A SPIRITUAL BACKGROUND 137 



Fortunately Truth and Knowledge do not deal 

 so cruel a blow at Beauty. Far from it : they take 

 her side. There are no grounds for supposing that 

 either chance or mechanism produces spirit, or that 

 from merely physical and chemical combinations 

 spirit can emerge. Spirit is no casual by-product 

 of mechanical or chemical processes. Spirit is the 

 governing factor regulating and controlling the 

 physical movements — controlling them, indeed, with 

 such orderliness that we may be apt from this very 

 orderliness to regard the whole as a machine and fail 

 to see that all is directed towards high spiritual ends. 



If we are to appeal to reason, it is much more 

 reasonable to assume that spirit always existed, and 

 that the conditions for the emergence of life were 

 brought about on purpose, than to assume that 

 spirit is a mere excretion, like perspiration, of 

 chemical processes. Certainly the former assump- 

 tions more clearly fit the facts of the case. For 

 these facts are, firstly, that we spiritual selves exist, 

 next that we have ideas of goodness and a deter- 

 mination to achieve it, next that plant as well as 

 animal life on this Earth is purposive, then that the 

 stars, numbering anything from a hundred to a 

 thousand million, each of them a sun and many of 

 them presumably with planets, are made of the same 

 materials as this Earth, the plants, animals, and 

 ourselves are composed of ; that these materials 

 have the same properties ; that the same fundamen- 

 tal laws of gravitation, heat, motion, chemical and 

 electrical action prevail there as here ; and lastly 

 that they are all connected with the Earth by some 

 medium or continuum of energies, which enables 



