90 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
keep us in doubt as to what he means by life. Life is consciousness launched 
into matter—“ availing itself of a slight elasticity in matter,’ “using matter 
for its own purposes.” Consciousness, or rather supra-cousciousness, is at 
the origin of life, and consciousness appears as the motive power in evolution. 
“Consciousness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for the rocket whose 
extinguished fragments fall back as matter; consciousness, again, is the 
name for that which subsists of the rocket itself, passing through the 
fragments and lighting them up into organisms. But this consciousness, 
which is a need of creation, is made manifest to itself only where creation is 
possible. It lies dormant when life is condemned to automatism ; it wakens 
as soon as the possibility of choice is restored.” In fact an organism is 
conscious in proportion to its power to move freely—a quaint metaphysical 
apology for athletics. In the course of evolution it becomes more and more 
free as the sensori-motor system becomes more perfect. “ But, everywhere 
except in man, consciousness has let itself be caught in the net whose meshes 
it tried to pass through: it has remained the captive of the mechanisms it 
has set up.” With man, however, a new freedom began. Consciousness is 
breaking its chains. How free it may become, who shall say ? 
A SUGGESTION. 
At these lofty altitudes the biologist, who is a dweller in tents, loses 
his breath. Under the sway of his evolution-idea, he finds it difficult to 
entertain the hypothesis of consciousness being launched into matter as a 
bolt from the blue. May it not have been that the anima animans has been 
with creation through and through, and from first to last.? We think of the 
majestic order of the heavens and the perfection of the dew-drop, of the 
extraordinary surge of our whole solar system towards some unknown goal, 
and of the internal “life” of crystals. We wonder if Time has, after all, 
simply flowed over the opal and the agate, and whether the beryl has 
garnered no fruits of experience. Our photograph of a zoophyte—Sertularia 
cupressina—is extraordinarily like the beautiful dendritic frescos which 
imprisoned Manganese makes on the wall of its cell! To take another 
example, we admire the intricate zonal structure of Liesegang’s rings— 
formed, for instance, when a big drop of silver nitrate is placed on a film 
of gelatine in which there is a trace of potassium bichromate. There we 
see, as the diffusion and precipitation proceed, the rings of growth on 
a salmon’s scale and the zones of the otolith in his ear. There we see, as 
the diffusion and precipitation continue, the zones of growth in the stem of 
an oak, in the recesses of a pearl, in the vertebra of a fish, on the scale of 
a tortoise, and on the barred feather of the hawk, No doubt a wide gulf is 
