TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1435 



grounds for protest. Hence, since such moral rebound and public 

 regulation have arisen as to animal life, why not yet more for human 

 life, and for community life above all? 



Yet such can be but steps towards that general re-moralisation, 

 of which more than evolutionists see encouraging beginnings. Social 

 aim may surely be as stimulating to each and every science as to 

 invention and to the fine arts, to medicine, and to education, as to 

 social and moral progress. And is it not when these are deficient that 

 we have scientific elaborations tending to futility, and inventions 

 and devices of trivial attractiveness? Has it not been such laxity of 

 the scientific and the practical spirit, in so-called peace, that has 

 ever made room for the sinister researches and the strenuous applica- 

 tions of the war- world, up to its now appalling potentialities? 



Without yet fuller place for the psychic side and aspect of life, 

 our views of the developmental process and the evolutionary alike 

 remain too naively mechanistic to be fully satisfying. It is, of course, 

 intellectually and practically necessary, at once rational and right, 

 to carry our physical lines of explanation as far as may be, and to 

 frame and test hypotheses for carrying them further still; else we 

 should fall again, as so many have fallen before, into opposing the 

 advance of each "legitimate materialism" of the preliminary 

 sciences, by futile abstractions, unjustifiable transcendentalisms. 

 Inorganic Nature's protean beauty of snow-crystals needs neither 

 internal psyche nor external design to explain them — any more 

 than does their massing into flakes as they faU into drifts as the 

 wind blows, or into ice as they gravitate and cohere and freeze 

 anew to flow as glacier, melt into stream-source, or break off as 

 mighty icebergs at once a glory and a terror of the ocean. We do 

 and must carry our conceptions of mechanical and physical processes 

 into organic development for aU they can give us of intelligibility 

 in detail, as (say) for the division of cells with increased volume, or 

 for the growth-impelled symmetric lateral uprisings to form the 

 primitive groove so manifest in the early development of the chick ; 

 and so on, as best we can, to its very completion. Yet in all this 

 there remains unexplained that orderly procession and co-ordina- 

 tion of life-events towards unity in form and function, which is 

 indeed even more impressive in embryonic life than in the adult. 

 It was obviously too abstract and too externalist to invoke here, as 

 in former generations, an "Archaeus", a "Vital Force", or the like; 

 yet the continuous and progressive co-ordination of active growth 

 and manifold differentiation, yet with harmonisation of all differ- 

 entiations into unity of form and function, is not really fully con- 

 ceivable in purely mechanistic imagery. It leaves us with no alterna- 

 tive but dimly to visualise a corresponding incipience and progress 

 of what we soon begin to see as neural development and control, so 



