26 ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE 



ship and duties towards other minds, we 

 see that factor in our environment which 

 will lead us on to higher things. 



The fact that the creature actually in pro- 

 cess of evolution has gained consciousness of 

 his own evolution will give a definite purpose 

 to his whole social system as a community, 

 and will enormously increase the velocity in 

 future generations of the process of evolution. 



Having thus far attempted to define the 

 relationships of the physico-chemical and 

 the more purely psychical processes of living 

 things, the remainder of this volume will chiefly 

 be devoted to describing the chain of evolution 

 whereby the organic originates from the 

 inorganic, and to the nature of the energy 

 exchanges which occur in the living organism 

 after it has evolved. 



The value of imagination to the scientist 

 has been mentioned above, and at the outset 

 it was pointed out that in imagining a scienti- 

 fic system to carry him forward from known 

 facts to fresh discoveries, the scientist equally 

 with the theologian was compelled to build 

 upon materialistic models. It follows there- 

 from that the orthodox scientific beliefs of one 

 generation become, in part at least, the scien- 

 tific myths of a succeeding one, and that 

 science just as much as religion possesses its 



