There are signs that the life of the body is even in the lower animals to some extent imbued with the free creative spirit. There are creative efforts of determination, changes of direction, triumphs over circumstance, that find their enlightening context in the more emancipated life of man.

A sea-urchin's egg, for instance, begins its development by dividing into two cells. Normally these cells, by a like division, share between them the making of the respective halves of the creature's body. If you remove one cell after the first division of the egg you may expect (you certainly should and will if you take your stand with the mechanistic theorists) to find that you have mutilated the creature. You may or will expect to see the remaining half of the egg grow to a half-embryo. Under some circumstances you will see what you expect; but if you are very skilful and are acquainted with the new methods you will have the disturbing joy of seeing the half-egg—you may even see a quarter-egg—take on the work of the whole, and grow to a complete though small embryo; and not only to an embryo but to a larva. You may do the same with a newt's egg or a frog's. With your mind's eye, then, you may if you like, and if you thus interpret things, watch the sea-urchin's, the frog's, or the newt's life, overcoming, according to a 'primary purposiveness' of its own, your effort to thwart its intention. You may watch it determining new contrivances from within to meet an unexpected emergency that threatens to mar the complete whole it means to be, changing a normal to an abnormal course of activity, that it may still attain its end—in short 'working out its own salvation,' as a morphologist remarks, 'upon original and individual lines.'

It would seem difficult not to recognize in these changes a likeness to what you know in yourself as intelligent action. Studying them it is hard for any but a confirmed mechanist to resist the contention of men who tell us that the vital is the intelligent. Whereas purely material changes, if they are left to themselves, follow the way of least material resistance, life, whether in the cell or in the organism, moves in an opposite direction. The living vegetable cell raises carbon and other elements from relative inertness to a condition charged with newly available power. And in these developmental changes the organism seems to manifest itself as in very truth 'a living, active, responsive thing, quite capable of relinquishing at need the beaten track of normal development,' like ourselves as we make our bodily, intellectual, moral and spiritual decisions. The mechanist is ready with his retort when we say this, but it is a poor retort. He tells us of mysterious 'specific organ-forming substances' which are not ordinary chemical substances of any kind; and which no research is able to detect, except it be as pictured behind the very processes of growth that are telling us of the organ-forming determination of a specific mode of life. For both us and the mechanist there is the same process and result. He sees, but only with his mind's eye, these utterly mysterious 'substances' he has himself invoked; we see, with our mind's eye, the sea-urchin's, or the newt's, life issuing in that purposeful endeavour which always and everywhere, we say, is a mark of the life we know. We may even admit the possibility of the existence of his organ-forming substances, but only as conditions of life's organ-forming, not as effective causes—a distinction of fundamental importance for the careful thinker not content to be arrested by the look of things, however scientific. We cannot rest in a mechanical interpretation which at best only thrusts the problem one stage farther away, as does the pseudo-physicist-philosopher's ether-God. Life to us seems effective, and under all conditions determining, within the limits of those conditions. Organ-forming substances there may be; but they are either the co-operative servants of life (if they exist at all) like other substances, or they are no better than names for the modes in which life is at work. To us life seems, from its first entrance into possession of a body, when it gave to material substances a higher status, to have worked always towards dominance over the established laws and customs (that is the habits) of matter, as no substances have ever worked. At first it did little more with matter than lift physical or chemical elements upward in heightening states of energy, within a body, against physical or chemical tendencies that would take them downward to their physical or chemical equilibrium; later it went on, through the organizing of an ever more and more complex and variable nervous system, to a man's brain, where the control of intelligence over the living instrument that is its very active servant became strong enough to guide into ever-widening relations and possibilities an activity seeking spiritual advance. An activity, straining for liberation against some resistance by which nevertheless it was itself made effectual, could—we are driven to think—do no other than find its way imperfectly and by slow degrees; yet on its way it has shown even in very lowly creatures signs of what it really is. That any 'substance' the mechanist can acknowledge has done this of its own motion and power, we take leave to doubt. And we have learnt to understand the mechanist.

If the train of reflexion thus suggested is followed up, some of us will find ourselves compelled to readjust certain beliefs in regard to spiritual life as related to the life of the body, and in regard also to bodily life as related to the life of the spirit. We shall perhaps learn that in looking upon spirit as altogether separate from matter or as connected with matter only by some fortuitous or indeed unhappy link, we may indeed have kept it safe from the attacks of the materialist, but only at the cost of emptying it of value for ourselves, except in so far as it is, perhaps, an all but invisible point de repÈre round about which our vague religious sentiments are grouped. Just as in the evolution of elements and compounds afterwards united in the marvel of life-jelly, we traced the preparation of a pathway for life moving towards its first manifestation, so we should trace in the successive phases of that manifestation a development of co-operative relations between spirit and matter, a development rendering matter more and more plastic to spirit, and spirit more and more responsive to the character of the far from inert instrument through which its purpose is effected.

The evolutionist philosopher has told us that we may picture life as a rising wave opposed by the contrary movement of matter towards stability. The greater part of the whole volume of the wave, after reaching one height or another, is arrested; and going no further it is at each several height converted into the whirling eddies, the contented plants and animals of which we have already spoken. At one point only, where it rises highest, does the wave find a free passage (and of this too we have spoken) along which it carries with it, converted to its further purpose, the material obstacle, condition, and means that will, in a sense and for a time, still in some degree encumber, but cannot now arrest, its advance. The life-current continues to flow, a gathering wave of conscious life grown to self-consciousness and world-consciousness. It flows on from this point of conquest through generation after generation of men in and to whom its spiritual character is now plainly revealed. For each man it is a rill from the great human river of life—life natural and spiritual, spiritual because so fully natural—which has become his own and is indeed himself. For each the material but living brain is the chief instrument and helper by means of which he himself stretches forth towards wider and wider relations, not only with material objects but with other spiritual beings. And as the spirit of a man thus expands, amassing life and becoming, by the sympathetic spiritual inclusion of other lives, greater in its reach and in itself, it is confirmed and consolidated in its self-ownership. You may say that as a self-knowing, self-governing, creative being, an owner of means and a seeker after ends, man's life has at last taken possession of the kingdom of itself, and that it has reached this all-important status through the medium and condition of a body and by the experience of an earthly world.

We will let the philosopher tell us the gist of this in his own words:—

'While we watch the birth of consciousness we are confronted, at the same time, by the apparition of living bodies, capable, even in their simplest forms, of movements spontaneous and unforeseen. The progress of living matter consists in a differentiation of function which leads first to the production and then to the increasing complication of a nervous system capable of canalizing excitations and of organizing actions: the more the higher centres develop, the more numerous become the motor paths among which the same excitation allows the living being to choose in order that it may act. An ever greater latitude left to movement in space—this indeed is what is seen. What is not seen is the growing and accompanying tension of consciousness in time. Not only, by its memory of former experiences, does this consciousness retain the past better and better, so as to organize it with the present in a newer and richer decision; but, living with an intenser life, contracting, by its memory of the immediate experience, a growing number of external moments in its present duration, it becomes more capable of creating acts of which the inner indetermination, spread over as large a multiplicity of the moments of matter as you please, will pass the more easily through the meshes of necessity. Thus, whether we consider it in time or in space, freedom always seems to have its roots deep in necessity and to be intimately organized with it. Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds, and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.'

Any philosopher, after writing or speaking some such words as these, may well ask us to consider—when we have watched the hard-won triumph of life over so great difficulties and so many obstacles, when we have discovered what seems to us clear evidence that it has for age upon age pursued with immeasurable power and resource a purpose which the spiritual consciousness of man is alone competent to fulfil, and that it has thus attained in man a position of supreme advantage for this fulfilment—whether we ought not to regard ourselves as paltering with reason if we expect that pursuit and that attainment both to be in vain. Is life, just where it seems in sight of final triumph, to be overcome at the last by death? Why should it be overcome by this when it has vanquished so much else? Why, if the world is rational, should we expect all the ages of preparation to be brought to naught, and the splendour of man's promise to be laid low in the grave?

We have to confess, I think, that reason is against this, and that when we allow ourselves to expect or to fear such an anti-climax we are influenced rather by prejudice, conscious or unconscious. Prejudice is born of our every-day dealing with things and our every-day notions about causes and about bodies. We think spirit is dependent upon matter, not as upon a living and responsive instrument of transmission and self-development to a certain necessary point of self-consolidation; but as most things we deal with depend upon other things, which, as we say, cause them, produce them, or make them do and be and happen. We suppose all too easily that just as steam ceases when the boiler-fires are drawn, so when the body dies life, its product, ceases too. We see the leaves fall from the trees to perish. Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse,—it is the common lot of things and men. It is familiar—what more need be said? The burden of proof lies on the man who would tell us of exceptions to the rule.

Yet, if and when we come to examine things and men, do we discover any such rule applicable to men? Are we not all but compelled, reading the astounding story of evolution in the light cast upon it by its culmination in man, to question every uncriticized and easily formed opinion on a subject so complex and profound? If indeed there is evidence to show that life is neither produced by nor released from matter, but is in some sort conjoined with matter, lifting it from its own level, and using its powers in a way altogether different from their normal material course; if there is evidence that these powers are made to fulfil a purpose that can be no other than a purpose for life; then, obviously, matter, in the order of power and of nature, is life's subordinate. We must, indeed, as reasonable beings, correct those easy opinions—these things being thus. The similes and illustrations of every day do not fit the case. Intimate as is the relation between spirit and matter, there is no more reason to think life is produced by a material substance than to think the boiler-fire is produced by the steam. Both thoughts are equally absurd, and perhaps the chief cause of our thinking so easily the one and of our being quite unable to think the other is that we can see and touch boilers and the like, and cannot see and touch 'spirit and life.'