648 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



and the wonderless, who darken the eyes of their under- 

 standing. 



In the third place, the plain man says : * This big talk 

 about the autonomy of the organism, and so forth, is all very 

 well, but do you mean that there is in the living creature 

 more than meets the eye ? Is there more than matter and 

 energy, or not ? ' The disappointing scientific answer must 

 be that the question is not rightly put. We do not know 

 what matter really is, nor what all the energies of matter 

 may be. What we do know is that present-day physico- 

 chemical formulae do not suffice for the biological descrip- 

 tions of organisms, and that we require to use historical 

 explanations which are beyond the limits of physics and 

 chemistry. And we find no warrant for asserting that the 

 physical concepts of ' matter ' and ' energy ', abstracted 

 off for particular scientific purposes, exhaust the reality of 

 Nature. Very much the reverse. 



We see before us an ascending series of individualized 

 activities correlated with an increasing complexity of 

 material organization the two aspects are inseparable : 

 the worm is a higher synthesis than the mineral, and the 

 bird than the worm, but we cannot explain the fundamental 

 properties of these successive syntheses in terms of anything 

 else. We feel sure, however, that organisms reveal or 

 express a deeper aspect of reality than crystals do (deeper, 

 because it is nearer to what is most real to ourselves, our 

 own conscious experience), and that in this sense there 

 is more in the plant than in the crystal, more in the animal 

 than in the plant, more in the bird than in the worm, and 

 more in man than in them all, 



FINIS 



