Conclusion 367 



vegetable world, this, he thinks, is an unintelligible idea. Purpose 

 is the prerogative of personality, and since it exists in ourselves, we 

 may infer the existence of a personal Creator. 



Now it is certainly true that we are convinced of the existence 

 of a self- directing purposive activity in ourselves. The onus 

 prohandi rests With those ^ho ascribe to delusion one of the primary 

 characters of our nature, as it is known to ourselves. A theory 

 which denies the truth of one of our fundamental convictions about 

 our own minds must have very strong evidence from other quarters 

 to make it credible. Nor do 1 dispute the validity of arguing 

 by analogy that the Creator must possess per eminentiam the 

 highest qualities with which humanity is endowed. But person- 

 ality is obviously a matter of degrees. The argument which I 

 have recapitulated implies that there is somewhere a line which 

 divides the personal from the infra-personal, and this line can 

 nowhere be found. The evidence seems to me to point to a 

 purposiveness running through all nature, sleeping in the stone, 

 dreaming in the flower, and partially awake and conscious in man, 

 a single purpose which points to a God who is both immanent and 

 transcendent. This view, as I shall presently show, is in harmony 

 with the doctrine of evolution, but not with the Naturalism which 

 is logically bound to deny evolution. 



I would rather emphasise what Professor Arthur Thomson 

 has said of the organic world, only extending it to the inorganic 

 world as well, since I believe that here also there is no rigid line 

 of demarcation, but a transition, in accordance with universal law, 

 from the inorganic to the organic, from the inanimate to the living. 

 This has not yet been definitely proved ; but it is possible, as 

 Professor Moore has suggested, that the colloids, or giant molecules, 

 may supply the link which is still missing. Professor Thomson 

 says : " Only a system with order and progress in the heart of it 

 could elaborate itself so perfectly and so intricately. There is 

 assuredly much to incline us to assert eternal providence and justify 

 the ways of God to man," 



If the whole of nature is purposive, it is not likely that we can 

 discern special purposes operating in particular cases. The laws 

 of nature are, on this hypothesis, purposive laws, like all other laws ; 

 and if they are the laws of an omnipotent and omniscient Being, 

 we should expect them to act regularly and uniformly, A machine 

 that needs tinkering is a faulty machine, but a machine that has no 



