2i6 Science Religion and Reality 



minds " to do something. It would be a comfortable theory if 

 we could lay the whole blame of free will on the transcendental 

 laws — particularly on those >Vhich have not yet been discovered ! 

 But I fear that there can be no satisfactory theory of free will with- 

 out admitting an interference with statistical laws. If a human 

 being can produce motion of material objects as the result of a 

 mental resolution — motion which would not have resulted from 

 the automatic interplay of electrons and atoms in his brain and 

 body — it seems clear that those electrons and atoms are for the time 

 not behaving as an ungoverned swarm would do, and some at least 

 of the statistical laws governing random crowds will fail to hold. 

 Indeed, the mind must necessarily have its grip on the crowd 

 rather than on the individual atom or quantum-process, for the 

 contact of matter and spirit is between brain and mind and not 

 between an atom of brain and a (conjectural) atom of mind. If 

 the physical aspects of what is occurring conform to statistical 

 laws the mental resolution itself must be governed by statistical 

 laws, and is therefore not what it appears to be — a simple 

 decision of will — but a conflict of billions of unrecognised mental 

 elements. 



The serious difficulty arises that at present no failure of 

 the statistical laws has been detected in experiments made on 

 living organisms, and that the chief of these laws — ^the second 

 law of thermodynamics — has been verified with some accuracy. 

 Whilst this difficulty is perhaps not insuperable, it must not be 

 minimised. 



We have attempted in this essay to show the direction in which, 

 it appears to us, the tendency of modern scientific thought is leading. 

 It differs markedly from the views of thirty years ago. Will the next 

 thirty years see another change ? Perhaps so. Scientific discovery 

 is like the fitting together of the pieces of a great jig-saw puzzle ; 

 now and then we are confident that we have added another 

 piece correctly, and we know that no future wave of thought 

 is likely to call for an alteration. But that technical achievement 

 is not what matters to the philosopher, he wants to know how the 

 puzzle-picture is developing. The scientist has his guesses as to 

 how the finished picture will work out ; he uses these in the search 

 for other pieces to fit ; but his guesses are modified from time to 

 time by unexpected developments as the fitting in of the pieces 

 proceeds. These revolutions of thought as to the final picture do 



