32 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



pugnance in the human mind to the doctrine of dead 

 matter ; and all along, the mystery of matter, and 

 especially its formative power, seems to have com- 

 pelled many ancient thinkers to endow it or associate 

 it with some sort of life, or soul, or sensibility. 



Plato had a World-Soul to mould matter into 

 archetypal forms. Anaxagoras had his Nous. 

 Empedocles moved his atoms by Love and Hate ; 

 and Lucretius, as we said, found it necessary to 

 endow his atoms with a species oi free-will^ in order 

 to account for their swerving motion, and with 

 concilium^ in order to account for their chemical 

 affinities. Anaxagoras was cast into prison for 

 asserting that the sun and moon were made of 

 earth and stone ; and we find that even Aristotle 

 considered the stars to be passionless beings, worthy 

 of worship, and that Zeno and Strato deemed the 

 world a living being. 



Moreover, though the distinction between the 

 living organic and the dead inorganic world, once 

 drawn, became gradually, century by century, more 

 hard and fast, and ultimately so firmly rooted as 

 to be almost ineradicable, yet it never quite 

 satisfied the human mind ; and at all times there 

 was a counter-tendency to take a more imaginative 

 view of so-called dead matter. Thus we find 

 Moses Maemonides, as late as the twelfth century, 

 writing as follows : " Know that this universe in 



