OPTICS, CHEMISTRY, AND BIOLOGY 69 



beings, for untold infra-geological eras, is without 

 the slightest net effect on our own consciousness. 



This calculation, though doubtful in a quanti- 

 tative sense, brings home to us the fact that our 

 consciousness is mercifully protected from the 

 teeming life of matter, just as it is largely un- 

 aware of the multiform organic processes which 

 go on in the life of each constituent cell of the 

 human body. Our mind resembles the Registrar- 

 General in a census. The census officers penetrate 

 into every remote hamlet, and every house, and 

 before the figures reach the Registrar-General they 

 have been summed up and boiled down by a 

 large staff of intermediate officials. The Registrar- 

 General gets the net result. He may do the same 

 amount of work as his subordinates I shall chari- 

 tably suppose that he does but he surveys the 

 country as a whole, and* a unit more or less is 

 indifferent to him. In the same way, our con- 

 sciousness, or at least our normal consciousness, is 

 not lost in detail, however complex "that may be. 

 There is a summarising and integrating power 

 within us which is constantly at work, and which 

 adjusts external events to a scale within our pur- 

 view. Hence the revelation of the infinite com- 

 plexity of matter need not overwhelm us with a 

 hopeless sense of tanglo and complication. This 

 world is an intelligible world to an almost infinite 

 extent. We are understanding it more and more 



