JULIAN S. HUXLEY 111 



and intensity of mind, toward greater capacities for 

 knowing, feeling, and purposing; and here, too, man 

 is pre-eminent. 



The curious thing is that both these trends, of the 

 world of lifeless matter as a whole, and of the world 

 of life on this planet, operate with the same materials. 

 The matter of which living things are composed is the 

 same as that in the lifeless earth and the most distant 

 stars; the energy by which they work is part of the 

 same general reservoir which sets the stars shining, 

 drives a motor car, and moves the planets or the tides. 

 There is, in fact, only one world-stuff. And since man 

 and life are part of this world-stuff, the properties of 

 consciousness, or something of the same nature as con- 

 sciousness, must be attributes of the world-stuff, too, 

 unless we are to drop any belief in continuity and uni- 

 formity in nature. The physicists and the chemists 

 and the physiologists do not deal with these mind-like 

 properties, for the simple reason that they have not 

 so far discovered any method of detecting or meas- 

 uring them directly. But the logic of evolution forces 

 us to believe that they are there, even if in lowly form, 

 throughout the universe. 



Finally, this universe which science depicts works 

 uniformly and regularly. A particular kind of matter 

 in a particular set of circumstances will always behave 

 in the same way; things work as they do, not because 

 of inherent principles of perfection, not because they 

 happen to be so made that they cannot work in any 

 other way. When we have found out something about 

 the way things are made so that we can prophesy how 

 they will work, we say we have discovered a natural 

 law; such laws, however, are not like human laws, im- 



