86 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 



but distantly follow his bold swimming. " I would not too 

 blatantly assert that even a doll on which much affection 

 had been lavished was wholly inert and material in the 

 inorganic sense." " I have reason to believe that a trace of 

 individuality can cling about terrestrial objects in a vague 

 and almost inperceptible fashion, but to a degree sufficient 

 to enable those traces to be detected by persons with 

 suitable faculties " (p. 122). Here we get just a momentary 

 glimpse of the real foundations of his philosophy ; all the 

 rest are false buttresses. Parliament and the Army are 

 offered us as analogues of " entities " that may exist disem- 

 bodied, when their constituent elements are dissolved. 

 Magnetism is finely developed as an analogy to life (most 

 " Materialists " will sympathise with that) until the critical 

 point is reached, when just as we are beginning to wonder 

 what the precise analogy is to an " immaterial " principle 

 it is discarded as " useful no longer." But when he adds 

 that if one conceived magnetism as " brought into relation 

 with the world of matter by certain acts," controlling it for 

 a time, and then "disappearing to the immaterial region 

 whence it came " when he says this " no physicist would 

 think it worth while to object to, and many indeed might 

 agree with," we are moved with pity for the " uneducated 

 reader." Sir O. Lodge has already assured us that ether is 

 matter (p. 29), and has discarded the idea of separate 

 inorganic energy in the name of " physical science " 

 (P- 



For such considerations we are asked to resist the natural 



