428 METAPHYSICAL EVOLUTION. 



the thesis, that energy can 'be conscious. If true, this is an ulti- 

 mate fact, neither more nor less difficult to comprehend than the 

 nature of energy or matter in their ultimate analyses. But how 

 is such a hypothesis to be reconciled with the facts of nature, 

 where consciousness plays a part so infinitesimally small ? The 

 explanation lies close at hand, and has already been referred to. 

 Energy become automatic is no longer conscious, or is about to be- 

 come unconscious. That this is the case is matter of every-day 

 observation on ourselves and on other animals. "What the molec- 

 ular conditions of consciousness are, is one of the problems of 

 the future, and for us a very interesting one. One thing is cer- 

 tain, the organization of the mechanism of habits is its enemy. 

 It is clear that in animals, energy, on the loss of consciousness, un- 

 dergoes a retrograde metamorjohosis, as it does later in the history 

 of organized beings on their death. This loss of consciousness 

 is first succeeded by the so-called involuntary and automatic func- 

 tions of animals. According to the law of catagenesis, the vege- 

 tative and other vital functions of animals and plants are a later 

 product of the retrograde metamorphosis of energy. With death, 

 energy falls to the level of the polar tensions of chemism, and the 

 regular and symmetrical movements of molecules in the crystalli- 

 zation of its inorganic products. Let us now trace in more de- 

 tail the energies displayed by animals and plants. 



It has been already advanced (see page 425) that the phenom- 

 ena of growth-force, which are especially characteristic of living 

 things, originated in the direction given to nutrition by conscious- 

 ness and by the automatic movements derived from it. There 

 remain, however, some other phenomena which do not yield so 

 readily to this analysis. These are : first, the conversion by ani- 

 mals of dead into living protoplasm ; second, the conversion of 

 inorganic substances into protoplasm by plants ; and third, the 

 manufacture of the so-called organic compounds from the inor- 

 ganic by plants. To these points we may return again. It is 

 also well known that living animal organisms act as producers, by 

 conversion, of various kinds of inorganic eneregy, as heat, light, 

 sound, electricity, motion, etc. It is the uses to which these 

 forces are put by the animal organism, the evident design in the 

 occasion of their production, that gives them the stamp of organic 

 life. We recognize the specific ultility of the secretions of the 

 glands, the appropriate distribution of the products of digestion, 

 and adaptation of muscular motion to many uses. The increase 



