116 ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT 
treat their subjects as they thought fit, expressed the 
wish that the courses should: have reference to “the 
presence of God in the natural and moral world.” It 
is with hesitation that I venture to refer to this wish: 
for I know that in some ways my own conclusions are 
probably different from those of many who have 
thought very deeply on this subject. 
In the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to 
describe the results of investigations on the physiology 
of breathing, and at the same time to show that these 
and other investigations lead to a biological concep- 
tion of life which cannot be reconciled with the 
mechanistic conceptions handed down to us from the 
latter half of the last century. I have also argued that 
in virtue of this biological conception we must claim 
for biology an independent position as a science deal- 
ing with the manifestations of an order immanent in 
the natural world. This order is of a far more inti- 
mate character than the order hitherto disclosed by 
study of what we at present call the inorganic world. 
To some men it has seemed that the facts of organic 
life furnish evidence of the existence of an external 
creator. The writings of Paley, for example, have 
popularised this view. If, as Paley tacitly assumed, 
organisms were machines there would be some basis 
for this argument: for the formation of the body 
cannot be explained as a physical and chemical pro- 
cess. The hypothesis that the body is formed in each 
individual by an act of miraculous creation would at 
any rate serve to stop a gap in our knowledge, though 
a God who did nothing but create machines would be 
