THE PURPOSE OF LIFE 175 



ing tendency of creation, fails to be intelligible if there 

 be nothing behind it, and if it lead to nothing more 

 than is evident on the surface. 



We have traced the consequences of the most 

 mechanical hypothesis first in order to show that, 

 even on its basis, we have to look further if we are to 

 frame an intelligible account of the Universe. But 

 the mechanical theory of life is not now in as much 

 favour with biologists or philosophers as it was twenty 

 or thirty or forty years ago. We can therefore pro- 

 bably reach a problem similar to that outlined above 

 by a shorter road than that required by the somewhat 

 extravagant supposition that consciousness can be ex- 

 plained fully in terms of physical conceptions. 



If, as seems possible, biologists return to more 

 vitalistic conceptions of life, we shall have to give up 

 the easiest theory of monism, the theory which refers 

 life and mind to matter. We shall have, at first at 

 all events, to accept a dualistic hypothesis, leaving open 

 for the time the possibility of some deeper concordance 

 either in terms of the idealism which expresses matter 

 in terms of mind, or in the light of some other 

 philosophy. 



For the time being we shall have to picture to our- 

 selves mind as distinct from matter, and life as some 

 foreign influence using matter as its vehicle. The 

 apparent determinism in which we see life immeshed 

 we must refer to the hampering effect of the medium 

 in which life has to work, an effect from which it 

 struggles to be free in the long effort of evolution, 

 and succeeds to a greater degree than elsewhere in the 

 comparative freedom of the human will. 



