THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



life" which is raised thereon demands an inteUigent 

 design and a deliberate constructing engineer for the 

 origin of the organism, just as we find in the case of the 

 machine. The organism is then very freely compared 

 to a watch or a locomotive. In order to secure the 

 regular working of such a complicated mechanism, it is 

 necessary to arrange for a perfect co-operation of all its 

 parts, and the slightest accident to a single wheel suffices 

 to throw it out of gear. This figure was particularly 

 employed by Louis Agassiz (1858), who saw "an incar- 

 nate thought of the Creator" in every species of animal 

 and plant. Of late years it has been much used by 

 Reinke in the support of his theosophic dualism. He 

 described God, or "the world-soul," as the "cosmic in- 

 telligence," but ascribes to this mystic immaterial being 

 the same attributes that the catechism and the preacher 

 give to the Creator of heaven and earth. He compares 

 the human intelligence which the watch-maker has 

 put into the elaborate structure of the watch with the 

 "cosmic intelligence" which the Creator has put in 

 the organism, and insists that it is impossible to deduce 

 its purposive organization from its material constituents. 

 In this he entirely overlooks the immense difTerence 

 between the "raw material" in the two cases. The 

 "organs" of the watch are metallic parts, which fulfil 

 their purpose in virtue only of their physical properties 

 f^ha-rdness, elasticity, etc.). The organs of the living 

 organism, on the other hand, perform their functions 

 chiefly in virtue of their chemical composition. Their 

 soft plasma-body is a chemical laboratory, the highly 

 elaborate molecular structure of which is the historical 

 product of countless complicated processes of heredity 

 and adaptation. This invisible and hypothetical molec- 

 ular structure must not (as is often done) be confused 

 with the real and microscopically discoverable structure 

 of the plasm, which is of great importance in the question 



30 



