‘laws’ of Nature can yet be turned to account, do they deserve the name of laws; and what limits our power is not their inflexibility but our own ignorance. Or again, compare living organisms and their processes, on the one hand, with inanimate objects and the changes that they undergo, on the other. We note at once an ever-increasing complexity as we rise in the scale of life, from the amoeba say to ourselves; and also in our artificial products as we rise in the scale of civilisation, say from the African kraal to the European city. The steady downward trend, the katabolic, levelling tendencies attributed to unchecked mechanism we find not merely suspended but reversed wherever there is life and mind. The notions of form, adaptation and control here force themselves upon our notice in contrast to matter and its blind, purposeless collisions. Undeterred by this amazing contrast, however, those who uphold the theory that Nature is really a closed mechanism must, and do, refuse to draw any line: living and lifeless, artificial and natural, are distinctions of no account from the point of view of the mechanical whole: life and mind are the concomitants of certain of its workings but the determinants of none. Still the prevision just now referred to and this sharp contrast are there, and have to be accounted for somehow: to allow that they exactly tally with the presence of lite and mind and advance continuously as these advance is but to state the problem, not to solve it. To be content with this is as veritable a specimen of what Germans call ‘beer philosophy’ as the profound remark that great rivers run through populous towns.
In the first place a series of coincidences so vast
