234 THE MECHANISM OF LIFE 



understanding " by experience, and ending with the death of the 

 matured " somatoplasm " (not necessarily the "body," note, 

 for the latter was both somatoplasm and germ plasm). This 

 remembered experience, with the indeterminism that is asso- 

 ciated with it, and the morality, immorality, virtue, and " sin " 

 that it is also associated with in virtue of its indeterminism, is 

 discontinuous, comes into existence and ceases to exist. We 

 have no reason to say that it is conserved, and the very notion 

 of conservation is inapplicable to it. 



Yet that personality is only a little of life, and the greater 

 fraction of the latter is continuous, and all the life of the world is 

 one. That is just what one means by reproduction and heredity. 

 What one means by evolution (or transformism) is that life 

 changes, that it undergoes passage. 



There is, of course, the other difficulty, felt by those who 

 profess " solipsism " : there is, literally, nothing in nature but the 

 thinking mind, or rather the thought. That, we hold, is negatived 

 by every life action. It is absurd to ' ' common sense ' ' (and surely 

 no philosophy can disregard that !). It is a pretence in anyone 

 who merely says or writes that he believes it (for in speaking and 

 writing he assumes that there are other minds that listen to his 

 words or read his writings), and we even suggest that there is a 

 kind of intellectual dishonesty in talking about it. 



So the objection fails, for life is always and everywhere there 

 (for we cannot say that thought is in space; a man is in a room, 

 but is his mind there ? Obviously not when he thinks of the 

 seaside holiday or of his boyhood). Therefore, life being always 

 and everywhere, we are free to suggest that its passage and that 

 of environing nature are relative to each other, and that we 

 cannot say " which is which." 



But, again, it seems quite possible to hold that this question 

 of the relativity of the life passage and the environmental nature 

 passage is one that has no meaning. We do not know what is 

 the stuff of nature, since all that we discover by investigation of 

 any kind is a system of naked relations. There may be an homo- 

 geneous stuff (as Bergson says), and it may be that the foim of 

 this is just what our possibilities of action make it. Atoms, and 

 electrons, and energy, are just the ways, it may be, in which our 

 life intuition cuts up this homogeneous stuff. The latter may 

 be the actual stuff of our consciousness, so that there is, then, 

 nothing in the universe but this: the stuff of life which continually 



