MECHANISM AND LIFE 169 



great deal to say on this question, and conceivably 

 might totally disagree. But, apart from extreme 

 opinions on such a point, I think there is a growing- 

 tendency to distinguish between the mechanism of 

 life and its conscious regulation. I think it would be 

 admitted that a completeness of knowledge, equal to 

 that in the processes of inanimate nature, with regard 

 to the former, and even the artificial generation of 

 life of a simple kind, would not necessarily add 

 anything to the solution of the real mystery. 



Once the Rubicon between the most complex 

 non-living mechanism and the simplest living cell is 

 crossed, the doctrine of evolution seems to point 

 clearly to an unbroken road of development up to 

 the higher expressions of life. On this view, the 

 peculiar problems of religion and the human soul 

 are not the most fundamental or incapable of 

 enunciation. In man, it is true, we get hopelessly 

 beyond the range of physical science, but, in 

 comparison with the simplest living organism, it 

 is a difference between magnitudes alike infinite. 

 Mechanism there is as before, and subconscious 

 control for most complicated routine processes, but 

 the mind can hardly be equal to the task of explain- 

 ing itself to itself. The mechanical and even the 

 animal or vital aspects have been thrust into the 

 background by a developed personality, that con- 

 sistently acts and tries to act and therefore, in the 

 language of science, already explained, is a distinct 

 being, resident in the body as a man may live in a 

 house, and, if real, then by the canons of human 

 thought, immortal. Thought, reasoning power, 

 memory, free-will, the aesthetic perceptions of beauty 

 and harmony, the ethical ideas of virtue, justice, duty, 

 and self-sacrifice, and the spiritual aspirations of 

 holiness and triumph over death, divide him from 

 the simplest form of life. Science, assuredly, has a 



