ORGANIC REGULATION 117 



a mere Juggernaut. We have seen, however, that 

 organisms are not machines, and with the machine 

 theory the argument, such as it was, for special crea- 

 tion disappears. Biology leads us to the conception, not 

 of an external Creator, but of an order immanent in 

 the natural world. This order is, however, conceived 

 as blind and unconscious, and cannot, so conceived, 

 be identified with what we have learnt to understand 

 as God. 



It is not from the data of biology, and still more 

 clearly not from those of the physical sciences, that 

 we derive our conception of God, but from the facts 

 of knowing and consciously doing which we observe 

 in ourselves and our fellow men as conscious person- 

 alities. In knowledge the mind extends itself over 

 our whole universe, so that what exists for us exists 

 as known, however imperfectly, and as a sphere of 

 our activities, however imperfect these activities may 

 be. But we find that neither knowledge nor conscious 

 activity in general is the mere knowledge or activity of 

 individual men. Just as the behaviour of the cells in 

 a compound organism is unintelligible if they are con- 

 sidered one by one, apart from their relations to the 

 whole organism, so the acquisition of knowledge and 

 conscious activity in general, are unintelligible from 

 the point of view of the individual man. We can 

 endeavour to picture to ourselves a man who would 

 be entirely self-centred — who would be a God to him- 

 self ; but the attempt ends in failure. It is the percep- 

 tion that in us as conscious personalities a Reality 



