404 DARWINISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE 



is scarcely possible. Living matter, we believe, evolved 

 from lifeless. But the psychic processes cannot have 

 developed from it, because we know that bodies alone 

 can be formed from bodies, never anything spiritual. 



Thus we are forced to ascribe psychic phenomena 

 even to inorganic matter. Why they are not recognis- 

 able in it, or why they are so different even in the lowest 

 animals, it is impossible for us to say. They are subject 

 to transformations which become so considerable in the 

 course of long ages that something entirely new seems 

 to have come into existence. That is all we can 

 say. 



But this process of transformation only applies to the 

 psychic processes, not to consciousness. It is absurd 

 to conceive consciousness as evolving from material 

 things, and as having any beginning at all. We know 

 that we .cannot imagine anything either corporeal or 

 spiritual, anything real at all, that is not a content of 

 consciousness. Time and space exist only in conscious- 

 ness. How, then, can consciousness, without which time 

 cannot be conceived, have arisen in time? How can 

 bodies and psychic phenomena, which always pre-suppose 

 consciousness, have given birth to it ? 



It will be clear to every one who has properly con- 

 ceived the world as existing in time and space only as a 

 content of consciousness that the creative power cannot 

 arise from the thing created, the subject from the object, 

 the perceptive power from the thing perceived. 



Consciousness cannot be imagined, because it is 

 itself the imaginative force. Consciousness is the 



