Conclusion 371 



Of one thing we may be certain. Science will never renounce 

 the attempt to bring everything under a single system of laws. 

 Science must be monistic, for under any other dispensation science 

 could not exist. The dualism of nature and supernature is in- 

 tolerable to science. And therefore, since the attempt to explain 

 mind materialistically and life mechanically appears to have failed, 

 nothing remains but to explain nature spiritually. Even the 

 partition of the world into the animate and the inanimate is dis- 

 tasteful to science, which dislikes any lines that cannot be crossed. 



There are many signs that this solution will be attempted. 

 Professor J. S. Haldane says, " It was formerly assumed that as 

 we trace life backwards to its simpler forms, we are tracing it 

 towards a primitive world of physical mechanism. This is not 

 the case. We are really tracing life into what we had wrongly 

 assumed to be a world of physical mechanism. It may be many 

 years before the significance of the phenomena of life for our con- 

 ceptions of visible reality are generally understood ; but assuredly 

 this general understanding will in time be reached." How far 

 this movement towards panpsychism has already gone may be 

 realised by the following words from an essay by Professor Carveth 

 Read : " It is reasonable to suppose that every cell that goes to 

 constitute the body has its own consciousness, of which we are 

 never distinctly aware, though each cell may contribute something 

 to our total subjectivity ; and even in the central nervous system, 

 with its prepared lines of connection, it is only in the cortex that 

 consciousness becomes identified with ourselves, and only in the 

 focus of attention that it becomes clear and coherent." On this 

 theory we are literally nations of living individuals. And if such 

 tiny entities as the cells of the body are to be regarded as having 

 their own life, and the germs of consciousness, it seems likely that 

 Some thinkers will go back to the speculations of Fechner, a very 

 remarkable philosopher whose works are now receiving much 

 attention on the Continent, though they have unfortunately not 

 been translated into English. Like the later Platonists and many 

 others in antiquity, Fechner regards the earth and the other spheres 

 as animated beings of a highly spiritual kind. As the spirits of men, 

 with all the life in the earth, are comprised as moments in one 

 conscious earth-spirit, so the earth-spirit is included with all the 

 other sidereal spirits in one conscious spirit of the universe, God. 

 I am not defending this theory, which to many will seem fantastic. 



