168 MATTER, ENERGY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRIT 



crude home-made machines, created their livelihood. 

 In much the same way the religious philosopher 

 holds that the benevolent atheist attributes to him- 

 self and his own innate self-righteousness a very 

 great deal indeed. He prefers to believe himself the 

 humble subordinate of a superior being that combines, 

 in one personality, the best of all beings that ever 

 lived. 



There is common ground in the position, that 

 even though a single mind might be able to compre- 

 hend all that has gone to the evolution and survival 

 of the essentially humane type of man, no single 

 personality could, if isolated, arrive at it by himself. 

 There is a continuity that endures in the creative 

 achievements of humanity, whether, as the theist 

 believes, in the form of a personal Deity, or whether 

 as a collective memory, engraved in type or ancient 

 saga, and from which, whether we read or not, we 

 can hardly escape. There seems very little between 

 these views worth argument, and among educated 

 modern peoples, were it not for the priests, religious 

 differences would scarcely trouble the world. 



THE RUBICON BETWEEN MECHANISM AND LIFE. 



There is, of course, a danger, since knowledge in 

 these days is of necessity patchy, and first-class 

 minds are rarely content with the known, but are 

 the first to push off into the unknown, and so become 

 specialists, that the mystery of life becomes auto- 

 matically thrust out from those regions each has 

 independently explored for himself into those known 

 only at second-hand and by hearsay or from books. 

 Thus, as a physicist or chemist, I hold that there is 

 no mystery in the proper sense in the inanimate 

 universe, and I put the Rubicon between mechanism 

 and life. A biologist would probably have a very 



