Man's Place in Nature 245 



just as the power of flight does. Thus mind or 

 something analogous to mind may be latent in a 

 material basis which in itself shows no trace of 

 mind. No trace, except indeed this, that it de- 

 velops after a fashion that we cannot redescribe 

 in terms of the movements of corpuscles. May 

 it not be that mind lies in the egg not inactive 

 like a sleeping bud but doing for the egg what 

 the mind does for the body, unifying, regulat- 

 ing, in a sense directing it, not insinuating itself 

 into the sequences of metabolism, but, so to speak, 

 informing them and expressing itself through 

 them ? We mean that the regulative principle, the 

 entelechy, which many embryologists find it nec- 

 essary to postulate in giving a more than merely 

 chronological account of an individual develop- 

 ment, is that resident quality of a living organism 

 which in its full expression we call mind. May 

 not the same conception be extended to the 

 amoeba ? And why stop there ? Why not extend 

 it also to the crystal, the jewel, the mineral, the 

 mountain, the meteorites and the nebula in short, 

 to the Cosmos in general ? It may be said, how- 

 ever, that though man materializes an idea when 

 he makes a clever machine, there is no mind in the 

 machine, and may not the bird be a materialized 

 idea in which likewise there is no mind ? But it 

 must not be forgotten that the bird is a creative 

 machine. 



