THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 95 



Sir Oliver Lodge believes in God, but not in a Father 

 " Almighty," nor in a " Creator of heaven and earth." 



"The struggle and effort towards progress extends even 



to the Deity " (p. 5) ; "I do not believe in things jumping 

 into existence and jumping out of existence " (p. 4) ; " What 

 may be the conditions of an Infinite Being we can never 

 tell " (p. 8). Is God distinct from nature ? At one point 

 (p. 3) he begins to deny it, and then dramatically breaks 

 his sentence ; later he says : " Nature, man, God, all in a 

 sense one." He claims constantly to be a Monist, but 

 thinks there may be a number of totally distinct fundamental 

 entities. He also thinks that " it is scientific," though " it 

 may not be entirely philosophical," to accept a thing 

 " although you may not be able to reconcile it fully with 

 some other things which also you may hold to " (p. 8). He 

 does not seem to think that God is a " pure spirit," since he 

 suggests that the cosmic bodies may make up his brain. 

 These are the ideas about the Deity which Christian 

 believers fondly imagine coincide with their own. 



His views of the human " soul " are not less profoundly 

 heretical and interesting. His basic principle is " the 

 persistence of being." if he took this as a purely empirical 

 principle, it would help him very little towards a belief in 

 the survival of the soul. He therefore naively ignoring 

 his unmerited stricture on Haeckel gives it an axiomatic 

 and self-evident character. Life is an ultimate entity, and 

 must persist. Does that mean that the soul of the beetle or 

 the cat survives, as well as the human soul ? The awkward 

 conclusion is met by the framing of a fresh axiomatic 



