XI FUNCTIONS AND IDEALS 307 



ment, but between the stimulus and the resulting movement 

 a whole new world intervenes, which transforms the stimulus 

 into the state of the organism, and makes the resulting 

 movement, not the mere mechanical effect of that cause, 

 but the free action of the organism. The organism absorbs 

 the cause as mere material, and emits the movement as the 

 resulting action of itself as the real cause. This trans- 

 formation not only is seen to happen in the case of the lower 

 organisms, but is revealed and interpreted in human con- 

 sciousness as what actually does take place. Consciousness 

 interpolates the self between all causal stimulus and all re- 

 sulting response, and reveals the self as the free creator or 

 prompter of the response after it has absorbed the stimulus. 

 Accordingly, as we saw in Chapter VI, freedom arises cre- 

 atively inside the process of natural causation. 



The spontaneous self-activity of the organism in the 

 assimilation of material necessary for its nutrition and de- 

 velopment shows that it is free as an organic whole; while 

 the assimilation and transformation of that material and the 

 reference of any resulting movements or responses to the 

 organism as their originating and determining cause show 

 that freedom or self-determination from another point of 

 view. There is no such spontaneity nor such power of 

 creative assimilation in any mere mechanical aggregate; in 

 so far as an organism is a whole, it is also a free self-deter- 

 mining agent in the activity which dissolves and assimilates 

 extraneous influences or materials and substitutes freedom 

 for causal necessity. 



We thus see that Freedom has its roots deep down in the 

 foundations and constitution of the universe. It is a pro- 

 found mistake to look for Freedom only in the human will.. 

 The correct and fruitful view discloses Freedom, not as an 

 exceptional development in the universe, as an attribute 

 merely of the 'human will, but as itself in one degree or 

 another the grand rule of the universe, as the free self- 

 determined activity of Holism in its universal process of 

 self-realisation in Evolution, and as the fundamental prin- 



