things, 
SEPTEMBER II, 1913] 
NATURE 
45 
quite apart from laboratory experiments. 
They belong to the common knowledge of the race. 
Births, deaths, and marriages are not affairs of the 
biologist, but of humanity; they went on before a 
single one of them was understood, before a vestige 
of science existed. We ourselves are the laboratory 
in which men of science, psychologists, and others 
make experiments. They can formulate our processes 
of digestion, and the material concomitants of will- 
ing, of sensation, of thinking; but the hidden guiding 
entities they do not touch. 
So also if any philosopher tells you that you do not 
exist, or that the external world does not exist, or 
that you are an automaton without free will, that all 
your actions are determined by outside causes, and 
that you are not responsible—or that a body cannot 
move out of its place, or that Achilles cannot catch a 
tortoise; then in all those cases appeal must be made 
to twelve average men, unsophisticated by special 
studies. There is always a danger of error in inter- 
preting experience, or in drawing inferences from it; 
but in a matter of bare fact, based on our own first- 
hand experience, we are able to give a verdict. We 
may be mistaken as to the nature of what we see. 
Stars may look to us like bright specks in a dome,: 
but the fact that we see them admits of no doubt. 
So also consciousness and will are realities of which 
we are directly aware, just as directly as we are of 
motion and force, just as clearly as we apprehend 
the philosophising utterances of an Agnostic. The 
process of seeing, the plain man does not understand ; 
he does not recognise that it is a method of ethereal 
telegraphy; he knows nothing of the zther and its 
ripples, nor of the retina and its rods and cones, nor 
of nerve and brain processes; but he sees and he hears 
and he touches, and he wills and he thinks and is 
conscious. This is not an appeal to the mob as 
against the philosopher, it is appeal to the experience 
of untold ages as against the studies of a generation. 
How consciousness became associated with matter, 
how life exerts guidance over chemical and physical 
forces, how mechanical motions are translated into 
sensations—all these things are puzzling and demand 
long study. But the fact that these things are so 
admits of no doubt; and difficulty of explanation is 
no argument against them. The blind man restored 
to sight had no opinion as to how he was healed, nor 
could he vouch for the moral character of the Healer, 
but he plainly knew that whereas he was blind now 
he saw. About that fact he was the best possible 
judge. So it is also with ‘‘this main miracle that 
thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on 
the world.” 
But although life and mind may be excluded from 
physiology, they are not excluded from science. Of 
course not. It is not reasonable to sav that things 
necessarily elude investigation merely because we do 
not knock against them. Yet the mistake is some- 
times made. The zther makes no appeal to sense, 
therefore some are beginning to say that it does not 
exist. Mind is occasionally put into the same predica- 
ment. Life is not detected in the laboratory, save 
in its physical and chemical manifestations; but we 
may have to admit that it guides processes neverthe- 
less. It may be called a catalytic agent. 
To understand the action of life itself, the simplest 
plan is not to think of a microscopic organism, or 
any unfamiliar animal, but to make use of our own 
experience as living beings. Any positive instance 
serves to stem a comprehensive denial; and if the 
reality of mind and guidance and plan is denied be- 
cause they make no appeal to sense, then think how 
the world would appear to an observer to whom the 
existence of men was unknown and undiscoverable, 
NO. 2289, VOL. 92] 
the current). 
while yet all the laws and activities of nature went on 
as they do now. 
Suppose, then, that man made no appeal to the 
senses of an observer of this planet. Suppose an out- 
side observer could see all the events occurring in 
the world, save only that he could not see animals 
or men. He would describe what he saw much as 
we have to describe the activities initiated by life. 
If he looked at the Firth of Forth, for instance, he 
would see piers arising in the water, beginning to 
sprout, reaching across in strange manner till they 
actually join or are joined by pieces attracted up from 
below to complete the circuit (a solid circuit round 
He would see a sort of bridge or fila- 
ment thus constructed, from one shore to the other, 
and across this bridge insect-like things crawling and 
returning for no very obvious reason. 
Or let him look at the Nile, and recognise the 
meritorious character of that river in promoting the 
growth of vegetation in the desert. Then let him see 
a kind of untoward crystallisation growing across 
and beginning to dam the beneficent stream. Blocks 
fly to their places by some kind of polar forces; “we 
cannot doubt” that it is by helio- or other tropism. 
There is no need to go outside the laws of mechanics 
and physics, there is no difficulty about supply of 
energy—none whatever—materials in tin cans are con- 
sumed which amply account for all the energy; and 
all the laws of physics are obeyed. The absence of 
any design, too, is manifest; for the effect of the 
structure is to flood an area up-stream which might 
have been useful, and to submerge a structure of 
some beauty; while down stream its effect is likely 
to be worse, for it would block the course of the river 
and waste it on the desert, were it not that fortu- 
nately some leaks develop and a sufficient supply still 
goes down—goes down, in fact, more equably than 
before: so that the ultimate result is beneficial to 
vegetation, and simulates intention. 
If told concerning either of these structures that an 
engineer, a designer in London, called Benjamin 
Baker, had anything to do with it, the idea would be 
preposterous. One conclusive argument is final 
against such a superstitious hypothesis—he is not 
there, and a thing plainly cannot act where it is not. 
But although we, with our greater advantages, per- 
ceive that the right solution for such an observer 
would be the recognition of some unknown agency 
or agent, it must be admitted that an explanation in 
terms of a vague entity called vital force would be 
useless, and might be so worded as to be misleading ; 
whereas a statement in terms of mechanics and physics 
could be clear and definite and true as far as it went, 
though it must necessarily be incomplete. 
And note that what we observe, in such understood 
cases, is an interaction of mind and matter; not 
parallelism nor epiphenomenalism nor anything 
strained or difficult, but a straightforward utilisation 
of the properties of matter and energy for purposes 
conceived in the mind, and executed by muscles guided 
by acts of will. 
But, it will be said, this is unfair, for we know 
that there is design in the Forth Bridge or the Nile 
Dam, we have seen the plans and understand the 
agencies at work: we know that it was conceived 
and guided by life and mind, it is unfair. to 
quote this as though it could simulate an automatic 
process. 
Not at all, say the extreme school of biologists 
whom I am criticising, or ought to say if they were 
consistent, there is nothing but chemistry and physics 
at work anywhere; and the mental activity apparently 
demonstrated by those structures is only an illusion, 
an epiphenomenon; the laws of chemistry and physics 
