166 MATTER, ENERGY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRIT 



drawn, the processes of life resume their uncontrolled 

 natural direction. In low organisms the guidance 

 seems to be largely automatic, a response to stimuli 

 which can be artificially imitated. Even in man, 

 the more important routine functions of life are 

 performed, asleep and awake, by a subconscious 

 regulation, or, as some hold, a subconscious per- 

 sonality. But in the higher animals there has 

 developed a consciousness or awareness of its 

 individual existence and of the existence of its 

 environment, which intelligently varies and directs 

 the acts of life at will. The mystery is in none of 

 the phenomena of life upon which, perhaps, the 

 most wonder and poetic fervour have been lavished, 

 and which are hardly more wonderful than those 

 that occur in inanimate materials under human 

 guidance. It is in the combination of the intelligent 

 guidance with what, for present purposes, has to 

 be considered a perfectly understandable machine. 

 Separately the two functions are readily compre- 

 hensible. Their combination in a single self-contained 

 organism is the real mystery of life. 



AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOUR or THEISM. 



It is quite outside my intention or capacity to 

 indulge in any specifically theological argument. 

 But perhaps I may be allowed, in passing, to point 

 out that the argument might be extended in favour 

 of theism. The self-contained organism is not 

 comprehensible, but the combination of an inanimate 

 mechanism and an external will is more intelligible. 

 But there is in man a conscience as well as a con- 

 sciousness, an ineradicable aspiration towards virtue, 

 which is certainly no less difficult to understand. 

 The combination of the machine and soul is as 

 much a riddle as the combination of machine and 



