i88 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



This being so, what is to prevent us from believing 

 that, once certain adjustments are made in the mental 

 sausage-machine, we shall discover that what we 

 once found impossibly tough meat will pass smoothly 

 through and become done up into the most satisfactory 

 of sausages ? In other words, that the values are 

 there if we choose to make them — an Euckenish 

 doctrine which, for all that it arouses instinctive 

 suspicion, may none the less be true. 



But even when we have made all possible discounts 

 of this kind, evolved the smoothest-running machinery, 

 converted the raw and meaty material of being into 

 every conceivable kind of tidy sausage, the fact re- 

 mains that there are feats beyond the power of our 

 machine — beyond its power because of the very 

 quality of its being. 



We live at a certain rhythm in time, at a certain 

 level of size and space ; beyond certain limits, events 

 in the outer world are not directly appreciable by 

 the ordinary channels of sense, although a symbolic 

 picture of them may be presented to us by the intellect. 



When we are listening to the organ, sometimes 

 there come notes which are on the border-line be- 

 tween sound and feeling : their separate vibrations 

 are distinguishable and pulse through us, and the more 

 the vibrations are separable, the more they are felt as 

 mechanical shocks, the less as sound. However, we 

 know perfectly well that all sounds as a matter of 

 fact depend on vibratory disturbance, and that it is 



