114 WALTEE AUBREY KIDD, M.D., M.R.C.S., F.Z.S.^ ON 



a bacterium, the modern tendency is to attribute even to such 

 lowly creatures a measure of purpose or will in its humble life. 



Even in plants it has been shown by Francis Darwin * tliat 

 a mechanism for the transmission of stimuli is to be discovered. 

 This mechanism cannot truly be called a nervous apparatus^ 

 and yet it furnishes means by which the purposes of a higher 

 apparatus are subserved. If we start from the rudimentary 

 actions of a bacterium which may be watched under a micro- 

 scope, and trace the growing complexity of the life-processes, 

 and actions of a hydra, sponge, medusa, sea anemone, worm, 

 starfish, crab, mollusc, fish, frog, reptile, bird, or mammal, we- 

 cannot refuse the conclusion that the enlarged conception of 

 will and intelligence is applicable to each and all, though 

 between the actions of a bacterium and those of a mammal a. 

 seemingly infinite gulf is fixed on the older theory of the pro- 

 duction of animal and vegetable forms of life. It may be urged 

 that this graduation of nervous and mental phenomena from 

 the lowest to the highest forms of life destroys the distinctive 

 properties of the human as distinguished from the lower animal 

 mind. But it is far otherwise when we take the view that the 

 highest not less than the lowest is but the expression of divine 

 and infinite mind, and that though between man and the- 

 highest ape there is that " vast gulf " which Huxley so freely 

 acknowledged to exist,t tlie physical medium through which 

 God manifests Himself in living beings is of the same essence 

 in the lower as in the higher creatures. We cannot now look 

 with minds dominated by materialistic views upon conscious- 

 ness in man as a " secretion of the brain " in the same sense as- 

 the gastric juice is a secretion of the stomach, nor as a mere 

 mode of motion. No view of thought meets fairly the require- 

 ments of modern knowledge which does not look upon the 

 matter of our earthly bodies as that which limits consciousness, 

 and confines its intensity within certain limits rather than that, 

 which jproduccs consciousness. 



Purpose may be truly said to begin where the rudiments of 

 mind first appear, and to end with God the First Great Cause^ 

 or more correctly to begin at the centre with God and to end 

 at those lowliest of creatures which require a microscope for 

 their detection. It will be useful here to follow out in some 



^ Nature, 1901, November 14, p. 40. 



t Man's Place in Nature, p. 153 : " At the same time, no one is more 

 strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized 

 man and the brutes, or is more certain that, whether from them or not,, 

 he is asrsuredly not o/ them." 



