640 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



laws, of forces possessed by the primitive nebulosity of the 

 universe, then it is no less certain that the present actual 

 world reposed potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that 

 an intelUgence, if great enough, could, from his knowledge 

 of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have 

 predicted the state of the fauna in Great Britain in 1888 

 with as much certitude as we say what will happen to 

 the vapour of our breath on a cold day in winter'. 



This strong and confident statement includes several 

 assumptions regarding which one may fairly argue. Thus 

 Professor Bergson calls attention to its practical denial 

 that time really counts. ' In such a doctrine, time is still 

 spoken of ; one pronounces the word, but one does not 

 think of the thing. For time is here deprived of efficacy, 

 and if it does nothing, it is nothing '. Huxley practically 

 denies the creative individuahty of organisms which trade 

 with time in a spontaneous and unpredictable way all their 

 own. 



The ' fundamental proposition of evolution ' (which 

 Huxley invoked) is of Man's own making, and we are not 

 inchned to be coerced by it into beheving that the state 

 of the British fauna either in 1888 or in 1914 could have 

 been predicted by any intelhgence however great from a 

 ' knowledge of the properties of the molecules ' of the 

 cosmic vapour. Not only because we beheve that time 

 counts with living creatures, but because molecules and 

 the Uke are concepts of physical science used for the de- 

 scription of certain abstracted aspects of reahty — ^used to 

 describe things for a particular purpose or from a certain 

 point of view. It is true that they correspond to that 

 aspect of reality so accurately that we risk lives and 

 fortunes on them, but to say that they exhaust the reality 



