28 METAPHYSICS 



tained by a mode of vital or pre-nervine energy, which 

 accomplished all the purposes of a nervous system by 

 diffusion along certain infra-cellular molecular lines or 

 protoplasmic ways, on the principles of intra-cellulo- 

 molecular metabolism. Even here, however, life is a 

 duplex affair, in that it requires for its manifestation a 

 combination of material and dynamic entities, in propor- 

 tion to and accordance with that determined by the first 

 creative, vital, or organic act and the law of evolution. 



When the conditions and environment of uni-cellular 

 existence had been outlived, and when these conditions 

 and environments no longer met the requirements of a 

 multi-cellular organism, then came the first call or need 

 for the provision of an organised nervous system which 

 would hold a cellular community together and innervate 

 it, while maintaining supremacy over the individual cells, 

 to the end that a co-ordinated functional regime should 

 subsist between the individual cells for communal pur- 

 poses, apart from or together with the individual cell 

 work. 



The duplex principle here still continues to manifest 

 itself by the combination of individual and communal cell 

 autonomy within the multi-cellular organism. But when 

 this form of organism has in turn " outlived its day and 

 generation," a new departure becomes necessary, and to 

 the system of innervation sympathetic which has been 

 thus far sufficient to meet the wants of this merely 

 vegetative innervation, so to speak, there has to be added 

 a further system of innervation to meet the requirements 

 of a voluntarily mobile organism, using muscular agency 

 for enabling it to bring itself into free and full relation- 

 ship with its environment. Here appears a principle in 

 developmental procedure, which has a most profound 

 effect on the whole current of succeeding organic 

 evolutionary events, introducing a third manner of inner- 

 vation into the already duplex method. This triple 

 method of innervation is composed of the uni-cellular, 

 or protoplasmic, the multi-cellular, or sympathetic, and the 

 structural, or systemic, the first concerning itself mainly 

 with metabolism, the second with communal organic 

 needs, and the third with intelligence and locomotion. 



