158 MATTER, ENERGY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRIT 



His scientific analogue is, no doubt, equally 

 selfish. He too must utterly immerse himself in 

 his own plane of thought, and must investigate the 

 mechanism of nature without giving consideration 

 even to the existence of any other plane, or to 

 whether his work be of good or evil import, valuable 

 or useless to humanity. But such a man, uncon- 

 sciously no doubt at first, but, as is now well 

 understood, infallibly, has taken the one and only 

 real method of discovery in science, and his work in 

 other hands has been such as to change the mode of 

 living and mental outlook of his kind. 



But the interest of the average man will lie and 

 must continue to rest in a just appreciation of the 

 relations of these several worlds, the spiritual and 

 the mechanical, to his own life. Not so much 

 antagonistic as out of all direct connection, the one 

 with the other, they do meet on common ground in 

 him. His is the unfortunate body from which, during 

 life, neither the aspiring soul can altogether soar, nor 

 the wheels of scientific materialism can be unmeshed. 

 He has to make his peace with both, as he is the 

 sufferer if his soul gets caught in the gear. 



Neither the spiritual nor mechanical worlds contain 

 him. First and foremost, neither spirit nor machine, 

 he is an animal, born as animals are born, his normal 

 healthy life largely occupied with the affairs of sex, 

 with parents, mate and offspring and the domestic 

 hearth, in later phases with the social, communal and 

 national life. 



Thus we have three distinct worlds, linked each 

 to each, as the links of a chain, the middle link only 

 being in direct relationship to the whole. The cold, 

 soulless mechanism of the cosmos invades the living 

 organism, and the principles of energy and matter 

 which we encounter in the inanimate world govern 

 man no less than mechanism. All that we can learn 



