LEAF AND TENDRIL 



and purpose pervades the universe. This inability 

 on my part may be only the limitation of thdught. 

 I know there are things I cannot conceive of that are 

 yet true. I cannot conceive how the sky is still over- 

 head at the South Pole as at the North, because 

 one position to my senses is the reverse of the 

 other, and I am compelled to think of up and 

 down as the same. I cannot think how anything 

 can begin, because time, like matter, is infinitely 

 divisible, and there always remains a mathemati- 

 calfragment of time between the not beginning and 

 the beginning. The conditions of thought are such 

 that I do not see how one can think of one's self, 

 that is, be object and subject at the same instant 

 of time — jump down one's own throat, so to speak 

 — and yet we seem to manage to do it. 



VI 



If life can finally be explained in terms of physics 

 and chemistry, that is, if the beginning of life upon 

 the globe was no new thing, the introduction of no 

 new principle, but only the result of a vastly more 

 complex and intimate play and interaction of the 

 old physico-chemical forces of the inorganic world, 

 then the gulf that is supposed to separate the two 

 worlds of living and non-living matter virtually dis- 

 appears : the two worlds meet and fuse. We shall 

 probably in time have to come to accept this view — 

 the view of the mechanico-chemical theory of life. 

 232 



