The Trend of Evolutionary Thought. 15 



within it, is a spiritual world. He urges that there is not the 

 remotest possibility of deriving the organic from the- inorganic, 

 but that in tracing life back and back towards what at first 

 appears to be the inoi-ganic, we are really seeking to reduce the 

 inorganic to the organic. Professor Frederick Soddy, who looks 

 at things with the eyes of a chemist and physicist, is equally 

 emphatic as to the impossibility of explaining the world of life 

 and personality as a result of the study of the world of 

 mechanism. He regards the two as distinct. He says : " Apart 

 from extreme opinions on such a point, I think there is a growing 

 tendency to distinguish between the mechanism of life and its 

 conscious regulation." And he emphasizes the fact that our 

 knowledge of the mechanical Avorld is of such a nature that 

 ^^ from thin ivorld mystery in any real sense has been banished." 

 And he adds : " One's scientific sense of direction tells that the 

 further one advances towards the ultimate insoluble problems of 

 physics, the more completely one leaves behind the phenomena of 

 life and all its mysteries." He compares the organism to Niagara 

 under control, with some of its water working turbines to which 

 are geared dynamos : and he points out that " Niagara to-day is 

 a mechanism as before, but it has been linked to an external 

 intelligence capable of guiding and varying its action at will."* 



Many zoologists have also emphasized the distinctiveness of 

 the living. E. B. Wilson, for example, in his great work on 

 "The Cell," says: "The study of the cell has, on the whole, 

 seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that 

 separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world." 

 Even in the humblest manifestations of life the student discovers 

 traces of an effective i)sychologieal ;i,ctivity. And physiologists 

 tell us how many of the mechanisms of the body are regulated. 

 " The idea," says Haldane, and others agree with him, "which 

 gives unity and coherence to the whole of the physiology of 

 respiration is that of the organic determinatton of the pheno- 

 mena." 



* Professor Frederick Soddy : '' Science and Lite." London. 1920, 



