KANT'S AND SPENCER'S VIEWS OF MATTER AND FORCE 223 



large wings of the insect, flying reptile, bird, and bat. The travelling organs and surfaces of all animals are 

 specially designed, and constructed for specific purposes. They are also (and this is important) constructed in 

 advance and before they are required. The wings would be ineffective for land transit, and the small feet for 

 navigating the air. In like manner, the tail of the fish would be ill adapted for progression either on the land 

 or in the air. 



The modifications and changes effected by environment are at best insignificant. They certainly do not 

 produce the various types of plants and animals ; neither do they produce the sense organs and organs of locomo- 

 tion. It is inconceivable that extraneous dead matter could create sense organs and organs of locomotion, how- 

 ever long the time allowed. There is in and behind living things a self-moving, self-modifying, and self-regulating 

 power, which is superior to environment, and which enables them, within limits, to adapt themselves to their sur- 

 roundings and work out their destinies. Plants and animals have their objectives on which they act, but the 

 objectives, although they slightly influence, do not make the subjectives. There is the thing acting and the thing 

 acted upon ; and the thing acting is, for the wisest of purposes, made superior to the thing acted upon. Wherever 

 there are means to ends a distinction must be drawn between the means and the ends. 



The subject of vitality crops up here. It is admitted that plants and animals derive their substance and 

 part of their force from the inorganic kingdom, and some aver that there is no such thing as vital force. They 

 strive to show that there is only one land of matter and only one kind of force, and that both are fixed quantities 

 and indestructible. They seek to identify inorganic and organic matter, and physical and vital force. This 

 generalisation is not warranted by facts. Organic matter can readily be distinguished from inorganic matter, and 

 vital force from physical force. Organic matter lives or has lived ; inorganic matter is invariably dead. Vital 

 force can control and alter the shape of inorganic matter ; it can also change the direction in which physical force 

 acts ; it is superior to both. This superiority implies reserve power, as one power can only be overcome by another 

 which exercises a directive influence or is greater. The question comes to be. Can hfe control inorganic matter 

 and physical force without trenching upon the modern belief that matter and force are fixed quantities which can 

 neither be increased, diminished, nor destroyed ? The vital force, if superior to physical force, must act outside 

 the latter — must, in fact, be an added quantity, of which no cognisance is taken by modern physicists. This view 

 can very well be maintained by those who believe in a First Cause which originated all kinds of matter and all kinds 

 of force. The potter is superior to the clay he manipulates ; he is also superior to the potter's wheel which he 

 directs and controls. The distinction between dead and living matter and physical and vital force is wide and 

 deep. Only an all-powerful, all-embracing First Cause can supply a connecting fink between them. Granted an 

 all-powerful First Cause, there is no difficulty. Without a First Cause many and insurmountable obstacles present 

 themselves. 



The attempt at unification and simplification here referred to has long been extended to matter as matter, 

 organic and inorganic. Inorganic, dead matter is said to consist originally of only one kind, and the same is said 

 of organic living matter. We are asked to beheve that all the known elements (some seventy-five in number) ^ 

 spring from and have a common origin which is homogeneous in its nature, and that all the plant and animal tissues, 

 however numerous and compUcated, are the lineal descendants of protoplasm, which is averred to be a simple homo- 

 geneous substance resembling the white of egg. The heterogeneous substances in the organic and inorganic kingdoms 

 are said to proceed from the homogeneous ones by condensation, rarefaction, attraction, repulsion, &c., by infinite 

 permutations in infmite time. The simple substances are held to be the parents or progenitors of the complex 

 ones. All the varieties of chemical substances, all plant and animal tissues, are referred to a single original. 

 Similar remarks are made of force. 



§ 37. Kant's and Herbert Spencer's Views of Matter and Force. 



Immanuel Kant in his "General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies" (1775) "pictures to 

 himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he sup- 

 poses a single centre of attraction set up, and shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central 

 body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. In vivid language 

 he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of miUions 

 of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos. But what 

 is gained at the margin is lost in the centre ; the attractions of the central systems bring their constituents together, 

 which then, by the heat evolved, are converted once more into molecular chaos. Thus the worlds that are he 



1 A list of the elements, so far as at present discovered, is given at pp. 194 and 195. 



