206 SYMBIOGENESIS 



influence would seem to be malign witness its powers of rendering sterile 

 those who work with it, showing it to traverse the great law of Creative 

 Life. 



We thus see again how everything in nature depends on 

 character and on a proper balance of opposites, on behaviour 

 of characters that may almost be called purposive in so far as 

 its subservience to cosmic or symbiogenetic ends is concerned. 



" Grant but sensibility," says Spencer in his First 

 Principles, " with no established power of thought, and a 

 force producing some nervous changes, will still be presentable 

 at the supposed seat of sensation." Spencer has thus to take 

 for granted something that is interpretable in terms of per- 

 sonality, by w T hich assumption and its associated hiatus only he 

 can pass to the consideration of those " sensitive " and 

 " plastic " aggregates which carry us to the higher organisms, 

 which manifest sensibility in its most striking forms. But 

 there is a long interval there, and no mention is made of nutri- 

 tion as an important function of these higher organisms, and 

 that even the colloids must grow by analogous processes though 

 here but termed " accretion," that is to say that for the 

 development of these higher functions a manipulation of raw 

 materials, a manufacturing process or "work" is required. 

 In short, we are brought back to bio-economic values and the 

 creation of physiological capital even at this elementary stage 

 of evolution, and this getting of food cannot be dissociated 

 from consciousness, however incipient, as Samuel Butler has 

 urged long ago. 



B.THE ACTIONS OF FORCES ON ORGANIC MATTER. 



In this chapter Herbert Spencer discusses the sensitiveness 

 displayed by organic matter to certain forces that are quasi- 

 mechanical, if not mechanical in the usual sense. 



One peculiarity coming under this head is the " power" 

 of colloids (called "capillary affinity") to take up a large 

 quantity of water : undergoing at the same time great increase 

 of bulk with change of form. The other already related 



