KIND OF REASONING FROM MECHANICAL PRINCIPLES. FOR MANY
+    CIRCUMSTANCES LEAD ME TO SUSPECT THAT ALL THESE PHENOMENA MAY
+    DEPEND UPON CERTAIN FORCES, IN VIRTUE OF WHICH THE PARTICLES OF
+    BODIES, BY CAUSES NOT YET KNOWN, ARE EITHER MUTUALLY IMPELLED
+    AGAINST ONE ANOTHER, AND COHERE INTO REGULAR FIGURES, OR REPEL AND
+    RECEDE FROM ONE ANOTHER; WHICH FORCES BEING UNKNOWN, PHILOSOPHERS
+    HAVE AS YET EXPLORED NATURE IN VAIN. BUT I HOPE THAT, EITHER BY
+    THIS METHOD OF PHILOSOPHISING, OR BY SOME OTHER AND BETTER, THE
+    PRINCIPLES HERE LAID DOWN MAY THROW SOME LIGHT UPON THE MATTER.'"
+
+Here is a full-blown anticipation of an intelligible exposition of the
+Universe in terms of matter and force: the substantial basis of what
+smaller men call materialism and develop into what they consider to be
+a materialistic philosophy. But there is no necessity for anything of
+the kind; a systematic expression of facts in terms of one of their
+aspects does not exclude expression in terms of other and totally
+different aspects also. Denial of all sides but one, is a poor kind of
+unification. Denial of this sort is the weakness and delusion of the
+people who call themselves 'Christian Scientists': they have hold of
+one side of truth--and that should be granted them,--but they hold it
+in so narrow and insecure a fashion that, in self-defence, they think
+it safest strenuously to deny the existence of all other sides. In this
+futile enterprise they are imitating the attitude of the philosophic
+Materialists, on the other side of the controversy.
+
+And then, again, Professor Huxley himself, who is commonly spoken of by
+half-informed people as if he were a philosophic materialist, was
+really nothing of the kind; for although, like Newton, fully imbued
+with the mechanical doctrine, and, of course, far better informed
+concerning the biological departments of Nature and the discoveries
+which have in the last century been made, and though he rightly
+regarded it as his mission to make the scientific point of view clear
+to his benighted contemporaries, and was full of enthusiasm for the
+facts on which materialists take their stand, he saw clearly that these
+alone were insufficient for a philosophy. The following extracts from
+the 'Hume' volume will show, first, that he entirely repudiated
+materialism as a satisfactory or complete scheme of things; and,
+secondly, that he profoundly disagreed with the position which now
+appears to be occupied by Professor Haeckel. Especially is he severe on
+gratuitous denials applied to provinces beyond our scope, saying:--
+
+    "that while it is the summit of human wisdom to learn the limit of
+    our faculties, it may be wise to recollect that we have no more
+    right to make denials, than to put forth affirmatives, about what
+    lies beyond that limit. Whether either mind or matter has a
+    'substance' or not is a problem which we are incompetent to
+    discuss; and it is just as likely that the common notions upon the
+    subject should be correct as any others.... 'The same principles
+    which, at first view, lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain
+    point, bring men back to common sense'" (p. 282).
+
+And on p. 286 he speaks concerning "substance"--that substance which
+constitutes the foundation of Haeckel's philosophy--almost as if he
+were purposely confuting that rather fly-blown production:--
+
+    "Thus, if any man think he has reason to believe that the
+    '_substance_' of matter, to the existence of which no limit can be
+    set either in time or space, is the infinite and eternal substratum
+    of all actual and possible existences, which is the doctrine of
+    philosophical materialism, as I understand it, I have no objection
+    to his holding that doctrine; and I fail to comprehend how it can
+    have the slightest influence upon any ethical or religious views he
+    may please to hold....
+
+    "Moreover, the ultimate forms of existence which we distinguish in
+    our little speck of the universe are, possibly, only two out of
+    infinite varieties of existence, not only analogous to matter and
+    analogous to mind, but of kinds which we are not competent so much
+    as to conceive--in the midst of which, indeed, we might be set
+    down, with no more notion of what was about us, than the worm in a
+    flower-pot, on a London balcony, has of the life of the great city.
+
+    "That which I do very strongly object to is the habit, which a
+    great many non-philosophical materialists unfortunately fall into,
+    of forgetting all these very obvious considerations. They talk as
+    if the proof that the 'substance of matter' was the 'substance' of
+    all things cleared up all the mysteries of existence. In point of
+    fact, it leaves them exactly where they were.... Your religious and
+    ethical difficulties are just as great as mine. The speculative
+    game is drawn--let us get to practical work" (p. 286).
+
+And again on pp. 251 and 279:--
+
+    "It is worth any amount of trouble to ... know by one's own
+    knowledge the great truth ... that the honest and rigorous
+    following up of the argument which leads us to 'materialism'
+    inevitably carries us beyond it" (p. 251).
+
+    "To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all
+    its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley
+    replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to us
+    only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived or
+    known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart from a
+    thinking mind, is a contradiction in terms.
+
+    "I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. And, therefore, if
+    I were obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute
+    idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative"
+    (p. 279).
+
+Let the jubilant but uninstructed and comparatively ignorant amateur
+materialist therefore beware, and bethink himself twice or even thrice
+before he conceives that he understands the universe and is competent
+to pour scorn upon the intuitions and perceptions of great men in what
+may be to him alien regions of thought and experience.
+
+Let him explain, if he can, what he means by his own identity, or the
+identity of any thinking or living being, which at different times
+consists of a totally different set of material particles. Something
+there clearly is which confers personal identity and constitutes an
+individual: it is a property characteristic of every form of life,
+even the humblest; but it is not yet explained or understood, and it
+is no answer to assert gratuitously that there is some fundamental
+"substance" or material basis on which that identity depends, any more
+than it is an explanation to say that it depends upon a "soul." These
+are all forms of words. As Hume says, quoted by Huxley with approval in
+the work already cited, p. 194:--
+
+    "It is impossible to attach any definite meaning to the word
+    'substance,' when employed for the hypothetical substratum of soul
+    and matter.... If it be said that our personal identity requires
+    the assumption of a substance which remains the same while the
+    accidents of perception shift and change, the question arises what
+    is meant by personal identity?... A plant or an animal, in the
+    course of its existence, from the condition of an egg or seed to
+    the end of life, remains the same neither in form, nor in
+    structure, nor in the matter of which it is composed: every
+    attribute it possesses is constantly changing, and yet we say that
+    it is always one and the same individual" (p. 194).
+
+And in his own preface to the 'Hume' volume Huxley expresses himself
+forcibly thus,--equally antagonistic as was his wont to both ostensible
+friend and ostensible foe, as soon as they got off what he considered
+the straight path:--
+
+    "That which it may be well for us not to forget is, that the
+    first-recorded judicial murder of a scientific thinker [Socrates]
+    was compassed and effected, not by a despot, nor by priests, but
+    was brought about by eloquent demagogues.... Clear knowledge of
+    what one does not know just as important as knowing what one does
+    know....
+
+    "The development of exact natural knowledge in all its vast range,
+    from physics to history and criticism, is the consequence of the
+    working out, in this province, of the resolution to 'take nothing
+    for truth without clear knowledge that it is such'; to consider all
+    beliefs open to criticism; to regard the value of authority as
+    neither greater nor less, than as much as it can prove itself to be
+    worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit 'which always denies,'
+    delighting only in destruction; still less is it that which builds
+    castles in the air rather than not construct; it is that spirit
+    which works and will work 'without haste and without rest,'
+    gathering harvest after harvest of truth into its barns, and
+    devouring error with unquenchable fire" (p. viii.).
+
+The harvesting of truth is a safe enough enterprise, but the devouring
+of error is a more dangerous pastime, since flames are liable to spread
+beyond our control; and though, in a world overgrown with weeds and
+refuse, the cleansing influence of fire is a necessity, it would be
+cruel to apply the same agency again at a later stage, when a fresh
+young crop is springing up in the cleared ground.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+The aphorism sometimes encountered, that "whatever properties appertain
+to a whole must essentially belong to the parts of which it is
+composed," is a fallacy. A property can be possessed by an aggregation
+of atoms which no atom possesses in the slightest degree. Those who
+think otherwise are unacquainted with mathematical laws other than
+simple proportion or some continuous or additive functions; they are
+not aware of discontinuities; they are not experienced in critical
+values, above which certain conditions obtain, while below them there
+is suddenly nothing. To refute them an instance must suffice:--
+
+A meteoric stone may seem to differ from a planet only in size, but the
+difference in size involves also many other differences, notably the
+fact that the larger body can attract and hold to itself an
+atmosphere--a circumstance of the utmost importance to the existence of
+life on its surface. In order, however, that a planet may by
+gravitative attraction control the roving atoms of gas, and confine
+their excursions to within a certain range of itself, it must have a
+very considerable mass.
+
+The earth is big enough to do it; the moon is not. By simply piling
+atoms or stones together into a mighty mass there comes a critical
+point at which an atmosphere becomes possible; and directly an
+atmosphere exists, all manner of phenomena may spring into existence,
+which without it were quite impossible.
+
+So, also, it may be said that a sun differs from a dark planet only in
+size; for it is just the fact of great size which enables its
+gravitative-shrinkage and earthquake-subsidence to generate an immense
+quantity of heat and to maintain the mass for aeons at an excessively
+high temperature, thereby fitting it to become the centre of light and
+life to a number of worlds. The blaze of the sun is a property which is
+the outcome of its great mass. A small permanent sun is an
+impossibility.
+
+Wherefore, properties can be possessed by an aggregate or assemblage of
+particles which in the particles themselves did not in the slightest
+degree exist.
+
+If, however, we reverse the aphorism and say that whatever is in a part
+must be in the whole, we are on much safer ground. I do not say that it
+cannot be pressed into illegitimate extremes, but in one and that the
+simplest sense it is little better than a platitude. The fact that an
+apple has pips legitimises the assertion that an apple-tree has pips,
+and that the peculiar property of pips represents a faculty enjoyed by
+the vegetable kingdom as a whole; but it would be a childish
+misunderstanding to expect to find actual pips in the trunk of a tree
+or in all vegetables.
+
+There is a tendency to call the argument or statement that whatever
+faculty man possesses the Deity must have also; by the name
+Anthropomorphism; but it seems to me a misnomer, and to convey quite
+wrong ideas. The argument represented by "He that formed the eye, shall
+he not see? he that planted the ear, shall he not hear?" need not
+assume for a moment that God has sense organs akin to those of man, or
+that He appreciates ethereal and aerial vibrations in the same sort of
+way. It is not an assertion of similarity between God and man, but
+merely a realisation that what belongs to a part _must_ be contained in
+the whole. It is not even necessarily pantheistic: it would hold
+equally well on a Theistic interpretation. Regarded pantheistically it
+is obvious and requires no stating: regarded Theistically, it is a
+perception that faculties and powers which have come into existence,
+and are actually at work in the universe, cannot have arisen without
+the knowledge and sympathy and full understanding of the Sustainer and
+Comprehender of it all. Nor can functions be expected in the creature
+which transcend the power of the Creator.
+
+All our faculties, sensations, and emotions must therefore be
+understood, and in a sense possessed, in some transcendental and to us
+unimaginable form, by the Deity.
+
+I know that it is possible to deny His existence, just as it is
+possible to deny the existence of an external world or to maintain that
+reality is limited to our sensations. If the Deity has a sense of
+humour, as undoubtedly He has, He must be amused at the remarkable
+philosophising faculty recently developed by the creature which on this
+planet has become most vigorously selfconscious and is in the early
+stages of progress towards higher things--a philosophising faculty so
+acute as to lead him to mistrust and throw away information conveyed to
+him by the very instruments which have enabled him to become what he
+is; so that having become keenly alive to the truth that all we are
+directly aware of is the fruit of our own sensations and consciousness,
+he proceeds to the grotesque supposition that these sensations and
+consciousness may be all that really exists, and that the information
+which for ages our senses have conveyed to us concerning external
+things may be illusory, not only in form and detail and appearance, but
+in substantial fact.
+
+He must be pleased, also, with the enterprise of those eager
+philosophers who are so strenuously impressed with the truth of some
+ultimate monistic unification, as to be unwilling to concede the
+multifariousness of existence--who decline to speak of mind and matter,
+or of body and spirit, or of God and the world, as in any sense
+separate entities--who stigmatise as dualistic anything which does not
+manifestly and consciously strain after an ultimate monistic view--and
+who then, as a climax, on the strength of a few years' superficial
+experience on a planet, by the aid of the sense organs which they
+themselves perceive to be illusory whenever the actual reality of
+things is in contemplation, proceed to develop the theory that the
+whole has come into being without direct intelligence and apart from
+spiritual guidance, that it is managed so well (or so ill) that it is
+really not managed at all, that no Deity exists, and that it is absurd
+to postulate the existence of a comprehensive and all-inclusive guiding
+Mind.
+
+To be able to perceive comprehensively and state fully not only what
+is, but also what is not, is a wonderful achievement. I do not think
+that such a power has yet been acquired by any of the sons of men; nor
+will the semi-educated readers of this country be wise if they pin
+their faith and build their hopes on the utterances of any man, however
+eminent, who makes this superhuman claim.
+
+Now, in all charity, it must be admitted that in some passages
+Professor Haeckel puts himself under the ban implied by the above
+paragraph, inasmuch as he conducts a sort of free and easy attack on
+religion, especially on what he conceives to be the fundamental
+doctrines of Christianity. But, after all, it can be perceived that his
+attack, so far as it is really an attack on religion, is evidently
+inspired by his mistrust and dislike, and to some extent fear, of
+Ecclesiasticism, especially of the Ultramontane movement in Germany,
+against which he says Prince Bismarck began a struggle in 1872. It is
+this kind of semi-political religion that he is really attacking, more
+than the pure essence of Christianity itself. He regards it as a
+bigoted system hostile to knowledge--which, if true, would amply
+justify an attack--and he says on page 118:--
+
+    "The great struggle between modern science and orthodox
+    Christianity has become more threatening; it has grown more
+    dangerous for science in proportion as Christianity has found
+    support in an increasing mental and political reaction."
+
+This may seem an exaggerated fear; but the following extract from a
+Pastoral address by the Bishop of Newport, which accidentally I saw
+reported in _The Tablet_, shows that the danger is not wholly
+imaginary, if unwise opinions are pressed to their logical practical
+issue:--
+
+    "If the formulas of modern science contradict the science of
+    Catholic dogma, it is the former that must be altered, not the
+    latter."[2]
+
+      [2] In case it is unfair to wrench a sentence like this from its
+      context, I quote the larger portion of that instructive report in
+      this note:--
+
+          _Extract from "The Tablet," Aug. 27th, 1904--An Address
+          by the Bishop of Newport._
+
+          "If the Abbe Loisy has followers within the Church, as we are
+          informed he has, it cannot be doubted that the danger for
+          Catholics is by no means imaginary. For Loisy teaches that
+          the dogmatic definitions of the Church [on the Incarnation],
+          although the best that could be given at the time and under
+          the circumstances, are only a most inadequate expression of
+          the real truth, which they represent merely relatively and
+          imperfectly. These definitions, he says, should now be stated
+          afresh, because the traditional formula no longer corresponds
+          to the way in which the mystery is regarded by contemporary
+          thought. In his view, our present knowledge of the universe
+          should suggest to the Church a new examination of the dogma
+          of Creation; our knowledge of history should make her revise
+          her ideas of revelation; and our progress in psychology and
+          moral philosophy should suggest to her to re-state her
+          theology of the Incarnation. Every one can see that there is
+          a grain of truth in this kind of talk. But it is, on the
+          whole, a pestilent and dangerous heresy. If the formulas of
+          modern science contradict the science of Catholic dogma, it
+          is the former that must be altered, not the latter. If modern
+          metaphysics are incompatible with the metaphysical terms and
+          expressions adopted by councils and explained by the Catholic
+          schools, then modern metaphysics must be rejected as
+          erroneous. The Church does not change her Christian
+          philosophy to suit the world's speculations; she teaches the
+          world, by her theological definitions, what true and sound
+          philosophy is. Whilst every effort should be made by Catholic
+          apologists to smooth the way for a genuine understanding of
+          the Church's dogmatic terminology, two things must never be
+          lost sight of, first, that this terminology expresses real
+          objective truth (however inadequate the expression may be to
+          the full meaning, as God sees it, of any given mystery); and,
+          secondly, that such truth is expressed in terms of sound
+          philosophy which will not be given up, and which may be
+          called the Christian philosophy."
+
+Professor Haeckel continues his criticism of Official Christianity in
+the following vein:--
+
+    "The so-called 'Peace between Church and State' is never more than
+    a suspension of hostilities. The modern Papacy, true to the
+    despotic principles it has followed for the last 1600 years, is
+    determined to wield sole dominion over the credulous souls of men;
+    it must demand the absolute submission of the cultured State,
+    which, as such, defends the rights of reason and science. True and
+    enduring peace there cannot be until one of the combatants lies
+    powerless on the ground. Either the Church wins, and then farewell
+    to all 'free science and free teaching'--then are our universities
+    no better than gaols, and our colleges become cloistral schools; or
+    else the modern rational State proves victorious--then, in the
+    twentieth century, human culture, freedom, and prosperity will
+    continue their progressive development until they far surpass even
+    the height of the nineteenth century.
+
+    "In order to compass these high aims, it is of the first importance
+    that modern science not only shatter the false structures of
+    superstition and sweep their ruins from the path, but that it also
+    erect a new abode for human emotion on the ground it has cleared--a
+    'palace of reason,' in which, under the influence of our new
+    monistic views, we do reverence to the real trinity of the
+    nineteenth century--the trinity of 'the true, the good, and the
+    beautiful'" (p. 119).
+
+These are the bases of religion, adopted from Goethe, which in
+Haeckel's view should entirely replace what he calls the Trinity of
+Kant, viz., God, Freedom, and Immortality--three ideas which he regards
+as mere superstition or as so enveloped in superstition as to be
+worthless.
+
+Occasionally, however, he attacks not solely ecclesiastical
+Christianity--in which enterprise he is entirely within his
+rights,--but he goes further and abuses some of its more primitive
+forms, and to some extent its practical fruits also. For instance:--
+
+    "Primitive Christianity preached the worthlessness of earthly life,
+    regarding it merely as a preparation for an eternal life beyond.
+    Hence it immediately followed that all we find in the life of a man
+    here below, all that is beautiful in art and science, in public and
+    in private life, is of no real value. The true Christian must avert
+    his eyes from them; he must think only of a worthy preparation for
+    the life beyond. Contempt of nature, aversion from all its
+    inexhaustible charms, rejection of every kind of fine art, are
+    Christian duties; and they are carried out to perfection when a man
+    separates himself from his fellows, chastises his body, and spends
+    all his time in prayers in the cloister or the hermit's cell.... A
+    Christian art is a contradiction in terms" (p. 120).
+
+I think it may without offence be said that if he means by "Primitive
+Christianity" the teachings of Christ, he is mistaken, and has
+something to learn as to what those teachings really were. If he means
+the times of persecution under the Roman empire, he could hardly expect
+much concentration on artistic pursuits or much enjoyment of
+terrestrial existence when it was liable to be violently extinguished
+at any moment: sufficient that the early Church survived its struggle
+for existence. But if he is referring to mediaeval Christianity, of any
+other than a debased kind,--common knowledge concerning mediaeval art
+and architecture sufficiently rebuts the indictment. So much so, that
+one may almost wonder if by chance he happened to be thinking of
+"Mohammedanism" rather than of Christianity.
+
+But he continues, in a more practical and observant vein:--
+
+    "Christianity has no place for that well-known love of animals,
+    that sympathy with the nearly-related and friendly mammals (dogs,
+    horses, cattle, etc.) which is urged in the ethical teaching of
+    many of the older religions, especially Buddhism. (Unfortunately,
+    Descartes gave some support to the error in teaching that man only
+    has a sensitive soul, not the animal.) Whoever has spent much time
+    in the south of Europe must have often witnessed those frightful
+    sufferings of animals which fill us friends of animals with the
+    deepest sympathy and indignation. And when one expostulates with
+    these brutal 'Christians' on their cruelty, the only answer is,
+    with a laugh: 'But the beasts are not Christians'" (p. 126).
+
+This, if true, and I have heard it from other sources, does constitute
+rather a serious indictment against the form of practical Christianity
+understood by the ignorant classes among the Latin races.
+
+To return, however, to the concluding paragraph of the extract quoted
+above (on page 81) from his page 119:--
+
+No one can have any objection to raise against the dignity and
+worthiness of the three great attributes which excite Professor
+Haeckel's, as they excited Goethe's, worship and admiration, viz., the
+three "goddesses," as he calls them: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; but
+there is no necessary competition or antagonism between these and the
+other three great conceptions which aroused the veneration of Kant:
+God, Freedom, and Immortality; nor does the upholding of the one triad
+mean the overthrow of the other: they may be all co-eternal together
+and co-equal. Nor are either of these triplets inconsistent with some
+reasonable view of what may be meant by the Christian Trinity. The
+total possibility of existence is so vast that no simple formula, nor
+indeed any form of words, however complex, is likely to be able to sum
+it up and express its essence to the exclusion of all other modes of
+expression. It is a pity, therefore, that Professor Haeckel should
+think it necessary to decry one set of ideas in order to support
+another set. There is room for all in this large universe--room for
+everything, except downright lies and falseness.
+
+Concerning Truth there is no need to speak: it cannot but be the breath
+of the nostrils of every genuine scientific man; but his ideas of truth
+should be large enough to take into account possibilities far beyond
+anything of which he is at present sure, and he should be careful to be
+undogmatic and docile in regions of which at present he has not the
+key.
+
+The meaning of Goodness, the whole domain of ethics, and the higher
+possibilities of sainthood of which the human spirit has shown itself
+capable, are at present outside his domain; and if a man of science
+seeks to dogmatise concerning the emotions and the will, and asserts
+that he can reduce them to atomic forces and motions, because he has
+learnt to recognise the undoubted truth that atomic forces and motions
+must accompany them and constitute the machinery of their manifestation
+here and now,--he is exhibiting the smallness of his conceptions and
+gibbeting himself as a laughing-stock to future generations.
+
+The atmosphere and full meaning of Beauty also he can only dimly grasp.
+If he seeks to explain it in terms of sexual selection, or any other
+small conception which he has recently been able to form in connection
+with vital procedure on this planet, he is explaining nothing: he is
+merely showing how the perception of beauty may operate in certain
+cases; but the inner nature of beauty and the faculty by which it is
+perceived are utterly beyond him. He cannot but feel that the
+unconscious and unobtrusive beauty of field and hedgerow must have
+originated in obedience to some primal instinct or in fulfilment of
+some immanent desire, some lofty need quite other than anything he
+recognises as human.
+
+And if a poet witnessing the colours of a sunset, for instance, or the
+profusion of beauty with which snow mountains seem to fling themselves
+to the heavens in districts unpeopled and in epochs long before human
+consciousness awoke upon the earth: if such a seer feels the revelation
+weigh upon his spirit with an almost sickening pressure, and is
+constrained to ascribe this wealth and prodigality of beauty to the joy
+of the Eternal Being in His own existence, to an anticipation as it
+were of the developments which lie before the universe in which He is
+at work, and which He is slowly tending towards an unimaginable
+perfection--it behooves the man of science to put his hand upon his
+mouth, lest in his efforts to be true, in the absence of knowledge, he
+find himself uttering, in his ignorance, words of lamentable folly or
+blasphemy.
+
+
+_Man and Nature._
+
+Consider our own position--it is surely worth considering. We are
+a part of this planet; on one side certainly and distinctly a part
+ of this material world, a part which has become self-conscious. At
+first we were a part which had become alive; a tremendous step
+that--introducing a number of powers and privileges which previously
+had been impossible, but that step introduced no responsibility; we
+were no longer, indeed, urged by mere pressure from behind, we were
+guided by our instincts and appetites, but we still obeyed the
+strongest external motive, almost like electro-magnetic automata. Now,
+however, we have become conscious, able to look before and after, to
+learn consciously from the past, to strive strenuously towards the
+future; we have acquired a knowledge of good and evil, we can choose
+the one and reject the other, and are thus burdened with a sense of
+responsibility for our acts. We still obey the strongest motive
+doubtless, but there is something in ourselves which makes it a motive
+and regulates its strength. We _can_ drift like other animals, and
+often do; but we can also obey our own volition.
+
+I would not deny the rudiments of self-consciousness, and some of what
+it implies, to certain domestic animals, notably the dog; but
+domestication itself is a result of humanity, and undoubtedly the
+attributes we are discussing are chiefly and almost solely human, they
+can hardly be detected in wild nature. No other animal can have a full
+perception of its own individuality and personality as separate from
+the rest of existence. Such ideas do not occur in the early periods of
+even human infancy: they are a later growth. Self-consciousness must
+have become prominent at a certain stage in the evolutionary process.
+
+How it all arose is a legitimate problem for genetic psychology, but to
+the plain man it is a puzzle; our ancestors invented legends to account
+for it--legends of apples and serpents and the like; but the fact is
+there, however it be accounted for. The truth embedded in that old
+Genesis legend is deep; it is the legend of man's awakening from a
+merely animal life to consciousness of good and evil, no longer obeying
+his primal instincts in a state of thoughtlessness and innocency--a
+state in which deliberate vice was impossible and therefore higher and
+purposed goodness also impossible,--it was the introduction of a new
+sense into the world, the sense of conscience, the power of deliberate
+choice; the power also of conscious guidance, the management of things
+and people external to himself, for preconceived ends. Man was
+beginning to cease to be merely a passenger on the planet, controlled
+by outside forces; it is as if the reins were then for the first time
+being placed in his hands, as if he was allowed to begin to steer, to
+govern his own fate and destiny, and to take over some considerable
+part of the management of the world.
+
+The process of handing over the reins to us is still going on. The
+education of the human race is a long process, and we are not yet fit
+to be fully trusted with the steering gear; but the words of the old
+serpent were true enough: once open our eyes to the perception and
+discrimination of good and evil, once become conscious of freedom of
+choice, and sooner or later we must inevitably acquire some of the
+power and responsibility of gods. A fall it might seem, just as a
+vicious man sometimes seems degraded below the beasts, but in promise
+and potency a rise it really was.
+
+The oneness between ourselves and Nature is not a thing to be deplored;
+it is a thing to rejoice at, when properly conceived. It awakens a kind
+of religious enthusiasm even in Haeckel, who clearly perceives but a
+limited aspect of it; yet the perception is vivid enough to cause him,
+this so-called Atheist, to close his _Confession of Faith_ with words
+such as these:--
+
+    "Now, at last, it is given to the mightily advancing human mind to
+    have its eyes opened; it is given to it to show that a true
+    knowledge of nature affords full satisfaction and inexhaustible
+    nourishment not only for its searching understanding, but also for
+    its yearning spirit.
+
+    "Knowledge of the true, training for the good, pursuit of the
+    beautiful: these are the three great departments of our monism; by
+    the harmonious and consistent cultivation of these we effect at
+    last the truly beatific union of religion and science, so painfully
+    longed after by so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the
+    Good, these are the three august Divine Ones before which we bow
+    the knee in adoration....
+
+    "In the hope that free research and free teaching may always
+    continue, I conclude my monistic _Confession of Faith_ with the
+    words: 'May God, the Spirit of the Good, the Beautiful, and the
+    True, be with us.'"
+
+This is clearly the utterance of a man to whose type I unconsciously
+referred in an article written two years ago (_Hibbert Journal_,
+January 1903), from which I now make the following appropriate
+extract:--
+
+Looking at the loom of nature, the feeling not of despair, but of what
+has been called atheism, one ingredient of atheism, has arisen: atheism
+never fully realised, and wrongly so called--recently it has been
+called severe Theism, indeed; for it is joyful sometimes, interested
+and placid always, exultant at the strange splendour of the spectacle
+which its intellect has laid bare to contemplation, satisfied with the
+perfection of the mechanism, content to be a part of the self-generated
+organism, and endeavouring to think that the feelings of duty, of
+earnest effort, and of faithful service, which conspicuously persist in
+spite of all discouragement, are on this view intelligible as well as
+instinctive, and sure that nothing less than unrepining unfaltering
+unswerving acquiescence is worthy of our dignity as man.
+
+The above 'Confession of Faith,' then, is very well; for the man
+himself very well indeed, but it is not enough for the race. Other
+parts of Haeckel's writings show that it is not enough, and that his
+conception of what he means by Godhead is narrow and limited to an
+extent at which instinct, reason, and experience alike rebel. No one
+can be satisfied with conceptions below the highest which to him are
+possible: I doubt if it is given to man to think out a clear and
+consistent system higher and nobler than the real truth. Our highest
+thoughts are likely to be nearest to reality: they must be stages in
+the direction of truth, else they could not have come to us and been
+recognised as highest. So, also, with our longings and aspirations
+towards ultimate perfection, those desires which we recognise as our
+noblest and best: surely they must have some correspondence with the
+facts of existence, else had they been unattainable by us. Reality is
+not to be surpassed, except locally and temporarily, by the ideals of
+knowledge and goodness invented by a fraction of itself; and if we
+could grasp the entire scheme of things, so far from wishing to
+
+            "shatter it to bits and then
+    Remould it nearer to the heart's desire,"
+
+we should hail it as better and more satisfying than any of our random
+imaginings. The universe is in no way limited to our conceptions: it
+has a reality apart from them; nevertheless, they themselves constitute
+a part of it, and can only take a clear and consistent character in so
+far as they correspond with something true and real. Whatever we can
+clearly and consistently conceive, that is _ipso facto_ in a sense
+already existent in the universe as a whole; and that, or something
+better, we shall find to be a dim foreshadowing of a higher reality.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+EXPLANATORY NOTE ON CONSTRUCTIVE THOUGHT AND OPTIMISM.
+
+(_Partly reprinted from "Mind."_)
+
+It may be worth while to explain how it is that, to a physicist
+unsmitten with any taint of solipsism, a well-elaborated scheme which
+is consistent with already known facts necessarily seems to correspond,
+or have close affinity, with the truth. It is the result of experience
+of a mathematical theorem concerning unique distributions. For
+instance, it can be shown that in an electric field, however
+complicated, any distribution of potential which satisfies boundary
+conditions, and one or two other essential criteria, must be the actual
+distribution; for it has been rigorously proved that there cannot be
+two or more distributions which satisfy those conditions, hence if one
+is arrived at theoretically, or intuitively, or by any means, it must
+be the correct one; and no further proof is required.
+
+So, also, in connection with analogies and working models: although
+they must necessarily be imperfect, so long as they are only analogies,
+yet the making or imagining of models (not necessarily or usually a
+material model, but a conceptual model) is a recognised way of arriving
+at an understanding of recondite and ultra-sensual processes, occurring
+say in the ether or elsewhere. As an addition to evidence derived from
+such experiments as have been found possible, and as a supplement to
+the experience out of which, as out of a nucleus, every conception must
+grow, the mind is set to design and invent a self-coherent scheme which
+shall imitate as far as possible the results exhibited by nature. By
+then using this as a working hypothesis, and pressing it into extremes,
+it can be gradually amended until it shows no sign of discordance or
+failure anywhere, and even serves as a guide to new and previously
+unsuspected phenomena. When that stage is reached, it is provisionally
+accepted and tentatively held as a step in the direction of the truth;
+though the mind is always kept ready to improve and modify and enlarge
+it, in accordance with the needs of more thorough investigation and
+fresh discovery. It was so, for instance, with Maxwell's
+electromagnetic theory of light; and there are a multitude of other
+instances.
+
+In the transcendental or ultra-mundane or supersensual region there is
+the further difficulty to be encountered, that we are not acquainted
+with anything like all the 'boundary conditions,' so to speak; we only
+know our little bit of the boundary, and we may err egregiously in
+inferring or attempting to infer the remainder. We may even make a
+mistake as to the form of function adapted to the case. Nevertheless
+there is no better clue, and the human mind is impelled to do the best
+it can with the confessedly imperfect data which it finds at its
+disposal. The result, therefore, in this region, is no system of
+definite and certain truth, as in Physics, but is either suspense of
+judgment altogether, or else a tentative scheme or working hypothesis,
+to be held undogmatically, in an attitude of constant receptiveness for
+further light, and in full readiness for modification in the direction
+of the truth.
+
+So far concerning the ascertainment of truth alone, in intangible
+regions of inquiry. The further hypothesis that such truth when found
+will be most satisfactory, or in other words higher and better than any
+alternative plan,--the conviction that faith in the exceeding grandeur
+of reality shall not be confounded,--requires further justification;
+and its grounds are not so easy to formulate. Perhaps the feeling is
+merely human and instinctive; but it is existent and customary I
+believe among physicists, possibly among men of Science in general,
+though I cannot speak for all; and it must be based upon familiarity
+with a mass of experience in which, after long groping and guess-work,
+the truth has ultimately been discovered, and been recognised as 'very
+good.' It is illustrated, for instance, by the words in which Tyndall
+closes the first edition of his book on Sound, wherein, after
+explaining Helmholtz's brilliant theory of Corti's organ and the
+musical mechanism of the ear,--a theory which, amid the difficulties of
+actual observation, was necessarily at first saturated with hypothesis,
+and is not even yet fully verified,--he says:--
+
+    "Within the ears of men, and without their knowledge or
+    contrivance, this lute of 3000 strings has existed for ages,
+    accepting the music of the outer world, and rendering it fit for
+    reception by the brain.... I do not ask you to consider these views
+    as established, but only as probable. They present the phenomena in
+    a connected and intelligible form; and should they be doomed to
+    displacement by a more correct or comprehensive theory, it will
+    assuredly be found that the wonder is not diminished by the
+    substitution of the truth."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MIND AND MATTER
+
+
+What, then, is the probable essence of truth in Professor Haeckel's
+philosophy? for it is not to be supposed that the speculations of an
+eminent man are baseless, or that he has been led to his view of what
+he conceives to be the truth by some wholly erroneous path; his
+intuitive convictions are to be respected, for they are based on a far
+wider experience and knowledge of fact than is given to the average
+man; and for the average man to consider it likely that there is no
+foundation whatever for the life convictions of a great specialist is
+as foolish as to suppose it probable that they are certain and
+infallible, or that they are uncritically to be accepted even in
+regions beyond those over which his jurisdiction extends.
+
+First as to the "law of substance," by which he sets so much store; the
+fact which he is really, though indistinctly, trying to emphasise, is
+what I have preferred to formulate as "the persistence of the really
+existent," see page 34; and, with that modification, we can agree with
+Haeckel, or with what I take to be his inner meaning, to some extent.
+We may all fairly agree, I think, that whatever really and fundamentally
+_exists_ must, so far as bare existence is concerned, be independent of
+time. It may go through many changes, and thus have a history; that is
+to say, must have definite time-relations, so far as its changes are
+concerned; but it can hardly be thought of as either going out of
+existence, or as coming into existence, at any given period, though it
+may completely change its form and accidents; everything basal must
+have a past and a future of some kind or other, though any special
+concatenation or arrangement may have a date of origin and of
+destruction.
+
+A crowd, for instance, is of this fugitive character: it assembles and
+it disperses, its existence as a crowd is over, but its constituent
+elements persist; and the same can be said of a planet or a sun. Yet
+for some "soul" or underlying reality even in these temporary
+accretions there is permanence of a sort:--Tyndall's "streak of morning
+cloud," though it may have "melted into infinite azure," has not
+thereby become non-existent, although as a visible object it has
+disappeared from our ken and become a memory only. It is true that it
+was a mere aggregate or accidental agglomeration--it had developed no
+self-consciousness, nothing that could be called personality or
+identity characterised it,--and so no individual persistence is to be
+expected for it; yet even it--low down in the scale of being as it
+is--even it has rejoined the general body of aqueous vapour whence,
+through the incarnating influence of night, it arose. The thing that
+_is_, both _was_ and _shall be_, and whatever does not satisfy this
+condition must be an accidental or fugitive or essentially temporary
+conglomeration or assemblage, and not one of the fundamental entities
+of the universe. It is interesting to remember that this was one of the
+opinions strongly held by the late Professor Tait, who considered that
+persistence or conservation was the test or criterion of real
+existence.
+
+The question, How many fundamental entities in this sense there are,
+and what they are, is a difficult one. Many people, including such
+opposite thinkers as Tait and Haeckel, would say "matter" and "energy";
+though Haeckel chooses, on his own account, to add that these two are
+one. (Perhaps Professor Ostwald would agree with him there; though to
+me the meaning is vague.) Physical science, pushed to the last resort,
+would probably reply that, within its sphere of knowledge at the
+present stage, the fundamental entities are _ether_ and _motion_; and
+that of other things at present it knows next to nothing. If physical
+science is interrogated as to the probable persistence, _i.e._, the
+fundamental existence, of "life" or of "mind," it ought to reply that
+it does not know; if asked about "personality," or "souls," or
+"God,"--about all of which Professor Haeckel has fully-fledged
+opinions--it would have to ask for a definition of the terms, and would
+speak either not at all or with bated breath concerning them.
+
+The possibility that "life" may be a real and basal form of existence,
+and therefore persistent, is a possibility to be borne in mind. It may
+at least serve as a clue to investigation, and some day may bear fruit;
+at present it is no better than a working hypothesis. It is one that on
+the whole commends itself to me; for I conceive that though we only
+know of it as a function of terrestrial matter, yet that it has another
+aspect too, and I say this because I see it arriving and
+leaving--animating matter for a time and then quitting it, just as I
+see dew appearing and disappearing on a plate. Apart from a solid
+surface, dew cannot exist as such; and to a savage it might seem to
+spring into and to go out of existence--to be an exudation from the
+solid, and dependent wholly upon it; but we happen to know more about
+it: we know that it has a permanent and continuous existence in an
+imperceptible, intangible, supersensual form, though its visible
+manifestation in the form of mist or dew is temporary and evanescent.
+Perhaps it is permissible to trace in that elementary phenomenon some
+superficial analogy to an incarnation.
+
+The fact concerning life which lies at the root of Professor Haeckel's
+doctrine about its origin, is that living beings have undoubtedly made
+their appearance on this planet, where at one time they cannot be
+suspected of having existed. Consequently that whatever life may be, it
+is something which can begin to interact with the atoms of terrestrial
+matter, at some period, or state of aggregation, or other condition of
+elaboration,--a condition which may perhaps be rather definite, if only
+we were aware of what it was. But that undoubted fact is quite
+consistent with any view as to the nature of "life," and even with any
+view as to the mode of its terrestrial commencement; there is nothing
+in that to say that it is a function of matter alone, any more than the
+wind is a function of the leaves which dance under its influence; there
+is nothing even to contradict the notion that it sprang into existence
+suddenly at a literal word of command. The improbability or absurdity
+of such a conception as this last, except in the symbolism of poetry,
+is extreme, and it is unthinkable by any educated person; but its
+improbability depends upon other considerations than biologic ones, and
+it is as repugnant to an enlightened Theology as to any other science.
+
+The mode in which biological speculation as to the probable development
+of living out of dead matter, and the general relation of protoplasm to
+physics and chemistry, can be surmised or provisionally granted,
+without thereby concurring in any destructive criticism of other facts
+and experiences, is explained in Chapter X. on "Life," further on: and
+there I emphasise my agreement with parts of the speculative
+contentions of Professor Haeckel on the positive side.
+
+
+_Soul and Body._
+
+Let us consider what are the facts scientifically known concerning the
+interaction between mind and matter. Fundamentally they amount to this:
+that a complex piece of matter, called the brain, is the organ or
+instrument of mind and consciousness; that if it be stimulated mental
+activity results; that if it be injured or destroyed no manifestation
+of mental activity is possible. Moreover, it is assumed, and need not
+be doubted, that a portion of brain substance is consumed, oxidised let
+us say, in every act of mentation: using that term in the vaguest and
+most general sense, and including in it unconscious as well as
+conscious operations.
+
+Suppose we grant all this, what then? We have granted that brain is the
+means whereby mind is made manifest on this material plane, it is the
+instrument through which alone we know it, but we have not granted that
+mind is _limited_ to its material manifestation; nor can we maintain
+that without matter the things we call mind, intelligence, consciousness,
+have no sort of existence. Mind may be incorporate or incarnate in
+matter, but it may also transcend it; it is through the region of ideas
+and the intervention of mind that we have become aware of the existence
+of matter. It is injudicious to discard our primary and fundamental
+_awareness_ for what is after all an instinctive inference or
+interpretation of certain sensations.
+
+The realities underlying those sensations are only known to us by
+inference, but they have an independent existence: in their inmost
+nature they may be quite other than what they seem, and are in no way
+dependent upon our perception of them. So, also, our actual personality
+may be something considerably unlike that conception of it which is
+based on our present terrestrial consciousness--a form of consciousness
+suited to, and developed by, our temporary existence here, but not
+necessarily more than a fraction of our total self.
+
+Take an analogy: the eye is the organ of vision; by it we perceive
+light. Stimulate the retina in any way, and we are conscious of the
+sensation of light; injure or destroy the eye, and vision becomes
+imperfect or impossible. If eyes did not exist we should probably know
+nothing about light, and we might be tempted to say that light did not
+exist. In a sense, to a blind race, light would not exist--that is to
+say, there would be no sensation of light, there would be no sight; but
+the underlying physical cause of that sensation--the ripples in the
+ether--would be there all the time. And it is these ethereal ripples
+which a physicist understands by the term "light." It is quite
+conceivable that a race of blind physicists would be able to devise
+experimental means whereby they could make experiments on what to us is
+luminous radiation, just as we now make experiments on electric waves,
+for which we have no sense organ. It would be absurd for a psychologist
+to inform them that light did not exist because sight did not. The
+_term_ might have to be reconsidered and redefined; indeed, most
+likely a polysyllabic term would be employed, as is unfortunately usual
+when a thing of which the race in general has no intimate knowledge
+requires nomenclature. But the thing would be there, though its mode of
+manifestation would be different; a term like "vision" might still be
+employed, to signify our mode of perceiving and experiencing the agency
+which now manifests itself to us through our eyes; and plants might
+grow by the aid of that agency just as they do now.
+
+So, also, brain is truly the organ of mind and consciousness, and to a
+brainless race these terms, and all other terms, would be meaningless;
+but no one is at liberty to assert, on the strength of that fact, that
+the realities underlying our use of those terms have no existence apart
+from terrestrial brains. Nor can we say with any security that the
+stuff called "brain" is the only conceivable machinery which they are
+able to utilise: though it is true that we know of no other. Yet it
+would seem that such a proposition must be held by a materialist, or by
+what can be implied by the term "monist," used in its narrowest and
+most unphilosophic sense--a sense which would be better expressed by
+the term materialistic-monist, with a limitation of the term matter to
+the terrestrial chemical elements and their combinations, _i.e._, to
+that form of substance to which the human race has grown accustomed--a
+sense which tends to exclude ethereal and other generalisations and
+unknown possibilities such as would occur to a philosophic monist of
+the widest kind.
+
+For that it may ultimately be discovered that there is some intimate
+and necessary connection between a generalised form of matter and some
+lofty variety of mind is not to be denied; though also it cannot be
+asserted. It has been surmised, for instance, that just as the
+corpuscles and atoms of matter, in their intricate movements and
+relations, combine to form the brain cell of a human being; so the
+cosmic bodies, the planets and suns and other groupings of the ether,
+may perhaps combine to form something corresponding as it were to the
+brain cell of some transcendent Mind. The idea is to be found in
+Newton. The thing is a mere guess, it is not an impossibility, and it
+cannot be excluded from a philosophic system by any negative statement
+based on scientific fact. In some such sense as that, matter and mind
+may be, for all we know, eternally and necessarily connected; they
+can be different aspects of some fundamental unity; and a lofty kind
+of monism can be true, just as a lofty kind of pantheism can be true.
+But the miserable degraded monism and lower pantheism, which limits
+the term "god" to that part of existence of which we are now
+aware--sometimes, indeed, to a fraction only of that--which limits the
+term "mind" to that of which we are ourselves conscious, and the term
+"matter" to the dust of the earth and the other visible bodies, is a
+system of thought appropriate, perhaps, to a fertile and energetic
+portion of the nineteenth century, but not likely to survive as a
+system of perennial truth.
+
+The term "organ" itself should have given pause to anyone desirous of
+promulgating a scheme such as that.
+
+"Organ" is a name popularly given to an instrument of music. Without
+it, or some other instrument, no material manifestation or display of
+music is possible; it is an instrument for the incarnation of
+music--the means whereby it interacts with the material world and
+throws the air and so our ears into vibration, it is the means whereby
+we apprehend it. Injure the organ and the music is imperfect; destroy
+it and it ceases to be possible. But is it to be asserted on the
+strength of that fact that the term "music" has no significance apart
+from its material manifestation? Have the ideas of Sir Edward Elgar no
+reality apart from their record on paper and reproduction by an
+orchestra? It is true that without suitable instruments and a suitable
+sense-organ we should know nothing of music, but it cannot be supposed
+that its underlying essence would be therefore extinct or non-existent
+and meaningless. Can there not be in the universe a multitude of things
+which matter as we know it is incompetent to express? Is it not the
+complaint of every genius that his material is intractable, that it is
+difficult to coerce matter as he knows it into the service of mind as
+he is conscious of it, and that his conceptions transcend his powers of
+expression?
+
+The connection between soul and body, or more generally between
+spiritual and material, has been illustrated by the connection between
+the meaning of a sentence and the written or spoken word conveying that
+meaning. The writing or the speaking may be regarded as an incarnation
+of the meaning, a mode of stating or exhibiting its essence. As
+delivered, the sentence must have time relations; it has a beginning,
+middle, and end; it may be repeated, and the same general meaning may
+be expressed in other words; but the intrinsic meaning of the sentence
+itself need have no time relations, it may be true _always_, it may
+exist as an eternal "now," though it may be perceived and expressed by
+humanity with varying clearness from time to time.
+
+The soul of a thing is its underlying permanent reality--that which
+gives it its meaning and confers upon it its attributes. The body is an
+instrument or mechanism for the manifestation or sensible presentation
+of what else would be imperceptible. It is useless to ask whether a
+soul is immortal--a soul is always immortal "where a soul can be
+discerned": the question to ask concerning any given object is whether
+it has a soul or meaning or personal underlying reality at all.
+
+Those who think that reality is limited to its terrestrial
+manifestation doubtless have a philosophy of their own, to which they
+are entitled and to which at any rate they are welcome; but if they set
+up to teach others that monism signifies a limitation of mind to the
+potentialities of matter as at present known; if they teach a pantheism
+which identifies God with nature in this narrow sense; if they hold
+that mind and what they call matter are so intimately connected that no
+_transcendence_ is possible; that, without the cerebral hemispheres,
+consciousness and intelligence and emotion and love, and all the higher
+attributes towards which humanity is slowly advancing, would cease to
+be; that the term "soul" signifies "a sum of plasma-movements in the
+ganglion cells"; and that the term "God" is limited to the operation of
+a known evolutionary process, and can be represented as "the infinite
+sum of all natural forces, the sum of all atomic forces and all ether
+vibrations," to quote Professor Haeckel (_Confession of Faith_, p. 78);
+then such philosophers must be content with an audience of uneducated
+persons, or, if writing as men of science, must hold themselves liable
+to be opposed by other men of science, who are able, at any rate in
+their own judgment, to take a wider survey of existence, and to
+perceive possibilities to which the said narrow and over-definite
+philosophers were blind.
+
+
+_Life and Guidance._
+
+Matter possesses energy, in the form of persistent motion, and it is
+propelled by force; but neither matter nor energy possesses the power
+of automatic guidance and control. Energy has no directing power (this
+has been elaborated by Croll and others: see, for instance, p. 24, and
+a letter in _Nature_, vol. 43, p. 434, thirteen years ago, under the
+heading "Force and Determinism"). Inorganic matter is impelled solely
+by pressure from behind, it is not influenced by the future, nor does
+it follow a preconceived course nor seek a predetermined end.
+
+An organism animated by mind is in a totally different case. The
+intangible influences of hunger, of a call, of perception of something
+ahead, are then the dominant feature. An intelligent animal which is
+being pushed is in an ignominious position and resents it; when led, or
+when voluntarily obeying a call, it is in its rightful attitude.
+
+The essence of mind is design and purpose. There are some who deny that
+there is any design or purpose in the universe at all: but how can that
+be maintained when humanity itself possesses these attributes? (_cf._
+pp. 54, 74). Is it not more reasonable to say that just as we are
+conscious of the power of guidance in ourselves, so guidance and
+intelligent control may be an element running through the universe, and
+may be incorporated even in material things?
+
+A traveller who has lost his way in a mountain district, coming across
+a path, may rejoice, saying, "This will guide me home." A materialist,
+if he were consistent, should laugh such a traveller to scorn, saying,
+"What guidance or purpose can there be in a material object? there is
+no guidance or purpose in the universe; things _are_ because they
+cannot be otherwise, not because of any intention underlying them. How
+can a path, which is little better than the absence of grass or the
+wearing down of stones, know where you live or guide you to any desired
+destination? Moreover, whatever knowledge or purpose the path exhibits
+must be _in the path_, must be a property of the atoms of which it is
+composed. To them some fraction of will, of power, of knowledge, and
+of feeling _may_ perhaps be attributed, and from their aggregation
+something of the same kind may perhaps be deduced. If the traveller can
+decipher that, he may utilise the material object to his advantage; but
+if he conceives the path to have been made with any teleological object
+or intelligent purpose, he is abandoning himself to superstition, and
+is as likely to be led by it to the edge of a precipice as to anywhere
+else. Let him follow his superstition at his peril!"
+
+This is not a quotation, of course: but it is a parable.
+
+Matter is the instrument and vehicle of mind; incarnation is the mode
+by which mind interacts with the present scheme of things, and thereby
+the element of guidance is supplied; it can, in fact, be embodied in an
+intelligent arrangement of inert inorganic matter. Even a mountain path
+exhibits the property of guidance, and has direction: it is an
+incorporation of intelligence, though itself inert.
+
+Direction is not a function of energy. The energy of sound from an
+organ is supplied by the blower of the bellows, which may be worked by
+a mechanical engine; but the melody and harmony, the sequence and
+co-existence of notes, are determined by the dominating mind of the
+musician: not necessarily of the executant alone, for the composer's
+mind may be evoked to some extent even by a pianola. The music may be
+said to be incarnate in the roll of paper which is ready to be passed
+through the instrument. So also can the conception of any artist
+receive material embodiment in his work, and if a picture or a
+beautiful building is destroyed it can be made to rise again from its
+ashes provided the painter or the architect still lives: in other
+words, his thought can receive a fresh incarnation; and a perception of
+the beautiful form shall hereafter, in a kindred spirit, arouse similar
+ideas.
+
+There is thus a truth in materialism, but it is not a truth readily to
+be apprehended and formulated. Matter may become imbued with life, and
+full of vital association; something of the personality of a departed
+owner seems to cling sometimes about an old garment, its curves and
+folds can suggest him vividly to our recollection. I would not too
+blatantly assert that even a doll on which much affection had been
+lavished was wholly inert and material in the inorganic sense. The
+tattered colours of a regiment are sometimes thought worthy to be hung
+in a church. They are a symbol truly, but they may be something more. I
+have reason to believe that a trace of individuality can cling about
+terrestrial objects in a vague and almost imperceptible fashion, but to
+a degree sufficient to enable those traces to be detected by persons
+with suitable faculties.
+
+There is a deep truth in materialism; and it is the foundation of the
+material parts of worship--sacraments and the like. It is possible to
+exaggerate their efficacy, but it is also possible to ignore it too
+completely. The whole universe is metrical, everything is a question of
+degree. A property like radio-activity or magnetism, discovered
+conspicuously in one form of matter, turns out to be possessed by
+matter of every kind, though to very varying extent.
+
+So it would appear to be with the power possessed by matter to
+incarnate and display mind.
+
+There are grades of incarnation: the most thorough kind is that
+illustrated by our bodies; in them we are incarnate, but probably not
+even in that case is the incarnation complete. It is quite credible
+that our whole and entire personality is never terrestrially manifest.
+
+There are grades of incarnation. Some of the personality of an Old
+Master is locked up in a painting: and whoever wilfully destroys a
+great picture is guilty of something akin to murder, namely, the
+premature and violent separation of soul and body. Some of the soul of
+a musician can be occluded in a piece of manuscript, to be deciphered
+thereafter by a perceptive mind.
+
+Matter is the vehicle of mind, but it is dominated and transcended by
+it. A painting is held together by cohesive forces among the atoms of
+its pigments, and if those forces rebelled or turned repulsive the
+picture would be disintegrated and destroyed; yet those forces did not
+make the picture. A cathedral is held together by inorganic forces, and
+it was built in obedience to them, but they do not explain it. It may
+owe its existence and design to the thought of someone who never
+touched a stone, or even of someone who was dead before it was begun.
+In its symbolism it represents One who was executed many centuries ago.
+Death and Time are far from dominant.
+
+Are we so sure that when we truly attribute a sunset, or the moonlight
+rippling on a lake, to the chemical and physical action of material
+forces--to the vibrations of matter and ether as we know them, that we
+have exhausted the whole truth of things? Many a thinker, brooding over
+the phenomena of Nature, has felt that they represent the thoughts of a
+dominating unknown Mind partially incarnate in it all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+PROFESSOR HAECKEL'S CONJECTURAL PHILOSOPHY
+
+_A reply to Mr M'Cabe._
+
+
+    Part of the preceding, so far as it is a criticism of Haeckel, was
+    given by me in the first instance as a Presidential Address to the
+    Members of the Birmingham and Midland Institute; and the greater
+    portion of this Address was printed in the _Hibbert Journal_ for
+    January 1905. Mr M'Cabe, the translator of Haeckel, thereupon took
+    up the cudgels on behalf of his Chief, and wrote an article in the
+    following July issue; to the pages of which references will be
+    given when quoting. A few observations of mine in reply to this
+    article emphasise one or two points which perhaps previously were
+    not quite clear; and so this reply, from the October number of the
+    _Hibbert Journal_, may be conveniently here reproduced.
+
+I have no fault to find with the tone of Mr M'Cabe's criticism of my
+criticism of Haeckel, and it is satisfactory that one who has proved
+himself an enthusiastic disciple, as well as a most industrious and
+competent translator, should stand up for the honour and credit of a
+foreign Master when he is attacked.
+
+But in admitting the appropriateness and the conciliatory tone of his
+article, I must not be supposed to agree with its contentions; for
+although he seeks to show that after all there is but little difference
+between myself and Haeckel--and although in a sense that is true as
+regards the fundamental facts of science, distinguishing the facts
+themselves from any hypothetical and interpretative gloss--yet with
+Haeckel's interpretations and speculative deductions from the facts,
+especially with the mode of presentation, and the crude and unbalanced
+attacks on other fields of human activity, my feeling of divergence
+occasionally becomes intense.
+
+And it is just these superficial, and as Mr M'Cabe now admits
+hypothetical, and as they seem to me rather rash, excursions into side
+issues, which have attracted the attention of the average man, and have
+succeeded in misleading the ignorant.
+
+If it could be universally recognised that
+
+    "it is expressly as a hypothesis that Haeckel formulates his
+    conjecture as to manner of the origin of life" (p. 744),
+
+and if it could be further generally admitted that his authority
+outside biology is so weak that
+
+    "it is mere pettiness to carp at incidental statements on matters
+    on which Haeckel is known to have or to exercise no peculiar
+    authority, or to labour in determining the precise degree of
+    evidence for the monism of the inorganic or the organic world" (p.
+    748),
+
+I should be quite content, and hope that I may never find it necessary
+to carp at these things again. Also I entirely agree with Mr M'Cabe,
+though I have some doubt whether Professor Haeckel would equally agree
+with him, that
+
+    "there remain the great questions whether this mechanical evolution
+    of the universe needed intelligent control, and whether the mind of
+    man stands out as imperishable amidst the wreck of worlds. These
+    constitute the serious controversy of our time in the region of
+    cosmic philosophy or science. These are the rocks that will divide
+    the stream of higher scientific thought for long years to come. To
+    many of us it seems that a concentration on these issues is as much
+    to be desired as sympathy and mutual appreciation" (p. 748).
+
+This is excellent; but then it is surely true that Professor Haeckel
+has taken great pains to state forcibly and clearly that these great
+questions cannot by him be regarded as open; in fact Mr M'Cabe himself
+says--
+
+    "Haeckel's position, if expressed at times with some harshness, and
+    not always with perfect consistency, is well enough known. He
+    rejects the idea of intelligent and benevolent guidance, chiefly on
+    the ground of the facts of dysteleology, and he fails to see any
+    evidence for exempting the human mind from the general law of
+    dissolution" (p. 748).
+
+Ultimately, however, he appears to have been driven to a singularly
+unphilosophic view, of which Mr M'Cabe says--
+
+    "It is interesting to note that in his latest work Haeckel regards
+    sensation (or unconscious sentience) as an ultimate and irreducible
+    attribute of substance, like matter (or extension) and force (or
+    spirit)" (p. 752).
+
+I call this unphilosophical because--omitting any reference here to the
+singular parenthetical explanations or paraphrases, for which I suppose
+Haeckel is not to be held responsible--this is simply abandoning all
+attempt at explanation; it even closes the door to inquiry, and is
+equivalent to an attitude proper to any man in the street, for it
+virtually says: "Here the thing is anyhow, I cannot explain it."
+However legitimate and necessary such an attitude may be as an
+expression of our ignorance, we ought not to use the phrase "ultimate
+and irreducible," as if no one could ever explain it.
+
+Moreover, if it be true that--
+
+    "Haeckel does not teach--never did teach--that the spiritual
+    universe is an aspect of the material universe, as his critic makes
+    him say, it is his fundamental and most distinctive idea that both
+    are attributes or aspects of a deeper reality" (p. 745)--
+
+in that case there is, indeed, but little difference between us. But
+no reader of Haeckel's _Riddle_ would have anticipated that such a
+contention could be made by any devout disciple; and I wonder whether
+Mr M'Cabe can adduce any passage adequate to support so estimable a
+position. Surely it is difficult to sustain in face of quotations such
+as these:--
+
+    "The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is ... a physiological
+    problem, and as such must be reduced to the phenomena of physics
+    and chemistry" (p. 65).
+
+    "I therefore consider Psychology a branch of natural science--a
+    section of physiology.... We shall give to the material basis of
+    all psychic activity, without which it is inconceivable, the
+    provisional name of psychoplasm" (p. 32).
+
+
+_Life and Energy._
+
+The one and only point on which I think it worth while to express
+decided dissidence is to be found in the paragraph where Mr M'Cabe
+makes a statement concerning what he calls "vital force,"--a term I do
+not remember to have ever used in my life. He claims for Haeckel what
+is represented by the following extracts from his article (pp. 745, 6,
+7):--
+
+    "He does not say that life is 'knocked out of existence' when the
+    material organism decays. He says that the vital energy no longer
+    exists _as such_, but is resolved into the inorganic energies
+    associated with the gases and relics of the decaying body. Thus the
+    matter looks a little different when Sir Oliver comes to 'challenge
+    him to say by what right he gives that answer.' He gives it on this
+    plain right, that _science always finds these inorganic energies to
+    reappear on the dissolution of life_, and has never in a single
+    instance found the slightest reason to suspect (if we make an
+    exception for the moment of psychical research) that the vital
+    force as such has continued to exist."
+
+The italics are mine. A little further on he continues:--
+
+    "There is no serious scientific demur to Haeckel's assumption of a
+    monism of the physical world, and his identification of vital force
+    with ordinary physical and chemical forces.
+
+    "Sir Oliver seems to admit, indeed, that the vital force is not in
+    its nature distinct from physical force, but holds that it needs
+    'guidance.'"
+
+    "On all sides we hear the echo of Professor Le Conte's words:
+    'Vital force may now be regarded as so much force withdrawn from
+    the general fund of chemical and physical forces.'"
+
+Very well then, here is no conflict on a matter of opinion or
+philosophic speculation, but divergence on a downright question of
+scientific fact (let it be noted that I do not wish to hold Professor
+Haeckel responsible for these utterances of his disciple: he must
+surely know better), and I wish to oppose the fallacy in the strongest
+terms.
+
+If it were true that vital energy turned into or was anyhow convertible
+into inorganic energy, if it were true that a dead body had more
+inorganic energy than a live one, if it were true that "these inorganic
+energies" always or ever "reappear on the dissolution of life," then
+undoubtedly _cadit quaestio_; life would immediately be proved to be a
+form of energy, and would enter into the scheme of physics. But
+inasmuch as all this is untrue--the direct contrary of the truth--I
+maintain that life is _not_ a form of energy, that it is _not_ included
+in our present physical categories, that its explanation is still to
+seek. And I have further stated--though there I do not dogmatise--that
+it appears to me to belong to a separate order of existence, which
+interacts with this material frame of things, and, while there, exerts
+guidance and control on the energy which already here exists (_cf._ p.
+24); for, though they alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though
+they merely utilise available energy like any other machine, live
+things are able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and
+special paths, so as to achieve results which without such living
+agency could not have occurred--_e.g._ forests, ant-hills, birds'
+nests, Forth bridge, sonatas, cathedrals.
+
+I have never taught, nor for a moment thought, that "vital force is
+akin to physical force, but that it needs guidance" (p. 747); the
+phrase sounds to me nonsense. I perceive, not as a theory, but as a
+fact, that life is _itself_ a guiding principle, a controlling agency,
+_i.e._ that a live animal or plant can and does guide or influence the
+elements of inorganic nature. The fact of an organism possessing life
+enables it to build up material particles into many notable forms--oak,
+eagle, man,--which material aggregates last until they are abandoned by
+the guiding principle, when they more or less speedily fall into decay,
+or become resolved into their elements, until utilised by a fresh
+incarnation; and hence I say that whatever life is or is not, it is
+certainly this: it is a guiding and controlling entity which interacts
+with our world according to laws so partially known that we have to say
+they are practically unknown, and therefore appear in some respects
+mysterious. If it be thought that I mean by this something
+superstitious, and for ever inexplicable or unintelligible, I have no
+such meaning. I believe in the ultimate intelligibility of the
+universe, though our present brains may require considerable
+improvement before we can grasp the deepest things by their aid; but
+this matter of "vitality" is probably not hopelessly beyond us; and it
+does not follow, because we have no theory of life or death now, that
+we shall be equally ignorant a century hence.
+
+My chief objection to Professor Haeckel's literary work is that he is
+dogmatic on such points as these, and would have people believe, what
+doubtless he believes himself, that he already knows the answer to a
+number of questions in the realms of physical nature and of philosophy.
+He writes in so forcible and positive and determined a fashion, from
+the vantage ground of scientific knowledge, that he exerts an undue
+influence on the uncultured among his readers, and causes them to fancy
+that only benighted fools or credulous dupes can really disagree with
+the historical criticisms, the speculative opinions, and philosophical,
+or perhaps unphilosophical, conjectures, thus powerfully set forth.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+HYPOTHESIS AND ANALOGIES CONCERNING LIFE
+
+
+The view concerning Life which I have endeavoured to express is that it
+is neither matter nor energy, nor even a function of matter or of
+energy, but is something belonging to a different category; that by
+some means at present unknown it is able to interact with the material
+world for a time, but that it can also exist in some sense
+independently; although in that condition of existence it is by no
+means apprehensible by our senses. It is dependent on matter for its
+phenomenal appearance--for its manifestation to us here and now, and
+for all its terrestrial activities; but otherwise, I conceive that it
+is independent, that its essential existence is continuous and
+permanent, though its interactions with matter are discontinuous and
+temporary; and I conjecture that it is subject to a law of
+evolution--that a linear advance is open to it--whether it be in its
+phenomenal or in its occult state.
+
+It may be well to indicate what I mean by conceiving of the possibility
+that life has an existence apart from its material manifestations as we
+know them at present. (Remember note on p. 40.) It is easy to imagine
+that such a view is a mere surmise, having no intelligible meaning, and
+that it is merely an attempt to clutch at human immortality in an
+emotional and unscientific spirit. To this, however, I in no way plead
+guilty. My ideas about life may be quite wrong, but they are as
+cold-blooded and free from bias as possible; moreover, they apply not
+to human life alone, but to all life--to that of all animals, and even
+of plants; and they are held by me as a working hypothesis, the only
+one which enables me to fit the known facts of ordinary vitality into a
+thinkable scheme. Without it, I should be met by all the usual
+puzzles:--(1) as to the stage at which existence begins, if it can be
+thought of as "beginning" at all;[3] (2) as to the nature of
+individuality, in the midst of diversity of particles, and the
+determination of form irrespective of variety of food; (3) the
+extraordinary rapidity of development, which results in the production
+of a fully endowed individual in the course of some fraction of a
+century.
+
+      [3] I doubt whether _existence_ can be "begun" at all, save as
+      the result of a juxtaposition of elements, or of a conveyance of
+      motion. We can put things together, and we can set things in
+      motion,--statics and kinetics,--can we do more? Ether can be
+      strained, matter can be moved: I doubt whether we see more than
+      this happening in the whole material universe. This dictum is
+      elaborated elsewhere.
+
+With it, I cannot pretend that all these things are thoroughly
+intelligible, but the lines on which an explanation may be forthcoming
+seem to be laid down:--the notion being that what we see is a temporary
+apparition or incarnation of a permanent entity or idea.
+
+It is easiest to explain my meaning by aid of analogues,--by the
+construction, as it were, of "models," just as is the custom in Physics
+whenever a recondite idea has to be grasped before it can be properly
+formulated and before a theory is complete.
+
+I will take two analogies: one from Magnetism and one from Politics.
+
+"Parliament," or "the Army," is a body which consists of individual
+members constantly changing, and its existence is not dependent on
+their existence: it pre-existed any particular set of them, and it can
+survive a dissolution. Even after a complete slaughter, the idea of the
+Army would survive, and another would come into being, to carry on the
+permanent traditions and life.
+
+Except as an idea in some sentient mind, it could not be said to exist
+at all. The mere individuals composing it do not make it: without the
+idea they would be only a disorganised mob. Abstractions like the
+British Constitution, and other such things, can hardly be said to have
+any incarnate existence. These exist _only_ as ideas.
+
+Parliament exists fundamentally as an idea, and it can be called into
+existence or re-incarnated again. Whether it is the same Parliament or
+not after a general election is a question that may be differently
+answered. It is not identical, it may have different characteristics,
+but there is certainly a sort of continuity; it is still a British
+Parliament, for instance, it has not changed its character to that of
+the French Assembly or the American Congress. It is a permanent entity
+even when disembodied; it has a past and it has a future; it has a
+fundamentally continuous existence though there are breaks or
+dislocations in its conspicuous activity, and though each incarnation
+has a separate identity or personality of its own. It is larger and
+more comprehensive than any individual representation of it; it may be
+said to have a "subliminal self," of which any septennial period sees
+but a meagre epitome.
+
+Some of those epitomes are more, some less, worthy; sometimes there
+appears only a poor deformity or a feeble-minded attempt, sometimes a
+strong and vigorous embodiment of the root idea.
+
+As to its technical continuity of existence and actual mode of
+reproduction, I suppose it would be merely fanciful to liken the
+"Crown" to those germ-cells or nuclei, whose existence continues
+without break, which serve the purpose of collecting and composing the
+somatic cells in due season.
+
+Other illustrations of the temporary incarnation of a permanent idea
+are readily furnished from the domain of Art; but, after all, the best
+analogy to life that I can at present think of is to be found in the
+subject of Magnetism.
+
+At one time it was possible to say that magnetism could not be produced
+except by antecedent magnetism; that there was no known way of
+generating it spontaneously; yet that, since it undoubtedly occurs in
+certain rocks of the earth, it must have come into existence somehow,
+at date unknown. It could also be said, and it can be said still, that,
+given an initial magnet, any number of others can be made, without loss
+to the generating magnet. By influence or induction exerted by
+proximity on other pieces of steel, the properties of one magnet can be
+excited in any number of such pieces,--the amount of magnetism thus
+producible being infinite; that is, being strictly without limit, and
+not dependent at all on the very finite strength of the original
+magnet, which indeed continues unabated. It is just as if magnetism
+were not really manufactured at all, but were a thing called out of
+some infinite reservoir: as if something were brought into active and
+prominent existence from a previously dormant state.
+
+And that indeed is the fact. The process of magnetisation, as conducted
+with a steel magnet on other pieces of previously inert steel, in no
+case really generates new lines of magnetic force, though it appears to
+generate them. We now know that the lines which thus spring into
+corporeal existence, as it were, are essentially closed curves or
+loops, which cannot be generated; they can be expanded or enlarged to
+cover a wide field, and they can be contracted or shrunk up into
+insignificance, but they cannot be created, they must be pre-existent;
+they were in the non-magnetised steel all the time, though they were so
+small and ill-arranged that they had no perceptible effect whatever;
+they constituted a potentiality for magnetism; they existed as
+molecular closed curves or loops, which, by the operation called
+magnetisation, could, some of them, be opened out into loops of finite
+area and spread out into space, where they are called "lines of force."
+They then constitute the region called a magnetic field, which remains
+a seat of so-called "permanent" magnetic activity, until by lapse of
+time, excessive heat, or other circumstance, they close up again; and
+so the magnet, as a magnet, dies. The magnetism itself, however, has
+not really died, it has a perpetual existence; and a fresh act of
+magnetisation can recall it, or something indistinguishable from it,
+into manifest activity again; so that it, or its equivalent, can once
+more interact with the rest of material energies, and be dealt with by
+physicists, or subserve the uses of humanity. Until that time of
+re-appearance its existence can only be inferred by the thought of the
+mathematician: it is indeed a matter of theory, not necessarily
+recognised as true by the practical man.
+
+Our present view is that the act of magnetisation consists in a
+re-arrangement and co-ordination of previously existing magnetic
+elements, lying dormant, so to speak, in iron and other magnetic
+materials; only a very small fraction of the whole number being usually
+brought into activity at any one time, and not necessarily always the
+same actual set. Only a small and indiscriminate selection is made from
+all the molecular loops; and it can be a different group each time, or
+some elements may be different and some the same, whenever a fresh
+individual or magnet is brought into being.
+
+All this can be said concerning the old process of magnetisation--the
+process as it was doubtless familiar to the unknown discoverer of the
+lodestone, to the ancient users of the mariner's compass, and to Dr
+Gilbert of Colchester, the discoverer of the magnetised condition of
+the Earth.
+
+But within the nineteenth century a fresh process of magnetisation has
+been discovered, and this new or electrical process is no longer
+obviously dependent on the existence of antecedent magnetism, but seems
+at first sight to be a property freshly or spontaneously generated, as
+it were. The process was discovered as the result of setting
+electricity into motion. So long as electricity was studied in its
+condition at rest on charged conductors, as in the old science of
+electrostatics or frictional electricity, it possessed no magnetic
+properties whatever, nor did it encroach on the magnetic domain: only
+vague similarities in the phenomena of attraction and repulsion aroused
+attention. But directly electricity was set in motion, constituting
+what is called an electric current, magnetic lines of force instantly
+sprang into being, without the presence of any steel or iron; and in
+twenty years they were recognised. These electrically generated lines
+of force are similar to those previously known, but they need no matter
+to sustain them. They need matter to display them, but they themselves
+exist equally well in perfect vacuum.
+
+How did they manage to spring into being? Can it be said that they too
+had existed previously in some dormant condition in the ether of space?
+That they too were closed loops opened out, and their existence thus
+displayed, by the electric current?
+
+That is an assertion which might reasonably be made: it is not the only
+way of regarding the matter, however, and the mode in which a magnetic
+field originates round the path of a moving charge--being generated
+during the acceleration-period by a pulse of radiation which travels
+with the speed of light, being maintained during the steady-motion
+period by a sort of inertia as if in accordance with the first law of
+motion, and being destroyed only by a return pulse of re-radiation
+during a retardation-period when the moving charge is stopped or
+diverted or reversed--all this can hardly be fully explained until the
+intimate nature of an electric charge has been more fully worked out;
+and the subject now trenches too nearly on the more advanced parts of
+Physics to be useful any longer as an analogue for general readers.
+
+Indeed it must be recollected that no analogy will bear pressing too
+far. All that we are concerned to show is that known magnetic behaviour
+exhibits a very fair analogy to some aspects of that still more
+mysterious entity which we call "life"; and if anyone should assert
+that all magnetism was pre-existent in some ethereal condition, that it
+would never go out of essential existence, but that it could be brought
+into relation with the world of matter by certain acts,--that while
+there it could operate in a certain way, controlling the motion of
+bodies, interacting with forms of energy, producing sundry effects for
+a time, and then disappearing from our ken to the immaterial region
+whence it came,--he would be saying what no physicist would think it
+worth while to object to, what many indeed might agree with.
+
+Well, that is the kind of assertion which I want to make, as a working
+hypothesis, concerning life.
+
+An acorn has in itself the potentiality not of one oak-tree alone, but
+of a forest of oak-trees, to the thousandth generation, and indeed of
+oak-trees without end. There is no sort of law of "conservation" here.
+It is not as if something were passed on from one thing to another. It
+is not analogous to energy at all, it is analogous to the magnetism
+which can be excited by any given magnet: the required energy, in both
+cases, being extraneously supplied, and only transmuted into the
+appropriate form by the guiding principle which controls the operation.
+
+We do not know how to generate life without the action of antecedent
+life at present, though that may be a discovery lying ready for us in
+the future; but even if we did, it would still be true (as I think)
+that the life was in some sense pre-existent, that it was not really
+created _de novo_, that it was brought into actual practical every-day
+existence doubtless, but that it had pre-existed in some sense too:
+being called out, as it were, from some great reservoir or storehouse
+of vitality, to which, when its earthly career is ended, it will
+return.
+
+Indeed, it cannot in any proper sense be said ever to have left that
+storehouse, though it has been made to interact with the world for a
+time; and, if we might so express it, it may be thought of as carrying
+back with it, into the general reservoir, any individuality, and any
+experience and training or development, which it can be thought of as
+having acquired here. Such a statement as this last cannot be made of
+magnetism, to which no known law of evolution and progress can be
+supposed to apply; but of life, of anything subject to continuous
+evolution or linear progress embodied in the race, of any condition not
+cyclically determinate and returning into itself, but progressing and
+advancing--acquiring fresh potentialities, fresh powers, fresh
+beauties, new characteristics such as perhaps may never in the whole
+universe have been displayed before--of everything which possesses such
+powers as these, a statement akin to the above may certainly be made.
+To all such things, when they reach a high enough stage, the ideas of
+continued personality, of memory, of persistent individual existence,
+not only may, but I think must, apply; notwithstanding the admitted
+return of the individual after each incarnation to the central store
+from which it was differentiated and individualised.
+
+Even so a villager, picked out as a recruit and sent to the seat of
+war, may serve his country, may gain experience, acquire a soul and a
+width of horizon such as he had not dreamt of; and when he returns,
+after the war is over, may be merged as before in his native village.
+But the village is the richer for his presence, and his individuality
+or personality is not really lost; though to the eye of the world,
+which has no further need for it, it has practically ceased to be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WILL AND GUIDANCE
+
+(_Partially read to the Synthetic Society in February 1903._)
+
+
+The influence of the divine on the human, and on the material world,
+has been variously conceived in different ages, and various forms of
+difficulty have been at different times felt and suggested; but always
+some sort of analogy between human action and divine action has had
+perforce to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least
+intelligible to our conception. The latest form of difficulty is
+peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical
+science. It consists in denying the possibility of any guidance or
+control,--not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part of every one
+of his creatures. It consists in pressing the laws of physics to what
+may seem their logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the
+conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as
+some have fancied, the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of
+the self-determined action of mind or living things upon matter,
+altogether. The appearance of control has accordingly been considered
+illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism,
+enveloping living things as well as inorganic nature.
+
+And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or unable to
+acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical agencies, whether it be
+by reason of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experience and
+sensation to the contrary, have thought it necessary of late years to
+seek to undermine the foundation of Physics, and to show that its
+much-vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their exactitude is
+illusory,--that the conservation of energy, for instance, has been too
+rapid an induction, that there may be ways of eluding many physical
+laws and of avoiding submission to their sovereign sway.
+
+By this sacrifice it has been thought that the eliminated guidance and
+control can philosophically be reintroduced.
+
+This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of a critical examination
+of the foundations of Physics by an American author, J. B. Stallo, in a
+little book called the _Concepts of Physics_. But the worst of that
+book was that Judge Stallo was not fully familiar with the teachings of
+the great physicists; he appears to have collected his information from
+popular writings, where the doctrines were very imperfectly laid down; so
+that some of his book is occupied in demolishing constructions of straw,
+unrecognisable by professed physicists except as caricatures at which
+they also might be willing to heave an occasional missile.
+
+The armoury pressed into the service of Professor James Ward's not
+wholly dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his
+criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate
+acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his
+Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism between the
+fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any intervention
+whether human or divine.
+
+If this antagonism is substantial it is serious; for Natural
+Philosophers will not be willing to concede fundamental inaccuracy or
+uncertainty about their recognised and long-established laws of motion,
+when applied to ordinary matter; nor will they be prepared to tolerate
+any the least departure from the law of the conservation of energy,
+when all forms of energy are taken into account. Hence, if guidance
+and control can be admitted into the scheme by no means short of
+undermining and refuting those laws, there may be every expectation
+that the attitude of scientific men will be perennially hostile to the
+idea of guidance or control, and so to the efficacy of prayer, and to
+many another practical outcome of religious belief. It becomes
+therefore an important question to consider whether it is true that
+life or mind is incompetent to disarrange or interfere with matter at
+all, except as itself an automatic part of the machine,--whether in
+fact it is merely an ornamental appendage or phantasmal accessory of
+the working parts.
+
+Now experience--the same kind of experience as gave us our scheme of
+mechanics--shows us that to all appearance live animals certainly can
+direct and control mechanical energies to bring about desired and
+preconceived results; and that man can definitely will that those
+results shall occur. The way the energy is provided is understood, and
+its mode of application is fairly understood; what is not understood is
+the way its activity is _determined_. Undoubtedly our body is material
+and can act on other matter; and the energy of its operations is
+derived from food, like any other self-propelled and fuel-fed
+mechanism; but mechanism is usually controlled by an attendant. The
+question is whether our will or mind or life can direct our body's
+energy along certain channels to attain desired ends, or whether--as in
+a motor-car with an automaton driver--the end and aim of all activity
+is wholly determined by mechanical causes. And a further question
+concerns the mode whereby vital control, if any, is achieved.
+
+Answers that might be hazarded are:
+
+    (_a_) That life is itself a latent store of energy, and achieves
+    its results by imparting to matter energy that would not otherwise
+    be in evidence: in which case life would be a part of the machine,
+    and as truly mechanical as all the rest.
+
+Experiment lends no support to this view of the relation between life
+and energy, and I hold that it is false; because the essential property
+of energy is that it can transform itself into other forms, remaining
+constant in quantity, whereas life does not add to the stock of any
+known form of energy, nor does death affect the sum of energy in any
+known way.
+
+    (_b_) That life is something outside the scheme of mechanics--outside
+    the categories of matter and energy; though it can nevertheless
+    control or direct material forces--timing them and determining
+    their place of application,--subject always to the laws of energy
+    and all other mechanical laws; supplementing or accompanying these
+    laws, therefore, but contradicting or traversing them no whit.
+
+This second answer I hold to be true; but in order to admit its truth
+we must recognise that force can be exerted and energy directed, by
+suitable adjustment of existing energy, without any introduction of
+energy from without; in other words, that the energy of operations
+automatically going on in any active region of the universe--any region
+where transformation and transference of energy are continuously
+occurring whether life be present or not--can be guided along paths
+that it would not automatically have taken, and can be directed so as
+to produce effects that would not otherwise have occurred; and this
+without any breakage or suspension of the laws of dynamics, and in full
+correspondence with both the conservation of energy and the
+conservation of momentum.
+
+That is where I part company with Professor James Ward in the second
+volume of _Naturalism and Agnosticism_; with whom nevertheless on many
+broad issues I find myself in fair agreement. Those who find a real
+antinomy between "mechanism and morals" must either throw overboard the
+possibility of interference or guidance or willed action altogether,
+which is one alternative, or must assume that the laws of Physics are
+only approximate and untrustworthy, which is the other alternative--the
+alternative apparently favoured by Professor James Ward. I wish to
+argue that neither of these alternatives is necessary, and that there
+is a third or middle course of proverbial safety: all that is necessary
+is to realise and admit that the laws of Physical Science are
+_incomplete_, when regarded as a formulation and philosophical summary
+of the universe in general. No Laplacian calculator can be supplied
+with all the data.
+
+On a stagnant and inactive world life would admittedly be powerless: it
+could only make dry bones stir in such a world if itself were a form of
+energy; I do not suppose for a moment that it could be incarnated on
+such a world; it is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically
+"available"--to use Lord Kelvin's term,--that is to say, is either
+potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In
+other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide
+its transmutations.
+
+It has gradually dawned upon me that the reason why Philosophers who
+are well acquainted with Physical or Dynamical Science are apt to fall
+into the error of supposing that mental and vital interference with the
+material world is impossible, in spite of their clamorous experience to
+the contrary (or else, on the strength of that experience, to conceive
+that there is something the matter with the formulation of physical and
+dynamical laws), is because all such interference is naturally and
+necessarily excluded from scientific methods and treatises.
+
+In pure Mechanics, "force" is treated as a function of configuration
+and momentum: the positions, the velocities, and the accelerations of a
+conservative system depend solely on each other, on initial conditions,
+and on mass; or, if we choose so to express it, the co-ordinates, the
+momenta, and the kinetic energies, of the parts of any dynamical system
+whatever, are all functions of time and of each other, and of nothing
+else. In other words, we have to deal, in this mode of regarding
+things, with a definite and completely determinate world, to which
+prediction may confidently be applied.
+
+But this determinateness is got by refusing to contemplate anything
+outside a certain scheme: it is an internal truth within the assigned
+boundaries, and is quite consistent with psychical interference
+and indeterminateness, as soon as those boundaries are ignored;
+determinateness is not part of the _essence_ of dynamical doctrine,
+it is arrived at by the tacit assumption that no undynamical or
+hyperdynamical agencies exist: in short, by that process of abstraction
+which is invariably necessary for simplicity, and indeed for
+possibility, of methodical human treatment. Everyone engaged in
+scientific research is aware that if exuberant charwomen, or
+intelligent but mischievous students (who for the moment may be taken
+to represent life and mind respectively) are admitted into a laboratory
+and given full scope for their activities, the subsequent scientific
+results--though still, no doubt, in some strained sense, concordant
+with law and order--are apt to be too complicated for investigation;
+wherefore there is usually an endeavour to exclude these incalculable
+influences, and to make a tacit assumption that they have not been let
+in.
+
+There is a similar tacit assumption in treatises on Physics and
+Chemistry; viz., that the laws of automatic nature shall be allowed
+unrestricted and unaided play, that nothing shall intervene in any
+operation from start to finish save mechanical sequent and
+antecedent,--that it is permissible in fact to exercise abstraction, as
+usual, to the exclusion of agents not necessarily connected with the
+problem, and not contemplated by the equations.
+
+In text-books of Dynamics and in treatises of Natural Philosophy that
+is a perfectly legitimate procedure;[4] but when later on we come to
+philosophise, and to deal with the universe as a whole, we must forgo
+the ingrained habit of abstraction, and must remember that for a
+_complete_ treatment _nothing_ must permanently be ignored. So if
+life and mind and will, and curiosity and mischief and folly, and greed
+and fraud and malice, and a whole catalogue of attributes and things
+not contemplated in Natural Philosophy--if these are known to have any
+real existence in the larger world of total experience, and if there is
+any reason to believe that any one of them may have had some influence
+in determining an observed result, then it is foolish to exclude these
+things from philosophic consideration, on the ground that they are out
+of place in the realm of Natural Philosophy, that they are not allowed
+for in its scheme, and therefore cannot possibly be supposed capable of
+exerting any effective interference, any real guidance or control.
+
+      [4] It is on a similar basis that there is a science of rigid
+      dynamics, with elasticity and fluidity excluded; and thus also
+      can there be a hydrodynamics in which the consequences of
+      viscosity are ignored.
+
+My contention then is--and in this contention I am practically speaking
+for my brother physicists--that whereas life or mind can neither
+generate energy nor directly exert force, yet it can cause matter to
+exert force on matter, and so can exercise guidance and control: it can
+so prepare any scene of activity, by arranging the position of existing
+material, and timing the liberation of existing energy, as to produce
+results concordant with an idea or scheme or intention: it can, in
+short, "aim" and "fire."
+
+Guidance of _matter_ can be affected by a passive exertion of force
+without doing work; as a quiescent rail can guide a train to its
+destination, provided an active engine propels it. But the analogy of
+the rail must not be pressed: the rail "guides" by exerting force
+perpendicular to the direction of motion, it does no work but it
+sustains an equal opposite reaction.[5] The guidance exercised by life
+or mind is managed in an unknown but certainly different fashion:
+"determination" can sustain no reaction--if it could it would be a
+straightforward mechanical agent--but it can utilise the mechanical
+properties both of rail and of engine; it arranged for the rail to be
+placed in position so that the lateral force thereby exerted should
+guide all future trains to a desired destination, and it further took
+steps to design and compose locomotives of sufficient power, and to
+start them at a prearranged time. It "employs" mechanical stress, as a
+capitalist employs a labourer, not doing anything itself, but directing
+the operations. It is impossible to explain all this fully by the laws
+of mechanics alone, that is to say, no mechanical analysis can be
+complete and all-embracing, though the whole procedure is fully subject
+to those laws.
+
+      [5] It is well to bear in mind the distinction between "force"
+      and "energy." These terms have been so popularly confused that it
+      may be difficult always to discriminate them, but in Physics they
+      are absolutely discriminated. We have a direct sense of "force,"
+      in our muscles, whether they be moving or at rest. A force in
+      motion is a "power," it "does work" and transfers energy from one
+      body to another, which is commonly though incorrectly spoken of
+      as "generating" energy. But a force at rest--a mere statical
+      stress, like that exerted by a pillar or a watershed--does no
+      work, and "generates" or transfers no energy; yet the one
+      sustains a roof which would otherwise fall, thereby screening a
+      portion of ground from vegetation; while the other deflects a
+      rain-drop into the Danube or the Rhine. This latter is the kind
+      of force which constrains a stone to revolve in a circle instead
+      of a straight line; a force like that of a groove or slot or
+      channel or "guide."
+
+To every force there is an equal opposite force or reaction, and a
+reaction may be against a live body, but it is never suspected of being
+against the abstraction life or mind--that would indeed be enlarging
+the scope of mechanics!--the reaction is always against some other
+body. All stresses as a matter of fact occur in the ether; and they all
+have a material terminus at each end (or in exceptional cases a
+wave-front or some other recondite etherial equivalent), that is to say
+something possessing inertia; but the timed or _opportune_ existence of
+a particular stress may be the result of organisation and control.
+Mechanical operations can be thus dominated by intelligence and
+purpose. When a stone is rolling over a cliff, it is all the same to
+"energy" whether it fall on point A or point B of the beach. But at A
+it shall merely dent the sand, whereas at B it shall strike a detonator
+and explode a mine. Scribbling on a piece of paper results in a certain
+distribution of fluid and production of a modicum of heat: so far as
+energy is concerned it is the same whether we sign Andrew Carnegie or
+Alexander Coppersmith, yet the one effort may land us in twelve months'
+imprisonment or may build a library, according to circumstances, while
+the other achieves no result at all. John Stuart Mill used to say that
+our sole power over Nature was to _move_ things; but strictly speaking
+we cannot do even that: we can only arrange that things shall move each
+other, and can determine by suitably preconceived plans the kind and
+direction of the motion that shall ensue at a given time and place.
+Provided always that we include in this category of "things" our
+undoubtedly material bodies, muscles and nerves.
+
+But here is just the puzzle: at what point does will or determination
+enter into the scheme? Contemplate a brain cell, whence originates a
+certain nerve-process whereby energy is liberated with some resultant
+effect; what pulled the detent in that cell which started the impulse?
+No \doubt some chemical process: combination or dissociation, something
+atomic, occurred; but what made it occur just then and in that way?
+
+I answer, not anything that we as yet understand, but apparently the
+same sort of pre-arrangement that determined whether the stone from the
+cliff should fall on point A or point B--the same sort of process that
+guided the pen to make legible and effective writing instead of
+illegible and ineffective scrawls--the same kind of control that
+determines when and where a trigger shall be pulled so as to secure the
+anticipated slaughter of a bird. So far as energy is concerned, the
+explosion and the trigger-pulling are the same identical operations
+whether the aim be exact or random. It is intelligence which directs;
+it is physical energy which is directed and controlled and produces the
+result in time and space.
+
+It will be said _some_ energy is needed to pull a hair-trigger, to open
+the throttle-valve of an engine, to press the button which shall
+shatter a rock. Granted: but the work-concomitants of that energy are
+all familiar, and equally present whether it be arranged so as to
+produce any predetermined effect or not. The opening of the
+throttle-valve for instance demands just the same exertion, and results
+in just the same imperceptible transformation of fully-accounted-for
+energy, whether it be used to start a train in accordance with a
+time-table and the guard's whistle, or whether it be pushed over, as if
+by the wind, at random. The shouting of an order to a troop demands
+vocal energy and produces its due equivalent of sound; but the
+intelligibility of the order is something superadded, and its result
+may be to make not sound or heat alone, but History.
+
+Energy must be _available_ for the performance of any physical
+operation, but the energy is independent of the determination or
+arrangement. Guidance and control are not forms of energy, nor need
+they be themselves phantom modes of force: their superposition upon the
+scheme of Physics need perturb physical and mechanical _laws_ no whit,
+and yet it may profoundly affect the consequences resulting from those
+same laws. The whole effort of civilisation would be futile if we could
+not guide the powers of nature. The powers are there, else we should be
+helpless; but life and mind are outside those powers, and, by
+pre-arranging their field of action, can direct them along an organised
+course.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+And this same life or mind, as we know it, is accessible to petition,
+to affection, to pity, to a multitude of non-physical influences; and
+hence, indirectly, the little plot of physical universe which is now
+our temporary home has become amenable to truly spiritual control.
+
+I lay stress upon a study of the nature and mode of human action of the
+interfering or guiding kind, because by that study we must be led if we
+are to form any intelligent conception of divine action. True, it might
+be feasible to admit divine agency and yet to deny the possibility of
+any human power of the same kind,--though that would be a nebulous and
+at least inconclusive procedure; but if once we are constrained to
+admit the existence and reality of human guidance and control,
+superposed upon the physical scheme, we cannot deny the possibility of
+such power and action to any higher being, nor even to any totality of
+Mind of which ours is a part.
+
+I do not see how the function claimed can be resented, except by those
+who deny "life" to be anything at all. If it exists, if it is not mere
+illusion, it appears to me to be something whose full significance lies
+in another scheme of things, but which touches and interacts with this
+material universe in a certain way, building its particles into notable
+configurations for a time--without confounding any physical laws,--and
+then evaporating whence it came. This language is vague and figurative
+undoubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we have not yet a
+theory of life--we have not even a theory of the essential nature of
+gravitation; discoveries are waiting to be made in this region, and it
+is absurd to suppose that we are already in possession of all the data.
+We can wait; but meanwhile we need not pretend that because we do not
+understand them, therefore life and will can accomplish nothing; we
+need not imagine that "life"--with its higher developments and still
+latent powers--is an impotent nonentity. The philosophic attitude,
+surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, both what it can and
+what it cannot achieve, and to realise that our present knowledge of it
+is extremely partial and incomplete.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
+NOTE ON FREE WILL AND FOREKNOWLEDGE.
+
+In the above chapter I must not be understood as pretending to settle
+the thorny question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and
+pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no
+mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in
+a limited region, can be used to contradict freedom of the will, under
+generalised conditions, in the Universe as a whole.
+
+Nevertheless there are things which may perhaps be usefully said, even
+on the larger and much-worn topic of the present note. If we still
+endeavour to learn as much as possible from human analogies, examples
+are easy:--
+
+An architect can draw in detail a building that is to be; the dwellers
+in a valley can be warned to evacuate their homesteads because a city
+has determined that a lake shall exist where none existed before.
+Doubtless the city is free to change its mind, but it is not expected
+to; and all predictions are understood to be made subject to the
+absence of disturbing, _i.e._ unforeseen, causes. Even the prediction
+of an eclipse is not free from a remote uncertainty, and in the case of
+the return of meteoric showers and comets the element of contingency is
+not even remote.
+
+But it will be said that to higher and superhuman knowledge all
+possible contingencies would be known and recognised as part of the
+data. That is quite possibly, though not quite certainly, true: and
+there comes the real difficulty of reconciling absolute prediction of
+events with real freedom of the actors in the drama. I anticipate that
+a complete solution of the problem must involve a treatment of the
+subject of _time_, and a recognition that "time," as it appears to us,
+is really part of our human limitations. We all realise that "the past"
+is in some sense not non-existent but only past; we may readily surmise
+that "the future" is similarly in some sense existent, only that we
+have not yet arrived at it; and our links with the future are less
+understood. That a seer in a moment of clairvoyance may catch a glimpse
+of futurity--some partial picture of what perhaps exists even now in
+the forethought of some higher mind--is not inconceivable. It may be
+after all only an unconscious and inspired inference from the present,
+on an enlarged and exceptional scale; and it is a matter for
+straightforward investigation whether such prevision ever occurs.
+
+The following article, on the general subject of "Free Will and
+Determinism," reprinted from the _Contemporary Review_ for March 1904,
+may conveniently be here reproduced:--
+
+    The conflict between Free Will and Determinism depends on a
+    question of boundaries. We occasionally ignore the fact that there
+    must be a subjective partition in the Universe separating the
+    region of which we have some inkling of knowledge from the region
+    of which we have absolutely none; we are apt to regard the portion
+    on our side as if it were the whole, and to debate whether it must
+    or must not be regarded as self-determined. As a matter of fact any
+    partitioned-off region is in general not completely
+    self-determined, since it is liable to be acted upon by influences
+    from the other side of the partition. If the far side of the
+    boundary is ignored, then an observer on the near side will
+    conclude that things really initiate their own motion and act
+    without stimulation or motive, in some cases, whereas the fact is
+    that no act is performed without stimulus or motive; even
+    irrational acts are caused by something, and so also are rational
+    acts. Madness and delirium are natural phenomena amenable to law.
+
+    But in actual life we are living on one side of a boundary, and are
+    aware of things on one side only; the things on this side appear to
+    us to constitute the whole universe, since they are all of which we
+    have any knowledge, either through our senses or in other ways.
+    Hence we are subject to certain illusions, and feel certain
+    difficulties,--the illusion of unstimulated and unmotived freedom
+    of action, and the difficulty of reconciling this with the felt
+    necessity for general determinism and causation.
+
+    If we speak in terms of the part of the universe that we know and
+    have to do with, we find free agencies rampant among organic life;
+    so that "freedom of action" is a definite and real experience, and
+    for practical convenience is so expressed. But if we could seize
+    the entirety of things and perceive what was occurring beyond the
+    range of our limited conceptions we should realise that the whole
+    was welded together, and that influences were coming through which
+    produced the effects that we observe.
+
+    Those philosophers, if there are any, who assert that we are wholly
+    chained bound and controlled by the circumstances of that part of
+    the Universe of which we are directly aware--that we are the slaves
+    of our environment and must act as we are compelled by forces
+    emanating from things on our side of the boundary alone,--those
+    philosophers err.
+
+    This kind of determinism is false; and the reaction against it has
+    led other philosophers to assert that we are _lawlessly_ free, and
+    able to initiate any action without motive or cause,--that each
+    individual is a capricious and chaotic entity, not part of a Cosmos
+    at all!
+
+    It may be doubted whether anyone has clearly and actually
+    maintained either of these theses in all its crudity; but there are
+    many who vigorously and cheaply deny one or other of them, and in
+    so denying the one conceive that they are maintaining the other.
+    Both the above theses are false; yet Free Will and Determinism are
+    both true, and in a completely known universe would cease to be
+    contradictories.
+
+    The reconciliation between opposing views lies in realising that
+    the Universe of which we have a kind of knowledge is but a portion
+    or an aspect of the whole.
+
+    We are free, and we are controlled. We are free, in so far as our
+    sensible surroundings and immediate environment are concerned; that
+    is, we are free for all practical purposes, and can choose between
+    alternatives as they present themselves. We are controlled, as
+    being intrinsic parts of an entire cosmos suffused with law and
+    order.
+
+    No scheme of science based on knowledge of our environment can
+    confidently predict our actions, nor the actions of any
+    sufficiently intelligent live creature. For "mind" and "will" have
+    their roots on the other side of the partition, and that which we
+    perceive of them is but a fraction of the whole. Nevertheless, the
+    more developed and consistent and harmonious our character becomes,
+    the less liable is it to random outbreaks, and the more certainly
+    can we be depended on. We thus, even now, can exhibit some
+    approximation to the highest state--that conscious unison with the
+    entire scheme of existence which is identical with perfect freedom.
+
+    If we could grasp the totality of things we should realise that
+    everything was ordered and definite, linked up with everything else
+    in a chain of causation, and that nothing was capricious and
+    uncertain and uncontrolled. The totality of things is, however, and
+    must remain, beyond our grasp; hence the actual working of the
+    process, the nature of the links, the causes which create our
+    determinations, are frequently unknown. And since it is necessary
+    for practical purposes to treat what is utterly beyond our ken as
+    if it were non-existent, it becomes easily possible to fall into
+    the erroneous habit of conceiving the transcendental region to be
+    completely inoperative.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+FURTHER SPECULATION AS TO THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE[6]
+
+_Preliminary Remarks on Recent Views in Chemistry._
+
+
+It is a fact extremely familiar to chemists that the groupings possible
+to atoms of carbon are exceptionally numerous and complicated, each
+carbon atom having the power of linking itself with others to an
+extraordinary extent, so that it is no exceptional thing to find a
+substance which contains twenty or thirty atoms of carbon as well as
+other elements linked together in its molecule in a perfectly definite
+way, the molecule being still classifiable as that of a definite
+chemical compound. But there are also some non-elementary bodies which,
+although they are chemically complete and satisfied, retain a
+considerable vestige of power to link their molecules together so as to
+make a complex and massive compound molecule; and these are able not
+only to link similar molecules into a more or less indefinite chain,
+but to unite and include the saturated molecules of many other
+substances also into the unwieldy aggregate.
+
+      [6] An article reprinted from the _North American Review_ for May
+      1905.
+
+Of the non-elementary bodies possessing this property, _water_ appears
+to be one of the chief; for there is evidence to show that the ordinary
+H-2-O molecule of water, although it may be properly spoken of as a
+saturated or satisfied compound, seldom exists in the simple isolated
+shape depicted by this formula, but rather that a great number of such
+simple molecules attach themselves to each other by what is called
+their residual or outstanding affinity, and build themselves up into a
+complex aggregate.
+
+The doctrine of residual affinity has been long advocated by Armstrong;
+and the present writer has recently shown that it is a necessary
+consequence of the electrical theory of chemical affinity,[7] and that
+the structure of the resulting groupings, or compound aggregates, may
+be partially studied by means of floating magnets, somewhat after the
+manner of Alfred Mayer.[8]
+
+      [7] See _Nature_, vol. 70, p. 176, June 23, 1904.
+
+      [8] See an article on "Modern Views of Chemical Affinity" by the
+      present writer in a magazine called _Technics_, for September
+      1904.
+
+It may be well here to explain to students that one of the lines of
+argument which lead to the conclusion that the water molecule, as it
+ordinarily exists, is really complex and massive, is based upon
+measurements of the Faraday dielectric constant for water; for this
+constant, or "specific inductive capacity," is found to be very large,
+something like 50 times that of air or free ether; whereas for glass it
+is only 5 or 6 times that of free space. The dielectric constant of a
+substance generally increases with the density or massiveness of its
+molecule,--indeed, the value of this constant is one of the methods
+whereby matter displays its interaction with and loading of the free
+ether of space,--and any such density as the conventional nine times
+that of hydrogen for the molecule of water would be wholly unable to
+explain its immense dielectric constant.
+
+The influence of the massiveness of a water molecule is also displayed
+in its power of tearing asunder or dissociating any salts or other
+simple chemical substance introduced into it; common salt, for
+instance, is found always to have a certain percentage of its molecules
+knocked or torn asunder directly it is dissolved in water, so that, in
+addition to a number of salt molecules in solution, there are a few
+positively charged sodium atoms and a few negatively charged chlorine
+atoms, existing in a state of loose attraction to the water aggregate,
+and amenable to the smallest electric force; which, when applied, urges
+the chlorine one way and the sodium the other way, so that they can be
+removed at an electrode and their place supplied by freshly dissociated
+molecules of salt, thus bringing about its permanent electro-chemical
+decomposition, and enabling the water to behave as an electrolytic
+conductor directly a little salt or acid is dissolved in it.
+
+The power of the water molecule to associate itself with molecules of
+other substances is illustrated by the well-known fact that water is an
+almost universal solvent. It is its residual affinity which enables it
+to enter into weak chemical combination with a large number of other
+substances, and thus to dissolve those substances. The dissolving power
+usually increases when the temperature is raised, possibly because the
+self-contained or self-sufficient groupings of the water molecules are
+then to some extent broken up and the fragments enabled to cling on to
+the foreign or introduced matter instead of only to each other. The
+foreign substance is apt to be extruded again when the liquid cools,
+and when the affinity of the water-aggregates for each other resumes
+its sway. Very hot water can dissolve not only the substances
+familiarly known to be soluble in water, but it can dissolve things
+like glass also; so that glass vessels are unable to retain water kept
+under high pressure at a very high temperature, approaching a red heat.
+
+Another material which also seems to have the power of combining with a
+number of other bodies, under the influence of the loose mode of
+chemical combination spoken of as residual affinity, is carbon; so that
+a block of charcoal can absorb hundreds of times its own bulk of
+certain gases.
+
+Indeed, Sir James Dewar has recently employed this absorbing power of
+very cold carbon to produce a perfect kind of vacuum, which may,
+perhaps, be the nearest approach to absolute vacuum that has yet been
+attained: probably higher than can be attained by any kind of
+mechanical or mercury pump.
+
+
+_Unexpected Influence of Size._
+
+Suppose now a substance contains a great number of carbon molecules and
+a great number of water molecules, each of which has this residual
+affinity or power of clinging together well developed, what may be
+expected to be the result? Surely, the formation of a molecule
+consisting of thousands or hundreds of thousands of atoms, constituting
+substances more complex even than those already known to or analysable
+by organic chemistry; and if these complex molecules likewise possess
+the adhesive faculty, a grouping of millions or even billions of atoms
+may ultimately be formed. (A billion, that is a million millions, of
+atoms is truly an immense number, but the resulting aggregate is still
+excessively minute. A portion of substance consisting of a billion
+atoms is only barely visible with the highest power of a microscope;
+and a speck or granule, in order to be visible to the naked eye, like a
+grain of lycopodium-dust, must be a million times bigger still.) Such a
+grouping is likely to have properties differing not only in degree but
+in kind from the properties of simple substances.
+
+For it must not be thought that aggregation only produces quantitative
+change and leaves quality unaltered. Fresh qualities altogether are
+liable to be introduced or to make their appearance at certain
+stages--certain critical stages--in the building up of a complex mass
+(_cf._ p. 71).
+
+The habitability of a house, for instance, depends on its possessing a
+cavity of a certain size; there is a critical size of brick-aggregate
+which enables it to serve as a dwelling. Nothing much smaller than this
+would do at all. The aggregate retains this property, thus conferred
+upon it by size, however big it may be made after that; until it
+becomes a palace or a cathedral, when it may perhaps reach an upper
+limit of size at which it would be crushed by its own weight, or at
+which the span of roof is too great to be supported. But the
+difference, as regards habitability, between a palace and a hovel is
+far less than that between a hovel and one of the air-holes in a brick
+or loaf, or any other cavity too small to act as a human habitation.
+The difference as regards habitability is then an infinite difference.
+
+To take a less trivial instance; a planet which is large enough to
+retain an atmosphere by its gravitative attraction differs utterly, in
+potentiality and importance, from the numerous lumps of matter
+scattered throughout space, which, though they may be as large as a
+haystack or a mountain or as the British Isles, or even Europe, are yet
+too small to hold any trace of air to their surface, and therefore
+cannot in any intelligible sense of the word be regarded as habitable.
+One of the lumps of matter in space can become a habitable planet only
+when it has attained a certain size, which conceivably it might do by
+falling together with others into a complex aggregate under the
+influence of gravitative attraction. The asteroids have not succeeded
+in doing this, but the planets have; and, accordingly, one of them, at
+any rate, has become a habitable world.
+
+But observe that the great size and the consequent retention of an
+atmosphere did not generate the inhabitants; it satisfied one of the
+conditions necessary for their existence. How they arose is another
+matter. All that we have seen so far is that an aggregate of bodies may
+possess properties and powers which the separate bodies themselves
+possess in no kind or sort of way. It is not a question of degree, but
+of kind.
+
+So also, further, if the aggregate is large enough, very much larger
+than any planet, as large as a million earths aggregated together, it
+acquires the property of conspicuous radio-activity, it becomes a
+self-heating and self-luminous body, able to keep the ether violently
+agitated in all space round it, and thus to supply the radiation
+necessary for protecting the habitable worlds from the cold of space to
+which they are exposed, for maintaining them at a temperature
+appropriate to organic existence, and likewise for supplying and
+generating the energy for their myriad activities. It has become in
+fact a central sun, and source of heat, solely because of its enormous
+size combined with the fact of the mutual gravitative attraction of its
+own constituent particles. No body of moderate size could perform this
+function, nor act as a perennial furnace to the rest.
+
+
+_Application to Protoplasm._
+
+Very well then, return now to our complex molecular aggregate, and ask
+what new property, beyond the province of ordinary chemistry and
+physics, is to be expected of a compound which contains millions or
+billions of atoms attached to each other in no rigid, stable, frigid
+manner, but by loose unstable links, enabling them constantly to
+re-arrange themselves and to be the theatre of perpetual change,
+aggregating and reaggregating in various ways and manifesting ceaseless
+activities. Such unstable aggregates of matter may, like the water of a
+pond or a heap of organic refuse, serve as the vehicle for influences
+wholly novel and unexpected.
+
+Too much agitation--that is, too high a temperature--will split them up
+and destroy the new-found potentiality of such aggregates; too little
+agitation--that is, too low a temperature--will permit them to begin to
+cohere and settle down into frozen rigid masses insusceptible of
+manifold activities. But take them just at the right temperature, when
+sufficiently complex and sufficiently mobile; take care of them, so to
+speak, for the structure may easily be killed; and what shall we find?
+We could not infer or guess what would be the result, but we can
+observe the result as it is.
+
+The result is that the complexes group themselves into minute masses
+visible in the microscope, each mass being called by us a "cell"; that
+these cells possess the power of uniting with or assimilating other
+cells, or fragments of cells, as they drift by and come into contact
+with them; and that they absorb into their own substance such portions
+as may be suitable, while the insufficiently elaborated portions--the
+grains of inorganic or over-simple material--are presently extruded.
+They thus begin the act of "feeding."
+
+Another remarkable property also can be observed; for a cell which thus
+grows by feeding need not remain as one individual, but may split into
+two, or into more than two, which may cohere for a time, but will
+ultimately separate and continue existence on their own account. Thus
+begins the act of "reproduction."
+
+But a still more remarkable property can be observed in some of the
+cells, though not in all; they can not only assimilate a fragment of
+matter which comes into contact with them, but they can sense it,
+apparently, while not yet in contact, and can protrude portions of
+their substance or move their whole bodies towards the fragment, thus
+beginning the act of "hunting"; and the incipient locomotory power can
+be extended till light and air and moisture and many other things can
+be sought and moved towards, until locomotion becomes so free that it
+sometimes seems apparently objectless--mere restlessness, change for
+the sake of change, like that of human beings.
+
+The power of locomotion is liable, however, to introduce the cell to
+new dangers, and to conditions hostile to its continued aggregate
+existence. So, in addition to the sense of food and other desirable
+things ahead, it seems to acquire, at any rate when still further
+aggregated and more developed, a sense of shrinking from and avoidance
+of the hostile and the dangerous,--a sense as it were of "pain."
+
+And so it enters on its long career of progress, always liable to
+disintegration or "death"; it begins to differentiate portions of
+itself for the feeding process, other portions for the reproductive
+process, other portions again for sensory processes, but retaining the
+protective sense of pain almost everywhere; until the spots sensitive
+to ethereal and aerial vibrations--which, arriving as they do from a
+distance, carry with them so much valuable information, and when duly
+appreciated render possible perception and prediction as to what is
+ahead--until these sensitive spots have become developed into the
+special organs which we now know as the "eye" and the "ear." Then,
+presently, the power of communication is slowly elaborated, speech and
+education begin, and the knowledge of the individual is no longer
+limited to his own experience, but expands till it embraces the past
+history and the condensed acquisition of the race. And thus gradually
+arises a developed self-consciousness, a discrimination between the
+self and the external world, and a realisation of the power of choice
+and freedom,--a stage beyond which we have not travelled as yet, but a
+stage at which almost all things seem possible.
+
+The first two properties, assimilation and reproduction, overshadowed
+by the possibility of _death_, are properties of life of every kind,
+plant life as of all other. The power of locomotion and special senses,
+over-shadowed by the sense of _pain_, are the sign of a still further
+development into what we call "animal life." The further development,
+of mind, consciousness, and sense of freedom, overshadowed by the
+possibility of wilful error or _sin_, is the conspicuous attribute
+of life which is distinctively human.
+
+Thus, our complex molecular aggregate has shown itself capable of
+extraordinary and most interesting processes, has proved capable of
+constituting the material vehicle of life, the natural basis of living
+organisms, and even of mind; very much as a planet of certain size
+proved capable of possessing an atmosphere.
+
+But is it to be supposed that the complex aggregate _generated_ the
+life and mind, as the planet generated its atmosphere? That is the
+so-called materialistic view, but to the writer it seems an erroneous
+one, and it is certainly one that is not proven. It is not even certain
+that every planet generated all the gases of its own atmosphere: some
+of them it may have swept up in its excursion through space. What is
+certain is that it possesses the power of retaining an atmosphere; it
+is by no means so certain how all the constituents of that atmosphere
+arrived.
+
+
+_Questions concerning the Origin and Nature of Life._
+
+All that we have actually experienced and verified is that a complex
+molecular aggregate is capable of being the vehicle or material basis
+of life; but to the question _what life is_ we have as yet no answer.
+Many have been the attempts to generate life _de novo_, by packing
+together suitable materials and keeping them pleasantly warm for a long
+time; but, if all germs of pre-existing life are rigorously excluded,
+the attempt hitherto has been a failure: so far, no life has made its
+appearance under observation, except from antecedent life.
+
+But, to exclude all trace of antecedent life, it is necessary not only
+to shut out floating germs, but to kill all germs previously existing
+in the material we are dealing with. This killing of previous life is
+usually accomplished by heat; but it has been argued that strong heat
+will destroy not only the life but the potentiality for life, will
+break up the complex aggregate on which life depends, will deprive the
+incubating solution not only of life but of livelihood. There is some
+force in the objection, and it is an illustration of the difficulty
+surrounding the subject. But Tyndall showed that antecedent life could
+be destroyed, without any very high temperature, by gentle heat
+periodically applied: heat insufficient to kill the germs, but
+sufficient to kill the hatched or developed organisms. Periodic heating
+enables the germs of successive ages to hatch, so to speak, and the
+product to be slain; and, although some each time may have reproduced
+germs before slaughter--eggs capable of standing the warmth--yet a
+succession of such warmings would ultimately be fatal to all, and that
+without necessarily breaking up the protoplasmic complex aggregates on
+the existence of which the whole vital potentiality depends.
+
+So far, however, all effort at spontaneous generation has been a
+failure; possibly because some essential ingredient or condition was
+omitted, possibly because great lapse of time was necessary. But
+suppose it was successful; what then? We should then be reproducing in
+the laboratory a process that must at some past age have occurred on
+the earth; for at one time the earth was certainly hot and molten and
+inorganic, whereas now it swarms with life.
+
+Does that show that the earth generated the life? By no means; no more
+than it need necessarily have generated all the gases of its
+atmosphere, or the meteoric dust which lies upon its snows.
+
+Life may be something not only ultra-terrestrial, but even immaterial,
+something outside our present categories of matter and energy; as real
+as they are, but different, and utilising them for its own purpose.
+What is certain is that life possesses the power of vitalising the
+complex material aggregates which exist on this planet, and of
+utilising their energies for a time to display itself amid terrestrial
+surroundings; and then it seems to disappear or evaporate whence it
+came. It is perpetually arriving and perpetually disappearing. While it
+is here, if it is at a sufficiently high level, the animated material
+body moves about and strives after many objects, some worthy, some
+unworthy; it acquires thereby a certain individuality, a certain
+character. It may realise _itself_, moreover, becoming conscious of
+its own mental and spiritual existence; and it then begins to explore
+the Mind which, like its own, it conceives must underlie the material
+fabric--half displayed, half concealed, by the environment, and
+intelligible only to a kindred spirit. Thus the scheme of law and
+order dimly dawns upon the nascent soul, and it begins to form clear
+conceptions of truth, goodness, and beauty; it may achieve something
+of permanent value, as a work of art or of literature; it may enter
+regions of emotion and may evolve ideas of the loftiest kind; it may
+degrade itself below the beasts, or it may soar till it is almost
+divine.
+
+Is it the material molecular aggregate that has of its own unaided
+latent power generated this individuality, acquired this character,
+felt these emotions, evolved these ideas? There are some who try to
+think that it is. There are others who recognise in this extraordinary
+development a contact between this material frame of things and a
+universe higher and other than anything known to our senses; a universe
+not dominated by Physics and Chemistry, but utilising the interactions
+of matter for its own purposes; a universe where the human spirit is
+more at home than it is among these temporary collocations of atoms; a
+universe capable of infinite development, of noble contemplation, and
+of lofty joy, long after this planet--nay, the whole solar system--shall
+have fulfilled its present spire of destiny, and retired cold and lifeless
+upon its endless way.
+
+                     *      *      *      *      *
+
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