prsity of California 
 them Regional 
 brary Facility
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 HUGH MILLER 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 EMERITUS 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
 
 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 

 
 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, 
 AND GOD 
 
 FIVE LECTURES ON CONTEMPORARY 
 TENDENCIES OF THOUGHT 
 
 BY 
 
 R. F. ALFRED HOERNLE 
 
 M.A., B.Sc. (Oxon.) 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, ARMSTRONG COLLEGE 
 (NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE) IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
 
 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
 
 IN MEMOEIAM 
 
 JOANNIS THEODORI MERZ 
 
 1782217
 
 PREFACE 
 
 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD may 
 well seem too big a title for so small a 
 book. And, truly, if it were taken to 
 imply a claim to exhaustive treatment of the topics 
 it names, it would bespeak inexcusable presump- 
 tion on the author's part. No, it is meant as 
 nothing more than a handy abbreviation for some 
 such phrase as this : " A discussion of what some 
 of the leading thinkers of our day are saying about 
 ' Matter, Life, Mind, and God.' " This, and no 
 more, is all this little volume of lectures attempts. 
 
 The original lectures were inspired by the thought 
 that a University placed, like Armstrong College, 
 in a centre of business and industry, owes a duty 
 not only to its enrolled students, but to the whole 
 community of which it forms a part : that it should 
 strive, in fact, to be the focus of the intellectual life 
 of its neighbourhood. For, the days when educa- 
 tion was treated as the special prerogative of the 
 well-to-do have passed away. In principle, no one 
 now disputes that all should have access to education
 
 viii MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 in the measure of their interest and capacity. More- 
 over, the many vigorous movements for Adult 
 Education which have sprung up of recent years 
 bear eloquent witness to the truth that the desire 
 for knowledge lasts as long as life itself. This new 
 spirit is altering profoundly the outlook of the 
 academic teacher. He is learning that he owes it 
 to his subject, to his University, to his city and dis- 
 trict, to help all who desire to keep in touch, not only 
 with new discoveries and theories in every field of 
 research, but especially with those larger move- 
 ments of thought, in science, in philosophy, in 
 religion, which lie behind the visible scene and 
 make or unmake our civilization. 
 
 The lectures, then, which compose this small 
 volume are offered as a contribution to the 
 realization of this ideal. They are not intended 
 for professors and experts. The audiences which 
 listened to them were composed mainly of men 
 and women without any special training in 
 philosophy. But they brought to the hearing, 
 together with a common background of general 
 education, a keen desire to understand whither 
 the reflections of leading thinkers of the day 
 are tending on such persistent problems as Matter 
 and Life, Mind and God. To meet this demand, so 
 far as lay in my power, was my aim. By this aim 
 I would ask that the lectures be judged, now that,
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 through the medium of print, they are laid before 
 a wider public. 
 
 The lectures were originally spoken freely from a 
 few notes and written out later, after an interval 
 occasioned by other claims upon my time. In 
 consequence, the written lectures differ, both by 
 omission and by addition, from the spoken ones. 
 Moreover, freed in writing from the time-limits 
 imposed on a speaker, I have re-arranged into five 
 printed lectures what occupied six lectures in 
 delivery. But the substance and the general plan 
 have remained the same. 
 
 The plan, or pervading interest, which runs 
 through the lectures is to review some of the chief 
 movements hi contemporary thought, in order to 
 see whether, in spite of their manifest diversity and 
 even their conflict, they do not exhibit traces, at 
 least, of a coherent pattern ; whether they do not 
 hold out the promise and possibility of unity in our 
 spiritual life a unity no less of thought than of 
 feeling. The precise nature of this synoptic problem 
 is set forth in the first lecture, which describes the 
 profound and many-sided influence of Science on 
 modern Thought, and then goes on to exhibit the 
 limitations of the scientific concept of " Nature " 
 as compared with the whole " Universe " of human 
 experience. The second lecture gives an account of 
 the revolt against " materialism " in the Philosophy
 
 x MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of Nature, of which A. N. Whitehead is the 
 brilliant leader a revolt, however, the success of 
 which has been prepared by many forerunners, 
 both among philosophers and physicists. The main 
 point is that physical theories are being brought to 
 the essentially philosophical test of a fresh analysis 
 of the actual data of our experience. This is shown, 
 in the third lecture, to react on the antithesis of 
 mechanism and vitalism, facilitating the recognition 
 of life as a distinctive type of phenomenon, open to 
 empirical study without needing to be explained 
 away into physics and chemistry, or else referred to a 
 hypothetical vital force or energy. Simultaneously, 
 recent philosophical analysis has undermined the 
 idolatry of " mechanism." The fourth lecture, 
 after an historical survey of theories of mind, and 
 a discussion of the causes of the present chaos in 
 psychology, attempts to support the suggestion that 
 the concept of " behaviour," freed from the exag- 
 gerations and prejudices of friend and foe which 
 now beset it, may offer a basis for the reconciliation 
 of the divergent tendencies which now divide psycho- 
 logists. The fifth lecture is devoted to reviewing 
 the attitude of philosophy to religion and theology, 
 and the main tendencies in the Philosophy of 
 Religion, more especially the revival of Theism. 
 
 It will thus be seen that I have tried to do little 
 more than play an intelligent showman's part.
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 though in selection, emphasis, and criticism, as well 
 as in the general synoptic aim, I naturally betray 
 the direction in which my own thinking runs. Still, 
 my chief aim has been to interpret to my audiences 
 the thoughts of some of the best thinkers of our own 
 generation. To those whom I have thus ventured 
 to expound I would now acknowledge, with sincere 
 gratitude, my obligations for the use I have made of 
 their writings in these lectures. There is no need 
 to assure them how acutely I am aware of the 
 inevitable shortcomings of my treatment. No sum- 
 mary presentation of tendencies of thought, eked 
 out here and there by specific quotation or allusion, 
 can possibly do justice to the many excellent books 
 enumerated in the bibliographies appended to each 
 chapter. But I hope my lectures nowhere fail to 
 make clear that they are intended, not as substitutes 
 for, but as guides and stimuli to, first-hand study. 
 I have reason to think that they have had this effect 
 on many of those who heard them delivered. If 
 in their printed form they gain additional students 
 for some of the masterpieces of contemporary philo- 
 sophy, they will not have been written in vain. 
 
 R. F. ALFRED HOERNLE" 
 
 ARMSTRONG COLLEGE 
 
 NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE 
 
 December, 1922
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE PAGE 
 
 I. SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY - I 
 
 II. THE PRESENT-DAY REVOLT AGAINST 
 
 " MATTER " - - - 44 
 
 III. THE ORDER OF NATURE : MECHANISM, 
 
 VITALISM, TELEOLOGY - - 87 
 
 IV. THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND - 127 
 V. RELIGION AND THE MEANING OF " GOD " l66
 
 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND 
 GOD 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 
 
 T 
 
 i. f | A HERE is a famous saying in Plato's 
 Republic : " He who sees things 
 together is the true dialectician," or, 
 as we should say, " the true philosopher." 
 
 What is meant by this " seeing things together," 
 this synoptic vision of the philosopher ? What need 
 is there for it ? What occasion ? What demand ? 
 Does not science give us all we want ? Or, else, 
 religion ? 
 
 Consideration of these questions will help to start 
 us on our way. We are about to review some of 
 the chief tendencies in contemporary speculation 
 concerning the nature of the world we live in. Such 
 an enquiry is inspired by no idle curiosity ; for our 
 beliefs concerning the nature of our world react 
 profoundly upon our feelings, upon our conduct, 
 upon our whole attitude. The whole spirit of our 
 living, the way we bear ourselves, the things we
 
 2 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 reckon of highest worth, are apt to depend on what 
 we believe to be our place, our duty, our destiny in a 
 world such as ours. But what sort of a world is it ? 
 With this problem we are still wrestling, as our 
 forefathers have wrestled with it back to the dawn 
 of human thought. We are conscious, indeed, that 
 our knowledge has made great strides and that new 
 discoveries are constantly extending its boundaries. 
 Modern science, especially in the last two centuries, 
 has achieved triumphs far beyond anything of which 
 our forefathers dared to dream. It has given us in 
 many ways a different world and, correspondingly, 
 a different attitude towards the world. 
 
 But when we survey the results attained, are there 
 not grounds also for misgiving ? We spoke just 
 now of " knowledge." To say that we have " know- 
 ledge " is to say that the world is really what we 
 think it to be. In other words, it implies a claim that 
 what we think, believe, affirm, is true and can be 
 trusted ; that criticism can find no flaw in it, no 
 ground for doubt. 
 
 If we ask, Why should the conclusions of science 
 be trusted ? or, Why should its theories rank as 
 " knowledge " ? we are referred to scientific method 
 for our answer. Ever since Bacon and Descartes 
 the problem of the right method for thinking, or 
 framing judgments, about the world has stood 
 in the centre of philosophical speculation. Now,
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 3 
 
 whatever in detail the method of science may be 
 and this is a question to some aspects of which we 
 have to return it conies to us with the prestige of 
 undeniable success. It works. Science enables 
 us to predict natural events ; more, it enables us to 
 control them and produce them at will. All modern 
 industry is built up by the application of science. 
 Here, then, is knowledge which is power. 
 
 But these reflections do not suffice to put us beyond 
 the reach of doubt altogether. For " science " is 
 a blanket-term which covers a variety of distinct 
 " sciences," and as soon as we look closer and compare 
 these sciences with each other, we notice that they 
 are, at least for the present, far from forming a single, 
 unified, coherently articulated structure. There are 
 sciences dealing with purely physical, or material, 
 objects. There are sciences dealing with living 
 beings and their behaviour. There are sciences 
 dealing with minds. But how matter, life, mind 
 are related to each other this is a question to 
 which we get ambiguous answers, or none at all. 
 In fact, as we shall see, about the very meaning of 
 these terms there is much dispute, not only among 
 philosophers whom it is customary to accuse of 
 logic-chopping and quibbling about terms, but 
 among scientists themselves. Thus, we are con- 
 fronted by the paradoxical result that a super- 
 structure which is secure enough to " work " in
 
 4 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 practice, rests nonetheless on insecure foundations. 
 Each science, so we might say, deals with a fragment 
 of the world, but the fragments fit ill together 
 nay, they may appear even to conflict. 
 
 Nor is this all. There are many feelings and 
 thoughts which the world evokes in us and which 
 we express in appropriate speech and conduct, 
 but for which the world, as scientific thought 
 defines its nature, offers no basis or justification. 
 The beauty which the artist perceives in the world 
 and renders in works of art, the moral values which 
 we embody in the organized institutions of a social 
 order, the perfection which a religious mind discerns 
 and worships what place have these in the scientific 
 scheme of things, as that is usually presented ? 
 They have no place in it at all. They have not been 
 considered in the framing of it. They may be 
 not only ignored by it, but denied as having no 
 foundation in the nature of things. Merely to 
 mention science and religion in one breath is to stir 
 up memories of past and present conflicts. 
 
 It is these conflicts, both within the realm of 
 science itself in respect of its fundamental concepts, 
 and also between it and other sides of the world of 
 our experience, which, on the one hand, throw doubt 
 on the sufficiency of science itself, and, on the other, 
 are a standing demand or call for a synoptic effort. 
 Seeing things together and thinking them together
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 5 
 
 are necessary if we are to escape from these discords 
 in what we feel, think, and express in act. In 
 proportion as we become acutely conscious of these 
 discords, we experience also the desire to overcome 
 them. We seek to transcend the fragmentariness 
 and instability of partial views and attitudes. 
 Is this merely a sentimental demand which the 
 world is not bound to satisfy ? Is it, in other 
 words, unreasonable ? Or is it not, rather, the 
 very clue which reason bids us follow if we would 
 learn to think the world as it really is ? The goal 
 of the synoptic endeavour is, precisely, to think 
 together all the data which experience offers us. 
 The actual success of our efforts may fall far short 
 of the attainment of this goal, and therefore 
 persistence in the effort requires much of the faith 
 which anticipates what it cannot bodily possess. 
 Still, it is no small gain for the reasonable conduct 
 of life to feel assured that our demand for unity 
 and stability in thought and feeling and action is 
 not likely to be, in principle, denied by the world. 
 But it would be a mistake to think that the 
 synoptic effort of philosophy requires for its satis- 
 faction the construction of a " system," snug, 
 tidy, all-inclusive, and, above all, fixed. The 
 stability of an attitude towards the world must not 
 be confused with the rigidity of a system. What 
 we value even in the apparently most rigid systems
 
 6 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of the older thinkers, e.g., in Spinoza's Ethics, 
 where he tries to demonstrate by the " geometric 
 method " that man's happiness consists in the 
 "intellectual love of God" is the attitude, the 
 living spirit. The stability of an attitude must rest 
 on principles and thus be ever true to itself, but it 
 must be also infinitely flexible and adaptable so 
 as to meet with appropriate response the ever- 
 changing demands of life. For, it is true, in a 
 sense, that life is too varied and changeful to be 
 imprisoned, once and for all, in a formula. The 
 world moves on, and no " system " can capture it 
 and hold it fast. We are never without fresh 
 discoveries and theories in science, new movements 
 in art or religion, new experiments in economic 
 or political organization. Old social customs are 
 always being abandoned and new fashions set up 
 in their place. Great crises, like war or revolution, 
 periodically threaten to engulf the landmarks by 
 which we have been wont to steer life's course. 
 Novelty, in this sense, is an ever-present feature of 
 our world, and thus the problem of adjusting our- 
 selves to facts and situations which we have never 
 met with before is always with us no less so in 
 family life, in business, in politics than in the 
 laboratory of the scientific researcher. This is the 
 reason why the philosophical problem of " seeing 
 things together " persists, why it is ever new, why
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 7 
 
 it has to be solved again by each generation in terms 
 of the fresh data of its experience. 
 
 Thus, we are not setting out in these lectures to 
 construct yet another system of philosophy. We 
 shall not even attempt to bring the whole field of 
 modern life and thought within the scope of our 
 synoptic survey. Human learning has become 
 too vast, human civilization too many-sided and 
 complex, for any single human mind to encompass 
 them, as Aristotle may, perhaps, be said to have 
 encompassed them in antiquity, or St. Thomas 
 Aquinas at the close of the Middle Ages, or Leibniz 
 in the seventeenth century, before the modern mind 
 had fairly got into its stride. Our task is to be a 
 much humbler one. We are to pass in review some 
 of the most recent movements of thought on the 
 problems of Matter, Life, Mind, and God or, in 
 other words, movements of thought in physics, 
 biology, psychology, and theology. On the other 
 hand, with all those currents of contemporary 
 thought and feeling which are, before our eyes, 
 remoulding the relations of classes and nations we 
 shall not be concerned. So, too, we shall leave 
 aside all movements in the realm of private morals, 
 or, again, in the realm of art. A truly compre- 
 hensive programme of synopsis would demand the 
 inclusion of all these, as also of history, and of many 
 sciences not mentioned above. But we must be
 
 8 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 content to limit ourselves and to select, from the 
 realm of theories, scientific and theological, a few 
 problems which must needs stand in the centre of 
 discussion whenever men debate what sort of a 
 world it is in which their lives are cast. 
 
 We are to make the experiment of looking for 
 evidence that contemporary movements of thought 
 on these problems are not mutually incompatible, 
 but hold out the promise of forming parts of a cohe- 
 rent pattern or order. In this sense, and to this 
 extent, we shall try to practise the philosophical 
 art of " seeing things together " on the science and 
 theology of our day. 
 
 2. In the realms of theory which we are about 
 to enter, we must be prepared for a good deal of 
 discussion which is technical and, in the common 
 phrase, " abstract." All the more important is it that 
 we should keep vividly with us, throughout, a sense 
 of the many-sided context of human life and work, 
 of the whole pageant of human history and civiliza- 
 tion, out of which even the most abstract theories 
 have sprung and within which they never cease to 
 have their roots. Only imagination can help us 
 here. Let us, therefore, evoke a picture which may, 
 as a sample, stand for countless other pictures taken 
 from the story of our race upon this earth. Let us 
 suppose ourselves to be standing on the Northum- 
 brian uplands, above the valley of the Tyne, where
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 9 
 
 the crumbling remains of the great Roman Wall 
 run along the crests of the hills from east to west 
 as far as the eye can reach. It is a scene sufficiently 
 desolate with the ruins at our feet witnessing to the 
 fall of an ancient empire, with sparse sheep browsing 
 on the fell-side, and here and there a lonely farm- 
 house tucked into the folds of the hills. Yet, even 
 so, there is scarce a spot on which the eye can rest 
 but bears the impress of human hands. And behind 
 the hands there are the minds, using the natural 
 resources which they find, in the measure of their 
 knowledge of them, for the appeasing, first, of the 
 urgent needs of bodily life, and, next, for the 
 gradual upbuilding of a civilization the essence of 
 which is to make physical things and physical forces 
 instrumental to, and expressive of, spiritual values. 
 It is easy to say that man has touched but the sur- 
 face of nature, here or anywhere : that sky and 
 mountain, river and sea, are what they always were 
 and would have been had man never appeared upon 
 the scene. Granted : man cannot alter the move- 
 ments of the stars or the vagaries of the weather 
 or the tides of the sea. He may level hills to build 
 his cities, but he does not turn mountain-ranges 
 into plains. He may canalize rivers for navigation 
 or dam them to irrigate his fields and supply power 
 to his turbines, but he cannot make rivers to 
 run if Nature has not provided them for him.
 
 10 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 He may drain marshes and fill up a Zuyder 
 Zee, but he cannot make dry land where 
 there are oceans. But, granting all this, it 
 still remains true that the actual environment in 
 which civilized man lives is one which he has made 
 what it now is, to suit his needs, to realize his 
 aspirations, to express some belief concerning the 
 meaning and purpose of his life. Wherever civiliza- 
 tion has established itself, there the virgin soil and 
 the untrod forest are no longer found. The farmer's 
 fields and meadows have been worked and tended 
 by generations, the trees have been planted, the 
 crops sown, the animals bred by human hands. 
 Wherever man has taken control, he has step, by 
 step, as he progressed in knowledge and the power 
 which is knowledge, elicited effects from Nature 
 which Nature, left to herself, would scarce have 
 produced. Consider, for example, the many species 
 of domesticated animals and plants which man has 
 bred out of their " wild " progenitors as he first 
 found them. The creative intelligence of man has 
 been in historical times one of the chief agencies of 
 organic variation. 
 
 But let us continue our experiment. Let us turn 
 from the lonely uplands down to the populous valley, 
 where villages and townships cluster round mines 
 and factories on the river bank, where road and 
 railway and telegraph run to the distant city. Let
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 11 
 
 us turn to the city itself where the streets are 
 crowded with traffic, where buildings climb high 
 into the sky, where in shop and office, church and 
 college, men gather on their various businesses 
 bent. Once more what a transformation of Nature ! 
 The once bare hillside is covered with structures of 
 brick and stone and cement. The original forest 
 survives as scarce a name. What was once a 
 babbling brook runs in a covered conduit and serves 
 as a sewer. The river banks are lined with mighty 
 works, and ocean-going steamers float where once 
 a ford crossed the river. 
 
 Yet this is but the surface, the visible scene. The 
 meaning and purpose of it all appear only when, in 
 terms of the human mind, we interpret this transfor- 
 mation of the pathless jungle and the untilled glebe 
 into farm and factory, road and city. If we would 
 understand it all we must take it as what it really is, 
 and talk of it in terms of agriculture and handicraft, 
 of industry and commerce, of trade and politics, of 
 war and peace. And last, but not least, we shall 
 have to speak of things of beauty created for the 
 sheer joy thereof, of knowledge sought for its own 
 sake, of the struggle of good and evil, of the worship 
 of God. Everywhere the visible scene is the symbol 
 of spiritual fact. A dwelling-house is, at its lowest, 
 a shelter against storm and wind, heat and cold, 
 but at its normal best it is a home and the setting
 
 12 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of family-life. Farm and factory are unintelligible 
 except as creations of intelligence applied to the 
 satisfaction of wants. Schools and colleges serve 
 the realization of educational ideals. Only a know- 
 ledge of religion will explain the edifice of a church 
 its existence, its design, the use of its various 
 parts, the symbolism of its total structure and its 
 detailed ornament. 
 
 What has not Man made of Nature ! How closely 
 interwoven are what Nature gives and Man has made 
 of the given. Materials are given " raw," until 
 human hands and intelligences impose upon them 
 form and shape, eliciting use and beauty from their 
 varied natural qualities. Forces, too, are given, 
 the " laws " of which we cannot alter, but we can 
 obey these laws and thus bend the forces to our 
 purposes. In proportion to the growth of civiliza- 
 tion does the actual environment of our daily living 
 become an environment of things made, shaped, 
 arranged by ourselves to satisfy our ever-increasing 
 needs an environment of tools and instruments 
 which secure, not merely the necessities of bare 
 existence, but comforts and luxuries, and which 
 make it possible to set free from the incessant 
 struggle for survival energies for the cultivation of 
 beauty and knowledge for their own sakes. When 
 we reflect on all the achievements of our modern 
 civilization we may well repeat, with deeper
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 13 
 
 meaning, the Greek poet's paean of the triumph of 
 Man : 
 
 There are marvellous wonders many 
 
 Where'er this world we scan, 
 Yet among them nowhere any 
 
 So great a marvel as Man. 
 To the white sea's uttermost verges 
 
 Afloat this miracle goes, 
 Forging through thundering surges 
 
 When the wintry southwind blows : 
 And the Earth, Heaven's Mother, divinest born, 
 The eternal, deathless, unoutworn. 
 Still plied with an endless to-and-fro 
 As the yearly ploughshares furrowing go, 
 
 By Man is fretted and torn. 
 
 The blithe swift careless races 
 
 On light wing flying in air 
 With speed of his wit he chases 
 
 And takes in a woven snare : 
 All deer in the wild wood running, 
 
 The deep sea's diverse kind, 
 Are snared in toils by the cunning 
 
 Of Man's outrivalling mind. 
 Strength of the lion, lord of the hill, 
 Yields to Man's overmastering skill ; 
 With his proud mane bowing under the yoke 
 The rebellious horse is tamed and broke, 
 
 And the mountain bull to his will. 
 
 He hath found out Speech, and the giving 
 
 Of wings to his high, proud Thought ; 
 And the ordered spirit of living 
 
 In Towns his mind hath taught ; 
 Shelter from arrowy shafts 
 
 Of the bleak air's frost and sleet ; 
 There is nought in store but his crafts 
 
 Shall have armed him ready to meet ;
 
 14 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 He fronts with fresh devices 
 
 The future's every shape : 
 Only, despite his cunning, 
 The Grave still mocks all shunning ; 
 Disease may root her vices, 
 
 But Art hath learned escape. 1 
 
 3. If Sophocles could write thus of the power 
 and cunning of man in the fifth century B.C., how 
 would he have written in our age of inventions and 
 machines ! Of beauty he might now find less, of 
 power vastly more. Whithersoever he turned, he 
 would find knowledge applied to the task of subduing 
 Nature to human purposes. It is a bare common- 
 place to say that our age of machines is an age of 
 applied science, an age which has taken for its motto 
 Bacon's maxim that " knowledge is power " 
 power to be used for improving man's estate. The 
 vast and rapid expansion of science, especially 
 during the last hundred and fifty years, is profoundly 
 altering the attitude of modern man towards the 
 world. This development of science has come on 
 the top of the revival of classical learning which we 
 call the Renaissance, of the religious emancipation 
 which we owe to the Reformation, of the voyages of 
 discovery and colonial expansion which carried the 
 civilization of Western Europe to all corners of the 
 earth. It has accompanied the rise of nation-states, 
 
 1 From Sophocles, Antigone, second chorus (Headlam's 
 translation).
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 15 
 
 each with its distinctive culture, language, and 
 national feeling. It has gone hand in hand with the 
 development and spread of democracy. It has made 
 possible the modern industrial system, with its huge 
 aggregations of workers in factory-towns and its 
 far-reaching changes in the economic and social 
 relations of men. With all these successive trans- 
 formations and expansions of his outlook, a subtle 
 change has come over the spirit of modern man 
 a change born of the new sense of power with which 
 science has endowed him. A new quality of hope- 
 fulness, of confidence in the future and in the destiny 
 of the human race on earth, marks now his attitude. 
 " Progress " has become his watchword. Belief 
 in progress has replaced the legends of a golden age 
 in the past, of a paradise lost. Our paradise lies 
 in the future and is to be built by our own strength 
 and knowledge. In this form, the belief, as Pro- 
 fessor J. B. Bury has recently shown in his History 
 of the Idea of Progress, is a peculiarly modern 
 phenomenon. Moreover, this new hopefulness and 
 confidence draw their main inspiration, not from 
 trust in the loving care of a personal God, but from 
 the conviction that through knowledge the human 
 race will increasingly become master of its own fate. 
 Mankind is learning, and will continue to learn, 
 ever more completely how to control the conditions 
 of its existence on earth, including the working of
 
 16 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 men's own bodies and minds. Health and happiness 
 for as many human beings as possible such is the 
 gospel of this new " religion of humanity." For 
 a religion it is a religion of devotion to the service 
 of man, a religion in which morality joins hands with 
 science, the latter supplying the means for the vic- 
 tory over poverty, disease, and vice which the former 
 proposes as the end. The achievement of happiness 
 by the use of all the resources of knowledge for 
 the elimination of evil thus one might formulate 
 the programme of the new spirit. Here is a typical 
 utterance : " That the control of nature through 
 the advancement of knowledge is the instrument of 
 progress and the chief ground of hope, is the axiom 
 of modern civilization. . . . The good is to be won 
 by the race and for the race ; it lies in the future, 
 and can result only from prolonged and collective 
 endeavour ; and the power to achieve it lies in the 
 progressive knowledge and control of Nature." 1 
 Here is another : " Of all the modern steps towards 
 international unity, the most indisputable, the most 
 firmly based and farthest reaching, is science, and 
 the various applications of science, both in promot- 
 ing intercourse between different parts of the world 
 and in alleviating suffering and strengthening and 
 illuminating human life. The more prominence, 
 therefore, that we can secure for the growth of 
 
 1 R. B. Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 4, 5.
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 17 
 
 science in the teaching of history, the larger place 
 humanity, or the united mind of mankind, will take 
 in the moving picture of the world." l On all sides 
 science is praised, and rightly praised, as being 
 progressive, co-operative, international, beneficent, 
 or, at least, beneficent when combined with the will 
 to use only for good ends the immense powers which 
 it confers. But this goodwill is universally assumed 
 by the apostles of the religion of humanity, for they 
 are commonly themselves burning with hatred of 
 injustice and evil, and many of them have been 
 zealous champions and devoted workers in the cause 
 of reform. 
 
 Nonetheless, it is a large assumption to make. 
 It is one thing to hope much from the power for good 
 which science brings. But a power for good is also 
 a power for evil. Hence, it is another thing to hope 
 much from men's will to seek the good and nothing 
 but the good. Moreover, are we even agreed, do we 
 know beyond the shadow of doubt, what the good 
 is ? If we press these questions, we soon find that 
 the optimism of the new spirit is dogged by pessi- 
 mism, that its hopefulness is easily by disappoint- 
 ment turned to despair. We would all like to 
 believe, with Mr. Bertrand Russell, that if men would 
 only take thought and show goodwill, they could 
 rid themselves in a few years of all the major ills 
 
 1 F. S. Marviu, The Unity of Civilization, p. 32.
 
 18 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 which now afflict them. But why do we take 
 thought so little, or so often think badly when we 
 do ? Why do we show so little goodwill ? Why 
 do we profess high ideals and so constantly fail to 
 carry them out ? If the War has taught us nothing 
 on this point, what of the Peace ? The Peace 
 Conference at Paris has shown to all of us that the 
 world with which our statesmen have to deal, is 
 rapidly becoming too vast and complicated for the 
 knowledge of any group of men to be equal to the 
 wise ordering of it. But, what is far more ominous 
 still, human character, i.e., the quality of the 
 purposes of nations, as expressed in the decisions 
 and actions of their representatives, looks like being 
 even more unequal to the demands made upon it. 
 Our passions constantly becloud our vision of the 
 common good. The " Great Society " of mankind, 
 as Mr. Graham Wallas calls it, is a fact which is 
 daily becoming more firmly established, especially 
 in the interlacing of the economic interests of all 
 peoples. But Mr. Wallas seems right in arguing 
 that so far we have failed to develop the type of 
 mind required of citizens of the Great Society. 
 Neither our power of understanding one another nor 
 our power of organized co-operation have, so far, 
 proved adequate to the need. Slowly, all too slowly, 
 we are learning to think and act internationally. 
 Moreover, our failure to organize the relations of
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 19 
 
 nations on a basis of peaceful co-operation is 
 repeated in our failure to organize the relations of 
 peoples and the relations of races. A cynic might 
 find ample opportunity for the exercise of bitter 
 humour in the contrast between mankind's trium- 
 phant control of non-human Nature and its con- 
 spicuous failure to manage itself. It is as if human 
 minds were too small to solve man-made problems 
 in knowledge too ill-equipped, in purpose too impure. 
 For nineteen hundred years the white race has been 
 schooled by Christian discipline : the present state 
 of Europe shows how little it has profited by the 
 lesson. 
 
 Thus, the gospel of man's place and destiny in the 
 world which the religion of humanity offers is sub- 
 ject to grave deductions on account of the defects 
 in human nature itself. But it is undeniable that 
 it has proved capable of expressing the best feelings 
 and aspirations of some of the ablest and most public- 
 spirited men, especially of the Victorian Age. After 
 Comte had formulated it in France, John Stuart 
 Mill transferred it to England, where it has become, 
 so we may fairly say, the working-creed of all 
 scientists who have shaped their world-view under 
 the vivid impression of all that science has done, 
 and promises still to do, for the alleviation of the 
 human lot. Darwin's theory of evolution did much 
 to dispose men's minds in favour of such an attitude.
 
 20 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 We know that Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, 
 was profoundly struck by the theory of evolution 
 as implying the ascent of man. The thought of 
 the human race evolving under the influence of 
 factors discoverable by scientific methods inspired 
 in him the vision of the intelligent control of the 
 evolutionary process, of the application of know- 
 ledge to the guidance and acceleration of that 
 process. He wrote of this inspiration as " a virile 
 creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to many of 
 the noblest feelings of our nature." It made him 
 the founder of the science of Eugenics. Another 
 scientific worker of that age, Metchnikoff, known 
 for his researches into the possibility of postponing 
 old age and death, was similarly inspired by the 
 thought of the dependence of human progress on 
 science a thought which came to him through 
 Buckle's History of Civilization. In Tyndall, in 
 Huxley, we find the same attitude. In our own day, 
 it is eloquently voiced by Soddy and by many others. 
 Its influence has penetrated into all departments 
 of modern life, wherever scientific ways of thinking 
 have found entrance. Through the development of 
 psychology, it has taught us that there is a technique 
 in the control and moulding of minds. Our educa- 
 tional practice is being transformed by new experi- 
 ments in methods of teaching and training. The 
 arts of advertisement and political propaganda
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 21 
 
 play upon our feelings and beliefs, for better or 
 worse. Social psychology sets itself to study the 
 behaviour of men in society, and the motives from 
 which it springs, in order to supply a psychological 
 technique for statesmanship. 1 Psycho-analysis is 
 perfecting a method for discovering, and curing, the 
 causes of many morbid derangements. It is begin- 
 ning to formulate valuable hints for moral training. 
 Even in the suggestion that crime is disease and 
 demands to be healed by the psychiatrist rather than 
 to be punished by the judge, no less than in the 
 Taylor system for securing increased output and 
 efficiency from industrial workers, we can trace the 
 influence of the ideal of managing men to better 
 effect by " taking thought," i.e., by the application 
 of science. 
 
 It was only to be expected that this new move- 
 ment should find expression also in contemporary 
 philosophy, for in philosophy the human spirit reflects 
 upon itself and gives an account to itself of what it 
 is and what it wants. The Pragmatism of William 
 James, the Humanism of F. C. S. Schiller, the 
 Instrumentalism of John Dewey, all emphasize 
 different aspects of the new attitude. Schiller 
 
 1 Cf. Graham Wallas, The Great Society, ch. ii, p. 20 : " The 
 science of social psychology aims at discovering and arranging 
 the knowledge which will enable us to forecast, and therefore 
 to influence, the conduct of large numbers of human beings 
 organized in societies."
 
 22 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 stresses the way in which all thinking is controlled 
 by purposes, by problems to be solved, by things 
 to be done. James dwells most on the part which 
 thinking plays in the guidance of behaviour, and on 
 the way in which the consequences of acting out our 
 ideas teach us to discriminate between good (true) 
 and bad (false) thinking. He, too, preaches the 
 gospel of Meliorism, i.e., the urgency and hopeful- 
 ness of the moral endeavour for the elimination of 
 evil, for the perfecting of man and of his world. 
 Dewey sums up in the concept of " creative intelli- 
 gence " the call to us to take thought about human 
 aff airs, and to apply scientific methods to the prob- 
 lems of educational and social reform. The term 
 " creative " expresses better than any other 
 the quality which contemporary thinkers acclaim 
 in the characteristic spirit of our age. It meets us 
 again in Bergson's Creative Evolution, in the pages 
 of which we find that bold, imaginative picture of 
 humanity, as the chief bearer of the cosmic elan 
 vital, galloping forward into the future like an army 
 of horsemen destined to put even death to flight. 1 
 In profounder metaphysical speculations, as in the 
 Gifford Lectures on Space, Time, and Deity of the 
 
 1 Cf. L' Evolution Cvkatrice, end of ch. iii, p. 295 : " L'humanit6 
 entiere, dans 1'espace et dans le temps est une immense armee 
 qui galope a cote de chacun de nous, en avant et en arriere de 
 nous, dans une charge entrainante capable de culbuter toutes 
 les resistances et de franchir bien des obstacles, meme peut-etre 
 la mort."
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 23 
 
 realist, Professor S. Alexander, the modern spirit 
 appears in the emphasis on evolution as the move- 
 ment of the world towards perfection, whereas in 
 the writings of the Italian neo-idealists, Croce, 
 Gentile, and others, it appears in the emphasis on 
 mind as " pure act." And in both theories the 
 ultimate reality of time is affirmed as the condition 
 of progress and creative advance. 
 
 We have already noted, above, that this modern 
 attitude appears in many of its representatives as 
 a religion, or, at least, that Comte's " religion of 
 humanity " is one of its most characteristic forms. 
 As such, it challenges comparison with the tradi- 
 tional forms of religion, or, rather, it is a phenomenon 
 of revolt against certain features of the traditional 
 theology. The lines of affiliation and contrast, 
 here, are many and tangled. But two among them 
 are clearly marked. One is the line of moral revolt 
 which J. S. Mill, for example, voiced in his posthum- 
 ous Essays on Religion and which bases itself on the 
 difficulty of reconciling the existence of evil with the 
 belief in a God who, as all-good and all-wise, cannot 
 have wuled evil, and who, as all-powerful, could 
 have prevented it. The other is the scientific revolt 
 against " physico-theology," i.e., against the theo- 
 logizing form of science which set itself piously to 
 explore the world for evidences of the goodness, 
 wisdom, and power of the Creator.
 
 24 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 But this emancipation of science from theology, 
 and the abandonment of design in favour of cause as 
 the explanatory principle of science, brings us to 
 another aspect of our topic. 
 
 4. So far, we have been considering the distinc- 
 tive cast which science, as power, has, in alliance with 
 morality, given to the feelings, thoughts, and actions 
 of many modern men. 
 
 But this is only one side of the story. Science has 
 helped to shape the modern mind and its way of 
 conceiving the world, not only as power, but also 
 as theory. As theory, science is a body of proposi- 
 tions, or judgments, in which a certain constitu- 
 tion and character are affirmed of the world. As 
 scientists, we claim to know that the world has the 
 character which these propositions ascribe to it. 
 Or, recalling the language which we used at the 
 beginning of this lecture, we may say that, when 
 we equate science with " knowledge," we affirm 
 that the world really is what we, as scientists, think 
 it to be. 
 
 Now, a theory about the character of the world 
 we live in is, as we also reminded ourselves, bound 
 to have consequences for the way we feel and the 
 way we behave. Particularly important, in this 
 respect, has been the emancipation, just mentioned, 
 of science from theology. For it implies that, in 
 scientific thinking, we ascribe to the world a char-
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 25 
 
 acter which may contradict, and which certainly 
 is different from, and lends no direct support 
 to, the character affirmed of it by religion and 
 theology. 
 
 What is this character which scientific theory 
 ascribes to the world ? 
 
 The most general and inclusive term for the world, 
 so far as science deals with it, is Nature. Hence, too, 
 when science is contrasted with theology, what is 
 meant is " natural science," and the contrast is 
 between thinking of the world as " Nature " and 
 thinking of it as " God." But what does 
 " Nature," here, include or exclude ? Let us take 
 the answer which the most recent interpreter of 
 science, Professor A. N. Whitehead, gives in his 
 Concept of Nature. 1 Nature, he tells us, is " that 
 which we observe in perception through the senses." 
 What is thus disclosed to our perception is assumed 
 by us to exist in its own right, apart from the fact 
 that we perceive it or think it. Relatively to our 
 acts of perception we regard it as self-contained and 
 independent. We assume that its existence and 
 character would be just what they are if we did not 
 perceive it at this moment at all. In Whitehead's 
 vivid phrase, Nature is " closed to mind." This 
 means that, in studying Nature, we can ignore its 
 relation to our minds, to us as percipients and 
 
 1 See especially pp. 2-5.
 
 26 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 thinkers. So, likewise, Nature is, for science, 
 closed to " moral and aesthetic values whose appre- 
 hension is vivid in proportion to self-conscious 
 activity." 
 
 Let us pause for a moment to consider what this 
 last statement implies. It implies, we must declare 
 at once, a very considerable selection, or abstraction, 
 from what Nature means to us in the concrete con- 
 text of everyday life. For, it is there tinged for us 
 by every kind of experience through which it is 
 interwoven with our lives. It certainly is the realm 
 of " that which we observe in perception through our 
 senses." But it is, also, much more than this. It 
 is the scene of our bodily activities. From some of 
 the objects within it we have to win the satisfaction 
 of our needs : others we may have to fight for our 
 very existence. Some may thrill us by their beauty, 
 others make a claim on our sympathy and care. 
 For, let us bear in mind that the phrase, " that which 
 we observe in perception through the senses," 
 covers all that we ordinarily distinguish as human 
 beings, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. 
 Towards these diverse objects we have diverse 
 relations. We feel and behave differently towards 
 them. Yet, Whitehead's formula is designedly 
 chosen in order to level away, as irrelevant to pure 
 science, these differences between the non-living 
 and the living, or, again, between living beings
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 27 
 
 which have minds and those which have none. 1 
 Similarly, it eliminates all differences in our attitudes 
 and responses to these different kinds of things, 
 and thereby all " aesthetic and moral values." 
 Yet, when we ordinarily speak of " Nature," the 
 term echoes for us something of the beauty which 
 thrills us, of the power which strikes us with fear, 
 of the order in her system which fills us with intel- 
 lectual satisfaction, of the religious sentiment of 
 awe which may be evoked when beauty and power 
 and order are joined with mystery and immensity. 
 Thus, clearly, the scientific meaning of " Nature," 
 i.e., the character which science ascribes to Nature, 
 is something much more narrow and artificial than 
 the character which Nature discloses when all the 
 resources of our experience are allowed to count. 
 This is what we mean when we say that science 
 selects or abstracts. To acknowledge this is not to 
 find fault with science for its method. To this 
 selective, or abstracting, method science owes its 
 
 1 At the end of his Principles of Natural Knowledge, Whitehead 
 touches in some tantalizingly brief sentences on the appearance 
 of life in " Nature," identifying it with rhythm in the events 
 which we " observe in perception by our senses." But, valuable 
 as this suggestion is, it does not carry us far towards under- 
 standing the functioning of a living organism. Still less does it 
 help us to understand mind as expressed in Nature, i.e., as 
 expressed through the perceptible behaviour of certain kinds of 
 organisms. This shows very clearly that Whitehead, whose 
 own special science is applied mathematics, has constructed his 
 concept of Nature to fit the requirements of theoretical physics, 
 rather then the requirements of biology or psychology.
 
 28 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 precision and its successes, in theory and practice. 
 Science, as a method, consists in this abstract way 
 of looking at the world. It selects and uses out of 
 the general context of human experience certain 
 data as evidence, and rejects all the rest. It uses 
 certain concepts in framing its theories and avoids 
 all others. That is the privilege of its character- 
 istic technique. But, we must note and emphasize 
 the contrast between the character of " Nature " 
 for science and its character for concrete experience, 
 precisely because this contrast presents one of the 
 chief problems for philosophical synopsis. For, the 
 individual scientist, as a man, may be also a poet 
 and a believer in God, but, as a scientist, he will 
 keep poetical or religious modes of thinking and feel- 
 ing out of his science, at least if he plays the game 
 of science according to the usual rules. The descrip- 
 tion of a natural event in the language of religious 
 emotion will not for him count as relevant evidence. 
 The beauty or sublimity of natural objects, for all 
 that they are intensely real to the artist's perception 
 and enjoyment, he will ignore. That human needs 
 and interests should depend, for better or worse, 
 on natural processes and laws is an accident to 
 the investigator's dispassionate gaze. He looks at 
 Nature with the eyes of pure and, as it were, dis- 
 embodied perception and intelligence. Nature, for 
 him, lies wholly in the plane of observation and logic.
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 29 
 
 This is not to deny, of course, that within these limits 
 the concept of Nature also undergoes a vast develop- 
 ment at the hands of science. For, not only do 
 scientific observation and experiment bring to light 
 regions of fact wholly beyond the reach of everyday 
 perception, but, above all, science emphasizes the 
 character of order and law throughout Nature, where 
 common experience finds much chaos and caprice. 
 Still, the broad fact remains undeniable : the 
 characteristic method of science consists in practis- 
 ing such a selection from the context of human 
 experience that the resulting object has to be de- 
 scribed in terms from which the language of human 
 desire or feeling, of aesthetic enjoyment, of moral 
 endeavour, of religious love, is in principle excluded. 
 This being so, it is the more significant to find 
 Whitehead admitting, at the end, that " the values 
 of Nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical 
 synthesis of existence," i.e., to what we have 
 described as the philosophical problem of " seeing 
 things together." 
 
 But there are many other ways, still, in which 
 science has revolutionized our ways of thinking of 
 Nature and of our place, as human beings, in its 
 scheme. Older ways of thinking, which have left 
 an abiding mark on our language and our literature, 
 interpreted natural processes " anthropomorphic- 
 ally," i.e., on the analogy of human behaviour, and
 
 30 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 construed the whole scheme of things " anthropo- 
 centrically," i.e., as centring round the welfare and 
 destiny of the human race. It is characteristic of 
 modern science that it has challenged all these 
 anthropomorphic and anthropocentric types of 
 belief and driven them from the field, at least in 
 their crudest forms. Mediaeval thought, accepting 
 the cosmology of the Book of Genesis, found the 
 meaning of the universe in the drama of man's fall 
 and redemption enacted upon the earth as the centre 
 of the universe. But when astronomy changed from 
 a geo-centric to a helio-centric theory, not only was 
 the earth displaced from the centre of the solar 
 system, but man was, so to speak, dethroned with 
 it. One may still meet with scientists who, having 
 been brought up, as children, on the older beliefs, 
 now find a grim emotional satisfaction in contrast- 
 ing the immensity in time and space of the stellar 
 universe with the insignificance of the earth and of 
 man upon the earth. The theory of evolution in 
 the nineteenth century has helped to intensify this 
 attitude, both by exhibiting the evolutionary deriva- 
 tion of man from lower forms of life, and by pre- 
 dicting, on astronomical grounds, the ultimate 
 extinction of all life on the earth. Thus, astronomy 
 and biology have combined to revolutionize the 
 traditional cosmology. Human history and civiliza- 
 tion shrink to the dimensions of a mere episode on
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 31 
 
 " one of the meanest of the planets," and man 
 appears verily as the helpless plaything of the blind 
 forces of Nature. How should the hopes and fears 
 and imaginings of a creature so puny supply the 
 clue to a theory of the universe ? Let man's desires 
 and feelings be what they may, the majesty of objec- 
 tive fact remains untouched by them and reveals 
 itself only to the disinterested eye of science. Those 
 who follow this line of thought to its bitter end are 
 apt to deal less gently with " values " than just now 
 we found Whitehead doing. In art, morality, 
 religion they see nothing but the mirage of feelings 
 and desires seeking a make-believe satisfaction. 
 Anything so incurably " subjective " and " human " 
 they would rigorously eliminate from the objective 
 contemplation of facts as they are. 
 
 If we may not be anthropocentric, neither may 
 we be anthropomorphic. The use of human 
 analogies in explaining natural processes and events 
 is not permissible in science. The most familiar 
 expression of this attitude is the so-called " mechan- 
 ical theory of Nature." This is a sustained protest 
 against the theory of agency to which common 
 thought is committed, without knowing it, by the 
 active and passive tenses of the verbs of current 
 speech. The sun melts the ice, the flowers are killed 
 by the frost thus, with unconscious personifica- 
 tion, we talk of things as doing and suffering where
 
 32 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 strict science bids us talk only of the " correlation 
 of events according to law." Causality, for science, 
 no longer connotes activity ; and with activity 
 have gone the allied notions of will, purpose, design, 
 intelligence. In one way this change has been all 
 to the good. The substitution of the question, 
 How ? for the question, Why ? has supplied 
 science with an inexhaustible programme for 
 research into the laws according to which pheno- 
 mena are connected. The concept of law has eman- 
 cipated science from the " animism " of primitive 
 thought which looked for the explanation of natural 
 events to the capricious will of some spirit or demon. 
 But, on the other hand, the mechanical theory has 
 raised grave difficulties of its own. Its most trium- 
 phant successes have been in those sciences in which, 
 as in astronomy, physics, and chemistry, no question 
 of life or mind arises. But, when we pass to the 
 study of living beings and, even more, of conscious 
 and intelligent beings, the mechanical concepts 
 work more and more awkwardly. It is not that we, 
 here, pass necessarily beyond the sphere of " law." 
 The difficulty is rather that life and mind seem each 
 to be something distinctive and unique, and that 
 the terms in which we analyse those physical objects 
 which are non-living and inanimate, hardly suffice 
 for a complete account of beings which, though their 
 bodies are " material " and " perceptible by the
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 33 
 
 senses," yet exhibit the characters of life and, it 
 may be, of intelligence and will. Thus, we are 
 brought from another angle to the same difficulty 
 which we noted, a short while ago, in Whitehead's 
 concept of Nature. The sharp distinction between 
 body and soul, matter and mind or consciousness, 
 which is so common and marked a feature of current 
 scientific views, is largely the result of the desire 
 to escape from these difficulties by eliminating from 
 " Nature," as the subject-matter of science, all 
 facts which, like consciousness, do not fit into the 
 mechanistic pattern and cannot be dealt with by 
 theoretical physics. 
 
 And, lastly, if the mechanical theory of Nature 
 excludes explanation in terms of human, or animal, 
 purpose and mind, it excludes, a fortiori, all explana- 
 tions which refer to the will, or design, of God. 
 Modern scientists do not employ the " hypothesis 
 of God." The famous Bridgewater Treatises were 
 the last considerable attempt to theologize in science. 
 Since then it has become the established practice of 
 science to avoid theological language. The break 
 is complete. Science no longer bids us admire, 
 God's wisdom, power, or goodness as displayed in 
 creation. It no longer explains the arrangements it 
 finds by saying that God made them just so, and 
 that, therefore, they are for the best. It does not 
 mention God at all. Whether this " break " with 
 3
 
 84 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 theology necessarily implies an irreconcilable conflict 
 remains to be seen. It may turn out to be more 
 of the nature of a division of labour a legitimate 
 result of the methodical abstraction which, as we 
 have seen, science practises, but which need not be 
 held to invalidate the aesthetic, moral, and religious 
 modes of experience. 
 
 But it is just because science abstracts that it 
 cannot be " synoptic," or take the place of philo- 
 sophy, which seeks to transcend abstract points of 
 view in order to see things together and to compre- 
 hend the world as a whole. 
 
 5. So far we have been tracing, in its main 
 ramifications, the profound influence which science, 
 both as power and as theory, has had upon the ways 
 in which modern man conceives the world and, 
 therefore, also upon the ways in which he responds 
 to the world in feeling and act. Especially have we 
 noted how, both as power and as theory, science 
 tends to lead men to doubt, and often to abandon, 
 not only the theological creeds which are our 
 historical heritage, but also the religious attitude 
 itself, the religious way of taking and valuing the 
 world, of which the creeds offer a reflective formula- 
 tion. Yet, this picture of the modern man and the 
 modern spirit which we have drawn is, strictly, 
 no more than the picture of an increasingly power- 
 ful tendency in contemporary civilization. It is
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 35 
 
 not a faithful portrait either of that civilization as 
 a whole or of the mind of the average educated 
 individual. True, both civilization as a whole 
 and the average individual are profoundly 
 influenced by the scientific thinking which 
 reaches us all through contact with the 
 scientists in our midst and with their lectures 
 and books. But, they are also shaped and moulded 
 by a large variety of other interests and experiences 
 and by a wealth of tradition kept alive, partly 
 through literature and education, and partly through 
 the modes of feeling, thinking, acting which are 
 fostered and standardized in the organizations of 
 Church and State. So far as physics influences us, 
 we talk of the world in terms of matter and motion. 
 When we think biologically, we talk of life and 
 behaviour. As psychologists, we use the language 
 of consciousness and mind. But we are interested, 
 too, in industry and commerce, in art, in morals, 
 in politics, in religion, and accordingly we talk 
 and think and act also in terms of wealth, of beauty, 
 of goodness, of citizenship and government, of God. 
 In the vocabulary which any moderately educated 
 man any newspaper-reader, shall we say ? daily 
 uses, fragments of all these technical languages play 
 their part. And with each language the individual 
 adjusts his attitude and response, more or less, to 
 the characteristic point of view which it expresses.
 
 36 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Yet what a babel of languages it is ! What a 
 chaos of attitudes and points of view ! We are 
 saved in ordinary life from bewilderment and con- 
 fusion, because we acquire, in greater or less measure, 
 the useful habit of switching over from one point of 
 view and language to another, without experiencing 
 the transition as a discord and, therefore, also with- 
 out feeling the need for a reconciliation, a synopsis. 
 Yet, when we once, in explicit reflexion, bring all 
 these diverse aspects of our civilization into a 
 single focus, what a thing of fragments, of shreds 
 and patches, even of conflicts, it then appears ! 
 The demand for unity in outlook and attitude then 
 becomes wellnigh irresistible. Yet, the wider a 
 man's interests and contacts, the more difficult 
 is he apt to find the achievement of such unity. For, 
 it requires a comprehensive theory of the Universe 
 in which all sides of his life have their place the 
 sort of theory, in short, which it is the traditional 
 aspiration of philosophy to supply. Paradoxically 
 enough, in modern education, and especially in 
 modern " higher " education, we do not attempt or 
 profess to provide such a theory. We cannot 
 provide it because we have not got it. Our civiliza- 
 tion has not yet achieved reflective expression in 
 any single philosophical form. We have plenty of 
 philosophies, but no philosophy ; plenty of " ten- 
 dencies " and " movements " and experiments,
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 37 
 
 but few common premises and still fewer common 
 conclusions. Religion which once supplied focus 
 and unity to civilization has lost this central position, 
 and the consequent secularization of education has 
 intensified the disintegration of our intellectual 
 world. The subjects taught at our universities and 
 colleges offer a fairly representative cross-section of 
 that world, yet it would be difficult to gather from 
 a survey of them any unified and coherent system 
 of what, in the name of " knowledge," we believe 
 the Universe to be. The very increase of know- 
 ledge compels teachers to specialize to a point where 
 the power of synopsis is inevitably lost, and students 
 to sample the intellectual world in so many discon- 
 nected places that it does not seem to be a world at 
 all but only a collection of atomic subjects. And, 
 thus, as subjects are subdivided and information 
 grows in volume, the problem of eliciting from all 
 these separate bits of theory a unified interpretation 
 of the world becomes increasingly unmanageable. 
 Let alone that our educational systems leave it 
 mainly to our private initiative to determine and 
 cultivate our attitudes to art and politics and 
 religion. No wonder that for all our " education " 
 few of us have a unified outlook upon life or that 
 fine stability of character which is almost unattain- 
 able without such an outlook. 
 It is, perhaps, fortunate for our peace of mind
 
 38 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 that most of us hardly feel the problem. We are 
 so busy living that we have no time to take stock 
 of our beliefs, no time to realize how incoherent they 
 usually are, no tune to ask whether they are true, 
 or how far, in our manner of living, we are true to 
 them. Such stability as we possess rests largely 
 on the comforting sense that each shred of belief 
 is shared by many of our fellows and perhaps backed 
 by special authority as well. For the rest, absorp- 
 tion in our work is our salvation. For the work of 
 each of us is, at once, his readiest channel of self- 
 expression, reflecting in its successes and failures 
 his good and bad qualities of intelligence and 
 character, and it is, also, his contribution to that 
 total achievement of the human spirit which we call 
 our civilization. Without reflecting on it, we all 
 draw some strength and inspiration from the fact 
 that in this total achievement we co-operate alike 
 with those who have gone before us and with those 
 who will come after us. Even if utter extinction 
 be, as some hold, the ultimate destiny of the human 
 race and all its works, yet here and now this partici- 
 pation in the creative effort of the human spirit 
 saves our individual lives from being merely 
 ephemeral and ineffective. 
 
 But, if once reflection awakens us to the need for 
 a synoptic effort, it is hard to draw back. And here 
 we may well draw courage from the support of a
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 39 
 
 distinguished scientist who, in the midst of his 
 scientific researches, has always kept his mind open 
 to the larger outlook. From him we can learn that 
 science, though by its abstract method it does so 
 much to stimulate, and so little to satisfy, the 
 demand for a synoptic attitude, is yet not hostile 
 to our endeavour. Professor J. A. Thomson, 
 surveying in his System of Animate Nature the whole 
 field of biology, defines his goal as a " Philosophy of 
 Animate Nature," i.e., " a consistent thinking 
 together of what we know and feel about Animate 
 Nature along with what we know and feel about 
 other orders of facts." A striking phrase is this 
 " what we know and feel." It finds its fuller 
 explanation in such utterances as these : " We get 
 closer to some things through feeling than we do 
 through science " ; or, " the tendency of feeling 
 is always to see things whole synoptically." And, 
 above all, " we cannot, for our life's sake, and for 
 the sake of our philosophical reconstruction, afford 
 to lose in scientific analysis what the poets and artists 
 and lovers of Nature all see. It is intuitively felt, 
 rather than intellectually perceived, the vision of 
 things as totalities, root and all, all in all ; neither 
 fancifully, nor mystically, but sympathetically in 
 their wholeness." 
 
 " Intellect " and " feeling " are, indeed, empty 
 terms until we translate them concretely into the
 
 40 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 scientist's theory and the poet's vision of the same 
 object. They are different, but are they incompat- 
 ible ? Is not each by itself impoverished for lack 
 of the characteristic excellence and truth of the 
 other ? The poet's vision uninformed by science 
 degenerates into sentimentalism. The scientist's 
 analysis tends to destroy the sense of the whole, 
 whilst his suspicion of " anthropomorphic " extrava- 
 gance often leads him to put into words something 
 less than the total impression he receives. Can it 
 be, one wonders, that laboratory research, just 
 because of its inevitably artificial conditions and 
 manipulations, lends itself to the use of the language 
 of physico-chemical mechanism, whereas most field- 
 naturalists, studying living creatures in their natural 
 haunts and enjoying Nature as an unbroken whole, 
 talk unhesitatingly anthropomorphic language ? 
 However this may be, Thomson is clearly a lover of 
 Nature as well as a scientist, and in this lies, we 
 may boldly say, his superior objectivity. The 
 result is not bad science, but better philosophy. For 
 the fuller use of experience provides additional 
 " pathways to reality," i.e., pathways to a total 
 view of Nature. Such a total view will not exclude 
 the effects, on our own minds, of the contact with 
 Nature in contemplation and enjoyment, for such 
 contact with Nature has, as Thomson justly says, 
 a " tonic virtue." Unrest and petty cares and
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 41 
 
 mean thoughts drop away as we learn to perceive 
 and appreciate the power, order, beauty, intricacy 
 of the web of life. Without this contact we are 
 impoverished, with it we are made strong in hope 
 and faith. 
 
 Of course, Thomson is dealing with " Animate 
 Nature," i.e., with the subject-matter of biology, 
 not simply with " Nature," which latter term, as 
 we have seen, orients us rather towards mathe- 
 matical physics. It is no mere accident that a 
 biologist should show himself more keenly alive to 
 the need for a synoptic philosophy than a physicist. 
 Without doubt, the abstractions of scientific method 
 are easier to practise in proportion as we face away 
 from all facts which suggest the presence and efficacy 
 of mind in the world. But though we may take up 
 and maintain such an attitude by a kind of 
 methodical make-believe, a moment's reflection on 
 the full world of concrete experience should convince 
 us that such a position cannot be final. Biology 
 shakes its foundations. Psychology ignores it. 
 Its inadequacy becomes patent when we turn to the 
 concrete achievements of mind in history, in social 
 and economic life, in government, and in art. And 
 any sane theory of religion transcends it altogether.
 
 42 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The following books, which obviously are but a selection from 
 the available literature, may be recommended to those who 
 wish to follow up the argument of Lecture I with further 
 reading : 
 
 1. Alexander, S. 
 
 2. Bosanquet, B. 
 
 3. Bosanquet, B. 
 
 4. Laird, J. 
 
 5. Marvin, F. S. 
 
 (editor) 
 
 6. Marvin, F. S. 
 
 (editor) 
 
 7. Merz, J. T. 
 
 8. Pringle- 
 Pattison, A. S. 
 
 9. Russell, B. 
 
 10. Russell, B. 
 
 11. Soddy, F. 
 
 12. Sorley, W. R. 
 
 13. Thomson, J. A 
 
 14. Whitehead, 
 A. N. 
 
 15. Whitehead, 
 
 A. N. 
 
 Space, Time and Deity, 2 vols. (Macmillan 
 
 & Co., 1920.) 
 The Principle of Individuality and Value. 
 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1912.) 
 The Value and Destiny of the Individual. 
 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1913.) 
 A Study in Realism. (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 
 1920.) 
 The Unity of Western Civilization. (Oxford 
 
 Univ. Press, 1915.) 
 Recent Developments in European Thought. 
 
 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1920.) 
 A History of European Thought in the Nine- 
 teenth Century, 4 vols. (Blackwood, 1896- 
 
 1914.) 
 The Idea of God in Recent Philosophy. 
 
 (Oxford Univ. Press, 1917.) 
 Philosophical Essays. (Longmans, Green & 
 
 Co., 1910.) 
 Mysticism and Logic. (Longmans, Green & 
 
 Co., 1918.) 
 
 Science and Life. (John Murray, 1920.) 
 Moral Values and the Idea of God, 2nd Ed. 
 
 (Camb. Univ. Press, 1921.) 
 The System of Animate Nature. (Williams 
 
 & Norgate, 1920.) 
 The Concept of Nature. (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 
 1920.) 
 The Principles of Natural Knowledge. (Camb. 
 
 Univ. Press, 1919.) 
 
 The claims advanced on behalf of science and scientific method 
 may be studied in No. n, in several essays in Nos. 9, 10, and 
 in Mr. Marvin's contributions to Nos. 5, 6. Nos. 14, 15 illus- 
 trate impressively how one of the most original among living 
 physicists looks at Nature. The sharp distinction between 
 Nature and the human beholder, between the object known and
 
 SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY 43 
 
 the knowing mind, which science postulates, has been elevated 
 to the dignity of a fundamental philosophical principle by the 
 movement known as " realism " or " neo-realism " (illustrated 
 by Nos. i, 4, 9, 10). With Nos. 2, 3, 8, 13, 14, the point of view 
 and the argument of the preceding lecture have most affinity. 
 No. 7 is invaluable as a mine of information about the develop- 
 ment of thought, both scientific and philosophical, in the nine- 
 teenth century. It is from Dr. Merz that I have adopted the 
 term " synoptic."
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 THE PRESENT-DAY REVOLT AGAINST 
 " MATTER " 
 
 I 
 
 i. "Y" N the first lecture our aim had been to bring 
 home to ourselves the need for a synoptic 
 effort a need resulting from the bewilder- 
 ing number and diversity of the currents and systems 
 of thought which our civilization, as a whole, has 
 produced and which impinge upon all educated men 
 and women in proportion to the range of their 
 interests, practical and theoretical. This need 
 becomes doubly great when systems of thought 
 which appeal to us with equal strength, though 
 perhaps on different grounds, appear to conflict 
 and to compel us to make a choice between them. 
 Here, so we held, is the great opportunity for philo- 
 sophy, the function of which is to stand for the ideal 
 of " thinking together " the whole of human experi- 
 ence, taken as revealing in all its modes and forms 
 through what we feel and will no less than through 
 what we perceive and think something of the 
 nature of the world we live in. 
 
 44
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 45 
 
 The undeniable vastness of such a synoptic pro- 
 gramme is no excuse for not attempting it at all. 
 If we could satisfy ourselves that some measure of 
 order and harmony obtains where, at first sight, all 
 is confusion and conflict, it would be no small gain. 
 If we could convince ourselves that some of the 
 most important tendencies of contemporary thought, 
 so far from being as isolated from, and repellent 
 to, each other as on the surface they may seem to be, 
 hold out a promise of fitting together into a unified 
 world-view, we should be amply rewarded for our 
 effort. At any rate, for better or for worse, the 
 effort to " see things together " is worth making. 
 
 Our programme calls, in to-day's lecture, for a 
 review of current tendencies of thought in the 
 " philosophy of Nature." By this term we mean 
 the philosophical criticism be it by philosophers, 
 be it by philosophically-minded scientists of what 
 the natural sciences, and more particularly physics, 
 have to tell us about " Nature," not in its details, 
 but in its general character. And " criticism," 
 here, does not mean fault-finding but interpreta- 
 tion nay more, appreciation. Its purpose is 
 neither to correct the sciences nor to do their work 
 for them. For Ersatz-science there is no room. 
 But there is room, and need, for a reflective estimate 
 and appreciation of what the sciences, severally and 
 together, have achieved in the way of making known
 
 46 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 to us the fundamental character of the world we 
 live in. To know a thing, as we said in the first 
 lecture, is to believe that it is really and truly what 
 we think it to be. Each of the sciences teaches us 
 to think of the world, or, at least, of that portion 
 of the world which is its chosen subject-matter, as 
 having a certain definite character and structure. 
 The philosophy of Nature is interested in these 
 characters and structures, in the evidence on which 
 they are affirmed, in their coherence and compati- 
 bility with each other, and ultimately, too, in their 
 coherence with the evidence of those modes of experi- 
 ence of which, as of the aesthetic, the moral, the 
 religious experience, the natural sciences take no 
 account. Such criticism and interpretation of 
 scientific concepts and theories is, clearly, synoptic 
 in tendency and effect. It does not claim to assist 
 the scientist in his investigations. It does not 
 make him a better observer or experimenter. He 
 can, if he pleases, ignore it all as irrelevant for his 
 purposes and limit his attention strictly to the 
 detailed problems of his special field. But he can- 
 not help becoming a philosopher himself the moment 
 he chooses to consider the relation of his field of 
 work to, and the bearing of his results on, the fields 
 and results of other scientists, or, again, the fields 
 and theories of students of art or morality or 
 religion.
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 47 
 
 In this lecture, however, we shall confine ourselves 
 to one natural science, viz., physics, which, by 
 teaching us to think of Nature as " material," has 
 profoundly affected all our other ways of thinking 
 of Nature. Ever since modern physics began with 
 the work of Galileo and Descartes, its influence on 
 other sciences, as well as on philosophy, has been 
 immense. Hence it is of the utmost interest and 
 importance for our synoptic programme that 
 philosophically-minded physicists are, once again, 
 becoming keenly critical of the concept of " matter," 
 and are thereby led, once again, to speculate about 
 the foundations of their science in the facts of 
 experience. When physicists themselves turn 
 philosophers and, like Whitehead, confess the 
 " incoherence " of their traditional theories of 
 Nature, philosophers may well expect some grist 
 for their own mill. Especially Whitehead's two 
 recent books, The Principles of Natural Knowledge 
 and The Concept of Nature, have with good reason 
 been hailed as the most illuminating contributions 
 of our day to the philosophy of Nature. Whitehead's 
 criticisms of " matter " and his fresh interpretation 
 of " Nature " are full of value for our synoptic 
 programme, just because Whitehead approaches 
 his problems throughout by way of the relation of 
 physical concepts to the ultimate data of experience. 
 
 2. It has been wittily said that " we know too
 
 48 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 much about matter to be any longer materialists." 
 This saying may serve as a text for the present 
 lecture. Let us consider in what sense, if any, it 
 is true. 
 
 Our best way to begin is to make clear to our- 
 selves that the term " matter " is exceedingly 
 ambiguous. Like every other term which has for 
 centuries been a centre of discussion and controversy 
 it has gathered round itself a variety of meanings 
 which are, commonly, not clearly distinguished. 
 We shall best prepare ourselves for an appreciation 
 of Whitehead's attack on " matter " by making a 
 preliminary survey of the chief senses in which the 
 term " matter " has come to be used. In each 
 of these senses there is a vague echo of some philo- 
 sophical or scientific theory. Thus, for example, 
 most of us have probably heard it said that 
 " idealists," like Berkeley, " deny the existence of 
 matter," and have wondered how anybody can be 
 such a fool. It is a pleasant fashion among many 
 scientists, in their anxiety to clear their " science " 
 from any taint of " philosophy," to hold Berkeley 
 up to scorn as the type of a " metaphysician," 
 which term, to them, means a person who flies in 
 the face of commonsense and denies the reality of 
 what to everybody else is obviously most real of 
 all. For, the " matter," the existence of which 
 Berkeley is supposed to deny, is by his critics taken
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 49 
 
 to mean tables and chairs, trees and animals, the 
 air we breathe and the ground we walk on in 
 short, the physical objects of everyday life, including 
 our own bodies. No wonder that the denial of 
 their existence seems nothing but a gratuitous 
 paradox. On the other hand, we have all heard, 
 too, of " materialists " who declare that matter is 
 the only reality and the ultimate principle of 
 explanation for everything, or who, in other words, 
 deny that anything is real except matter. But, 
 what becomes of this theory of mind and God ? 
 The implied denial of the existence of mind seems 
 as much an offence against commonsense as 
 Berkeley's denial of matter, and the implied denial 
 of the existence of God is uneasily felt to be an 
 attack on religion. The suspicion that science is 
 committed to " materialism " arouses misgivings, 
 if not hostility, in many quarters and tends to 
 bring undeserved discredit upon science. But in 
 this whole situation there is much confusion of 
 thought, resulting from the failure to distinguish 
 the different senses of " matter." We are all far 
 too apt to take it for granted that we know what 
 the term " matter " means. We argue and take 
 sides without asking first in what sense, precisely, 
 Berkeley denies, or physicists affirm, the existence 
 of matter, and whether in either case the paradoxical 
 consequences really follow from the sense intended. 
 
 4
 
 50 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Thus, a discrimination, however rough, of the 
 different meanings of " matter," and of the contexts 
 to which each meaning belongs, is indispensable 
 both for clearness of thought and for a just apprecia- 
 tion of the position of physical science in our 
 own day. 
 
 The following enumeration, though by no means 
 exhaustive, will suffice for our purpose : 
 i There is the meaning of matter as opposed 
 
 to mind or spirit. 
 
 2 Matter, or the material world, may be used as 
 a blanket-term for all objects of normal, 
 waking perception as opposed to the objects 
 of hallucination and dream. 
 3 Matter may mean the atoms, electrons, and 
 similar imperceptible entities, which scientific 
 theory postulates for the explanation of 
 perceptible phenomena. 
 4 Matter may mean the imperceptible cause of 
 
 our sensations. 
 
 These four senses of " matter " are all different 
 from each other, but they are not easy to distinguish 
 in fact, they are frequently confused because 
 there is a single, central situation in the different 
 analyses of which each of the different senses takes 
 its rise. 
 
 It will assist our argument if we state this single, 
 central situation at once, and then show how each
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 51 
 
 of the different senses of matter arises from a 
 different analysis of it. 
 
 Physics is an empirical science. That is to say, 
 its ultimate data the facts from which it starts 
 and which it seeks to explain are data, or facts, 
 of " experience." Experience, here, means sense- 
 experience, sense-perception. With facts of sense- 
 perception, or sensible " phenomena," the physicist 
 begins ; they provide his problems. With facts of 
 sense-perception, too, he ends ; to them he appeals 
 for the verification of his theories. Whatever the 
 terms may be in which he formulates his laws, 
 these laws must apply, in the end, to phenomena 
 open to his observation and, preferably, capable of 
 being checked and confirmed by the observation 
 of others. This explains the central position of 
 observation, with or without experiment, in the 
 physicist's procedure. He may frame hypotheses 
 concerning imperceptible entities and processes, 
 but his justification for doing so will be that in no 
 other way can he explain, or predict the occurrence 
 of, the phenomena which he perceives. 
 
 The central situation, then, is that physics, as 
 an empirical science, finds it subject-matter within 
 the field of what we perceive by our senses. This 
 is, as we saw in the last lecture, what Whitehead, 
 too, means when he defines the subject-matter of 
 science as " Nature," and identifies Nature wiHi
 
 52 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 " what we perceive by the senses." The philoso- 
 phical criticism of physical theory thus becomes 
 inevitably, hi Whitehead's phrase, a " philosophy 
 of the thing perceived," i.e., a study of the problems 
 raised by different analyses of the processes and 
 objects of perception. 
 
 It is in this context that we can most conveniently 
 locate, and distinguish, the four different meanings 
 of " matter." 
 
 (i) Matter and mind, or spirit, have often been 
 distinguished in the past by saying that matter is 
 passive, mind is active, or that matter is " extended," 
 i.e., occupies space, whereas mind does not. But, 
 in this form the distinction has ceased to interest 
 contemporary thought. Nowadays, we use the 
 distinction between mind and matter most often 
 in the attempt to differentiate between the subject- 
 matter of physics and that of psychology, between 
 the " outer " world of " Nature " and the " inner " 
 world of " consciousness." But both these worlds 
 seeing that each is being dealt with by an 
 " empirical " science must ia& within " experience" 
 in the widest sense of that term. Thus, the distinc- 
 tion between them is best interpreted as one of 
 the most emphatic ways of acknowledging the fact, 
 already recognized by us in the last lecture, that 
 physics selects and abstracts. As Mr. Norman 
 Campbell puts it, " the whole field of our experience
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 53 
 
 is not the domain of science, but only a very limited 
 portion of it." 1 Whitehead's principle that " Nature 
 is closed to mind " is another way of putting the 
 same distinction. To say, as Campbell and many 
 others do, that physics has for its subject-matter 
 the " material " world means that it studies " what 
 we perceive by the senses " without reference to, 
 or in abstraction from, the processes of perceiving, 
 thinking, reasoning, etc., which are involved in the 
 studying ; in abstraction, too, from the student's 
 feelings, desires, and other " mental " processes. 
 All these are part of our " experience " in the 
 widest sense, but when we restrict physics to 
 " matter " as distinct from " mind," we exclude 
 these ranges of experience from its scope. By the 
 same act, as we have seen, our aesthetic, moral, 
 religious reactions to the world which we perceive 
 by our senses are ruled out from the realm of 
 physics. 
 
 This, then, is the first sense in which " matter " 
 may be interpreted. It is a sense strictly relevant 
 to this context, and to this context only. " Matter," 
 or the material world, here means the world of " what 
 we perceive by our senses," abstracted, in the 
 manner characteristic of physics, from " mind," 
 i.e., from the rest of our experience. " Matter " 
 
 1 Cf . Physics : The Elements, p. 238. (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 1920.)
 
 54 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 (with its synonyms, " Nature," the " external 
 world," the " physical world ") signalizes this 
 methodically maintained attitude of abstraction. 
 (2) But, the description of the subject-matter of 
 physics as what we perceive by the senses is, 
 according to some authorities, still too wide. And, 
 correspondingly, the meaning of " matter," and 
 " material world," has to be further restricted to 
 those objects of perception which we commonly 
 call " real," as distinct from those which are 
 " unreal." The golfer who has partaken of whisky 
 not wisely but too well, may see two balls, but his 
 testimony is not accepted by any physicist as good 
 evidence. Hallucinations are commonly as vivid 
 as, and often much more impressive than, ordinary 
 percepts, but they do not count as " facts " for 
 physical theory to explain. The objects and events 
 which we witness in dreams may in themselves be 
 indistinguishable from similar objects and events 
 perceived in waking, yet, once again, they are not 
 included among the data of physics. These 
 examples may serve to remind us that, although 
 these several kinds of experiences must be classed 
 as perceptions, what we perceive on these occasions 
 is not accounted as " real " and forms no part of 
 what the science of physics deals with. In other 
 words, the physicist, if his observations are to be 
 good evidence for the purposes of his science, must
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 55 
 
 make his observations when he is neither drunk, 
 nor subject to the influence of drugs, nor the victim 
 of hallucinations, nor asleep and dreaming. No 
 phenomena perceived under such conditions will be 
 recorded as physical facts or furnish occasion to 
 physicists for further research. They may be 
 investigated by physician or psychologist, but the 
 physicist will simply rule them out of his domain. 
 There are, indeed, border-line cases, e.g., so-called 
 after-images, on which the decision, one way or the 
 other, seems arbitrary, but, broadly speaking, the 
 physicist's " material world " covers all those 
 phenomena which are " real " in the sense that 
 they can be perceived by more than one observer, 
 so that one man's perception of them can be checked 
 and confirmed, either simultaneously or subse- 
 quently, by that of others. To talk, with Norman 
 Campbell, of " universal assent " as the test of 
 what is for the physicist " material," in the sense 
 of " real," is, perhaps, to use too large a word. 
 But getting one's perceptions confirmed and corro- 
 borated, or, if necessary, corrected, by others is a 
 recognized procedure, both in ordinary life and in 
 science, for guarding oneself against illusions of 
 one's own senses. It is, for example, by this test 
 that most physicists reject the evidence offered for 
 the existence of ghosts, and for the occurrence 
 of other " supernatural," or, at least, abnormal,
 
 56 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 phenomena, such as are investigated by the Society 
 for Psychical Research. Though the evidence is 
 voluminous, and though there are even cases in 
 which several observers have perceived the same 
 ghost, ghosts have not yet made good their status 
 as " real " at the bar of physical science. 
 
 It is, however, to be observed that in all the 
 experiences which the physicist rejects, something, 
 whatever it may be, is really perceived. An after- 
 image may not count as " real " for the physicist, 
 but it is none the less a genuine phenomenon 
 after its own kind ; and the same is true of illusions 
 of the senses, hallucinations, dreams. The delusions 
 of drunkards and drug-fiends exhibit a considerable 
 degree of " assent." Moreover, all these experiences 
 obey laws which we can ascertain. They occur 
 regularly under appropriate conditions, such as the 
 action of alcohol or drugs on the nervous system. 
 Whitehead, thoroughgoing in his application of the 
 principle that Nature consists of what we perceive 
 by the senses, includes them in " Nature." But 
 physics, as practised by most physicists of our day, 
 excludes these " unreal " objects from its scope 
 and, assigning them to other sciences, such as 
 psychology or psychiatry, labels them " purely 
 mental." They are said to exist " merely in the 
 mind." But, then, physicists are apt to use " mind " 
 as a picturesque appellation for the rubbish-heap of
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 57 
 
 all those facts of experience for which they have 
 no use. 
 
 Thus, our examination of the second sense of 
 " matter " and " material world " has led us into 
 a fresh context, involving not merely, as before, a 
 reduction of the world of experience to what we 
 perceive by the senses, but a further severe selection 
 by the physicist even among the objects of percep- 
 tion. He not only samples Nature most commonly 
 under highly artificial laboratory conditions, but 
 he admits phenomena as " real " only subject to 
 the test of " assent " by several percipients. This 
 second sense of " matter," therefore, embodies the 
 commonsense distinction of " real " and " unreal " 
 objects of perception, the former being " material," 
 the latter " merely mental." 
 
 (3) The third sense of " matter " introduces us to 
 yet a further manipulation of the notion of " what 
 we perceive by the senses." In fact, it takes us 
 beyond the realm of sense-data altogether and 
 introduces us to a world of entities which are 
 frankly acknowledged to be inaccessible in them- 
 selves to our senses, though indispensable for the 
 occurrence of the phenomena which we can, and 
 do, observe. Of this order are the atoms and the 
 ether of the older physical theories, and the " electro- 
 magnetic theory of matter " of our own day. 
 Current discussions about the " constitution of
 
 58 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 matter " move wholly in this sphere and are con- 
 ducted in terms of corpuscles, ions, electric charges, 
 etc. all of these being entities which, though 
 affirmed to be " real," are in their very nature 
 imperceptible by our senses even when aided by 
 our most powerful instruments of observation. 
 More familiar instances of material processes of this 
 sort are the air-waves which are correlated with 
 the sounds we hear, or the light-waves (" oscillations 
 in the luminiferous ether ") which are correlated 
 with the colours we see. This third sense of 
 " matter," thus, takes us into yet another context. 
 We are now no longer concerned, as we were in 
 the first two senses of " matter," with determining 
 what belongs, and what does not belong, to the 
 data, or subject-matter, of physics. We are 
 concerned now with the explanatory theory of 
 physics with " scientific objects," as Whitehead 
 calls them to distinguish them from the " perceptual 
 objects " and " sense-data " which have occupied 
 us until now. 
 
 At this point we may observe a curious shift 
 of emphasis and interest in the attitude of many 
 physicists. Without explicitly challenging or deny- 
 ing the principle that Nature is what we perceive 
 by our senses, and without ceasing to use their 
 senses for observation, they yet tend to look upon 
 the world of sense-experience as if it were a sort
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 59 
 
 of veil which stood between us and the imperceptible 
 objects of scientific theory, and as if our having to 
 use our senses were a handicap and a limitation 
 rather than an opportunity and an advantage. 
 The spectrum, for example, exhausts the colours 
 which we can actually see, but the scale of " light- 
 rays " extends beyond both ends of the visible 
 spectrum, so that we speak, e.g., of ultra-violet 
 rays to which no colour corresponds that any 
 human eye has ever seen. Similarly, sound-waves 
 extend beyond both ends of the scale of tones 
 audible to our ears. The physicist is interested 
 in the light-rays or sound-waves as such, and in 
 their properties and laws. Whether visible colours 
 or audible tones are, or are not, correlated with 
 them, is irrelevant to him, though it was the percep- 
 tion of colours and sounds that first gave him a 
 clue to these light-rays and sound-waves. Again, 
 different observers may vary widely in their colour- 
 or sound- judgments, whereas the entities of physical 
 theory possess a stability very satisfying to the 
 intellect. For these and similar reasons, many 
 physicists tend to deprecate the world of sense- 
 perception by comparison with the world of physical 
 theory. Norman Campbell gives typical expression 
 to this view when he writes, " Colour and pitch 
 are not in any way fundamental in physics ; it 
 would be perfectly possible to leave out of our
 
 60 MATTER, MIND, LIFE, AND GOD 
 
 treatises any mention of them and out of our 
 experiments any use of them, and yet to leave the 
 science of physics essentially unchanged. So far as 
 I can see, persons totally blind and totally deaf 
 from birth could appreciate as well as anyone else 
 the significance of all the propositions of physics." 
 
 On the other hand, thinkers like Whitehead, who 
 on this point continues the attitude of physicists 
 like Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson, do not 
 countenance this depreciation of the world of 
 sense-perception, and maintain, rather, that the 
 significance of scientific theories lies in their power 
 to explain and order the data of perception. The 
 purpose of all our efforts to develop our physical 
 theories to the utmost extent is to make Nature, 
 as perceived by the senses, more intelligible. 
 
 At this point, therefore, we come upon a profound 
 divergence hi the interpretation of physics. But 
 we shall be better able to appreciate the issue after 
 we have paid some attention to the fourth sense 
 of the term " matter." 
 
 (4) This fourth sense is for our argument the 
 most important of all, as it is also the most familiar 
 to students of philosophy. It is reached from the 
 third sense, which we have just been discussing, by 
 regarding colours, sounds, smells, etc., as " sensa- 
 tions " or " mental impressions," and explaining 
 them as effects which are caused by the action of
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 61 
 
 " matter," or " material objects," on the percipient's 
 mind. This theory is a very plausible one for 
 two reasons. One reason is that it falls in with 
 our ordinary habit of speaking of colours, sounds, 
 etc., as " impressions received from the world 
 outside, or around, us." The other is that it looks 
 very much like a somewhat crude version of the 
 physiological theory of perception in terms of 
 " stimulus " and " response." Moreover, it is 
 fatally easy to confuse it with the third sense of 
 " matter," for it seems plausible to identify the 
 material objects which are supposed to cause our 
 sensations with the atoms, corpuscles, rays, etc., 
 of the physicist's theory. But just because the 
 confusion is easy (and, therefore, also very common), 
 it must at all costs be avoided. Hence it is most 
 important to make clear to oneself what the differ- 
 ence is. The difference is this. On the third 
 view, colours, sounds and other sense-data are 
 bona fide natural phenomena, parts of " Nature " 
 as " what we perceive by the senses." On the 
 fourth view, they have become " sensations " and 
 are classed as " mental." As such, they cease to 
 be parts of Nature, with the result that Nature no 
 longer includes the colours we see, the sounds we 
 hear, or any of the other sense-data, but is restricted 
 to the imperceptible entities and processes which 
 are supposed to cause sensations of colour, etc.,
 
 62 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 in our minds. Thus, the two views differ in that 
 the third view counts sense-data as part of Nature 
 (part of what we perceive), whereas the fourth view 
 counts them as part of Mind (part of the percipient's 
 inner consciousness). The two views draw the line 
 between Nature and Mind in different places, and 
 whilst the third, for all that it credits Nature with 
 much that is not perceptible, does not break with 
 the definition of Nature as " what we perceive by 
 the senses," the fourth view breaks so sharply with 
 that definition as, in effect, to abandon it altogether. 
 At the same time, it is characteristic of the fourth 
 view to hold that all we directly know of Nature 
 consists of these sensations produced in our minds. 
 But, if so, how do we know what has caused them, 
 or how can we verify our guesses on this point ? 
 A long line of philosophical critics and of scientists, 
 too has laboured to point out the difficulties and 
 improbabilities hi this account, and to re-establish 
 the principle that colours, sounds and other sense- 
 data are natural phenomena, and parts of Nature 
 as " what we perceive by the senses." Berkeley 
 was the first of these critics, and it is in this fourth 
 sense, and only in this fourth sense, that he denies 
 " the existence of matter." He was the first to 
 re-affirm, in opposition to Locke and others, that 
 the colours we see and the sounds we hear are 
 genuine phenomena, i.e., objects which we perceive,
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 63 
 
 and not merely states, or modes, of the percipient's 
 own mind. On this ground he claimed, fairly 
 enough, to be the champion of commonsense. 
 He defended our right to trust our senses against 
 the " scepticism " lurking in the view that what 
 our senses perceive are effects caused by an 
 " unknowable somewhat." 1 Again, " materialism " 
 is built on this fourth sense of " matter." It is to 
 this sense of " matter," and to no other, that the 
 saying applies, " We know too much about 
 matter to be any longer materialists." 
 
 To sum up and recapitulate : The four different 
 senses of " matter " which we have distinguished 
 are best understood as arising in the course of 
 different interpretations of the principle that 
 physics, as an empirical science, has for its subject- 
 matter " Nature," or " what we perceive by the 
 senses." The first sense of " matter " serves to 
 exclude from the field of physics all reference to 
 mental activities and to the values connected with 
 feeling and will. The second further excludes the 
 objects of certain perceptions as unreal or abnormal. 
 The third correlates what we perceive with a world 
 of imperceptible entities and processes, inferred by 
 scientific theory. The fourth treats the objects of 
 
 1 The above, of course, is far from being a complete account 
 of Berkeley's whole position, but it does put right a common 
 misinterpretation of that position as necessarily incompatible 
 with, and hostile to, physics as an empirical science.
 
 64 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 perception as mental sensations caused by non- 
 mental objects. 
 
 Each of these four senses of " matter," with the 
 context to which it belongs, raises problems of 
 great philosophical interest. But the fourth is for 
 us the most interesting of all, because once again 
 we are witnessing at the present day a revolt 
 among philosophically-minded scientists against 
 the mutilation of Nature which it involves. This 
 revolt bids fair to inaugurate a new chapter in the 
 history of the philosophy of Nature, and we must 
 now turn to a closer consideration of it. But, 
 before doing so, let us emphasize once more that 
 this revolt against " matter " and " materialism " 
 is not a denial of the existence of anything which 
 physics rightly affirms to exist. It is not a denial 
 of the existence of atoms or corpuscles or light-rays 
 or sound-waves. It is not a denial of the " electro- 
 magnetic theory of matter," or of any other specific 
 and established physical theory. The denial of 
 " matter " with which we are concerned is neither 
 more nor less than the denial of the theory which 
 is quite different from all these that what we 
 perceive is mental sensations, and that Nature is 
 the material Something which causes these sensa- 
 tions to occur in our minds. Nothing else is at 
 issue but this theory of what Nature is and of how 
 it is related to our minds. If, for example, anyone
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 65 
 
 were to deny the existence of matter in any sense 
 which implied that Sir Ernest Rutherford's epoch- 
 making experiments on the disintegration of the 
 atoms of certain chemical elements under bombard- 
 ment by a-particles expelled from radium were a 
 mere fairy-tale, he would justly deserve the scorn 
 which some scientists like to pour on " idealists " 
 and " metaphysicians." All that is in question 
 when we speak of a revolt against " matter " 
 is the truth of a certain theory concerning the nature 
 of what we perceive and the causes of our perceiving. 
 This is the special context which we have to bear 
 in mind throughout all that follows. 
 
 3. Let us, now, state fully and explicitly the 
 theory to be examined. 
 
 By " Nature " we have agreed to mean the whole 
 scene, including our bodies, which our senses 
 present or disclose to us the world of things we 
 perceive. Strictly, what each of us perceives at 
 any one moment is only a fragment, a more or less 
 limited section of this world. Beyond the range 
 of what we actually perceive there lies all that is 
 perceptible, though it may never actually be 
 perceived by anyone. Nature, then, is the world 
 of actual or possible sense-perception. Further, 
 we commonly assume that the fragments of Nature 
 which each of us perceives may overlap, or, to put 
 it more simply, that different percipients can 
 5
 
 66 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 perceive the same objects and events. In short, we 
 regard the world of Nature as, in principle, common 
 to all percipients. 
 
 But, what is it that we actually perceive ? Our 
 first impulse will be to answer this question by 
 enumerating some of the things which we here and 
 now perceive, or which at once occur to us as 
 perceptible the walls and desks of this room, the 
 persons in it, the trams and motor-cars the noise 
 of which comes to us from the street ; in short, 
 the whole assemblage of things which constitute 
 the familiar environment of our lives earth and 
 sky and sea, mountains and rivers, trees and 
 animals, human beings and all the works of their 
 hands. 
 
 But, further, of these objects what precisely do 
 we perceive ? The answer will surely be : their 
 qualities their colours and shapes, their tastes, 
 smells, temperatures, the sounds they make, their 
 feel to the touch. It will not occur to us to give 
 any other answer, for our very language, with its 
 substantives and adjectives, imposes this type of 
 answer on us. Perhaps you have remarked that 
 the benches in this lecture-room are uncomfortably 
 hard. Well, if so, you have translated your painful 
 experience of sitting on them into language which 
 names a " thing " (the bench) and attributes to it 
 a " quality " (hardness). The grammar of our
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 67 
 
 language thus expresses our habit of thinking in 
 terms of things and their qualities. 
 
 A " habit of thinking," did we say ? The phrase 
 may well give us pause. We ought not to let it 
 pass unchallenged. Is it merely a trick of ours 
 thus to think ? Is it an arbitrary pattern which 
 our minds impose upon Nature, because they are 
 built that way ? Is not Nature " really " composed 
 of things and their qualities ? 
 
 These questions are not asked with the intention 
 of throwing doubts on our habits of thinking. We 
 have no desire to infer that Nature is really quite 
 different from what we think her to be. We take 
 our stand, now as before, on the principle that 
 Nature is what we think her to be, subject only 
 to the proviso that bad thinking can be corrected 
 by better. To abandon this principle is to deny 
 the very possibility of knowledge. 
 
 But, the purpose of our questions is to force us 
 to realize that, in thinking in terms of things and 
 qualities, we do put an interpretation on the evidence 
 of our senses. We do adopt a theory of what it is 
 that we perceive. By all means let us say that the 
 theory is true, and even that the very facts which we 
 perceive compel us so to interpret them. But, grant- 
 ing all this, our immediate task is still to distinguish 
 between the interpretation, the theory, and the ulti- 
 mate data of perception which are thus interpreted.
 
 68 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 What are these ultimate data of perception ? 
 The best language to use about them, when we thus 
 try to attend to them apart from all interpretation, 
 is to say that we perceive a " tissue," or " together," 
 or " mass," of colours, sounds, temperatures, 
 touches, etc. ; and that we perceive them, not as 
 atomic items, but as a continuous and continuously 
 changing flow or stream. At the basis, thus, of 
 the articulated world of things lies, as the ultimate 
 fact of perception, this constantly changing tissue 
 of what choosing the most neutral and non- 
 committal words we can find we will call " sense- 
 data," or, with Whitehead, " sense-objects." The 
 knowledge of Nature, the discovery of what Nature 
 is, begins for all of us at this point. We begin as 
 children at this level. We advance rapidly to the 
 next level which, adopting again Whitehead's 
 terminology, we may call the level of " perceptual 
 objects," i.e., the things with their qualities of 
 common parlance. But, only if we are scientists 
 do we advance to the third level, the level of 
 " scientific objects," i.e., the entities and processes 
 affirmed by the theories of physics and chemistry. 
 These are the three stages in the development of 
 our knowledge of Nature. Obviously the earlier 
 stages are the foundation of the later and persist 
 as integral factors within it. The scientist, in his 
 observations, constantly draws upon his perception
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 69 
 
 of sense-objects, and by this means he discriminates 
 the " things " he handles in his laboratory or in 
 field-work just as ordinary mortals do, though with 
 more precision. And the whole process is an 
 advance in knowledge, i.e., an advance in the 
 interpretation, by thinking, of the evidence of our 
 senses an advance towards a complete revelation 
 of what Nature really is. This follows from our 
 principle that to " know " Nature is to believe 
 that Nature is really what the progress of thought, 
 and especially of scientific thought, reveals her to 
 be. The interest of the " philosophy of Nature " 
 lies in analyzing, on the basis of this principle, the 
 logic of the progress of thought from stage to stage. 
 
 Now, the theory of " matter " the " material- 
 ism " of common parlance which we have to 
 discuss and which we shall find reason to reject as 
 untenable, is a particular theory of the nature of 
 sense-objects and of their relation, on the one side, 
 to the percipient's mind, and, on the other, to 
 " scientific objects." 
 
 The essence of this theory is to be found in the 
 following propositions : 
 
 (1) Sense-objects (colours, sounds, etc.) are 
 " sensations " and, as such, states of the 
 perceiver's mind. They are " subjective." 
 
 (2) By this classification of sense-objects as 
 " mental states," or " mental impressions,"
 
 70 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 they are, at once, excluded from Nature as 
 " physical " (" material," " objective "). 
 
 (3) Hence, they cannot be in any proper sense 
 qualities of physical things (theory of 
 " secondary qualities " : strictly, we should 
 not say, " the sky is blue," but, " it produces 
 a blue sensation in our minds "). 
 
 (4) As mental states they are effects produced 
 in us. 
 
 (5) The cause of these effects is matter, or 
 material things, acting through our sense- 
 organs, nerves, and brain on our minds. 
 
 (6) The manner of this causation is mechanical, 
 i.e., by contact, or impact ; hence the 
 physical cause must possess the " primary 
 qualities " of shape, size, solidity, resistance. 
 
 Two points, especially, stand out in this material- 
 istic theory. The first is that the world of Nature 
 is stripped of all sense-objects, of all colour, sound, 
 smell, temperature, etc., which are all denied to 
 Nature by being classed under the heading of 
 " mind," with the twofold result that (a) our 
 ordinary way of speaking of perceptual objects and 
 their qualities involves a complete illusion, and 
 (b) that what remains of Nature must be conceived 
 as consisting only of imperceptible entities, possess- 
 ing only the primary qualities. The second point 
 is a causal theory of perception : the sense-objects
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 71 
 
 which we perceive are the effects produced in our 
 minds by the action of the imperceptible entities 
 on our sense-organs. In short, it is a theory, not 
 merely of what Nature is, or is known to be, but 
 also of what Nature does to the mind of the 
 percipient. 
 
 The net result is that Nature is split in two. 
 What we directly perceive (the tissue of sense- 
 objects) is divorced from the realm of scientific 
 objects, which latter now figure precariously as 
 the hypothetical and unverifiable causes of the 
 impressions in our minds. 
 
 Some physicists, straying into the field of philo- 
 sophy of Nature, have endorsed this materialistic 
 theory under the impression that it is at least in 
 harmony with, if not actually implied by, the 
 science of physics itself. But these adventurers are 
 misguided. For, closely considered, nothing could 
 well be less in harmony with this theory than the 
 actual method of scientific investigation. As 
 observer and experimenter, the physicist gets his 
 evidence of what Nature is, and does, in the first 
 instance through his senses. Yet, on the theory, 
 this evidence consists of nothing but subjective 
 impressions in his mind, and he is still .separated 
 from Nature by a gap which he can bridge only 
 by means of a precarious hypothesis concerning the 
 imperceptible Somewhat which may have caused
 
 72 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 his sensations. In fact, were his practice not 
 better than this theory, he could hardly move a 
 step. Fortunately, in actual practice he forgets 
 all about the theory and accepts all he observes as 
 bona fide disclosures of Nature. He does not 
 hamper himself by labelling " mental " whatever 
 he perceives, and then guessing at the " physical " 
 world " behind the veil." He never thinks of 
 sensations, but only of phenomena, and of what 
 may be needed to explain them. If the defender 
 of materialism should plead Berkeley's maxim that 
 " we ought to think with the learned, and speak 
 with the vulgar," we shall reply that the resulting 
 tangle is such as to encourage us in the search for 
 a theory which will preserve the good sense in the 
 speech of the vulgar and avoid the nonsense in the 
 thought of the learned. 
 
 The upshot of our argument is that we are 
 placed, fair and square, before the choice between 
 the old materialistic philosophy of Nature which 
 divides " Nature " " bifurcates " it, is Whitehead's 
 picturesque term for the operation into mental 
 sensations and their material causes, and the new 
 philosophy of Nature which proceeds on the principle 
 that, from the first moment of perception to the 
 latest hypotheses of scientific speculation, there is 
 a continuously growing knowledge of Nature a 
 knowledge for which, as Whitehead says, " every-
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 73 
 
 thing perceived is in Nature " and the main task 
 is to follow up " the coherence of things perceptively 
 known." The programme of the new philosophy 
 of Nature thus calls for the denial of " matter " in 
 our fourth sense, and for a fresh analysis of how the 
 concepts of physics are founded upon the data of 
 perception. 
 
 4. It will naturally be asked how it has come 
 about that a theory so false has had so long a 
 history and has been accepted by so many thinkers 
 of distinction. Does not the length of tradition 
 and the weight of authority throw doubt on our 
 diagnosis of it as an error ? 
 
 The explanation of this phenomenon, as White- 
 head has plausibly suggested, is to be found in the 
 fact that two distinct movements of thought have 
 united to produce it. One of these movements 
 goes back to the beginnings of European speculation 
 in Ancient Greece. It connects the " matter " 
 and " ether " of modern theories by direct historical 
 descent with the water, air, fire, out of which the 
 early Ionian thinkers supposed the world to be 
 made up. From this side, " matter " is but the 
 last chapter in the long tale of efforts to discover 
 the stuff, so to speak, of which all things are com- 
 posed. This fundamental stuff, or " substance," 
 is naturally regarded as occupying space, and 
 science is the attempt to give an intelligible account
 
 74 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of the adventures and transformations which it 
 undergoes in the course of time. Thus we get the 
 close association of matter, space, and time in 
 current theory. A nuance of sophistication crept 
 into this somewhat naive concept of a universal 
 stuff, or substance, when Aristotle, in his Physics, 
 imported into the discussion the logical concept of 
 a " subject " of which " attributes " can be predi- 
 cated. " Substance " and " subject " fused in the 
 notion of a " substratum " in which attributes 
 " inhere." But, this very language suggested a 
 distinction between the attributes (e.g., the colours, 
 sounds, touch-qualities, etc.) and the substratum 
 (e.g., matter), thus facilitating a tendency to push 
 the substratum into the position of an unknowable 
 and indefinable Something-or-other to which the 
 attributes somehow belong. 
 
 This tendency received additional impetus, and 
 the " bifurcation of Nature " was completed, by 
 the rise, in the seventeenth century, of the trans- 
 mission theories of light and sound. According to 
 these theories, what we see are colours, but what 
 enters the eye are colourless, and indeed invisible, 
 waves of " luminiferous ether " ; what we hear 
 are sounds, but what enters the ear are air-waves, 
 in themselves silent and soundless. How, then, can 
 colours and sounds inhere as attributes in this sort 
 of substance an oscillating medium ? The easiest
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 75 
 
 way out of the difficulty was to cease thinking of 
 colours and sounds as qualities, and to think of 
 them as effects instead, viz., effects produced in 
 the observer's mind by the motions in the physical 
 substance. Thus, the theory of matter which we 
 are criticizing may be described as the offspring 
 of an unholy marriage between the old search for 
 an ultimate substance and the new causal theory 
 of colours, sounds, etc., as sensations produced in 
 our minds. This twist of the theory makes out of 
 the world actually perceived by our senses a subjec- 
 tive illusion, and out of the material world which 
 causes it the object of a doubtful guess. One half 
 of Nature, as Whitehead puts it, becomes a " dream," 
 the other half a " conjecture." 
 
 Thus, we come back to a moral which must be, 
 by now, amply familiar. The theory which declares 
 the colours, sounds, and other sense-objects which 
 we perceive, to be " mental," and which postulates 
 an imperceptible " matter " as the cause of these 
 mental effects is untenable. Present-day criticism 
 of it endorses the remark which Berkeley already 
 aimed at " matter," taken in this sense. " There 
 can be no use of matter in Natural Philosophy," 
 was the bishop's blunt way of putting it, 1 and 
 through Whitehead' s mouth modern philosophy of 
 Nature utters its agreement. 
 
 1 Cf . Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 50.
 
 76 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 5. For the synoptic point of view of these 
 lectures it is no small gain, not only that this old 
 error is, at length, being laid to rest, but especially 
 that this result has been achieved by a happy 
 co-operation between philosophers and scientists. 
 We can hardly exaggerate the importance of the 
 fact that the sustained philosophical polemic 
 against the theory of " matter " (in the fourth of 
 the senses which we have distinguished) a polemic 
 which has commonly been misunderstood as an 
 attack on the very foundations of science itself 
 has at last been endorsed by a spokesman of science 
 so acute and brilliant as Whitehead. There have 
 been scientists before Whitehead who had gone a 
 ^considerable distance in the same direction, e.g., 
 Ernst Mach in his Analysis of Sensations and Karl 
 Pearson in his Grammar of Science, but their attempts 
 at an emancipation of natural science from this 
 sort of materialism are far surpassed by Whitehead's 
 thoroughness and originality. 
 
 The value of Whitehead's work, however, lies 
 not only in what he pulls down, but even more hi 
 what he builds up. And this constructive work, 
 too, is full of promise for our synoptic programme. 
 The details of it, involving largely a new technical 
 language, are too intricate and difficult to be 
 presented here without doing them a grave injustice. 
 But we must make an attempt, at least, to appreci-
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 77 
 
 ate the general direction and method of Whitehead's 
 thought. 
 
 If we rid ourselves of the notion that sense-objects 
 are mental impressions, and regard them now, 
 bona fide, as phenomena constituting the very 
 substance (so to speak) of Nature, what is the 
 constructive problem which confronts us ? It is 
 the problem of showing how " perceptual objects," 
 i.e., the " things " of everyday parlance, and 
 " scientific objects," i.e., the space, the time, the 
 atoms, etc., of the theory of physics, are related 
 to the sense-objects, i.e., to the colours, sounds, 
 etc., which supply, first and last, our contact with 
 Nature, which are our directest evidence of what 
 goes on in Nature. The empirical foundations of 
 physical theory and the consistency of current 
 physical theory with the empirical data these 
 supply the problems for positive construction. For, 
 reflexion soon bears out Whitehead's severe indict- 
 ment : " Scientific theory is shot through and 
 through with notions which are frankly inconsistent 
 with its explicit fundamental data." We must be 
 content with a mere mention of the most striking 
 of these inconsistencies as pointed out in the opening 
 pages of Whitehead's Principles. The orthodox 
 answer of speculative physics, as Whitehead reminds 
 us, to the demand for an explanation of natural 
 phenomena " has invariably been couched in terms
 
 78 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of Time (flowing equably in measurable lapses), 
 and of Space (timeless, void of activity, euclidean), 
 and of Material in space (such as matter, ether, or 
 electricity)." In its extremest and purest form 
 this theory demands an analysis of Nature into a 
 sequence of momentary states, each state embracing 
 all Nature at that moment. Thus, any one 
 distribution of material throughout all space at a 
 durationless instant of time will be preceded and 
 followed by other distributions of the same material 
 throughout the same space at other durationless 
 instants of time. As Whitehead points out, the 
 scheme makes it very difficult to deal with change, 
 for the conception of a durationless instant of time 
 excludes the reference to past and future which 
 change involves. Similarly, there is no room in 
 the scheme for velocity, acceleration, momentum. 
 Again, the biological concept of an organism as a 
 unity which functions in time and is spread through 
 space conflicts with the traditional theory. Above 
 all, that theory fails to include the immediate facts 
 of perception which are the ultimate data of scientific 
 knowledge. Its concept of space, for example, 
 assumes the existence of points as ultimate given 
 entities. But where is a mathematical point ever 
 given in perception ? Thus, Geometry as an 
 abstract science deduced from hypothetical premises 
 is one thing, but Geometry as a " physical science "
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 79 
 
 is another, and has to do with the question, How 
 is space rooted in experience ? Similarly, every- 
 thing we perceive has a certain duration, however 
 short, and nothing we perceive corresponds to the 
 assumed durationless instants of time. Lastly, the 
 traditional theory, in its neglect of the immediate 
 deliverances of sense-perception, excludes from the 
 terms in which it is stated all the facts of relativity, 
 such as the ways in which colour, shape, sound, 
 temperature, vary with the different points of view 
 of different observers, or of the same observer at 
 different times, to say nothing of the fact that 
 each observer's world has its own space-time system. 
 
 How is this state of things to be remedied ? 
 Whitehead's full answer, as we have already 
 confessed, is too technical to be adequately sum- 
 marized here. But, we may not unfairly single 
 out three general features of it from which we may 
 judge both its striking originality and its significance 
 for the kind of synoptic philosophical outlook which 
 we are here attempting. 
 
 (i) The first, and perhaps most striking, feature 
 of Whitehead's analysis of Nature is his insistence 
 that the immediate data of perception the colours, 
 sounds, etc., which make up the varied spectacle 
 of Nature presented to our senses are all of them 
 happenings or events. " Perception," we read, " is 
 an awareness of events, or happenings, forming a
 
 80 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 partially discerned complex within the background 
 of a simultaneous whole of Nature." And, again, 
 from the side of Nature : " Nature is a structure of 
 events and each event has its position in this 
 structure and its own peculiar character or quality." 
 Whether we speak of Nature as one whole event 
 or as a tissue of many events, is of no importance : 
 the main fact is that there is a continuous coming 
 to be and passing away of events. Every colour, 
 every sound, every touch, be its duration short or 
 long, is transient in this transient world of sense- 
 data. Within this continuous stream, no event is, 
 for perception, marked off from other events by 
 definite spatio-temporal boundaries. Events are 
 not isolated from each other atomically, like beads 
 on a string ; rather, they melt into each other. 
 But thought demands demarcation and definiteness. 
 It seeks to discriminate fixed terms and relations 
 in the continuous and ever freshly-varied flow of 
 events, in order that science may express the 
 essential concepts of time, space, and material as 
 issuing from fundamental relations between events 
 and from recognitions of the characters of events. 
 Yet, beneath all distinctions of thought, and 
 persisting through them, Nature, as a tissue of 
 events, retains its fundamental character of 
 " passage." But this passage of events which 
 is the very being of Nature is no mere flux or
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 81 
 
 " becomingness." It is at the same time a creative 
 advance, for " Nature is ever originating its own 
 development." Indeed, the percipient, as a part 
 of Nature, is intimately involved in this creative 
 advance. " Hence perception is always at the 
 utmost point of creation." In this emphasis on 
 the " life of Nature " the phrase is more than a 
 poetic metaphor for Whitehead : it is but another 
 expression for the fundamental fact that in Nature 
 nothing is at rest, all is movement, happening, 
 event Whitehead is unique among physicists. 
 But a philosophically-trained ear will be quick to 
 catch the affinity with Bergson's elan vital and, 
 through it, with an historic strain in philosophy 
 which leads right back to Heraclitus' iravra /5eF 
 (all is flowing). 
 
 (2) If the theory of events is the first feature of 
 Whitehead' s analysis of Nature, his theory of 
 objects is certainly the second. Here, again, a 
 certain similarity to Bergson appears. If the 
 senses present Nature to us as a passage of events, 
 thought apprehends in the stream definite objects 
 with definite relations. Thought, as Bergson puts 
 it, " immobilizes " and " fixes " the ever-moving, 
 ever-creating, life-impulse. It " attempts to catch 
 nature without its passage," as Whitehead puts it. 
 It reveals to us that "passage of events " is the 
 first, but not the last, word about Nature. There 
 6
 
 82 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 is that in Nature which does not pass. Events 
 pass, but do not change. Objects can change, 
 because they are, at least relatively, permanent. 
 This permanence of objects is a side of Nature as 
 important for perception as the ever-fresh profusion 
 of transient events. For, it makes possible the 
 recognition of a " thing " as maintaining itself 
 amidst the flux of events, as self-identical in the 
 change of what we call its " qualities." An event 
 can never be repeated. An object is essentially 
 the kind of thing which can " be again." 
 
 Objects, in Whitehead's terminology, are 
 " situated " in events, and conversely the " charac- 
 ter " of an event depends upon the object, or 
 objects, of which it is the situation. It is only 
 by means of the objects thus situated in events 
 that we can effect a demarcation of events and 
 thus state the laws of Nature. " Rational thought 
 . . . would be intrinsically impossible without 
 objects." The passage of events implies that 
 " something is going on everywhere all the time." 
 But what is going on anywhere at any time we can 
 state to ourselves only in terms of the various kinds 
 of objects which enter Nature through being 
 " situated " in events, and which, like Plato's 
 Forms, are exempt from passage and becoming and 
 can thus be apprehended in their self-identity. 
 
 (3) The third feature is Whitehead's attempt to
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 83 
 
 distinguish different kinds of objects. Among 
 these, " scientific objects/' like an atom or an 
 electron, are of especial importance for the philosophy 
 of Nature. But this part of the theory, it must be 
 confessed, has been left by Whitehead in a very 
 sketchy and undeveloped state, and it is not at all 
 easy to make out precisely how he conceives them 
 to be related to perceptual objects (" things ") or 
 to sense-objects and the events in which sense- 
 objects are situated. We must, here, content 
 ourselves with the vague, but safe, statement that 
 science is driven to infer, or postulate, " scientific 
 objects " in the effort to " express the causal 
 character of events," i.e., to give a precise and 
 systematic explanation of the conditions under 
 which sense-objects are found situated in events. 
 In conclusion : it is obvious how well this fresh 
 and illuminating analysis of Nature, and of the 
 empirical foundations of physics, lends itself to our 
 synoptic purpose. For, the method which White- 
 head here employs need not be restricted, as he, 
 in fact, does restrict it, to the concepts and theories 
 of physics. To the question, what kinds of objects 
 thought can recognize in the flux of sensible events, 
 more sciences than one supply an answer. Percep- 
 tual objects, so Whitehead argues (instancing 
 Cleopatra's Needle), are, compared with scientific 
 objects, too vague and lacking in precision to serve
 
 84 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 the explanatory needs of physics. Granted but it 
 still remains true that these same perceptual objects 
 may furnish the subject-matter for several other 
 sciences which study in them characters neglected 
 by the physicist. This is most obviously true of 
 all those perceptual objects which we distinguish 
 as " organisms " from the inorganic world, and of 
 which we predicate, " life " and in their higher forms, 
 " consciousness." These characters form the bases 
 for the distinct sciences of biology and psychology. 
 Our next step must, therefore, be to consider how 
 the present-day tendencies of thought in biology 
 promise to fit into our synoptic pattern. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1. Poynting, J. H. " Physical Law and Life." Hibbert Journal, 
 
 Vol. I. pp. 727 fl. 
 
 2. Mach, Ernst. The Analysis of Sensations, tr. By C. M. 
 
 Williams & S. Waterlow (Open Court 
 Publ. Co.) 
 
 3. Pearson, Karl The Grammar of Science, 3rd Ed., Part I. 
 
 (A. & C. Black, 1911.) 
 
 4. Russell, The Our Knowledge of the External World. (Open 
 
 Hon. Bertrand Court Publ. Co., 1914.) 
 
 5. Whitehcad, The Principles of Natural Knowledge. (Camb. 
 
 A. N. Univ. Press, 1919.) 
 
 6. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature. (Camb. Univ. 
 
 A. N. Press, 1920.) 
 
 7. Eddington, Space, Time and Gravitation. (Camb. Univ. 
 
 A. S. Press, 1920.) 
 
 8. Cauipbell, N. Physics, The Elements. (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 
 1921.) 
 
 9. Haldane, The Reign of Relativity. (Murray, 1921.) 
 
 Viscount
 
 THE REVOLT AGAINST "MATTER" 85 
 
 For the historical background of the problem discussed in 
 Lecture II, students of philosophy will naturally go to Berkeley's 
 Principles and Dialogues, Hume's Treatise, Kant's Critique of 
 Pure Reason, and Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's 
 Philosophy. 
 
 The article by Professor Poynting (No. i) is an excellent 
 example of the position taken up, about the turn of the century, 
 by an intelligent physicist. It shows him hovering in uneasy 
 equilibrium between an ideal of physics as concerned exclusively 
 with the laws of " sensible events," without recourse to " hypo- 
 thetical bridges," like atoms, etc., and the dim perception that 
 the part played by such objects as atoms in scientific theory is 
 incompatible with their being nothing more than indispensable 
 fictions. Typical, also, is Poynting's sense of the impotence 
 of physics when confronted by the phenomena of life and 
 consciousness. 
 
 The first section of Campbell's book (No. 8) contains much 
 interesting discussion of the relations of science to philosophy, 
 and of the senses in which the scientist uses, or ought, in Camp- 
 bell's opinion, to use, the terms " real " and " matter." Camp- 
 bell volubly protests against being mistaken for a philosopher, 
 but he forgets that the only safe way of avoiding that label is 
 to refrain from discussing philosophical problems. 
 
 Professor Eddington's book (No. 7), apart from supplying a 
 most stimulating introduction to the theory of relativity for all 
 readers with some mathematical and physical knowledge, has 
 also a considerable philosophical interest, especially in the 
 Prologue, " What is Geometry ? " and in Chapter XII, " On 
 the Nature of Things." Large portions of the latter chapter are 
 confessedly tentative, such as the suggestion that " mind 
 filters out matter from the meaningless jumble of qualities, as 
 the prism filters out the colours of the rainbow from the chaotic 
 pulsations of white light " (p. 198) . But such principles as these : 
 " Physical reality is the synthesis of all possible physical aspects^, 
 of nature " (p. 182), and " Reality is only obtained when all 
 conceivable points of view have been combined " (ibid.), apply 
 within the realm of physics the synoptic principle, the extension 
 of which to all phenomena to be met with in human experience 
 we are emphasizing in these lectures. Another example of the 
 synoptic method is Viscount Haldane's book (No. 9), which 
 traces, with great learning, the applications of the concept of 
 relativity in science and philosophy. 
 
 The books of Mach and Pearson (Nos. 2 and 3) represent
 
 86 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 earlier attempts on the part of a physicist and a mathematician, 
 respectively, to remind physics of its empirical basis, and thereby 
 to restore sense-data to their fundamental place in Nature. 
 
 Mr. Russell's book (No. 4) has important points of contact 
 with the argument of the present lecture. He, too, rejects the 
 theory that sense-data are mental effects caused by material 
 objects, but he takes a line of his own in the theory that a 
 physical thing is a " logical construction," or " class," of sense- 
 data.
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE: MECHANISM, 
 VITALISM, TELEOLOGY 
 
 E 
 
 i. 1 ^ VERY student of the influence of natural 
 science, and more especially of physics, 
 upon philosophy is aware that, next to the 
 concept of " matter," the concept of " machine " or 
 " mechanism " has presented the greatest obstacles 
 to a synoptic theory of the universe. Or, rather, 
 we should say that " materialism " and the 
 " mechanical theory of nature," going hand in hand, 
 have themselves claimed to be the one all-sufficing 
 synopsis. Expanding the theories of physics to 
 the dimensions of a professedly all-inclusive philo- 
 sophy, they would leave no room for anything in our 
 experience which resists absorption into their 
 scheme. All is matter, all is mechanism ; and 
 what is neither is nothing, or, else, is a mere 
 " epiphenomenon." Mind, for example, if not 
 denied outright, is politely segregated and quietly 
 ignored, rather than that the acknowledgment of 
 its presence and effectiveness in the world should 
 
 87
 
 88 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 be allowed to disturb the trim tidiness of the 
 mechanistic theory. Yet, to call mind an " epiphe- 
 nomenon " is but to hide the bankruptcy of the 
 theory beneath the decent obscurity of a learned 
 tongue. 
 
 In the last lecture, we had noted, as of the utmost 
 interest for our synoptic programme, a spontaneous 
 revolt among certain physicists and mathematicians 
 against " matter " and " materialism " in the only 
 sense of these terms in which philosophers have ever 
 been concerned to combat and deny them. In the 
 present lecture, similarly, our task will be to examine 
 contemporary thought for indications of dissatis- 
 faction with the closely allied theory of " mechan- 
 ism." And, just as before we found that the criti- 
 cism of materialism had its constructive side in a 
 fresh analysis of Nature as " what we perceive by 
 the senses," so here we shall look for the construct- 
 ive side of the criticism of mechanism in all those 
 movements of biological thought which declare the 
 need of non-mechanical principles, both for the 
 explanation of living organisms and for that of 
 Nature as the " fit " environment for organisms to 
 live in. 
 
 2. That living beings present obvious difficulties 
 to the mechanical theory may be admitted even by 
 thinkers who, nonetheless, believe that the study of 
 living beings can be genuinely " scientific " only so
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 89 
 
 far as the mechanical theory is applicable to them. 
 Hence biology is the field where the battle for, and 
 against, mechanism rages most fiercely before our 
 eyes. On the principle that offence is the best 
 defence, the mechanist's most effective tactics are 
 to show, if he can, that all proposed alternatives, 
 such as " vitalism," are open to even greater objec- 
 tions than the mechanistic theory itself. Further, 
 he will claim that behind any " vital principle " 
 or " vital force " there lurk in shadowy form the 
 concepts of " mind " and " purpose," leading to 
 " design " and to " teleology " in the traditional 
 sense of that term. The situation, thus, is 
 exceedingly complex, and this complexity becomes 
 most marked when we focus our attention 
 on the higher forms of animal life. " Higher " 
 here means, roughly, nearest to man in the 
 series of vertebrates. It is an undeniable fact, 
 which anyone can verify by a cursory survey of 
 contemporary biological literature, that evidence 
 drawn from man, for all that he is classed as a living 
 organism and an animal, plays a comparatively 
 small part in shaping biological theory. If human 
 behaviour, as displayed in business, politics, art, 
 etc., were included by biologists in their field as 
 readily as they so include, e.g., Jennings's Contri- 
 butions to the Study of the Behaviour of Lower Organ- 
 isms ; or if biologists studied, e.g., their own
 
 90 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 conduct as scientists with the same loving care with 
 which they study the " tropisms " of an amoeba, 
 we can hardly doubt that the concepts of biology 
 would be very different from what they are. 1 
 Biology, as ordinarily understood and practised, 
 treats the human species as just a small corner of 
 the field of living beings, and tends, in actual 
 research, to concentrate largely on the non-human 
 field. This is, of course, due to a variety of causes. 
 One of them is, no doubt, that the human corner is 
 already being very thoroughly worked over by the 
 medical sciences. Another is that most of the 
 experiments made on non-human animals could not, 
 for social and moral reasons, be repeated on humans. 
 Laboratory-technique is thus compelled to sample 
 life in the form of plants, or, if it takes animals, in 
 the form of micro-organisms, like amoebae, or of 
 insects, or of frogs, guinea-pigs, etc. But it is worth 
 reflecting whether our theories do not take some 
 colour from the samples of life we work with. The 
 mechanistic tendency is observably strongest among 
 those biologists who sample life in those forms of it 
 which are most remote from the human. On the 
 
 1 It is the merit of A. D. Darbishire's Introduction to Biology 
 to have drawn attention to the effect on biological theory of its 
 tendency to regard as the proper study of mankind any other 
 living thing rather than man. Bergson's critique of biology 
 (Creative Evolution, ch. i) is, of course, based on the principle 
 that we must take our clue to the understanding of life from 
 where we can sample it best, viz., in our own consciousness.
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 91 
 
 other hand, even the most determined mechanist 
 finds it rather difficult to ignore mind when 
 he comes to human life and behaviour. Still, 
 many biologists protect themselves from a 
 clear realization of this fact by keeping 
 their work mainly to the non-human field, 
 and by dealing in principles which are equally 
 applicable to the non-human and the human 
 material, the lower and the higher forms of life. 
 In this way they may be honestly blind to their 
 failure to deal with the distinctive characters of the 
 higher forms of life, e.g., in man with intelligence 
 and will as manifested through bodily movements 
 and the effects thus produced on the surrounding 
 world. Or they may cover up their failure, like 
 Jacques Loeb, by bold dogmatic assertions. But 
 the ordinary mechanist is only too eager, as a rule, 
 to keep off such dangerous ground. He disclaims 
 any desire, or power, to deal with consciousness, 
 and finds it safest to concentrate on the study of 
 those forms and conditions of life in which the 
 problem of consciousness is least likely to arise. 
 
 No one can honestly say that the resulting bio- 
 logical theory is either stable or satisfactory. The 
 biologist's programme calls for a study of the whole 
 province of living beings, of all the manifestations 
 of life of whatever degree or kind. In actual 
 practice, and especially in experimental research, he
 
 92 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 is compelled to sample life by selecting here and 
 there out of its infinite range and variety. There 
 is an immense difference between sampling life in 
 human beings and sampling it in infusoria or algae. 
 There is an even more profound and far-reaching 
 difference between the method of a biology which, 
 in the name of being " objective," restricts itself on 
 principle to what an observer can perceive by his 
 senses of the life of other creatures around him, 
 and the method of a biology which includes among 
 the evidence admitted as relevant the observer's 
 " subjective " or " inward " self -observation. It 
 seems, on the face of it, unlikely that the concepts 
 which suffice, or seem to suffice, for all that we, as 
 outside spectators, can find out about the life of 
 infusoria or algae, should also suffice for all that by 
 self-observation and communication with others 
 we know of the life of man. No wonder that 
 biologists, as Professor R. M. Wheeler of Harvard 
 University points out, tend to fall into three groups 
 of extremists : the mystery-mongers, the sim- 
 plicists, and the humanizers. The mystery-mongers 
 appeal to some quite mysterious force or factor, 
 postulated ad hoc. The simplicists leave out, not 
 only mind, but even life as a distinctive character, 
 and reduce whatever goes on hi a living being be 
 it a single cell or a multicellular organism to 
 physico-chemical processes. The humanizers treat
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 93 
 
 all living things as if they were miniature men and 
 women. Each of these types of extremists is 
 wedded to a theory which it is determined to force 
 upon the facts. If the theory does not fit, so much 
 the worse for the facts. Fortunately, the majority 
 of biologists are not so ready to compel all facts 
 into a single mould for the sake of intellectual 
 economy or tidiness. They realize that no single 
 formula will exhaust the infinite variety of life, 
 and that the real problem of a " philosophy of living 
 nature " is, as Professor J. A. Thomson shows in his 
 System of Animate Nature, essentially synoptic 
 demanding a concept of living beings which shall be 
 plastic enough to fit their manifold kinds and the 
 diversity of their dealings with each other and with 
 their inorganic environment ; a concept which has 
 room within itself for the physico-chemical basis of 
 life at the one end and for feeling and intelligence at 
 the other. 
 
 It may, perhaps, be thought that the issue between 
 the divergent theories in biology might be settled 
 by an appeal to experiment. And, indeed, experi- 
 ments form part of Driesch's case for vitalism against 
 mechanism as they form part of Loeb's case for 
 mechanism against vitalism. But we are coming 
 to see that in such ultimate questions as these there 
 is no conclusive appeal to the verdict of a crucial 
 experiment. The experiment yields results, no
 
 94 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 doubt ; but the correct interpretation of these 
 results that is precisely what the experiment rarely 
 settles. What answer we get from Nature depends 
 very much on what question we put. And it 
 depends also, we should add, on what answer we are 
 determined to hear. As the polemical literature 
 of the last quarter of a century on these issues amply 
 shows, he is a poor theorist who cannot invent a 
 more or less plausible argument for disqualifying 
 even the apparently most damaging evidence against 
 his own theory. Next to the miracles of the will 
 to believe are those of the will to disbelieve. At any 
 rate, it should be clear that the extremist positions 
 in biology, especially the mechanistic one, are 
 maintained, not because the evidence imperatively 
 demands them to the exclusion of every rival, but 
 because they are preferred on general, and, in the 
 last resort, philosophical grounds. This will become 
 abundantly clear as we proceed. 
 
 Summing up, we may, perhaps, put the situa- 
 tion which confronts the biologist, thus : living 
 beings are living bodies, perceptible by the senses, 
 and belonging by this test to the realm of " Nature." 
 Whatever their distinctive character as " living " 
 may be, as " bodies " they obey the laws of physics. 
 The substances of which they are composed are the 
 same chemical substances which compose also their 
 inorganic and inanimate environment. Many of
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 95 
 
 the chemical compounds which occur in living bodies 
 have been artificially synthesized in the laboratory, 
 and the chemical character of many of the most 
 important processes by which life is maintained, 
 such as breathing, digestion, metabolism, has been 
 studied and exhibited in detail. In this sense, it is 
 possible to speak of organisms as " physico-chemical 
 machines," even though no bit of living substance 
 (protoplasm), and still less a living cell, has actually 
 been manufactured in a laboratory. This failure, 
 however, rightly counts for little, for if the theory 
 of evolution is true, Nature's laboratory must have 
 solved the problem of evolving living beings out of 
 the non-living. On the other hand, for all its con- 
 nexion with the inorganic, the realm of life exhibits 
 a character unique, distinctive, and in the order of 
 evolution qualitatively new. There is, too, the 
 marked, even if relative, individuality of a living 
 thing, be it cell or large-scale organism. The 
 unity and self-identity of an organism are not 
 dependent on the human observer's point of view or 
 interest, but are given as the recognizable pattern 
 of the organism's form, structure, behaviour. As 
 Bergson puts it, " the living body has been separated 
 and closed off by Nature herself. It is composed of 
 unlike parts that complete each other. It performs 
 diverse functions that involve each other." It is 
 born and dies, and between these termini it grows,
 
 96 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 matures, ages. Within limits it regenerates itself 
 when injured, restores the wastage of tissue, repro- 
 duces itself in others of the same kind. In its 
 reactions to its environment it maintains, as far as 
 it can, its own existence, i.e., it continues the routine 
 of its life ; and its resourcefulness in doing so ranges 
 from passive adaptation to active control. Among 
 the higher animals, if not before, and certainly in 
 ourselves, we find knowledge and foresight in the 
 service of vital needs. At the human level, there is 
 an ever-increasing exploration and experimentation 
 going on which increase man's power over his 
 environment, which make his behaviour, singly and 
 co-operatively, more many-sided, his desires and 
 satisfactions more various, his experience of the 
 world richer. The student who enters this realm of 
 life from below will naturally try to apply the con- 
 cepts which suffice for physics and chemistry. 
 The student who begins at the upper end will as 
 naturally seek to extend the concept of mind over 
 the whole field. The vitalist will attempt to steer 
 a course midway between these two and assume 
 with Driesch an " entelechy," or with Reinke a 
 " dominant," conceived as other than mechanical, 
 yet as not intelligent and foreseeing enough to be of 
 the order of consciousness. 
 
 Such, broadly, is the situation hi which the issue 
 of mechanism presents itself at the present day.
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 97 
 
 3. The " issue of mechanism " ! We have been 
 glibly following the prevailing fashion of talking 
 about mechanism as if we were all agreed on 
 what the term " mechanism " means. But, pre- 
 cisely, what is a mechanical explanation ? The 
 proper answer to this question is curiously difficult 
 to discover. It might have been expected that in 
 the voluminous controversial literature which has 
 been evoked by the debate for and against mechan- 
 ism, the disputants would have taken good care to 
 define unambiguously just what they are affirming 
 or denying. But it is not so. Anyone can convince 
 himself of this by collecting typical statements from 
 prominent writers on both sides, or even by looking 
 up the philosophical dictionaries which in this 
 matter faithfully reflect the prevailing haziness. He 
 will find a variety of vague formulae, differing more 
 or less from each other in terminology, and all 
 perplexingly difficult to fit to the detailed concepts 
 and laws even of those sciences which, like physics 
 and chemistry, ranker excellence as " mechanical." 
 
 The reason, as a glance at the history of the con- 
 troversy shows, is that " mechanism " is prized by 
 its advocates rather as a battle-cry and a protest 
 than as an explanatory theory. It is valued for 
 what it denies much more than for what it affirms. 
 It is a symbol of emancipation. " Do mechanical 
 laws embrace every department of the universe ? 
 7
 
 98 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Is there a purpose for which the universe was 
 created, or a goal towards which it is tending ? Is 
 there a religious or moral significance behind nature, 
 or have we to do with a mere clash of blind and 
 unintelligent forces ? " Such is the choice which a 
 recent reviewer of Professor J. A. Thomson's System 
 of Animate Nature puts before us. It is typical of 
 the temper to which mechanism appeals. In these 
 rhetorical alternatives the negative bias is plain. It 
 is re-enforced by the significant iteration of the ad- 
 jective " blind " in the same writer's programmatic 
 statement of what the mechanist positively affirms : 
 " all the functions of the body are based purely on 
 the laws of physics and chemistry ; all the activities 
 of man would be found, if our knowledge were suffi- 
 cient, to be no more than an immense elaboration of 
 blind physico-chemical phenomena. . . . (living 
 beings) are but minute and special cases of that 
 vast and continuous redistribution of matter and 
 energy, of which no complete understanding can 
 ever enter the mind of man." 
 
 In fact, the sting of mechanism lies in its three 
 denials, i. It denies that Nature as a whole, or 
 in its living parts, is the creation of God. 2. It 
 denies that minds, human or animal, are operative 
 as verae causae in the behaviour of living beings. 
 3. It denies the existence of any " vital " principle 
 or force. It is a protest against talking of natural
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 99 
 
 phenomena in the language of life, or of mind, or of 
 God. It proclaims the emancipation of the physico- 
 chemical sciences from theology, psychology, and 
 any kind of biology which seeks to retain its own 
 concepts and language, at the same time that it 
 proclaims the determination of physics and 
 chemistry to dominate the whole field of " Nature " 
 and to tolerate no competitor beside themselves. A 
 reminder of the controversies between scientists 
 and theologians which arose out of Darwin's theory 
 of evolution, and which nowadays are happily little 
 more than a literary echo, may serve to illustrate 
 the point. Biology for a long time proved 
 an obstacle to the victorious advance of 
 mechanism. The triumphs of bio-chemistry 
 were still to come, and, in the absence of the 
 theory of descent, the existence of living beings 
 seemed to point to special creation, just as 
 their adaptation to their environment seemed evi- 
 dence of the wisdom and goodness of the Creator's 
 design. Darwin's theory of the origin of species by 
 the accumulation of accidental variations and by the 
 survival of those specimens which had the good 
 luck to fit the environment, was hailed as the 
 conquest of the realm of life by the mechanical 
 theory of nature. The fortress of biology had sur- 
 rendered. But what was there " mechanical " 
 about the theory ? Nothing but the part assigned
 
 100 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 to " accident " and " luck " a part, moreover, 
 exaggerated by enthusiastic disciples of the new 
 theory far beyond Darwin's own sober and cautious 
 statements. It was enough that chance eliminated 
 design, that descent was put in the place of creation, 
 and the struggle for existence (" nature red in tooth 
 and claw ") in the place of the care of a kindly Provi- 
 dence for its creatures. The fashion of theologizing 
 in biology had received its death-blow. Thenceforth 
 there has been as little mention of God in biology 
 as there already was in physics or chemistry. 
 
 At this time of day, no competent judge will 
 dispute the gain which this revolution has brought. 
 The present position of biology is due almost wholly 
 to the many lines of experimental research which 
 have sprung from the effort to test, develop, correct 
 the evolutionary hypothesis. The days of theolo- 
 gizing in biology are definitely past. But though 
 the victory has been won, the victors still seem to 
 fear the resurrection of the foe. Whether the argu- 
 ment be about Driesch's " entelechy," or Bergson's 
 elan vital, or even only about human or animal 
 minds, the mechanists in biology not uncommonly 
 talk as if vitalism or psychology were but thin 
 ends of the wedge of theology. And so they bolt 
 and bar every door by insisting on the exclusive 
 use of physico-chemical terms, lest God slip in again 
 disguised as " entelechy " or " consciousness."
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 101 
 
 But granted that theology is out of place in 
 biology, and indeed in natural science generally, 
 this emancipation of science from theology still 
 leaves them both fellow-members in the universe 
 of man's spiritual experience. There would be 
 occasion enough here for an effort at synopsis, even 
 if the extension of mechanism over the field of 
 biology (including physiology) had not burdened 
 our psychology and, indeed, our whole scheme of 
 thought about the universe, with the embarrassing 
 problem of the relation of body and soul, matter 
 and mind. It was one of the first mechanists in 
 biology, Descartes, who bequeathed to us the 
 dualism of body and soul with its attendant conun- 
 drums of epiphenomenalism, psycho-physical paral- 
 lelism, and interaction, of which the first two, at any 
 rate, are nothing but. devices for making the 
 mechanical scheme tight against any intrusion of 
 mind, without flying so far in the face of experience 
 as to deny outright that there is any such thing as 
 mind at all. The last chapter in this long con- 
 troversy is being written in our own day under the 
 title of " behaviourism," and we shall have to con- 
 sider it in our next lecture. Meanwhile, we may 
 with added conviction repeat what we said already 
 in the first lecture, viz., that the interrelations 
 between the various sciences present no less urgent 
 a synoptic problem than the relations between the
 
 102 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 sciences as a whole and the other great realms of 
 experience and thought in which as civilized men 
 we move. 
 
 But enough of the negative side of mechanism 
 what of its positive side ? As applied to biology, 
 it amounts, as we have seen, briefly to this : that 
 biology is nothing but the physics and chemistry 
 of organisms, and that an organism is nothing 
 but an exceedingly complex physico-chemical 
 machine. For practical purposes, mechanists 
 generally stop at this point. But the more specula- 
 tively venturesome among them go further and set 
 before us, as the ultimate goal of all scientific endeav- 
 our, the reduction of the concepts and laws of 
 ordinary physics and chemistry to those of dynamics, 
 to " matter in motion," as the popular phrase has 
 it. Thus, one of the leading champions of 
 mechanism at the present day, Jacques Loeb, in 
 his The Organism as a Whole from a Physico- 
 Chemical View-point, speaks of the " visualization 
 of all phenomena in terms of the groupings and 
 displacements of ultimate particles." This is that 
 " redistribution of matter and energy " which 
 Thomson's reviewer above set before us as ultimate 
 truth. This is that traditional scheme of explana- 
 tion in terms of time, space, and material which in 
 our last lecture we found Whitehead criticizing. 
 This is the famous ideal of Laplace's calculator.
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 103 
 
 There are, then, as we see even now, degrees of 
 mechanism. We may be mildly mechanical by 
 talking chemistry, or we may be rigidly mechanical 
 by talking dynamics. Two questions here suggest 
 themselves, (i) Is there, as appears to be alleged, 
 a continuous transition along the line of increasing 
 generalization and greater mathematical precision 
 from mild to rigid mechanism, so that mild 
 mechanism is but a crude and provisional approxi- 
 mation to the ideal of rigid mechanism ? (2) Does 
 either type of mechanism really deal faithfully with 
 all the relevant facts ? 
 
 4. The discussion of these two questions must 
 inevitably be somewhat technical, but the argument 
 of the last lecture will have prepared us to appreciate 
 not a few of its points. x The traditional theory of 
 " matter," it will be recalled, claims to explain the 
 facts and events which we perceive, as sensations 
 caused in our minds by the activity of hypothetical, 
 imperceptible particles. Adapting to our present 
 purpose the convenient terminology of the physicist 
 Lorenz, we may say that " macroscopic " (i.e., 
 perceptible and measurable) bodies and movements 
 are explained in terms of " microscopic " (i.e., 
 
 1 The best discussion of " mechanism " known to me is to be 
 found in Professor C. D. Broad's paper on " Mechanical Explana- 
 tion and its Alternatives," in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian 
 Society, 1918-1919. The present section of this lecture owes 
 more than I can easily acknowledge to this paper.
 
 104 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 imperceptible) entities and motions. This scheme 
 has the merit of extreme simplicity, in that it takes 
 Nature to be composed of, say, electrons which 
 are all qualitatively exactly alike, but which have 
 different motions and are combined in many different 
 kinds of structures. But it cannot be said, as is 
 sometimes done, that the very possibility of 
 " science " stands or falls with the truth of just this 
 microscopic type of mechanism. The fact is that 
 most sciences do not come within measurable dis- 
 tance of it, and, as we shall presently see, are 
 unlikely ever to reach it. We can, and do, deal 
 successfully with systems much more complicated, 
 and, in fact, the success of science would seem to 
 depend mainly on the fact that among the macro- 
 scopic phenomena with the observation of which 
 science begins and ends, there are some, viz., 
 geometrical magnitudes, lapses of time, masses, 
 which are measurable with sufficient precision for 
 determinate quantitative correlations to be traced. 
 Moreover, whether or no the molecules of the theory 
 of gases, and the atoms of the eighty odd chemical 
 elements, will ultimately be exhibited as combina- 
 tions of electrons, in any case there are in the 
 macroscopic world different kinds of substances with 
 specifically different chemical properties, and 
 capable of differences of state (gaseous, fluid, solid) 
 which modify their mechanical action on each other.
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 105 
 
 Rigid mechanism would be so palpably false if 
 applied to these macroscopic phenomena that it 
 must assume the microscopic form to save itself. 
 As Broad puts it, " the rigid mechanist would wish 
 to assume that the distinctions between one kind 
 of matter and another, e.g., wood and iron ; or 
 between one state of matter and another, e.g., 
 between an unmagnetized piece of iron and the same 
 piece magnetized, are only macroscopic differences, 
 and that their microscopic correlates are always 
 differences of number, configuration and density." 
 But that they are so, has not only not been con- 
 clusively made out, but, on the contrary, a survey 
 of the sciences goes rather to show that there is a 
 hierarchy of laws of which the higher are not 
 reducible to the lower. Delightful as it would be if 
 at all levels of Nature we could treat all differences 
 as due simply to differences of arrangement and 
 motion of the ultimate, homogeneous particles, 
 we are compelled at present rather to acknowledge 
 something like qualitative breaks, or novelties, from 
 level to level. Taking the sciences in ascending order, 
 we find that ever fresh independent variables now 
 characters of elements, now characters of groups or 
 compounds or systems of elements are introduced 
 into our laws, and that the laws of a higher stage 
 cannot be reduced to, or predicted from, or treated 
 as particular cases of, the more general laws of
 
 106 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 a lower stage. If this is the actual situation, it 
 explains why scientists, whatever their program- 
 matic professions, do not actually work with the 
 theory of pure mechanism. In this connexion, too, 
 it is worth remembering that no mechanical explana- 
 tion ever employs nothing but the " laws of motion." 
 For, by themselves, these are purely regulative, 
 somewhat like the laws of logic. They define the 
 limits within which all possible motions fall, but 
 they do not determine that any particular motion 
 happens, or when, or in detail the way in which 
 one motion will cause other motions. For all this 
 we need further data, and these may be of various 
 sorts, chemical, thermal, magnetic, electric, etc. 
 
 Thus, when we are sent to " mechanism," we find 
 no simple or single theory. The atomic theory in 
 chemistry, for example, in so far as it assumes 
 different kinds of atoms and does not assume that 
 the interactions of atoms can be formulated in terms 
 of the laws of motion, is not strictly mechanical, 
 for all that its atoms are " microscopic." In fact, 
 mechanistic biologists, like Loeb, are content to 
 claim that they have found a " mechanistic " 
 explanation, either (a) when they have discovered 
 a quantitative correlation between two phenomena 
 (e.g., when the behaviour of heliotropic animals 
 conforms to the Roscoe-Bunsen law for photo- 
 chemical reactions) ; or (b) when they have produced
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 107 
 
 a vital phenomenon by non- vital means (e.g., when 
 the egg of a sea-urchin is stimulated into develop- 
 ment, not by a spermatozoon, but by the prick of a 
 needle). A mechanism so mild that it is content 
 with the discovery of quantitative correlations, can 
 hardly be said any longer to exclude or forbid the 
 recognition of yet higher laws, though the terms 
 of which these laws affirm the correlation may no 
 longer permit measurement. 
 
 Before we close this examination of mechanism, 
 we may just in a word remind ourselves that, so far 
 as the traditional microscopic mechanism involves 
 the " bifurcation of Nature " and the depreciation 
 of colours, sounds, etc., to mere impressions in an 
 observer's mind, these macroscopic appearances do 
 not in any real sense receive a " mechanical " 
 explanation, nor is the action of matter on mind 
 by which these impressions are supposed to be 
 produced, in any intelligible sense a " mechanical " 
 action. 
 
 Thus mechanism, closely inspected, turns out to 
 be full of ambiguity and, at critical points, full, too, 
 of incoherence. The use which has sometimes been 
 made of it in argument has been sheer bluff. Its 
 main value, we repeat, is negative, not positive. 
 Only its mildest forms are actually used by 
 biologists, and so far from being a complete explana- 
 tory theory of all vital phenomena, mechanism is
 
 108 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 really little more than a proclamation of the right, 
 and the will, to apply all the resources of physical 
 and chemical experimentation to the study of the 
 facts of life. But this programme obviously cannot 
 be twisted into an in junction against the recognition, 
 in biology, of laws the terms and relations of which 
 are not of the physico-chemical order at all. In 
 short, mechanism may play its part among the tools 
 of the biologist without destroying the autonomy of 
 biology as a science. Huxley, with that vividness 
 of phrase of which he was a master, once summed up 
 an organism as " nothing but the constant form of 
 a turmoil of material molecules." Stripping the 
 phrase of its metaphor, let us grant whatever truth 
 it may seem to us to possess, but then let us reflect 
 how far it is from describing, or making intelligible, 
 the dominant character of life as exhibited in the 
 observable behaviour of living beings. 
 
 5. It is one thing, however, to criticize the 
 mechanical theory of Nature and to point out that, 
 at best, it covers only the lower levels in the hier- 
 archy of Nature's laws, and that this limitation 
 comes more and more fully into view in proportion 
 as we turn our attention to the higher forms of life 
 in animal and man. It is another thing to decide 
 what concepts are needed to supplement it. Our 
 next task, therefore, is to pass in review, very briefly, 
 a number of contemporary tendencies of thought
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 109 
 
 which have at least this in common : they seek in 
 one way or another to express the fact that our 
 experience of living beings, and of our dealings with 
 them, leaves upon us a peculiar and distinctive 
 impression of life as a unique and, as such, not 
 further analyzable quality or character, or, as 
 Whitehead has it, " rhythm " and " pattern." The 
 difference between what is living and what is dead, 
 what is inorganic and inanimate and what is organic 
 and alive, is the fundamental datum of observation 
 upon which biology is built up. Hence, as J. S. 
 Haldane points out, " in dealing with life we not 
 only use a whole series of special terms, but these 
 terms appear to belong to a specific general concep- 
 tion which is never made use of in the physical 
 sciences." We may illustrate this for ourselves 
 by reflecting that when we study living beings as 
 physico-chemical machines, their character as living 
 is simply irrelevant. So far from being explained, 
 it is rather ignored. It is not part of the physicist's 
 or chemist's universe of discourse. The very term 
 " organic," which a biologist uses only of what is 
 living, has lost in the chemist's mouth all reference 
 to the living. Organic chemistry is simply the 
 chemistry of carbon-compounds, regardless of 
 whether they are found or produced in the living 
 or in the non-living. 
 The concept of life, then, is a distinctive concept,
 
 110 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of a different order from physical or chemical 
 concepts, and not reducible to them by analysis. 
 Life is sui generis, qualitatively unique. And the 
 concept of life is derived from our experience of 
 living beings, and has in that experience its obser- 
 vational root and datum. A living being is an ob j ect 
 perceptible by the senses, but an object which in 
 structure, behaviour, intercourse with its environ- 
 ment, makes upon us a unique total impression 
 which we signalize by the terms life, living, alive, 
 and seek to express more in detail by describing a 
 living being as "an active autonomous whole " 
 (J. S. Haldane and others), or by speaking, with 
 J. A. Thomson, of " an insurgent self-assertiveness," 
 and even of "an endeavour after well-being " 
 observable in living creatures. The proverbial 
 " will to live " and Bergson's elan vital are more 
 generalized terms for the same impression. 
 
 We said just now " observable." But our right 
 to use this term will be challenged. We shall be 
 told that the deliverance of our senses includes 
 nothing so psychological as will, endeavour, self- 
 assertion, or even autonomous activity. The most 
 which the critics will allow to be observable by the 
 senses is motion bodily movement, change of place, 
 change of state. They will boggle even at White- 
 head's rhythm and pattern. Very well, let us 
 humour the critics, and, lest we quarrel merely about
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 111 
 
 words, concede that " observation " is limited as 
 they suggest. Let us say that we know life, when 
 we meet it, by " interpretation," or, with a learned 
 flavour, by " empathy " (Einfuhlung). If we were 
 not alive ourselves, if we did not know life (know 
 what it feels like, so to speak) by living, we should 
 hardly recognize it in the world about us. Inter- 
 pretation or empathy just express that certain 
 objects of perception by their structure and 
 behaviour or, if the critics insist, by their composi- 
 tion and movement elicit from us a certain response 
 or attitude, which is an essential ingredient in our 
 way of perceiving or apprehending them, and which 
 involves feeling and acting as well as perceiving. 
 In evoking this peculiarly complex experience on 
 our part, the life which confronts us reveals itself 
 to us. As J. S. Haldane quaintly but accurately 
 puts it, "a biologist feels it in his very bones " 
 that he is dealing with living structure and living 
 activity. This interpretative manner of perceiving 
 is no more infallible than any other ; perhaps rather 
 less so. We certainly learn by experience, i.e., by 
 trial and error, the limits within which objects both 
 demand and permit this manner of apprehending 
 them. We may use it on occasions when it should 
 not be used and fail to use it when we should ; in 
 other words, we may feel and behave and talk as 
 if there were life when there is none, and fail to
 
 112 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 recognize it when it is present. But experience 
 here, as elsewhere, makes expert and supplies its 
 own correctives. 
 
 At any rate, the point we have to note is that all 
 biologists who regard mechanistic concepts as inade- 
 quate for the analysis of life, do in effect assert that 
 life is unique and sui generis, and that we need a 
 special language and special concepts to express our 
 experience of it. 
 
 Let us illustrate this, and at the same time com- 
 ment on the strength or weakness of the resulting 
 theory, by taking the views of Hans Driesch, Henri 
 Bergson, and J. S. Haldane. 
 
 For Driesch, the empirical datum is the " factual 
 wholeness " of an organism, as " a type of manifold- 
 ness which is at the same time a unity," not merely 
 in form, but in function, i.e., in what it does. It 
 grows, it repairs itself, it adapts itself, and in these 
 and other " teleological " processes builds up, 
 restores, maintains its factual wholeness. More- 
 over, many of the activities of an organism have an 
 historical quality. An organism does not merely 
 repeat its movements like a machine, but, within 
 wider or narrower limits, learns to modify them by 
 repetition so as to correspond more closely to vary- 
 ing stimuli. No machine, so Driesch holds, can 
 do any of these things, and therefore no mechanistic, 
 i.e., physico-chemical, explanation of them is
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 113 
 
 possible. Hence, we must postulate an impercept- 
 ible factor of a different order which Driesch, borrow- 
 ing an Aristotelian term, calls an " entelechy." 
 With this empirical, or inductive, argument Driesch 
 couples a speculative logical argument which is built 
 on the principle that there cannot be more in the 
 effect than there is in the cause. Now, in the growth 
 of an organism there is a visible increase in com- 
 plexity or manifoldness, from which Driesch infers, 
 with the help of the principle just stated, that the 
 cause, i.e., the visible starting-point of growth (such 
 as a fertilized ovum), must involve an impercept- 
 ible factor or agent to which the building up of the 
 complex organism is due. This agent is the 
 entelechy. It is not conceived by Driesch as a 
 conscious mind, but neither, on the other hand, is it 
 a physical thing. It is something intermediate 
 between these, and produces its effects by control- 
 ling and directing the physico-chemical processes, 
 now suspending, now releasing them. 
 
 This particular way of dealing with the unique 
 character of life has found no favour with biologists 
 at large, not even with those who share Driesch's 
 conviction of the insufficiency of the mechanistic 
 theory. In truth, an entelechy is too hypothe- 
 tical a creature to command conviction. It is too 
 obviously a stop-gap invented ad hoc. Driesch's 
 arguments consist in pointing out lacunae in 
 8
 
 114 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 the mechanistic account and then invoking 
 the entelechy to fill them. At the same 
 tune, the hypothesis of entelechies is weak 
 just where the mechanistic theory is strongest. 
 The latter has been immensely fertile in 
 suggesting problems for experimental research, 
 whereas the vitalistic hypothesis has been barren 
 in this respect. In fact, the vitalistic hypothesis 
 cannot be strictly either verified or disproved 
 by experiment. Its " verification," if we are to 
 call it so, consists hi its being invoked at all the 
 points at which mechanism is said to fail. But we 
 cannot well blame mechanists for regarding it as a 
 mere symbol of ignorance, and for hoping that 
 further research will discover mechanistic explana- 
 tions for the processes which Driesch ascribes to 
 the activity of entelechies. 
 
 The fact is that Driesch's entelechy is a product 
 of the same vice of " bifurcation " which, as we 
 saw in the last lecture, has also produced the 
 traditional theory of " matter." Instead of deriving 
 the concept of lif e from the facts of lif e as experienced 
 by us, he postulates an imperceptible agent as the 
 hypothetical cause of these facts. The philosophical 
 nakedness of this device is but thinly disguised by 
 the venerable title " entelechy." 
 
 But, among the empirical characters of life 
 emphasized by Driesch there is one which connects
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 115 
 
 his theory with Bergson's, viz., the " historical " 
 character of vital activity, its plasticity through 
 memory (so to speak). In an older generation, 
 Semon, Hering, and Samuel Butler had already 
 made attempts to follow up this clue and make it 
 available for precise theory. It leads to such 
 suggestions as that the " mechanical " routine of 
 physico-chemical processes is akin to habits, now 
 fixed by age-long repetition, but once formed by 
 living endeavour and experiment. The most 
 familiar version of this view at the present day is 
 Bergson's theory of " matter " as the deposit of 
 the elan vital in its slackening, and of " real time," 
 or " duration," as the way in which the elan vital, 
 enriched by its whole past, creates unceasingly 
 unpredictable novelties. Biologists who take a 
 philosophical interest in their subject cannot afford 
 to ignore these theories wholly, for they serve to 
 bring vividly before our minds a character of life 
 which else we are apt to ignore its resourcefulness 
 and fertility of invention. But even non-mechanistic 
 biologists have so far been unable to make much 
 positive use of Bergson's concepts, probably be- 
 cause they are, as Bergson frankly acknowledges 
 them to be, of the psychological order and 
 thus make consciousness, or some analogon of 
 consciousness, coextensive, or even identical, with 
 life. This is a step which most biologists are
 
 116 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 not prepared to take. Their topic is life, not 
 mind. 
 
 The position of those who " see no use for the 
 hypothesis that life as a whole is a mechanical 
 process," is perhaps best represented by the writings 
 of Professors J. A. Thomson and J. S. Haldane, 
 the latter of whom goes so far as to say that the 
 mechanistic theory seems to him to be a serious 
 hindrance to the progress of biology. More clearly 
 than any other biologists these two scientists affirm 
 that biology rests on the concept of life, that we have 
 been led to this concept by our experience of life, 
 and that only in subordination to this concept does 
 physico-chemical knowledge become relevant in the 
 study of living beings. Thus J. S. Haldane writes : 
 " The bodily processes for instance, the apparent 
 mechanical or chemical processes of movement of 
 the limbs, of breathing, of circulation, of digestive 
 changes, of the taking up and giving off of various 
 forms of matter and energy become nothing but 
 the expression of organic activity. Their main- 
 tenance and working during life are only phases 
 of the organic determination which is the key to 
 all the phenomena of life. They must be looked 
 at from the physiological or biological standpoint, 
 and not merely from that of the physical sciences." 
 
 And Thomson places the same point of view in 
 a wider synoptic context, in his System of Animate
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 117 
 
 Nature, by surveying the whole " web of life " 
 and invoking all sides of our experience of the 
 spectacle of life in its natural setting, including its 
 appeal to our sense of beauty and to religious 
 emotion. 
 
 But both these biologists are also philosophers, 
 and this, no doubt, explains why they do not close 
 their minds to the wider outlook, and why their 
 biological theory is capable of forming part of a 
 synoptic philosophy. 
 
 6. So far we have avoided the mention of one 
 concept which holds a time-honoured place in all 
 discussions of life. It remains for us to consider 
 briefly what recent thought has contributed to the 
 elucidation of teleology in nature. 
 
 The endeavour to explain living beings by the 
 application to them of the concept of purpose or 
 design reaches back almost as far as philosophy 
 itself. The striking form and organization of 
 living beings, their behaviour directed towards 
 their own preservation and welfare, their fitness 
 for their environment and their environment's 
 fitness for them all these topics have been elabor- 
 ated in infinite detail as evidences of intelligent 
 and benevolent design. But design implies a 
 designer. Where shall we look for the designing 
 mind and will ? Two possibilities only seem open. 
 We must attribute the guidance and purpose either
 
 118 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 to the mind of the living organism itself, or else 
 we must refer the whole system of Nature with all 
 the manifold life in it to the design of a divine 
 creator. On the former view, consciousness must 
 be supposed to be coextensive with the realm of 
 living beings ; indeed every living thing must not 
 only have a mind, but a mind sufficiently developed 
 to know in anticipation what it wants. This 
 requires foresight ; and foresight, in turn, requires, 
 if not constructive reasoning, at least memory 
 the recollection of what in previous experience has 
 followed from similar situations. But to distribute 
 mentality of this high order and nothing less will 
 really do the work of intelligent guidance through- 
 out the whole realm of life is a speculative venture 
 which has, indeed, been made by such eminent 
 thinkers as Samuel Butler and James Ward, but 
 against which there are at least two strong argu- 
 ments. The first is that the hypothesis by far 
 outruns the evidence, even in animals, let alone in 
 plants. The other is that in man, where intelligent 
 control is a factor, a great part of the routine of 
 life is carried on " automatically " often without 
 consciousness of what is going on, and certainly 
 without explicit purpose. Neither of these argu- 
 ments is, indeed, absolutely conclusive, but 
 together they form a strong presumption against 
 the hypothesis that the organization and behaviour
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 119 
 
 of a living being are due to its own thought and 
 will. " The orchid could have no mind that could 
 contrive its fertilization, any more than man has a 
 mind which could teach him to swallow or digest, 
 or could choose the place or century of his birth " 
 (Bosanquet). Samuel Butler suggests that for 
 automatic performances no conscious purpose is 
 needed, because the living creature knows so well 
 how to do them, having practised them an untold 
 number of times in successive incarnations. But 
 it is impossible to imagine how the process of 
 acquiring the automatic routine or skill should 
 ever have got started without an already existing 
 basis of physical organization, and the argument 
 about choice of time and place of birth is not met 
 at all. Bergson, clearly, takes a safer line in 
 excluding " finalism," i.e., conscious purpose, 
 altogether from life, even when it is most creative. 
 The other view, postulating a divine designer 
 and creator, has shared with other theological 
 concepts the fate of elimination from science. The 
 contest between it and " mechanism " has ended 
 with the definite victory of the latter. The famous 
 Bridge-water Treatises are the last example (on a 
 comprehensive scale) of the attempt to exhibit in 
 detail the goodness, power, and wisdom of God as 
 manifested in natural creation. There is no need 
 to recapitulate the fluctuating fortunes of this
 
 120 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 debate, from Bacon's epigram about the barrenness 
 of final causes, which inspired Cowley, in his ode 
 to the Royal Society, to write " Bacon has broke 
 that scar-crow Deity," to Paley's Evidences ; from 
 Newton's acceptance of the argument for design to 
 Laplace's " I have no need of that hypothesis." 1 
 From the judgment-seat of philosophy first 
 Hume, and next, with greater force and finality, 
 Kant, pronounced the verdict against the " physico- 
 theological " argument for the existence of God. 
 Science no longer looks for evidences of God's 
 design, nor is it satisfied to explain any given 
 phenomenon by saying that it is " best " so, and 
 that God willed it for this reason. 
 
 1 The Ideological argument has been made ridiculous largely 
 by its own extravagances. As Spinoza suggests, it tempts 
 the lazy and ignorant to substitute a facile reference to God's 
 presumed purposes for the patient exploration of the actual 
 and necessary nexus of facts. Theology cannot do the work 
 of natural science, and should not be substituted for it. But 
 after science has done its work by its own methods, is there not 
 room for recognizing that Nature evokes the religious experience, 
 too ? And is there not a problem here for synopsis ? A 
 passion for knowledge and for truth is not incompatible with 
 worship, and it seems clear that for a man like Newton the 
 traditional metaphor of divine design expressed the very genuine 
 experience of the way in which every fresh insight into the order 
 of Nature accorded with, and heightened, his religious response. 
 It is worth recalling, too, as one of the curiosities of this debate, 
 that many thinkers originally adopted the mechanical theory 
 precisely because it seemed to facilitate the argument for design. 
 To call anything a " machine " ipso facto implied a maker whose 
 knowledge and power were commensurate with the scale and 
 intricacy of his work. The cosmos as a machine required 
 nothing less than God as its author. From this crudely anthro- 
 pomorphic argument Hume and Kant have delivered us.
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 121 
 
 But the acceptance of this result has given rise 
 to two fresh problems. It has set us seeking, first, 
 for a new and deeper interpretation of the relation 
 of natural science to religion ; and, secondly, for 
 a way of dealing in science with those facts and 
 relationships which the teleological argument had 
 interpreted as evidences of intelligent purpose. 
 To the former problem we shall return in Lecture V. 
 To the latter Professor L. J. Henderson has recently 
 made a remarkable contribution, which we must 
 now consider. 
 
 The line of investigation which Henderson has 
 pursued in his two books on The Fitness of the 
 Environment and on The Order of Nature, may be 
 summarized as follows. Two aspects of Nature 
 have impressed themselves upon the inquiring 
 mind. One is the determination of phenomena 
 according to causal law, which has been elaborated 
 into the mechanical theory of Nature. The other 
 is the existence of living organisms, whose structure, 
 behaviour, and relation to their environment have 
 seemed to demand, almost irresistibly, an explana- 
 tion in terms of purpose and design. This " teleo- 
 logical appearance " cannot be denied or argued 
 away. Yet, what can science do to make it intelli- 
 gible ? The mechanical theory throws no light 
 on the matter : for it, the teleological appearance 
 is an " accident." On the other hand, neither
 
 122 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 theology with its concept of design, nor psychology 
 with its concept of animal or human intelligence, 
 nor vitalism, be it of Bergson's kind or of Driesch's, 
 can fill the gap. The way out of this impasse 
 which Henderson explores is that science has 
 overlooked an order among the properties of the 
 constituent elements of Nature, and among their 
 laws, uniquely adapted to the needs of life. This 
 order or " pattern " is missed when Nature is 
 considered statically, or, rather, unhistorically. 
 But, it comes into view when history, i.e., evolution, 
 is taken into account, or, in other words, when we 
 consider the physico-chemical constitution of Nature 
 in the light of the fact that living beings have 
 evolved on the basis of it. Organisms are indivi- 
 duals, i.e., stable, durable systems maintaining 
 their equilibrium (or self-identity) in the flux of 
 physico-chemical processes. Hume was the first 
 to perceive this problem, viz., how to account for 
 that " economy of Nature " which explains the 
 constancy of organic forms in a world of matter 
 in motion. But Hume's suggestion was too far 
 in advance of the science of his time, and it was 
 forgotten. It needed the concurrent development 
 of physics, chemistry, and biology during the 
 nineteenth century to enable scientists to recognize 
 that living beings are systems functioning according 
 to a pattern of their own, and that their existence
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 123 
 
 points to a specific pattern or order in the constitu- 
 tion of Nature. The clue, so Henderson claims, 
 is to be found in the thermodynamic researches of 
 Willard Gibbs, culminating in the rigorous statement 
 of the concept of a physico-chemical system. " Just 
 as Newton first conclusively showed that this is a 
 world of masses, so Willard Gibbs first revealed it 
 as a world of systems." Organisms are systems 
 the formation and stability of which we can now 
 correlate definitely with a unique pattern in the 
 environment. For, by far the most abundant 
 chemical elements in the environment of life are 
 hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. These are also the 
 most active elements, give rise to the most numerous 
 compounds, form the most complex molecular 
 structures, yield the most energy in their mutual 
 transformations. In all these ways, they make 
 the actual environment the fittest possible for life. 
 If, for example, water, carbonic acid, and the 
 carbohydrates did not play the part in the economy 
 of Nature which we find them playing, life as we 
 know it would be impossible. Yet this ensemble 
 of properties is so infinitely improbable when 
 considered as the result of mere chance, that we 
 can make it intelligible to ourselves only by regard- 
 ing it as a " preparation " for life. 
 
 The term " preparation," thus, sums up 
 Henderson's recognition of a teleological pattern
 
 124 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 in Nature. It is his substitute for " design." In 
 fact, when we compare his Order of Nature with, 
 say, Prout's volume in the Bridge-water Treatises, 
 we perceive that his argument is in principle that 
 of the Bridgewater Treatises but with the science 
 brought up-to-date and with God left out. 
 
 The significance of such a view for a synoptic 
 philosophy lies in the suggestion that the teleo- 
 logical character of life is deeply rooted in the 
 physico-chemical, or " mechanical," constitution 
 of Nature. It is neither an accident, nor a miracle. 
 And, what is thus true of life may be true of those 
 other appearances which commonly rank as teleo- 
 logical the beauty of natural objects which is 
 revealed to the artist and the perfection to which 
 religious feeling responds in worship. As Bosanquet 
 reminds us, the beauty of a flower, the curl of a 
 wave, the form of a precipice are appearances as 
 deeply rooted in the ultimate data and laws of 
 Nature as the motion of the solar system or the 
 formation of a chemical compound. They are 
 neither an " accidental by-product of the inter- 
 action of elements in whose nature and general 
 laws of combination no such result is immanent," 
 nor are they ab extra superinduced upon Nature 
 by the operation of a mind working on the analogy 
 of a human artist. " We must interpret the nature 
 of Nature as much by the flower as by the law of
 
 THE ORDER OF NATURE 
 
 125 
 
 gravitation." In other words, we need the synoptic 
 use of all the resources of our experience. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1 . Merz, J . T. A History of European Thought in the Nine- 
 
 teenth Century. (W. Blackwood & Sons.) 
 
 2. Loeb, Jacques The Dynamics of Living Matter. (Mac- 
 
 millan & Co., 1910.) 
 
 3. Loeb, Jacques The Organism as a Whole. (G. P. Putnam's 
 
 Sons, 1919.) 
 
 4. Loeb, Jacques " Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal 
 
 Conduct." Vol. I of Monographs on 
 Experimental Biology. (Philadelphia and 
 London : J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1920.) 
 
 5 . Driesch, Hans The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, 
 
 2 vols. (A. & C. Black, 1907, 1908.) 
 
 6. Driesch, Hans The Problem of Individuality (Macmillan 
 
 & Co., 1914.) 
 
 7. Bergson, H. Creative Evolution, tr. A. Mitchell. (Mac- 
 
 millan & Co., 1914.) 
 
 8. Butler, Samuel Life and Habit. (A. C. Fifield, 1916.) 
 
 9. Darbishire, An Introduction to Biology. (Cassell & Co., 
 A. D. 1917.) 
 
 10. Ward, James The Realm of Ends. (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 
 1911.) 
 n. Haldane, J. S. Mechanism, Life and Personality. (John 
 
 Murray, 1913.) 
 
 12. Thomson, The System of Animate Nature. (Williams 
 
 J.Arthur & Norgate, 1920.) 
 
 13. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment. (Macmillan 
 
 L. J. & Co., 1913.) 
 
 14. Henderson, The Order of Nature. (Harvard Univ. Press, 
 
 L. J. 1917-) 
 
 15. Bosanquet, B. " The Meaning of Teleology." (Reprint 
 
 from Proceedings of the British Academy, 
 Vol. II, London : Henry Froude, 1906.) 
 
 16. Broad, C. D. " Mechanical Explanation and its Alter- 
 
 natives." (Proceedings of the Aristotelian 
 Society, Vol. XIX.)
 
 126 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 17. Hoernl6. Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics. (New 
 
 R. F. A. York : Harcourt, Brace & Co. ; London : 
 
 Kegan Paul, 1920.) 
 
 In this list mechanism is represented in an extreme, but 
 typical form by Loeb (Nos. 2, 3, 4), vitalism by Driesch (Nos. 5, 
 6), Bergson (No. 7) and Butler (No. 8). Butler's Evolution, 
 Old and New (A. C. Fifield, 1916), too, is worth consulting. 
 Another variant of the argument which traces mechanism back 
 to purposive intelligence is to be found in No. 10 ; cf . also Ward's 
 Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture on Heredity and Memory 
 (Camb. Univ. Press, 1913). Darbishire (No. 9) illustrates what 
 use an experimental biologist claims to be able to make of 
 Bergson's and Butler's points of view. Haldane (No. n) and 
 Thomson (Nov. 12) represent the attempt to overcome the anti- 
 thesis of mechanism and vitalism by studying life as an " appear- 
 ance " (i.e. as something definitely appearing or revealing itself 
 to empirical observation), which is neither to be referred to an 
 hypothetical factor or impulse, nor to be treated as mental or 
 conscious. Henderson (Nos. 13, 14) tries to give a meaning to 
 teleology in science as recognition of a definite physico-chemical 
 pattern in nature, favourable to life. The history of the con- 
 troversy between vitalism and mechanism in the nineteenth 
 century may be studied in Merz (No i). Bosanquet's paper 
 (No. 15) is the best treatment of teleology from the point of view 
 of an idealist metaphysician ; cf . also his Principle of Individuality 
 and Value, Lecture IV. Broad's paper (No. 16) is the best 
 critical examination of mechanism. The argument in section 
 4 of the Lecture is mainly based on it. Both Nos. 15 and 16 
 should be carefully studied by everyone interested in the philo- 
 sophical criticism of scientific concepts and methods. A further 
 discussion of the topic of the Lecture by the Lecturer will be 
 found in No. 17, chs. vi and vii. Among the older literature, 
 Robert Boyle's Disquisition about the Final Causes of Things. 
 London, 1688, is still worth reading ; it shows the emancipation 
 of scientific method from theology in the making.
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 
 
 I 
 
 I. "WN the last lecture we had found ourselves 
 trembling more than once on the very thres- 
 hold of " mind." It is not easy, as we saw, 
 for biology to vindicate for itself a place as an 
 autonomous science between physics and chemistry 
 on the one side, and psychology on the other. 
 Biological thinking is pulled in opposite directions. 
 One party tries to make biology nothing but a 
 branch of physics and chemistry ; the other relies 
 on analogy in an effort to extend psychological 
 concepts over the whole field of the li ving. Between 
 these two extremes, a middle party, embarrassed 
 by a " vitalistic " left wing, tries to hold to " life " 
 as a fact in the order of nature and of evolution, 
 which is more than " matter " and less than " mind." 
 True, we can hardly deny minds to the higher 
 animals, and still less to homo sapiens, but to 
 attribute minds to lower animals becomes an 
 increasingly precarious procedure. And what of 
 
 127
 
 128 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 plants ? Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose has shown 
 experimentally that plants exhibit in their responses 
 to stimuli a sensitiveness and irritability which we 
 can readily parallel with similar responses in animals. 
 Again, the " tropisms " of plants have so close a 
 counterpart in certain features of animal behaviour, 
 that Loeb can in all seriousness formulate the pro- 
 gramme of reducing even the highest activities of 
 men, via the instinctive behaviour of animals and 
 the tropisms of plants, to purely physico-chemical 
 reactions. But what are we to make of these 
 affinities ? The appeal to continuity cuts both 
 ways. If the pull of the argument is, in one direc- 
 tion, back to matter and mechanism, it is also, in 
 the other direction, forward to mind. It is just 
 as easy to postulate and it is constantly being 
 done that mind cannot have evolved out 
 of the non-mental, or life out of the non- 
 living, as it is easy to assert that what is 
 once physico-chemical is always physico-chemical 
 and never anything but physico-chemical. But, 
 as we saw in the last lecture, if we take evolution 
 seriously, we must expect to find discontinuity as 
 well as continuity, the emergence of qualitatively 
 new appearances in the world, as well as the per- 
 sistence of the old. Where to draw the line, may 
 often be difficult to say. The exercise of good 
 judgment in difficult border-line cases requires a
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 129 
 
 quality akin to tact an expertness only to be 
 gained by long and close familiarity with the facts. 
 Biologists appear to be able to get on without 
 feeling the need to attribute minds to living cells, 
 or to plants. But no less clearly are they compelled 
 to recognize minds in human beings and many of 
 the other higher animals. So sound an observer 
 as Jennings regards even the behaviour of protozoa 
 as being of the psychological order. The presence 
 or absence of a central nervous system furnishes 
 an additional test, for it seems reasonable to assume 
 that the formation of so distinctive a structure is 
 the basis for the emergence of the new quality or 
 power which we call " mind." However, with the 
 problem where to draw the line we are not con- 
 cerned. It is enough for us if the occurrence of 
 mind is granted. At least, except by way of abuse, 
 we shall not deny the presence of mind in each 
 other. 
 
 And so it is now our task to review the tendencies 
 in contemporary psychology in order to discover 
 what they may hold of promise for our synoptic 
 programme. 
 
 2. What sort of a thing is a " mind " ? No 
 question seemingly could be simpler to answer. 
 We all have minds, we all use them (more or less) ; 
 indeed, to put it more strongly still, we all are minds. 
 If each of us has that most intimate acquaintance 
 9
 
 130 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 with what a mind is which comes from being a mind, 
 where is the difficulty ? Yet this innocent question 
 confounds all the experts. It is a somewhat 
 humiliating confession to make, but it cannot be 
 avoided : psychology at the present day has no 
 single, straightforward answer to give. There are 
 different schools of psychology which are more or 
 less at war with each other about the fundamental 
 principles of their science, and hence about the very 
 language in which we are to speak about the mind. 
 An unsettled terminology is a sure symptom of 
 unsettled thinking, and every candid psychologist 
 will have to admit, what kindly critics do not tire 
 from pointing out, that psychology as a whole 
 presents a spectacle of chaos and confusion. It 
 is like a patient in a critical condition, with a 
 multitude of doctors disagreeing on diagnosis and 
 treatment. This is not to deny that vigorous 
 research and consequent development of theory 
 are constantly going on in many directions. From 
 psychical research to psycho-analysis, from animal 
 to human, from physiological and experimental 
 to introspective psychology, from the psychology 
 of industry or of crime to the psychology of aesthetic 
 or of religious experience, there is no lack of activity. 
 But the trouble is that the outcome of all this 
 activity does but make the confusion worse 
 confounded.
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 131 
 
 There are many reasons, as we shall presently 
 see more in detail, for this state of things, but the 
 most fundamental reason of all may be suggested 
 at once. Indeed, we shall do well to bear it in mind 
 throughout this lecture, for it contains both the 
 problem and the promise of a synoptic treatment. 
 
 This fundamental reason is that mind is manifestly 
 a quality or power which admits of infinite degrees 
 and variations. As we watch the animal world 
 around us, nay, as we watch ourselves, we find 
 here more, there less, of mind. In the individual, 
 mind develops and increases and, again, it de- 
 generates and shrinks. Indeed, it fluctuates within 
 varying limits in every one of us in the course of 
 every twenty-four hours. To catch anything so 
 mobile, so tidal in its energies, so manifold in its 
 forms, in the comparatively rigid network of a 
 theory is no easy task. And we can easily under- 
 stand how it is that different students, concen- 
 trating upon some of the facts of mind and forgetting 
 others, have framed different concepts and used 
 apparently incompatible languages. Yet the broad 
 fact which we have just pointed out is nothing 
 recondite or technical. On the contrary, it is the 
 most familiar fact of everyday experience, con- 
 stantly acknowledged by us in practice and in many 
 a current turn of speech. In countless ways, we 
 are constantly comparing minds, and thereby
 
 182 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 treating them as something of which there can be 
 more or less. Minds differ in range, in depth, in 
 organization, in intelligence, in will-power ; in fact, 
 in every property which can be predicated of a 
 mind. In current judgments on each other, and 
 by special tests like intelligence-tests, we are 
 always comparing and sorting and grading minds. 
 We recognize special aptitudes which some minds 
 possess and others lack, e.g., for music, or for 
 mathematics, or for the leadership of men, and 
 which the minds that possess them have in all 
 sorts of degrees and nuances. We know that minds 
 differ in range a child's from an adult's, one 
 adult's from another's, an animal's from a man's. 
 Each profession has its characteristic type of mind, 
 and different types will deal differently with the 
 same situation, e.g., a lawyer and a scientist, a 
 business-man and an artist. 1 In old age, mind 
 tends gradually to fail, but there are oscillations 
 in range and power throughout an individual's 
 life, and even within a day his mind waxes and 
 wanes in energy : it is not always at its best, nor, 
 indeed, always active at all. The same fact can be 
 brought out even more strikingly by turning to 
 
 1 Consider, e.g., the current attitude of the technical expert to 
 the politician. The books on the war, and on the making of the 
 peace, abound in examples of conflicts of different types of mind. 
 See the contrast of Wilson's professorial and Lansing's legal 
 mind in the latter's The Peace Negotiations : A Personal Narra- 
 tive. (Constable, 1921.)
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 133 
 
 what is the crux of the mind, viz., consciousness. 
 There is, surely, no denying that there are degrees 
 and fluctuations of consciousness. To be conscious, 
 so it is commonly held, is to feel, to will, to think. 
 But these are blanket-terms. Feeling covers ex- 
 periences as various as pleasure and pain (or 
 " displeasure," as some psychologists prefer to say 
 in order to distinguish the feeling from the sensation 
 of pain), and all the emotions, simple or complex. 
 Willing covers desire, wish, impulse in short, 
 every form of conation or striving. Thinking 
 covers sensing, perceiving, imagining, reasoning, 
 and many more. Clearly all these, which together 
 make up " consciousness," occur in all sorts of 
 degrees and variations in different creatures, and in 
 the same creature at different times. They all 
 admit of more or less. Moreover and this is 
 perhaps the most important point of all it does 
 not avail us much to classify the contents or pro- 
 cesses of consciousness under these three heads of 
 feeling, willing, thinking, unless we go on to con- 
 sider what a given mind, or type of mind, feels, 
 wills, thinks. The truly important differences 
 between minds in range, organization, power, do 
 not emerge until we throw the emphasis on what 
 it is that they feel, will, think. This gives us the 
 world of each mind, or better still, each mind as a 
 world, a microcosm, a cross-section of the universe,
 
 184 MATTER, I JFK, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 as such constantly expanding and shrinking ; 
 growing and failing ; retaining old, absorbing new, 
 experiences ; at its best transforming itself, and 
 its world, by an activity which is both creative and 
 logical. But to say this is to anticipate our con- 
 clusion, viz., the direction in which a synoptic 
 theory of mind promises to move. So far we have 
 not given a theory, but merely reminded ourselves 
 of a fact by which we can measure the adequacy 
 of the theories which are currently offered. 
 
 3. Apart from the fundamental difficulty which 
 we have just pointed out, the chaos in modern 
 psychology is due to special causes which we may 
 conveniently divide into two groups. 
 
 One group consists of difficulties due to the 
 ramifications of psychological research at the present 
 day. Specialization, here as elsewhere, has meant 
 divergence, and in diverging the workers in psycho- 
 logy have lost touch with each other and with the 
 unity of their topic. Moreover, coming into 
 contact, along their different lines of work, with 
 different theoretical influences from other sources, 
 from physics, or biology, or philosophy, or religion, 
 or medicine, they have almost forgotten how to 
 speak a common language or how to understand 
 each other. The psychologists of the laboratory 
 and of the market-place have gone their different 
 ways, and sometimes seem even resentful of the
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 135 
 
 synoptic philosopher's attempt to bring them 
 together again. 
 
 And, secondly, this centrifugal tendency has been 
 intensified by the past history of psychology which, 
 culminating in the discovery of " consciousness," 
 has embarrassed us with the dualism of matter 
 and mind, or body and soul perhaps the most 
 formidable obstacle to synopsis in the whole welter 
 of modern theories. 
 
 Let us glance at each of these special sources of 
 difficulty in turn, beginning with the first-mentioned, 
 viz., the divergences of present-day psychological 
 research. Under this heading, four points deserve 
 our notice. 
 
 (a) There is considerable disagreement about the 
 range of facts which " scientific " psychology 
 should include. Most psychologists fight shy of 
 the whole realm of psychical research. Now, 
 granted that spiritualism is a field in which deceit 
 and trickery are rampant, and fraudulent mediums 
 too often exploit the will to believe of an ignorant 
 public, yet, after all deductions, there would seem 
 to remain a very substantial residue of phenomena 
 the genuineness of which is sufficiently well attested 
 to justify the attempt to investigate them further, 
 and more especially to bring them under experi- 
 mental control, so that the conditions of their 
 occurrence may be determined. Whether among
 
 136 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 the various kinds of mediumistic phenomena we 
 attach the greater importance to the alleged com- 
 munications from departed spirits and the implied 
 evidence for survival of death, or to such feats of 
 materialization as the late Mr. W. J. Crawford has 
 been investigating with the help of photography 
 and experimental apparatus, in either case there 
 can be no doubt that our current theories of what 
 a mind is and what it can do would require ex- 
 tensive remodelling, if these groups of phenomena 
 were once accepted as well-established. In another 
 direction, orthodox psychology tends to look askance 
 at investigations which claim for animals a greater 
 degree of intelligence than we commonly concede 
 to them. The " Kluge Hans," and other horses, 
 after having been investigated by several commis- 
 sions of experts, appear to have had the claims to 
 well-nigh human intelligence, which were made for 
 them by their owners and trainers, disallowed. 
 But experiments in developing the minds of animals 
 have not ceased. Dogs have been taught to express 
 themselves in a semi-phonetic alphabet, in which 
 each sound is represented by a fixed number of 
 taps with the paw. Cases are reported of their 
 using this language for the spontaneous com- 
 munication of their experiences, and in Germany 
 the Letters and Reminiscences of the dog " Rolf " 
 have actually been published in an edition de luxe.
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 137 
 
 Should these stories be authenticated, they will 
 at least warn us not to set dogmatic limits to the 
 powers of an animal mind. 
 
 (b) A second source of trouble is the disagreement 
 about methods and principles. Psychologists who 
 seek to frame all explanations in physiological 
 terms are confronted by others who hold that mind 
 is sui generis and must be described in its own 
 terms ; and there is a middle party which muddles 
 through somehow on a mixed intellectual diet of 
 bits of physiology and bits of psychology. Behind 
 these differences there looms the time-honoured 
 problem of the relation of body to mind. Are they 
 different entities or " substances " ? If so, can 
 they exist apart ? And how are they connected 
 so as to co-operate ? For, a mind-body creature 
 somehow acts as a whole, as if it were all of one 
 piece, so to speak, not a compound of heterogeneous 
 substances mysteriously coupled together. In 
 another direction, students of human minds and 
 students of animal minds are driven apart by the 
 fact that human beings can make objects of their 
 own minds, whereas animals, apparently, cannot. 
 Or, at least, the power of self-objectification is useless 
 to the psychologist without communication by 
 language. In animal psychology, therefore, we are 
 in the position of external spectators, and at once 
 the question arises whether we can really observe
 
 188 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 the animal's mind at all. The animal's behaviour 
 yes, but its mind ? We can watch what its 
 body does, but can we know what goes on " inside " 
 its mind ? If we say, " Yes, we can, viz., by 
 inference or interpretation," the question becomes, 
 Have we good grounds for such inference ? Will 
 it not be safer and more scientific to stick to what we 
 can observe, and, avoiding hypotheses which we 
 cannot check, to frame our explanations in terms 
 capable of being tested by observation ? That 
 way lies " behaviourism." But, at least, it may be 
 urged, we know our own minds from inside. Yes, 
 each perhaps his own mind ; but his neighbour's ? 
 Are we not towards each other in the same position 
 of external spectators of behaviour in which we 
 stand towards animals ? Self-objectification, then, 
 or " introspection," might possibly furnish auto- 
 biographies, but will these furnish a science of mind 
 as such ? True, there is language : we can tell 
 one another what is going on in our own minds, 
 and this does modify very profoundly our relation 
 towards each other even as external observers. 
 For, speaking is not merely behaviour but expressive 
 behaviour. The words have a meaning because 
 they express a feeling or act of thought or of will, 
 in short an experience, a bit of the life of a mind. 
 We understand another's language by taking his 
 words to express what we should express in the
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 139 
 
 same words. It follows that language makes a 
 very profound difference even to introspection, for 
 it breaches that privacy of introspection which, 
 at first sight, threatens to make introspection so 
 utterly useless an instrument for psychology. For, 
 what would it avail the psychologist, if his field 
 of investigation were narrowed down inexorably 
 to his own mind, when his aim is to achieve a theory 
 of mind as such, and to discover laws which will be 
 true for other minds no less than for his own ? 
 Now, introspection or self-observation yields theory 
 only so far as the facts it discovers are put into 
 words ; but whence does the psychologist take 
 his words except from the common stock of language, 
 fashioned, ready for his use, by the self-expression 
 of other minds ? Yet, if this reflexion disposes of 
 the difficulty of privacy, it does not release us from 
 all our troubles. The language of introspective 
 analysis and the language of external observation 
 require to be harmonized, for even where the 
 vocabulary is the same, the meaning may be 
 different. The statement, for example, that an 
 animal hears a sound may mean, in terms of what 
 an observer can perceive, that the animal " responds 
 to an auditory stimulus," i.e., that it pricks its 
 ears, looks around, gets ready to fly or fight or 
 catch a prey, etc. In introspective terms, on the 
 other hand, it will mean that a sound (an " auditory
 
 140 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 sensation ") occurs in the animal's " stream of 
 consciousness " and receives attention. Whilst 
 some psychologists are doing their best to 
 synthesize these two languages, others (the " be- 
 haviourists ") are striving to force them apart, 
 with the professed aim of eliminating the intro- 
 spective method and its language altogether from 
 psychology. As long as psychologists thus pull 
 in opposite directions, confusion cannot but continue 
 to reign in their science. 
 
 (c) A third source of trouble, closely connected 
 with the preceding, is that language is used by a 
 speaker to express what he is conscious of. But is 
 " consciousness " co-extensive with " mind " ? Are 
 the two words synonymous ? There is a tendency 
 so to treat them, especially among introspective 
 psychologists. Introspection is said to bring to 
 attention and make accessible to analysis " what 
 goes on in consciousness." The well-known defini- 
 tion of mind as the " stream of consciousness " is 
 typical of this line of psychology. Of course, over 
 and above the processes which introspection dis- 
 covers going on in the mind, the introspective 
 psychologist must assume also a structure of mind. 
 He will be found talking of " mental dispositions " 
 and of " laws " of mental process, in short, of 
 uniformities which, though revealed by his analysis, 
 are not part of " consciousness " in the sense hi
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 141 
 
 which it is the datum for introspection. But to 
 explain consciousness by reference to " unconscious " 
 dispositions and laws is one thing ; it is quite 
 another thing to assume unconscious processes to 
 be going on all the time in the mind, and this is the 
 hypothesis which another school of psychologists 
 regards as indispensable. On this view, conscious- 
 ness is but the apex, as it were, of the mind its 
 luminous peak ; and the bulk of the mind extends 
 " below the threshold " of consciousness, just as 
 the bulk of an iceberg is below the surface of the 
 water. Thence it is but a step to the hypothesis 
 that the moving forces are mainly, or even wholly, 
 down there, out of sight as it were. Consciousness, 
 then, becomes a sort of stage, the marionettes on 
 which are being pulled by invisible strings from an 
 underworld of sub-conscious or unconscious mental 
 factors. In this sense Professor G. Stanley Hall 
 once asserted in a lecture that " consciousness never 
 says what it means." Whatever goes on in con- 
 sciousness will thus be symbolic of the play of 
 forces which never appear in propria persona, but 
 only in disguises more or less complete. This 
 view, of course, is extreme, yet recent psycho- 
 analysis itself already split into several more or 
 less hostile schools certainly throws the emphasis 
 in the study of mind on to that portion of mind 
 which lies below consciousness. It offers an in-
 
 142 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 creasingly elaborate account of the layers or strata 
 there to be found, and of the mechanism or structure 
 by which the processes in consciousness are deter- 
 mined, as when a dream is analyzed as the fulfilment 
 in imagination of a repressed wish, or a slip of the 
 tongue as a betrayal of a similar repression. On 
 the other hand, however, the whole technique of 
 psycho-analysis depends on identifying the con- 
 stituents of the unconscious realm by dragging 
 them into consciousness. It is, apparently, only 
 through consciousness that the unconscious can 
 be studied, and the various methods employed 
 have the common aim of locating and breaking down 
 the resistances which prevent the unconscious 
 factors from emerging in their own true character. 
 The curative effect of psycho-analysis seems to 
 depend wholly on the extent to which the repressed 
 memories or wishes, which cause morbid dis- 
 turbances of consciousness, can be brought into the 
 light of consciousness so that rational self-control 
 may be regained. Hypnotism, as employed in 
 psychiatry, has the same purpose, viz., to explore 
 what is normally hidden in the unconscious, by 
 letting it come to the surface, or evoking it, in the 
 hypnotic trance. Meanwhile, psycho-analysts, 
 whilst they agree in dividing the whole mind into 
 conscious and unconscious strata, differ profoundly 
 on the origin of the unconscious. The extreme
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 143 
 
 Freudian view seems to be that the unconscious 
 mind consists wholly of repressed materials. On 
 the other hand, Jung and his adherents regard the 
 unconscious rather as the primitive basis of mind 
 out of which consciousness has arisen. Here, 
 again, therefore, we find conflict rather than unity. 
 (d) A last source of trouble consists in the im- 
 portation into psychology of concepts and theories 
 borrowed from other sciences, and assumed to be 
 valid for psychology too. Not infrequently the 
 point of view from which mind is approached 
 exhibits some such theoretical bias which inevitably 
 is reflected in the limitations of the resulting account. 
 An enquirer, for example, trained to work with the 
 concepts of physics or even of physiology, is very 
 commonly ill at ease in psychology and distinctly 
 hampered in dealing with the more spiritual forms 
 of experience. On the other hand, a student who 
 approaches psychology with theological habits of 
 thought will constantly use language which to his 
 scientific neighbour will seem illegitimate, if not 
 unintelligible. Again, if we start by taking for 
 granted the two-substance theory of body and mind 
 in the form of epiphenomenalism (i.e., the theory 
 that mind is a mere by-product of the bodily 
 machine) or psycho-physical parallelism (i.e., the 
 theory that mental and physical processes run side 
 by side without influencing each other), we are
 
 144 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 committed to regarding mind as completely ineffec- 
 tive and otiose. It is there, but it does nothing. 
 It has no assignable function. It does not determine 
 behaviour : it neither receives anything from, nor 
 gives anything to, the physical world. Either of 
 these dualistic theories brings us at once into 
 conflict with the evolutionary view that mind is 
 useful in the struggle for existence, as an organ for 
 better adaptation to the environment, and hence 
 for survival. Intelligent behaviour, learning by 
 experience, guidance of conduct by cunning and 
 knowledge simply have no place in the pattern of 
 epiphenomenalism or parallelism. But even the 
 evolutionary point of view, though it does assign 
 to mind a function, yet fails to do justice to it, 
 because, as a rule, it takes as its standard the 
 function of mind in animal life rather than the 
 range and power of which it shows itself to be capable 
 in human achievements at their best. Whether we 
 take mind to be distributed over a wider or a 
 narrower area within the realm of living organisms, 
 on any view there is between the lowest and the 
 highest types of mind an infinite range of differences 
 in feeling, in knowledge, in foresight and construc- 
 tive purpose. In the past the introspective 
 psychologist has conspired with the physiologist to 
 work on the assumption of the mind-body dualism, 
 with the result that he, from whom a more complete
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 145 
 
 treatment of mind might have been expected, has 
 filled our text-books with abstract generalities, to 
 the neglect of the study of mind in its concrete 
 manifestations, in social life, in economics, in 
 politics, and, again, in the creation or enjoyment 
 of works of art, or in the varieties of religious 
 experience. It is only within comparatively recent 
 times that more detailed studies in social, or aesthetic, 
 or religious psychology have appeared, but very 
 commonly they have suffered from the prevailing 
 confusion in the theoretical groundwork of 
 psychology. 
 
 It is chiefly for these reasons that present-day 
 psychology cannot with its whole authority give 
 any single answer to the question, What is and 
 what does a mind ? 
 
 4. Moreover, the answer to this question, as has 
 already been mentioned, is not made easier by the 
 legacy of problems which psychology owes to its 
 history. It will repay us to glance at this history, 
 for, without it, we can hardly appreciate the 
 significance of the most recent movements in 
 psychology. 
 
 If psychology began when man first learned to 
 recognize the soul, its origin lies hidden in the mists 
 of the past. But an imaginative reconstruction of 
 the early story may be attempted with a fair degree 
 of plausibility. Primitive man was both daring
 
 146 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 and ingenious in his speculations about the facts 
 which struck his attention. Foremost among these, 
 we may suppose, must have been death, and the 
 plainly observable difference between the dead and 
 the living. A living body is warm, breathes, and 
 moves. A dead body is cold, stark, and motionless. 
 What more natural than to explain the difference 
 by supposing the presence of something in the 
 living which is absent from the dead ? This some- 
 thing is the original " soul," the Latin name of 
 which, anima, still bears witness to its birth in 
 breath. This is the nucleus from which have 
 developed, through many vicissitudes of specula- 
 tion, the " consciousness " and the " behaviour " 
 of modern psychologists. 
 
 The heat of the living body would readily suggest 
 that the soul must be akin to fire, and the identi- 
 fication of fire and spirit, literally or metaphorically, 
 has remained ever since a persistent strain in 
 religious language and symbolism. Again, the 
 breath, impalpable, invisible, yet real, must have 
 helped towards the concept of the soul as having 
 these same qualities and as made of a substance 
 more tenuous and refined than the body. Thus 
 was mediated the transition to the concept of the 
 soul as " immaterial," and this immaterial! ty, 
 together with imperceptibility to the senses of an 
 observer, has been inherited by the modern concept
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 147 
 
 of " consciousness." Further, sooner or later, 
 speech and other purposive actions must have been 
 singled out among the movements especially of the 
 human body, and the concept of the soul as the 
 source of these must have been expanded so as to 
 include the power of perception, thought and feeling. 
 But many centuries had to pass before the concept 
 of " consciousness " was formed and fixed in a 
 distinctive word. Even during the classical period 
 of Greek Philosophy we find no clear recognition 
 of consciousness as distinct from bodily life. It 
 is not until the second century of our era that a term 
 for it appears in the literature. In other words, 
 the soul began its career simply as a principle of 
 life. 
 
 With this first strand of soul-theory very early 
 a second must have mingled, representing in its 
 junction with the first an even more venturesome 
 flight of synthesis on the part of primitive man. 
 Not accustomed to distinguish, as we do, between 
 dreams as unreal and waking perceptions as real, 
 and inclined, moreover, to attribute to dreams a 
 special significance, primitive man may well, so it 
 has been suggested, have fused the dream- 
 appearances of departed persons with his concept 
 of soul. If the soul is present in the living body, 
 absent from the dead, it must soon have been con- 
 ceived as distinct and separable from the body and
 
 148 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 capable of independent existence. Thence it was 
 but a step to the two-substance theory of body and 
 soul, on the one hand, and to the belief in survival 
 of death and immortality, on the other. It is need- 
 less to dwell on the elaboration of this motif in 
 mythology and religious belief, from ancestor- 
 worship to the transmigration and re-incarnation 
 of souls, from the dismal abode of bloodless shades 
 in Hades to the Isles of the Blest in Greek story or 
 the Happy Hunting Grounds of the Red Indian 
 brave. The heaven and hell of popular theology 
 have here their ultimate roots, but they have 
 become interwoven with a belief in the moral 
 government of the world, requiting sin with punish- 
 ment and rewarding repentance with redemption. 
 We strike here a third strain, and a much later 
 one ; attributable in Western thought, if Professor 
 J. Burnet is right, to no less a thinker than Socrates. 
 This is the truly " spiritual " conception of the soul 
 as that in ourselves the moral excellence or cor- 
 ruption of which ought to be our foremost concern. 
 Henceforth the condition of the soul in respect of 
 virtue or vice, purity or pollution, becomes a matter 
 of care and solicitude. We are on the threshold of 
 the concept of it as something requiring to be 
 " saved." From Socrates, by way of Plato and th? 
 Stoics, we are led to the Christian doctrine of sin 
 and salvation which has dominated Western man's
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 149 
 
 interest in the nature and destiny of rnVsoul, when- 
 ever he has approached these questions from the 
 point of view of his religion. The great Eastern 
 religions almost all offer variants of the same theme. 
 For, though they have conceived salvation, and the 
 way to it, and the need for it, somewhat differently, 
 yet the underlying principle of an escape from the 
 bondage of illusion, intellectual or moral, into the 
 freedom of union with God, or the All, is the same. 
 
 Adventurous indeed has been the journey of the 
 original life-principle, and amazing the synthetic 
 power which human thought has exhibited in 
 working so many heterogeneous strands into the 
 tissue of a single theory. Indeed, the web has 
 become so large and complicated, and the connexions 
 in places so loose, that it is little wonder that some 
 of the intellectual interests which had participated 
 in the weaving of it, should have broken free and 
 sought a development along their own lines. 
 
 One of the obvious breaking points in the 
 synthesis is death. The living creature an em- 
 bodied soul or a besouled body, as we may choose 
 to take it we can observe and study. What may 
 befall it after death is guess-work ; fit matter, in 
 Plato's language, for " myth," not for " knowledge." 
 If, then, we drop the setting of religious metaphysics, 
 what remains ? Precisely the standpoint of 
 Aristotle's psychology an unprejudiced study of
 
 150 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 " soul " as exhibited by diverse kinds of living 
 beings, or rather living bodies. A living body is 
 " besouled," for Aristotle, when it is actively 
 exercising its proper functions. What seeing is to 
 the eye, that the soul is to the organism as a whole. 
 The soul, in Aristotle's technical language, is the 
 " form " or " entelechy " of the body. In other 
 words, it is the body in action, all organs doing their 
 appropriate work, and through them the whole 
 body functioning as a whole. A plant-soul consists 
 in the nutritive and generative processes the cycle 
 of which constitutes the life of the plant. Animals 
 add sensation, appetition, locomotion to these 
 functions. The human soul shares all these lower 
 functions, but consists specifically in the rational 
 activities which man alone possesses. Thus, for a 
 human being to be, or have, a soul is to do whatever 
 things a human body can do. A human soul is, 
 we may say outright, a human body engaged in all 
 the various activities, from metabolic processes to 
 philosophizing, which make up a typical human 
 life. 
 
 Aristotle's theory of the soul is clearly, in our 
 modern jargon, " functional " or " behaviouristic." 
 In fact, his " soul " is what we mean by " be- 
 haviour," especially if we take the latter term in 
 a sense sufficiently wide to include all the rational 
 activities which are specifically human. Some of
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 151 
 
 our modern behaviourists, like E. B. Holt, are 
 fully aware that their theory is a return to Aristotle's 
 position. 
 
 Meanwhile, after Aristotle, the history of the soul 
 took a turn which led away from behaviour to the 
 discovery of " consciousness." It is commonly, 
 and rightly, held that this turn was due to the 
 increased emphasis of Christianity on inwardness, 
 on the moral quality of man's feelings and thoughts, 
 on the opposition of flesh and spirit. The effort 
 to scrutinize the spiritual condition of the soul 
 inevitably encouraged introspection and self- 
 analysis, and led to the noticing and distinguishing 
 of states and processes of consciousness taken as a 
 realm opposed, as it were, to the outer and material 
 world of which the body forms part. At the same 
 time, the Christian scheme of salvation incorporated 
 the belief in the survival of death, and therefore in 
 the soul as a " substance " distinct from the body 
 and capable of existing independently from it. 
 The identification of this soul-substance with that 
 which is conscious, and the opposition of both to 
 body and matter, brings us, on the threshold of the 
 modern period, to Descartes' dualism, i.e., two- 
 substance theory, according to which matter is 
 res extensa, substance which occupies space, and 
 soul is res cogitans, substance which thinks or is 
 conscious. It is no mere accident that Descartes
 
 152 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 was one of the founders of modern physiology. 
 In strict consistency with his dualism he tried a 
 double book-keeping, dealing with the behaviour 
 of the body in terms of the nervous system, con- 
 ceived as a mechanism for responding with appro- 
 priate movements to sensory stimuli, and with the 
 processes of consciousness in terms of sensations, 
 ideas and volitions. That he was compelled to 
 postulate the interaction of body and soul through 
 the pineal gland shows how the unity of the conscious 
 organism took its revenge upon his dualism. 
 
 The rest of the story is briefly told. Broadly, 
 it has consisted of the effort to get rid of the soul- 
 substance ; and thereby of the body-soul dualism. 
 First came, chiefly through Hume and Kant, the 
 attack upon " Rational Psychology " with its 
 theological affiliations, i.e., upon the theory of the 
 soul as a spiritual substance, one, simple, indi- 
 visible, indestructible, immortal. Side by side 
 with this, and largely under the influence of the 
 theory of knowledge, there developed " Empirical 
 Psychology," i.e., the analysis, mainly introspective, 
 of the stream of consciousness, without reference 
 to a soul-substance in short, a " psychology 
 without a soul." But consciousness, thus studied, 
 is still burdened with the problem of its relation to 
 the body. It is still an immaterial Somewhat in 
 a dualistic scheme, a mysterious appendage of a
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 153 
 
 physical body. Some propose to surmount this 
 dualism by the desperate expedient of denying 
 consciousness outright and leaving only the body. 
 The mind is the brain, they say. Others try to 
 cling to the double book-keeping device and advocate 
 psycho-physical parallelism. Some, like William 
 McDougall, in Body and Mind, return to the soul- 
 substance concept. Bergson identifies the soul 
 with the cosmic elan vital. Most recently, the 
 behaviourists have tried to escape from the tangle 
 by means of the concept of " behaviour," but the 
 extremists among them, like John B. Watson, are 
 stultifying themselves by refusing to include con- 
 sciousness in their theory of behaviour, and by 
 professing to believe that psychology as the science 
 of consciousness will go the way of pseudo-sciences 
 like alchemy and astrology. 
 
 This is where we stand now. The " soul " (as 
 substance) is gone. " Consciousness," if not going, 
 is threatened. Between the " unconscious " of the 
 psycho-analysts and the " behaviour " of the 
 behaviourists, what is the outlook for psychology ? 
 Can we discern anywhere the promise of a movement 
 towards synopsis ? 
 
 5. Yes, we can discern such a promise. At any 
 rate, it is as if the stage were all set for a synoptic 
 movement to begin. We have no right, perhaps, 
 to prophesy that such a movement will actually
 
 154 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 take place merely because all the conditions seem 
 eminently favourable, but we have a right at least 
 to point out what these favourable conditions are. 
 (a) In the first place, there is common ground in 
 the almost universal acceptance of evolution as the 
 context within which a theory of " finite," i.e., 
 animal or human, mind must be framed. The 
 evolutionary point of view is shared by nearly all 
 psychologists. Even those whose method is analytic 
 and introspective will not deny that minds fall 
 within the realm of the living, and that they pre- 
 suppose, so far as empirical evidence goes, the 
 existence of living bodies in good working order. 
 There really seems no good ground for denying that 
 the ingestion of food is as essential to " mental," 
 as it is to " bodily," work, or that efficiency in 
 thinking and willing requires a varied equipment 
 of bodily responses and adjustments, technically 
 called " motor-sets," ready for use as occasion 
 demands. Minds, then, presuppose living bodies, 
 both in the order of evolution, and as conditions of 
 their existence and development here and now. 
 Behaviouristic psychologists certainly, one and all, 
 are found to stress this fact and even to exaggerate 
 its importance. And philosophers, on their side, 
 whether they be realists or idealists, appear ready 
 to agree on this point, even to the very language in 
 which they express it. To a realist, like Professor
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 155 
 
 S. Alexander, mind is a new quality or level of 
 existence in the order of evolution, which comes 
 into being with living bodies possessing a nervous 
 system. It is a " perfection " supervening upon 
 the appropriate bodily conditions. Precisely the 
 same is the verdict of an idealist, like Bernard 
 Bosanquet, who recalls Hegel's account of an 
 actuelle Seele as " the perfection of a living body 
 highly trained and definitely habituated." Con- 
 scious behaviour, they all agree, cannot be construed 
 as the guidance of the bodily machine by a separate 
 soul somehow attached to it. The most original 
 or creative thinking is only made possible by, and 
 grows out of, the whole organized system built up 
 through the accumulation of conscious and 
 unconscious doings and experiences. 
 
 (6) Secondly, the concept of " behaviour " 
 signalizes a return to a more concrete study of 
 mind. It is, as we have already seen, closely akin 
 to Aristotle's concept of mind, and definitely 
 emancipates us from the abstractions which the 
 dualistic separation of body and mind inflicts upon 
 us. A behaviourist, whose programme, like that 
 of E. B. Holt, includes the study of man as " work- 
 ing or playing, reading, writing, or talking, making 
 money or spending it, constructing or destroying, 
 curing disease, alleviating poverty, comforting the 
 oppressed, and promoting one or another sort of
 
 156 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 orderliness," cannot be accused of neglecting 
 anything that goes to make a man's mind what it 
 is. It is all to the good that human activities 
 should not here be described in parallel languages, 
 viz., on the one side, in physiological terms as more 
 or less complex responses to more or less complex 
 stimuli, and, on the other, in terms of purely " in- 
 ward " feelings, thinkings, willings. The concept 
 of behaviour, so we would deliberately and em- 
 phatically suggest, has precisely the great merit 
 that it permits us to use the terms of ordinary life, 
 the total meaning of which combines within itself 
 the experience of the observer describing others 
 and the experience of the subject expressing his 
 feelings and thoughts. The meaning, e.g., of 
 " playing " is derived hardly less from seeing others 
 play than from playing oneself. Neither way of 
 experience by itself is adequate or sufficing. One 
 has to do or suffer a thing, in order to " know what 
 it feels like," to realize it in terms of one's own 
 sensations of movement with their attendant 
 pleasure or pain. This helps one to interpret what 
 one observes others doing or undergoing. But, 
 on the other hand, the observation of others in turn 
 helps one to interpret the meaning of one's own 
 feelings and sensations. It supplies that fuller 
 understanding which comes from realizing what 
 one's own conduct looks like to others and what
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 157 
 
 feelings and judgments it evokes in them. The 
 total fact requires the fusion of both points of view. 
 In short, we are welcoming the concept of be- 
 haviour as delivering us from the body-soul dualism 
 which compels us, in effect, instead of studying 
 the living creature as a whole in its world as a whole, 
 to split up our study of it into physiology on the 
 one hand and introspective psychology on the other. 
 How far behaviourists will accept this use of their 
 concept is for the moment doubtful. E. B. Holt 
 comes nearest to the position for which we are here 
 pleading. He makes it very clear, in discussing, e.g., 
 the behaviour of a bee, that it will not do to analyze 
 its behaviour merely into separate reflexes answering 
 to successive stimuli, whilst wholly ignoring the 
 total pattern of its behaviour, viz., that it is 
 collecting honey and carrying it home to the hive. 
 The physiological side here is duly subordinated, 
 but when Holt turns to human behaviour, it is not 
 equally clear how far he recognizes and incorporates 
 the fact, that an agent's experience of the action 
 which he performs is different from the outside 
 observer's experience who is merely looking on. 
 He writes as if the analysis were always conducted 
 from an observer's point of view. So, indeed, it 
 must be with the bee, for the bee cannot tell us 
 what her doings feel like. But, every word of our 
 language which expresses human activity has, as
 
 158 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 we said above, a meaning in the full understanding 
 of which the knowledge which we get by observation 
 of others and the knowledge which we have as 
 agents must be joined and fused. From extreme 
 behaviourists, like J, B. Watson, who reject the 
 language of consciousness altogether, we must at 
 this point part company. They impoverish the 
 concept of behaviour too much to serve our synoptic 
 purpose. 
 
 (c) Even the current controversy about " con- 
 sciousness " and " introspection " brings grist to 
 our mill. Watson argues as if there were no 
 alternative between introspection, " looking into 
 one's own mind," and external observation of 
 another's bodily behaviour, and he would hold 
 psychology strictly to the latter method. But 
 this appears to overlook the fact that language 
 serves for self -expression, and that we constantly 
 make statements of psychological import about 
 ourselves, without first going through the elaborate 
 procedure of " turning our attention inwards upon 
 ourselves " and " making an object of our own 
 minds." When we say that we feel, believe, doubt, 
 think, want, intend, etc., we are expressing and 
 communicating our minds, and need no intro- 
 spection for doing so. The meaning which these 
 verbs have comes to them, not merely from our 
 watching the behaviour of others or hearing their
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 159 
 
 language, but from our own experience of what it 
 is to do these things. In short, self-expression by 
 language, the meanings of which, coming from two 
 sources, are subject to a twofold check, is a form of 
 behaviour which emancipates the study and descrip- 
 tion of behaviour, among human beings at least, 
 from exclusive restriction to the observer's point 
 of view. 
 
 Psychologists rarely acknowledge this fact in so 
 many words, though they always acknowledge it 
 by acting upon it. The explicit recognition of it, 
 we submit, permits and demands the expansion of 
 the concept of behaviour so as to include the normal 
 language of consciousness. There is, if this be 
 admitted, no need to force upon all psychological 
 terms a meaning which is either technically physio- 
 logical, or else intelligible only from an outside 
 observer's point of view. With this correction, 
 the obvious objections which at present He against 
 the concept of behaviour, as advocated, e.g., by 
 J. B. Watson, cease to apply and "behaviour" 
 may well become the most useful term in the 
 psychologist's vocabulary. 
 
 (d) Consciousness, then, if we are right, can be 
 incorporated*^! behaviour, but we need not claim, 
 therefore, that all behaviour is conscious. On the 
 contrary, the concept of behaviour, taken as covering 
 a range within which conscious behaviour forms the
 
 160 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 higher levels, makes it possible, not only to take 
 full account of all the habits and automatisms, 
 acquired, or innate, which consciousness presupposes, 
 but also to include the " unconscious " of the 
 psycho-analysts. The way in this direction has been 
 shown by E. B. Holt's Freudian Wish, which 
 restates Freud's principle in a most original way, 
 making it available for the psychology of the 
 normal mind instead of merely for that of the 
 pathological mind. What the psycho-analyst is 
 studying is persistent tendencies to behaviour 
 which, though powerful in themselves, are so 
 strongly repressed by dominant behaviour-systems 
 more powerful than they, that they do not appear 
 in consciousness at all, except in a disguised form 
 in dreams, or by misfits and derangements of 
 conscious behaviour indicative of hidden conflict. 
 (e) And, lastly, there is a convergence of philo- 
 sophical theories from very different sides upon a 
 view of mind which may fitly round off our tale. 
 A creature's behaviour is relative to its environment, 
 is a " function " of it, in the technical language 
 which some psychologists have borrowed from 
 mathematics. Vice versa, the environment is 
 relative to the creature : its world is what it responds 
 to, what it takes account of in its behaviour. A 
 dog's philosophy, so it has been said, would be : 
 What smells is real ; what does not smell is nothing.
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 161 
 
 This is probably unfair to the dog who, we would 
 gladly believe, loves his master for more than his 
 smell, even if he recognizes him chiefly by his smell. 
 But the principle is sound : a creature's world is 
 denned by what it responds to, including, of course, 
 conscious response where that occurs. Its world 
 is a selection out of the wider universe, a " cross- 
 section." Creatures with a keener sense of smell 
 than ours, for example, have to that extent a wider 
 world than we. The same principle applies to the 
 human world. The world in which each one of us 
 lives is defined for him by his responses and interests. 
 This is quite a familiar fact recognized in every 
 comparison of mind with mind. One man is aware 
 of, and loves to contemplate, study, and enjoy, 
 things of the very existence of which most of his 
 neighbours are unaware. Or, even when they are 
 aware of the same things, one man's understanding 
 of them may be far completer than another's. 
 Or, again, one man's range of interests may com- 
 prehend and include those of many lesser minds ; 
 take, e.g., the mind of a Leonardo, or a Goethe, or 
 a Napoleon. The point is not affected, even if 
 with some of the English realists, like Alexander, 
 Laird, and others, we insist on distinguishing 
 between the mental acts of apprehending and the 
 non-mental objects apprehended. For it will still 
 remain true that, when we rank and estimate minds,
 
 162 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 be it in respect of their scientific knowledge, be it 
 for skill in business, or wisdom in statesmanship, 
 be it merely for wit or humour in conversation, 
 we value, not their acts of apprehension in the 
 abstract, but the worlds to which they show them- 
 selves responsive. A mind, in fact, as we said 
 earlier in the lecture, is a world, when we think of 
 what habitually engages its interests, elicits its 
 feelings and purposes, is the object of its thoughts 
 and actions. On some such concept of mind a 
 behaviourist, like Holt (from whom, above, we 
 borrowed the term " cross-section), and an idealist, 
 like Bosanquet, appear to converge. Of course, 
 " cross-section " must be interpreted to cover 
 past experiences as well as present, and like- 
 wise anticipations of future events and plans to 
 meet them. It must cover equally the behaviour 
 of a thinker who focuses the experiences and 
 studies of a lifetime into the writing of a book, 
 and that of a general who plans a campaign. A 
 mind, according to its range and power, focuses 
 within itself a more or less varied section of the 
 universe. Consciousness, according to its degree, 
 makes for wider and also more systematic respon- 
 siveness. Above all, it seems that only where 
 there is consciousness do we find a measure of self- 
 direction, of freedom, initiative, experiment and 
 exploration in practical construction and invention,
 
 THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MIND 163 
 
 creative originality in the search for truth and for 
 beauty. Activities such as these are, by every 
 usage of the term, credited to " mind," but they 
 are " behaviour," too behaviour which is con- 
 scious indeed, which is of that intensely conscious 
 kind described by Bergson as the " spear-point " 
 of creative advance. In some such way as this we 
 must conceive the mind of man, of which we spoke 
 in the first lecture as moulding Nature to its needs 
 and using Nature's materials and forces in the 
 building up of its civilization. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 1. Alexander, S. Space, Time and Deity. (Macmillan & Co., 
 
 1920.) 
 
 2. Bergson, H. Matter and Memory. (George Allen & 
 
 Unwin, 1913.) 
 
 3. Bergson, H. Creative Evolution. (Macmillan & Co., 
 
 1914.) 
 
 4. Bosanquet, B. The Principle of Individuality and Value. 
 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1912.) 
 
 5. Burnet, John " The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul " (Pro- 
 
 ceedings of the British Academy, Vol. VII.) 
 
 6. Crawford, The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle. 
 
 W. J. (J. M. Watkins, 1920.) 
 
 7. Hoernle', Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics. (New 
 
 R. F. A. York : Harcourt, Brace & Co. London : 
 
 Kegan Paul, 1920.) 
 
 8. Holt, E. B. The Concept of Consciousness. (George 
 
 Allen & Co., 1914.) 
 
 9. Holt, E. B. The Freudian Wish. (Henry Holt & Co., 
 
 IQI5-) 
 
 10. Merz, J. T. A Fragment on the Human Mind. (W. 
 Blackwood & Sons, 1919.)
 
 164 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 11. McDougall, W.Body and Mind. (Methuen & Co., 1911.) 
 
 12. Richardson, Spiritual Pluralism and Recent Philosophy. 
 C. A. (Camb. Univ. Press, 1919.) 
 
 13. Tansley, A. G. The New Psychology. (George Allen & 
 
 Unwin, 1920.) 
 
 14. Watson, J. B. Psychology from the Standpoint of a Be- 
 
 haviourist. (J. B. Lippincott, 1919.) 
 
 For behaviourism in its extremest form the reader may 
 consult, in addition to No. 14, Professor Watson's very illuminat- 
 ing paper under the title, " Is Thinking merely the Action of 
 Language Mechanisms ? " in the British Journal of Psychology, 
 Vol. XI, Part I. Behaviourism in its broader and more philo- 
 sophical form is best studied in No. 9. The concept of mind 
 as a " cross-section " of the universe is taken from No. 8, ch. ix. 
 Otherwise, this book should be used with caution, as no longer 
 representing Professor Holt's views. No. 13 gives a convenient 
 account of the influence of psycho-analysis on the theory of mind . 
 It avoids the sensationalism of which psycho-analytic literature 
 is sometimes guilty. The realistic theory of mind as a tissue of 
 mental acts is most fully set forth in No. i. But the reader 
 might also refer to Professor John Laird's Problems of the Self 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1915) and A Study in Realism, ch. viii (Camb. 
 Univ. Press, 1920). Nos. 2, 3, n and 12 may be studied for 
 views of mind at variance with the view adopted in this 
 lecture as best fitting into a synoptic pattern. This latter view 
 has been greatly influenced by No. 4, especially chs. ii-v. No. 
 7, ch. viii, may also be consulted. No. 10 traces in an interesting 
 manner the way in which the world of mind develops. No. 6 
 is the most recent record of the attempts of an English scientist, 
 by profession a lecturer on engineering, to apply the methods of 
 physical science to the study of materializations. The same 
 investigator's The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (J. M. Watkins, 
 1917), and Experiments in Psychical Science (ibid., 1919) may be 
 referred to for earlier reports. It must, however, be pointed 
 out that all Dr. Crawford's books are popular expositions rather 
 than scientific treatises, and that the experiments of other 
 investigators with the Goligher circle, made after Dr. Crawford's 
 death, have led to negative results and thrown a great deal of 
 doubt on the adequacy of his methods. For wider reading on 
 all the lines of evidence commonly summed up as " psychical 
 research," and for their bearing on our theories of the soul, 
 Students will be well advised to go straight to the Proceedings
 
 of the Society for Psychical Research (London : Francis Edwards). 
 They must judge for themselves how far they will adopt the 
 very positive and confident conclusions put forward, e.g., by 
 Sir Oliver Lodge in The Survival of Man and in Raymond, or by 
 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 RELIGION AND THE MEANING OF " GOD " 
 
 " The feeling of the Divine is justified, as we shall see ; yet 
 not all opinions based on it are justifiable." Varisco, The Great 
 Problems. 
 
 IN our last lecture, greatly daring, we had 
 ventured to suggest that the concept of " be- 
 haviour " might prove elastic enough to 
 incorporate within itself " consciousness " as well 
 as " the unconscious," and to overcome, also, the 
 dualism which splits the unity of living man into an 
 " inward " stream of experiences and an " outward " 
 body a ghost-soul mysteriously linked to a piece 
 of physical mechanism. 
 
 It is, however, only right that we should acknow- 
 ledge that there are philosophers and psychologists 
 of the first rank who still advocate the contrary 
 view that body and mind are absolutely distinct 
 entities. Thus, Bergson, partly on general meta- 
 physical grounds, partly on evidence drawn from 
 disturbances of memory, argues that the function 
 
 1 66
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 167 
 
 of brain and body is solely to supply motor- 
 mechanisms through which the mind can act on 
 the environment ; and that " the mind overflows 
 the brain," i.e., that much goes on in the mind for 
 which there is no physical basis, or counterpart, 
 in the brain. 
 
 Again, McDougall occupies an exceptional posi- 
 tion among psychologists in maintaining that body 
 and soul are distinct and that the soul can con- 
 tinue to exist by itself after its separation from 
 the body. In his Body and Mind he offers a varied 
 assortment of arguments in support of this view. 
 Among them the most striking is his declaration 
 that it is hardly conceivable that without the 
 belief in immortality " whole nations could rise 
 to the level of an austere morality, or even maintain 
 a decent standard of conduct." Hence, he regards 
 it as extremely desirable that psychology should 
 furnish, if possible, scientific support for the belief 
 that the soul survives bodily death. And he 
 quotes with apparent approval Tylor's dictum, in 
 Primitive Culture, that " animism " (which is the 
 technical name for the theory of the soul as an 
 entity independent of the body) is the groundwork 
 of religion from the savage up to civilized man. 
 ' The future of religion is intimately bound up with 
 the fate of animism." 
 
 We have, h^re, but another instance of a linkage
 
 168 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of ideas which, reaching across all abstract boundary 
 lines, demands synoptic treatment. By an effort of 
 abstraction we can limit our concepts to narrowly- 
 defined fields and uses, and shut our eyes to all 
 problems which press in from beyond our boundary- 
 lines. But such problems do not cease to exist 
 because we may choose methodically to ignore them. 
 Life and literature keep forcing them again and 
 again on our notice, and when we have once noticed 
 them we cannot, except at the price of intellectual 
 dishonesty, refuse to make the attempt to adjust 
 our different accounts of different fields to each 
 other and to form them into a coherent whole. 
 
 Our final task, therefore, in this present lecture 
 is to bring religious experience and thought within 
 the scope of our survey. Let us take stock of what 
 appear to be the chief movements of thought in 
 contemporary philosophy of religion, especially as 
 they bear on the central problem of all, viz., the 
 existence of God. 
 
 2. If we would be fair to our subject, we must 
 confess at once, and bear in mind throughout, that 
 religion is far too vast a topic to be adequately 
 handled within the limits of time of a single lecture. 
 If we want to say anything worth saying at all, we 
 must select and concentrate, and, in order to do so, 
 we must needs ignore many problems which 
 religion raises and be content on many others to
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 169 
 
 take for granted, without debate, positions which 
 would have to be debated in a fuller treatment. 
 The problem which lies at the heart of religion is 
 obviously the problem of God. 1 But before we 
 can approach this problem directly, there is some 
 preliminary spade-work to be done. Even at the 
 risk of seeming dogmatic, we have to lay down, 
 briefly, certain positions and to establish certain 
 distinctions, in order to appreciate correctly the 
 significance of recent contributions to the philo- 
 sophy of religion. 
 
 In the first place, it is almost inevitable that to 
 all of us who are brought up in the tradition of 
 Christianity, the word " religion " should suggest 
 exclusively the Christian religion. Whatever is most 
 vivid in the meaning of " religion " for each of us 
 must needs be drawn from that religion with the 
 creed and ritual of which we are, by education and 
 
 1 Or gods ; but we may claim that the simplification is per- 
 missible in view of the evolution of religion from polytheism to 
 monotheism, and the almost universal consent that mono- 
 theistic religions are " higher," i.e., exhibit the true nature of 
 religion more fully. The Buddhism of Gautama is the only great 
 historic religion which has in it nothing analogous to a personal 
 God or gods. It may be questioned, for this reason, whether 
 it is strictly a religion at all. But, as is explained further on 
 in the lecture, it is impossible to frame any definition of religion 
 which can be rigidly applied, and Buddhism is certainly more 
 than merely a moral theory inculcating a manner of life. Like 
 all religion, it bases its teaching of salvation on a definite theory 
 of, and attitude towards, the universe as a whole, and its inexor- 
 able law of Karma has for a Buddhist's life and thought much of 
 the meaning which God has for a Christian's.
 
 170 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 participation, in some degree familiar. Yet the 
 philosopher of religion, though in a Christian 
 milieu he will draw his readiest illustrations from 
 Christianity, cannot accept any limitation of 
 religion to Christianity. Even though he may 
 agree that Christianity is the highest and truest of 
 religions, he cannot identify himself with the 
 theological ardour which would divide humanity 
 into believers and unbelievers, Christians and 
 heathens. He cannot make it his business to take 
 sides in the quarrels about orthodoxy and hetero- 
 doxy which have disrupted Christendom into 
 hostile sects and denominations. It is not even 
 part of his task to prove to the world at large that 
 Christianity, in some one or other form of it, is the 
 only true religion, and that all other religions are 
 false and their votaries destined to eternal damna- 
 tion. It is not in any such sense as this that the 
 philosopher comes forward as a " defender of the 
 faith." What, then, is the relation of philosophy 
 to religion and, further, to theology? Briefly, 
 we must answer that philosophy, with the 
 help of anthropology, psychology, and the history 
 of religions, takes a comparative survey and 
 recognizes in religion a phenomenon that is 
 universal in the human race at every stage of its 
 civilization and in every period of its history. At 
 the same time, philosophy recognizes also that
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 171 
 
 religion occurs in different types or forms, and that 
 each type occurs in manifold degrees of complete- 
 ness. And, lastly, such a survey, guided by the 
 clue of evolution, enables the student also to dis- 
 tinguish more primitive from more advanced, 
 cruder from more refined, types. The facts supply 
 their own standard for grading ; they exhibit the 
 essence of religion more or less perfectly, and the 
 most perfect examples, here as elsewhere, must 
 guide the philosopher in his interpretation of the 
 whole range of the phenomenon. The one thing 
 that philosophy ought not to do is to estimate, or rank, 
 religion by a non-religious standard. 
 
 Every religion has as its centre a creed, and this 
 is true even of those religions in which much more 
 importance is attached to the due performance of 
 ritual than to the performer's belief in the creed. 
 Even though the community may not exact from the 
 individual more than conformity in ritual, yet the 
 ritual, in the last resort, presupposes the creed ; 
 and " every creed," as a recent writer has put it, 
 " is a view of the universe, a theory of man and the 
 world, a theory of God." In short, religion always 
 includes theology, in however rudimentary a form, 
 and all the more developed theologies owe much to 
 philosophy, are indeed philosophical systems on a 
 religious basis. But, for this very reason, there is 
 a clear difference between theology and philosophy
 
 172 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 of religion. Although theology might be, and 
 occasionally has been, studied in an attitude of 
 detached and unbelieving curiosity, it is normally 
 the central point of the professional training for the 
 ministry or priesthood of a given religion. The 
 theologian stands on a particular denominational 
 basis. He is not only religious, but the member 
 of a particular religious community, or church, 
 and it is the tradition and doctrine of his church 
 which he sets himself systematically to expound 
 and defend, accepting it sincerely as the truth with 
 which his religion stands or falls. 
 
 Philosophy of religion, by contrast, is not tied to 
 a particular religion, but takes religion as such for 
 its province. It tries to understand religion in all 
 its varied forms and degrees, to appreciate its place 
 and function in human civilization, and in the 
 individual. Above all, it tries to evaluate religion, 
 to justify it as a reasonable attitude for reasonable 
 beings. In this general sense, philosophy has been, 
 and still is, a " defender of the faith." 
 
 3. This last statement may well provoke objec- 
 tion. And this is, perhaps, our best opportunity 
 for considering shortly the diverse tendencies in 
 modern life and thought which are hostile to 
 religion in any form in which it is more than 
 " morality tinged with emotion." As a statement 
 of fact, indeed, our assertion is fairly secure.
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 173 
 
 Almost all the great philosophers of modern times 
 have taken religion seriously. Without neces- 
 sarily defending all the details of the Christian, or 
 of any other, theology, they have yet defended 
 religion as such. They have tried to show that 
 the nature of the universe sustains and justifies, in 
 principle, the religious attitude. But, as a state- 
 ment of how philosophy ought to deal with religion, 
 our assertion will be challenged by all who hold that, 
 so far from justifying religion, it is the function of 
 philosophy to emancipate the human mind from its 
 bondage to religion. There has been growing, 
 throughout the nineteenth century, a steady 
 counter-current of revolt against religion, which 
 has reflected itself in sharp criticism of every 
 philosophy of religion which does not either identify 
 religion with morality or, else, treat it as a super- 
 stition to be overcome by the advance of civiliza- 
 tion and science. The roots of this movement are 
 spread so widely through every province of human 
 thought and activity, that its advocates have some 
 excuse for their claim to be the heralds of the future, 
 the leaders of " progress." The philosophically 
 most powerful representative of this tendency is 
 " positivism," and in Comte's law of the three 
 stages of human thought theological, meta- 
 physical, positive it has found the classical formula 
 for its interpretation of history and for its gospel of
 
 174 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 progress. The emancipation of science from 
 theology, of which we took note throughout the 
 preceding lectures, though its beginnings date back 
 beyond positivism, yet received from it a fresh 
 impetus. Everywhere positivism stands for the 
 rejection of all beliefs in the supernatural as mere 
 survivals of pre-scientific modes of thought. History, 
 anthropology, psychology are studied from a 
 naturalistic angle, and then in turn invoked to 
 reinforce the positivistic conclusion about religion. 
 The very fact that to the anthropologist the beliefs 
 of primitive peoples which he studies are nothing 
 but superstitions and myths, and their ritual full 
 of magic, opens his eyes to many survivals of 
 myth and magic in the symbols and language of 
 his own religion. Thus a process of detachment 
 and scepticism has set in. Religion in all its forms 
 is approached, not as something which is being 
 believed, accepted, lived, by the student, but as an 
 object for aloof intellectual curiosity. All human 
 beliefs, it appears, can be studied as facts, in entire 
 abstraction from the question of their truth. Die 
 Wissenschaft kennt keine Werturteile 1 is the classic 
 maxim for this attitude. Indeed, if the student 
 begins by regarding primitive forms of religion as 
 obviously false, this judgment will inevitably 
 
 1 It is not the business of science to pass judgments of value 
 (scil., on the objects which it studies).
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 175 
 
 extend to the higher forms, too. If religion began 
 as superstition, why should it not end as such ? 
 Similarly, psychology, working on Mr. A. J. Balfour's 
 principle, " Scratch a reason and you will find a 
 cause," shows that beliefs are commonly induced 
 by a variety of non-rational causes, and may persist, 
 not only in the absence of objective reasons for 
 them, but in the face of patent counter-evidence or 
 inherent improbability. Even concerning meta- 
 physical beliefs, one of the greatest living meta- 
 physicians, Mr. F. H. Bradley, has remarked that 
 " metaphysics is nothing but the finding of bad 
 reasons for what we believe upon instinct." True, 
 he goes on, at once, to add that " to find these 
 reasons is itself an instinct," nor does its origin in 
 instinct necessarily imply that a belief is false. 
 Still, the reaction against religion persists, gaining 
 no little strength from the ill-judged insistence of 
 the orthodox on the literal acceptance of much in 
 the traditional doctrine which deserves to give way 
 to better knowledge or finer feeling. The cause of 
 religion has suffered at the hands of its friends by 
 their attempt to retain much bad science in the 
 bible, and much bad logic in theology. 
 
 That the positivists themselves should have 
 founded a church of the " religion of humanity," 
 which enlisted the enthusiasm of some of the finest 
 spirits of the age, like John Stuart Mill, is no doubt a
 
 176 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 tribute to the strength of the demand for religion in 
 human nature. But what is most significant about 
 the new religion is the point of its challenge to the 
 old. For the ineffective love of a supernatural, or 
 even non-existent, God it seeks to substitute the 
 effective love of actual men and women. From 
 preoccupation with the salvation of his soul in a 
 life after death it seeks to turn man to the service 
 of his kind in this life. It aims at making the 
 energy of religion available in the cause of human 
 progress, for the fight against disease, poverty, 
 ignorance, crime. It preaches a crusade against 
 remediable ills in the cause of a better future for the 
 human race on this earth. Thus, positivism in its 
 opposition to the supernatural is as characteris- 
 tically the philosophy of a scientific age, as in its 
 moral fervour for the amelioration of the human 
 lot it is the philosophy of a philanthropic age. 
 The " meliorism " of William James and the prag- 
 matists echoes the similar attitude of Mill. Both 
 point to the existence of evil as incompatible with 
 the perfection of the universe, be that perfection 
 predicated in the name of the God of theology or 
 in the name of the Absolute of philosophy. Both 
 declare that the belief in perfection must corrupt 
 the moral effort at its source. Is it not illogical 
 to try to better a world which is already as good as 
 it can be ? If this is the best of all possible worlds,
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 177 
 
 morality is meaningless, and either resignation, or 
 the taking of " moral holidays," is the only logical 
 course. On the traditional view, the existence of 
 evil presents an insoluble theoretical problem. On 
 the meliorist view, there is no problem of evil except 
 the practical one, how best to do away with it. This 
 moralistic strain of thought has exercised an 
 influence upon religious thought far beyond the 
 borders of positivism proper. It has revived the 
 old problem of whether God's goodness and wisdom 
 are compatible with his omnipotence, and a philo- 
 sopher like James Ward, a theologian like Dean 
 Rashdall, are found inclining to a " limited " 
 Deity finite in power, infinite in goodness as 
 the most reasonable escape from the horns of the 
 dilemma. 
 
 This is undoubtedly one of the gravest problems 
 which the philosophy of religion has to face. For 
 a full discussion of it this is not the place. But 
 the outline of an answer to the melioristic view may 
 be briefly sketched, (i) In the first place, the 
 evidence of religious experience is decisively against 
 the attempt of meliorists to shrink religion to a 
 moralistic pattern, or to fix the attitude of uncom- 
 promising hostility to evil as the exclusive attitude 
 of religion. The saintliest of men have, as a rule, 
 risen beyond the antagonism of good and evil, and 
 yet there has been no weakening of their efforts or
 
 178 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 their influence for righteousness, as the records of 
 their lives abundantly show. To quote but one 
 recent example. The Bengali saint and mystic, 
 Ramakrishna, said towards the end of his life : 
 " I have now come to a stage of realization in which 
 I see that God is walking in every human form 
 and manifesting Himself alike through the saint and 
 the sinner, the virtuous and the vicious. Therefore 
 when I meet different people, I say to myself : 
 ' God in the form of the saint, God in the form of 
 the sinner, God in the form of the unrighteous and 
 God in the form of the righteous ! ' He who has 
 attained to such realization goes beyond good and 
 evil, above virtue and vice, and realizes that the 
 Divine is working everywhere." 1 Examples such 
 as this might be multiplied indefinitely. They 
 show that the moralists in religion commonly 
 ignore the mystical attitude altogether. (2) The 
 concepts of God's love, of redemption, atonement, 
 forgiveness of sins, take us, not indeed towards any 
 condonation, still less towards any encouragement, 
 of evil, yet in a direction very different from the 
 meliorist's hope. They do not weaken the springs 
 of moral effort, but they warn us not to overestimate 
 their strength. They teach us and here, surely, 
 
 1 Gospel of Ramakrishna, p. 88. See also Max Mdller, The 
 Life and Sayings of Ramakrishna. I owe quotation and refer- 
 ence to J. B. Pratt's The Religious Consciousness (Macmillan & 
 Co., 1920), pp. 132-3.
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 179 
 
 they are at one with common experience not to 
 expect the complete disappearance of evil through 
 the complete perfecting of human nature by human 
 effort. The roots of good and evil lie very deep in 
 human nature and also very close together. The 
 moral problem presents itself afresh to each genera- 
 tion, and in terms which change with every new 
 development in civilization, with new powers and 
 new opportunities giving rise to new desires and 
 altered human relationships. For all a parent's 
 efforts to hand on the hard-won moral heritage to 
 his children by precept and example, he knows 
 well enough that in the main they must acquire 
 the knowledge of good and evil, by which they will 
 actually live, through their own trial and error. 
 Eritis sicut deus, scientes bonum et malum. 1 The 
 " knowledge " here in question must be, for us 
 human beings, not a mere spectator's, but an 
 agent's knowledge a knowledge gained by the 
 good or evil which we personally feel and do. Again, 
 self-control conies only with self-knowledge, and 
 self-knowledge is never complete so long as we 
 constantly find ourselves in new situations to which 
 in temperament, judgment, and purpose we may 
 prove unequal. These hazards seem inherent in 
 human life, and no meliorist has yet shown a way 
 
 1 Ye shall be like unto God, knowing good and evil. Cf. 
 Goethe's Faust.
 
 180 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 to eliminate them. And even if they could be 
 eliminated, how many of us would, with Huxley, 
 be willing to surrender the management of our own 
 lives and be regulated like a clock, on condition of 
 never going wrong ? 
 
 It is not to be forgotten that this whole reaction 
 against religion is, as a movement in the Christian 
 world, a reaction against Christianity. But the 
 meaning of " Christianity " is not simple or single. 
 It may, e.g., mean the bare gospel-record of the 
 teaching of Christ ; it may mean the whole body of 
 doctrine built upon that foundation by the Church ; 
 it may mean the Church as an organization, the 
 acts and policies of which, quite apart from its 
 spiritual teachings, make it a force in human affairs. 
 If the positivist reaction was provoked in part by 
 certain metaphysical and moral features of Christian 
 theology, it was also directed against the Church as 
 a powerful instrument of dominion over the lives 
 and minds of men. Symptomatic of this is the 
 fact that the word " laique " has taken on, in the 
 sociological theories of religion of the Durkheim 
 school, the meaning of " anti-clerical," reflecting 
 the antagonism of church and state in the political 
 life of France. 
 
 At the same time, the trial of the war has made 
 it clear that perhaps the profoundest reaction of 
 men against the Christianity of the churches is due
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 181 
 
 to the perception of the fact that the churches 
 have, on the whole, failed to make the teaching of 
 Christ an effective force in the lives of Christian 
 communities. The most obvious criticism which 
 an intelligent non-European will invariably make 
 upon the white man's civilization is that, by and 
 large, Christians do not practise what they preach, 
 and do not seriously try to. And who will con- 
 fidently deny the charge ? Religion, whatever else 
 it may be, is not departmental. It claims to 
 control and pervade the whole of life. It is not an 
 affair of special moods or exceptional moments. 
 It is not intended to be shelved on weekdays and 
 exhibited on Sundays by going through a con- 
 ventional routine. It is a thing to live by, always. 
 Now, this being so, it is a simple question to ask : 
 How far are our policies and institutions, political 
 or economic, ordered with any definite reference 
 to the Christian ideals which we profess ? The 
 facts, surely, are rather that since we have 
 abandoned the mediaeval ideal of a theocratic state 
 on earth, both politics and economics in their 
 public or communal aspects have emancipated 
 themselves from the control of religious ideals, the 
 sphere of which in consequence has shrunk to the 
 individual's private conduct. Religion is, no doubt, 
 the direct relation of the individual to God, yet 
 it does not follow that the social order which so
 
 182 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 largely determines the individual's aims, duties, 
 and standards of judgment, is indifferent and 
 negligible. Yet, this is exactly what the social 
 order is all too often treated by the churches as 
 being. The most vital and burning problems 
 which at the present day divide men's minds centre 
 precisely round the values for which the existing 
 order stands. Yet, in the main, the churches, 
 which claim to be our guides and guardians in 
 questions of value affecting the whole conduct of 
 our lives, stand timidly aloof and their leaders but 
 too often utter only benevolent exhortations, from 
 which neither they nor their hearers trouble to draw 
 the practical consequences. 
 
 That the churches should, as is commonly acknow- 
 ledged, be losing their hold, and that much genuinely 
 religious life should be alienated from them and seek 
 an outlet through other channels or languish for 
 lack of an outlet, is in the circumstances not a matter 
 for wonder. But, in spite of this, the philosopher, 
 taking a comprehensive survey of human experience 
 and thought, has little difficulty in discerning the 
 central place which " religion " a term which hi 
 this assertion means something more fundamental 
 than assent to this or that theology, or membership 
 of this or that church holds in normal human life. 
 Whatever the fluctuations in the fortunes of 
 churches may be, or, again, the quickenings and
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 183 
 
 slackenings in the energy of men's religious life itself, 
 philosophy renders to religion the service of making 
 the need of it and the justification for it clear 
 to reflective consciousness. 
 
 4. We have followed the negative argument 
 long enough. Let us now turn to the positive side 
 and consider the procedure of philosophy in its 
 defence of religion. 
 
 We said above that philosophy has to " evaluate " 
 religion. The phrase may have suggested philosophy 
 sitting in the judgment-seat, and religion coming 
 before it to assert its own value and accept philo- 
 sophy's verdict on its claim. But, whence is the 
 supposed philosophical judge to take his own 
 standard for measuring the justice of that claim ? 
 Philosophy has nothing to philosophize with except 
 what human experience offers to it as material for 
 reflective synthesis or synopsis. There is, indeed, 
 a formal principle by which the philosopher is 
 guided, viz., the principle of consistency or 
 coherence. But the matter to be moulded in this 
 form consists of all the wealth which experience 
 presents to him who would " think things together." 
 This implies at once that the existence of religion 
 is one of the cardinal data for a philosophical 
 synopsis. Whatever choice philosophy may have 
 in the way in which it will fit religion into its edifice, 
 it has no choice between accepting and rejecting it
 
 184 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Philosophy is not free to omit religion ; it simply 
 cannot leave religion out. 
 
 But more : not only must it include religion 
 among its data, but it must do so substantially on 
 religion's own terms, and at its own valuation. 
 It must concede the central place of religion. Its 
 synopsis would be untrue to the proportions of the 
 data, if it did not put in the centre the things which 
 are in the centre. That religion is thus central or 
 focal is a commonplace among all students of it. 
 Psychologically, it is admitted on all hands, 
 it is not " departmental." It is not an affair of 
 the intellect alone, or the will alone, or the feelings 
 alone, though any one of these three may be 
 dominant in the religion of a given individual or a 
 given age. In principle, religion involves the 
 whole man : at its best, it is itself a synthesis, a 
 unification, a harmonious stabilization of all sides 
 of his nature. And for this reason, again, it is, in 
 principle, not one departmental interest or activity 
 among others : at its best, it pervades all interests 
 and sweeps them into its orbit. This being its 
 nature, it is best, perhaps, to follow those writers 
 who speak of religion as an " attitude " rather than 
 as an " experience." For " experience " suggests 
 too much that religion is merely " subjective," 
 mere inward feeling, mere thought without an 
 objective basis. " Attitude," without ceasing to
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 185 
 
 connote the subjective side, yet suggests also 
 activity, response, and thus implies the objective 
 side, the universe, to which religion is the response. 
 Moreover, " attitude " brings out, too, that religion 
 is more than a theory : it is a way of life. It 
 includes, indeed, always a theory, or theology, 
 more or less reasoned and explicit, but it is first 
 and always more than merely intellectual assent to 
 a theory. And, again, whilst, no doubt, the theory 
 aims at being true as tested by logical canons, and 
 must be recast if it fails to meet that test, yet the 
 truth of religious theory is not really separable 
 from the success of the religious attitude. Religion 
 claims to " work," to be known by its fruits. This 
 " pragmatic " character of religion, too, is nowadays 
 conceded by most of the students of it. Fruitful- 
 ness and moral effect are vouchers of truth. Or, 
 perhaps, we should rather, with W. E. Hocking, 
 use the pragmatic principle negatively : that which 
 does not work is not true, and say of any theory 
 which " lowers the capacity of men to meet the 
 stress of existence, or diminishes the worth to them 
 of what existence they have," that it is somehow 
 false, and that we have no peace until it is remedied. 
 That religion works in the way here suggested by 
 Hocking cannot well be doubted by anyone who 
 honestly looks at the facts. Here is the verdict 
 of the most recent student of the religious conscious-
 
 186 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 ness, Professor J. B. Pratt : " When one compares 
 the deeply religious and spiritual person with the 
 best and bravest of those who are not religious, 
 one sees, it must be confessed, that the former 
 possesses something which the others lack. It is 
 not that he is any better morally than his non- 
 religious brother, nor any more appreciative of 
 beauty and love, nor any braver. It is, rather, that 
 he has a confidence in the universe and an inner 
 joy which the other does not know. He is, perhaps, 
 no more at home in this world than the other 
 (perhaps he is not so much at home here), but he 
 seems more at home in the universe as a whole. 
 He feels himself in touch, and he acts as if he were 
 in touch, with a larger environment. He either 
 has a more cosmic sense or his attitude towards 
 the cosmos is one of larger hope and greater con- 
 fidence. Besides this, or as a result of this, he has 
 an inner source of joy and strength which does not 
 seem dependent on outer circumstance, and which 
 in fact seems greatest at times when outer sources 
 of strength and promise fail. He is, therefore, able 
 to shed a kind of peace around him which no argu- 
 ment and no mere animal spirits and no mere 
 courage can produce." 
 
 We see now more clearly in what sense philosophy 
 defends and justifies religion and accepts it at its 
 own valuation. But we may throw light upon the
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 187 
 
 same point from another side. If philosophy, it 
 may be said, defends religion, it should at least 
 define what it is that it defends. Now this problem 
 of defining religion is one which has given no end 
 of trouble. Pratt refers to no less than forty-eight 
 definitions from as many different writers, and 
 rounds off the list by adding two fresh c les of his 
 own. The reason for the difficulty is very obviously 
 that religion is so multiform in type and degree, 
 that a formula which would adequately reflect its 
 variations would be intolerably complex. On the 
 other hand, any compact formula will, in proportion 
 to its compactness, fit part of the facts only, and 
 compel us to reject as irreligious whatever it does 
 not include. And there is a deeper difficulty 
 which has induced one of the foremost English 
 writers on religion at the present day, Professor 
 C. C. J. Webb, to declare that any definition of 
 religion is impossible, viz., the difficulty that it will 
 always be either circular or irrelevant : the defining 
 phrase will either surreptitiously slip in the term 
 to be defined, or else miss out precisely what 
 differentiates religion from other human attitudes. 
 But, if religion is thus indefinable and unique, a 
 consequence follows which has not always been 
 observed. It is this, that the philosopher who sets 
 out to discuss religion must himself be religious. 
 For else, to put it bluntly, he will simply not know
 
 188 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 what he is talking about. The outsider's point of 
 view alone is here clearly inadequate. Whether a 
 definition of i sligion be possible or not, no definition 
 can enable anyone to understand what religion is 
 who is not acquainted with it to some extent by 
 being religious. Unless the student knows what 
 the term " religion " means by being religious, 
 there is no other attitude in which he can stand to 
 religious language, belief, and cult, than the external 
 attitude in which we all commonly stand to religions 
 other than our own. Let a Protestant, brought 
 up in ignorant contempt of " popish idolatry," 
 watch a Roman Catholic service the candles, 
 bells, beads, incense, genuflexions and other 
 ministrations, the repetition of lengthy formulae in 
 unintelligible Latin, the appeals to saints, etc. 
 and as he stands there, detached, aloof, unsharing, 
 he may find it utterly unintelligible that the worship- 
 pers take part with reverence, and gain obvious 
 peace and comfort. A fortiori, the mental distance 
 is even greater when a European watches the 
 ceremonies of savages, involving, it may be, animal 
 sacrifices, grotesque dances, self-torture, or indecent 
 rites. If it is hard for those brought up in one 
 religion to understand another, it is doubly hard for 
 those who are irreligious to understand those who 
 are religious. Religion, then, cannot be intelligently 
 discussed except by those who are acquainted with
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 189 
 
 it from within, though this acquaintance must 
 needs be with some particular type of religion, in 
 conformity with the student's whole intellectual 
 outlook and social heritage. And this brings us 
 back to our point : if being religious is the only 
 basis on which we can philosophize about religion 
 with genuine insight, and if being religious means 
 living in a definite attitude towards the universe 
 an attitude engaging all sides of our nature, per- 
 vading all our activities, and including a core of 
 belief or theory about the character of the universe 
 and its disposition towards us then we can under- 
 stand why philosophy, so far from seeking to 
 destroy religion as being unreasonable, has sought 
 to defend its reasonableness by exhibiting reflec- 
 tively its central position in man's life as a " life of 
 reason." Whoever knows " from within " what 
 religion is, cannot thereafter either build his philo- 
 sophy without it or treat it as anything but central. 
 Negatively, this appears even in the attitude of 
 pessimism which is essentially an inverted type of 
 religion, the cri du cceur of those who have failed 
 to find, or to maintain, the attitude of confidence 
 and trust in the universe, and who thence proclaim 
 either that human existence has nothing of value 
 to justify it, or else that our values, in a universe 
 indifferent to them, are not destined to endure. 
 For the pessimist this negative result is as central
 
 190 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 in his whole scheme of thinking as is the opposite 
 estimate for any philosophy which bases itself on 
 religion triumphant. In either case, as Webb 
 says, it is " with Religion that the interest in 
 Reality as a whole, which is the characteristic 
 interest of philosophy, first takes shape in the 
 human mind." 
 
 5. In the technical language of philosophy, the 
 position which we have now reached has been 
 acknowledged and expressed in one of two ways. 
 One way is to assert that religion is metaphysical, 
 i.e., that metaphysics, as the explicit effort to frame 
 a reflective theory of the universe as a whole by the 
 thinking together of all sides of human experience, 
 must take from the religious experience, or attitude, 
 its most important clue to the nature of the whole. 
 Religious feeling and thought must be accepted as, 
 in principle, not fancy, or make-believe, but bona 
 fide discovery or revelation of the real character 
 of the real world. The other way, which leads to 
 the same goal, is to be found in the handling by 
 modern philosophers of the old arguments for the 
 existence of God. The lesson which we have 
 learnt from the destructive criticisms of the tra- 
 ditional arguments by Hume and Kant, is that 
 these arguments failed precisely because they tried 
 to demonstrate the existence of God without 
 appealing to the evidence of the religious attitude
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 191 
 
 itself. The tactics of the traditional arguments 
 were undoubtedly due to the distinction between 
 revelation and reason. Religion being regarded as 
 fundamentally based on revelation, i.e., on the 
 self-revelation of God, the problem took the form 
 of reaching the same assurance of God's existence 
 by the road of reasoning, either from the evidence 
 of design in Nature, or from the existence of the 
 world as requiring a cause, or from the assumed 
 perfection of the Supreme Being. None of these 
 three arguments was free, in consequence, to 
 appeal to religion itself, for that would have been 
 an appeal to revelation, narrowly interpreted as 
 an appeal to the Holy Scriptures and the authori- 
 tative teaching of the Church. By contrast, the 
 argument of modern philosophy of religion does not 
 assume, as its basis, this distinction between 
 revelation and reason (or, in another form of it, 
 between revealed and natural religion). Hence it 
 does not attempt to prove if " proof " is the 
 proper word the existence of God without an 
 appeal to religious experience. And, whilst appeal- 
 ing to this experience, and, indeed, regarding it as 
 the only really relevant evidence, it also enlarges 
 the scope of it far beyond " revelation," so as to 
 include, in effect, all that is valuable in the old 
 appeal to " reason." The modern argument has 
 learned much from the methods of Kant's
 
 192 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 " postulates of the moral reason," for a postulate 
 is essentially a belief held, or a theory affirmed, as 
 implicit in the maintenance of an " attitude " 
 towards the universe in the sense which we have 
 above given to the term " attitude." To put it 
 in a nutshell : we know God through religion, and 
 there is no other way of knowing him. It is not 
 that we are religious because we have become 
 convinced antecedently, from other sources, that 
 there is a God. Nor do we gain our conviction by 
 an exercise of the " will to believe," if that means, 
 Pascal-wise, taking a gambler's chance on the 
 possibility of there being a God. If there is a 
 " venture of faith " which outruns demonstration 
 and yet is not sapped by doubt, it is because in 
 religion we live by a conviction which the very 
 habit of living by it re-enforces and sustains, and 
 which justifies itself by a stability of outlook and 
 response unshaken by the vicissitudes of human 
 fortune, and by a strength equal to every call 
 upon it. 
 
 The result of this re-orientation of the philosophy 
 of religion, in respect of the problem of God's 
 existence, is far-reaching. It means, as Webb 
 puts it, that " the great question for the thinker 
 about religion is not whether God exists, but rather 
 what God is." Or, to put it differently, to doubt 
 God's existence is, at bottom, nothing but to doubt
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 193 
 
 whether the universe, in its real nature, is such as 
 to justify the religious attitude towards it ; whether 
 it deserves to be worshipped. Even more strikingly 
 the new technique appears in Hocking's attempt 
 to exhibit what it is in our experience of the universe 
 that we mean by " God." In the very form in 
 which he thus puts the problem, it is taken for 
 granted that " experience is essentially meta- 
 physical," that it consists in the " discovery " and 
 " recognition " of a real object. Proof of God's 
 existence is, thus, not a process of building a 
 precarious speculative bridge from the world we 
 see to its unseen author, but a making plain what, 
 in a sense, is there and possessed by us all the time, 
 but what, for all its presence, we may fail securely 
 to grasp or clearly to discern. We need argument 
 because our hold on reality is variable. We live, 
 we feel, we think, now on the surface lightly, now 
 seriously and strenuously in the depths. This is 
 why the assurance which religion as a living attitude 
 carries with it and demonstrates in deeds, needs 
 also to be raised to the level of reflective certainty, 
 at least by, and for, those minds who, having once 
 begun to think things together, are consumed by a 
 cognitive restlessness which only the success of 
 their synoptic endeavours can still. Thus, the 
 argument does not start with a definition of God 
 and then search the world of experience for an 
 13
 
 194 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 object which conforms to the definition : it starts 
 with the world of experience and, pushing through 
 half-truths and partial impressions to its real 
 nature, finds there the meaning of " God." 
 
 6. But we have anticipated in thus focusing 
 our attention upon the problem of the existence of 
 God. This problem is symptomatic of the revival 
 of theism, which is the most recent, as it is also the 
 most striking, movement in contemporary philo- 
 sophy of religion. Among its literature, W. E. 
 Hocking's The Meaning of God in Human Experience 
 is written fresh from the life, as it were ; the record 
 of the philosophical pilgrimage of a deeply religious 
 mind. C. C. J. Webb's Gifford Lectures, especially 
 Vol. I, on God and Personality, develop a theistic 
 philosophy in closest contact with the detailed 
 structure of Christian theology. Professor A. S. 
 Pringle-Pattison's Gifford Lectures on The Idea of 
 God in the Light of Recent Philosophy reach a theistic 
 conclusion, not so much through an interpretation 
 of theological thought, as through a criticism, on 
 the one hand, of naturalistic and agnostic tendencies 
 in modern philosophy, and of pantheistic tendencies 
 on the other. The significance of this movement 
 will be the more readily appreciated when we recall 
 that, not quite thirty years ago, F. H. Bradley, in 
 Appearance and Reality, whilst declaring that 
 nothing could be more certain than religion, yet
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 195 
 
 also proclaimed the God of theology to be " riddled 
 with contradictions." Nor did Bradley hold out 
 any hope that by further, and better, thinking we 
 might remove these contradictions, for the chief 
 of his theses was that all thinking is from its very 
 nature bound to be self -contradictory ; bound to 
 pursue a consistency which it must ever fail to 
 attain. 
 
 The effect of this doctrine might well have been 
 to discourage all philosophical effort, had not 
 Bradley qualified it by saying also that we cannot 
 help thinking and, indeed, that we can think satis- 
 factorily enough for all " practical " purposes. 
 At any rate, since Bradley's book appeared, philo- 
 sophical activity in all directions has been singularly 
 varied and vigorous, and not least so on the subject 
 of religion. There are at least three distinct 
 tendencies : (i) There is the theistic tendency, 
 already noted, which attempts a philosophical 
 defence of belief in a personal God. (2) There is the 
 tendency to emphasize, not so much God and 
 personality, as the perfection, or value, of the 
 universe. Hoffding's definition of religion as " faith 
 in the conservation of value " is a typical expression 
 of this view, which for us is best represented by 
 Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures on The Principle of 
 Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny 
 of the Individual. (3) And there is the curious
 
 196 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 doctrine of " Deity " which S. Alexander has 
 recently put forward, as part of his " realistic " 
 system, in Space, Time and Deity, and which presents 
 familiar motifs in a highly original combination. 
 
 Let us glance at each of these three tendencies, 
 remembering that within the time at our disposal 
 we can do no more than pick out a central point 
 or two. 
 
 (i) The strength of theism, as also its difficulties, 
 lie in its interpretation of religion by social analogies 
 and, consequently, its emphasis on the personality 
 of the worshipper and the personality of God. 
 The chief reason why metaphysicians of our second 
 group shrink from the theistic position is just that 
 they feel unable either to rank human personality 
 so high, or to conceive God so anthropomorphical ly. 
 For God as a person must needs be pictured to the 
 imagination as a man writ large, and as we ascribe 
 to him such human attributes as love, knowledge, 
 will, power, we are ever conscious of alternative 
 dangers, both equally fatal. For, on the one hand, 
 we feel driven to assert that all these attributes 
 exist in God in a perfection utterly beyond anything 
 we know in man. Yet, the more we stress this 
 transcendent perfection, the more do our terms 
 threaten to become meaningless. On the other 
 hand, the more vividly concrete we seek to make 
 their meaning, the more do we shrink God to the
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 197 
 
 dimensions of the human patterns with which we 
 are familiar. However, we do not wish now to 
 exploit these dialectics. The fact stands that, in 
 proportion as the worshipper feels himself responding 
 to a power which responds to him, his religion takes 
 on the theistic form, even though it acknowledges 
 more than one God, or a devil as well as a god. 
 Almost all the higher religions employ the language 
 of social intercourse at its most intimate to render 
 the worshipper's sense of his closeness to, and trust 
 in, God. To know God, and to be known by Him ; 
 to love God, and to be loved by Him is not the best 
 of Christianity summed up in these simple and 
 familiar phrases ? God as father, God as judge, 
 God as King always a social relationship supplies 
 the pattern on which the worshipper's attitude is 
 moulded. Webb admits that the concept of God 
 as a person is of very recent origin even in Christian 
 thought, and that Christianity is the only one of 
 the great historical religions the theology of which 
 culminates in that concept. But he also argues 
 that this is " the natural culmination of a tendency 
 traceable in all Religion," and with skill and 
 sympathy he sets himself to show that the chief 
 concepts of the Christian religion sin, forgiveness, 
 justice, sacrifice, union with God gain both in 
 intelligibility and in moral power when God is 
 conceived as a person. Thus, e.g., " to regard Sin
 
 198 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 as an offence against a personal authority, and still 
 more to regard it as an affront to a loving Father, 
 is a more intelligible and a more ethically significant 
 way of thinking about it than it is to conceive it 
 after the analogy of a physical defilement or an 
 
 automatic mechanism." And both love and know- 
 \ 
 
 ledge, when applied by religion, suggest an intimacy 
 of union in which the distinction of persons adds 
 richness of content and is so little an obstacle to 
 union, that we may well come near to Spinoza's 
 language about our love towards God being the 
 very love with which God loves himself. For 
 " God in us " is as essential to the full religious 
 attitude as " God above, or beyond, us." 
 
 The same social character of theism is developed 
 in a very different and strikingly interesting way by 
 Hocking. 1 After emphasizing that religion in its 
 higher forms grows into a sense of God as the 
 " intimate, infallible associate," the " companion " 
 whose constant presence brings peace of mind and 
 happiness, he describes the " original source of the 
 knowledge of God " as " an experience of not being 
 alone in knowing the world, and especially the world 
 of Nature." This clue he follows up into an analysis 
 
 1 Perhaps Hocking's argument owes something to a position 
 which Royce outlined in his early work on The Religious Aspect 
 of Philosophy. But, if so, Hocking has re-thought and re- 
 stated the argument in a thoroughly original way, and the direct 
 affiliation to Berkeley which it had in Royce, has dropped wholly 
 into the background in Hocking.
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 199 
 
 of our knowledge of Nature as a world actually, 
 or potentially, common to ourselves and others, 
 and of our knowledge of other minds as minds also 
 knowing, or interested in, just these objects which 
 we know and are interested in ourselves. And over 
 this bridge of the social character of knowledge he 
 seeks to travel to the conclusion, that in knowing 
 Nature we are in social contact with the great 
 Other Mind which communicates itself to us through 
 Nature, and which to religion reveals itself in the 
 character of God. 
 
 (2) The second type of philosophy of religion 
 does occasionally express itself in language which, 
 torn from its context, may seem to identify it with 
 straightforward theism. Thus Bosanquet ends his 
 chapter on " The Religious Consciousness " with the 
 words : " Religion establishes the infinite spirit 
 because it is continuous with and present in the 
 finite in love and in the will for perfection. It 
 does not need to appeal to facts of separate being, 
 or to endeavour to demonstrate them. It is an 
 experience of God, not a proof of him." This last 
 sentence illustrates admirably the change in the 
 point of view of modern philosophy of religion which 
 we had pointed out above. But " God " for 
 Bosanquet in this passage is not the personal 
 Spirit of the theist, but rather the impersonal, or 
 super-personal, Reality in its character of perfection.
 
 200 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 The theist's God is characterized by Bosanquet, 
 in a passage immediately preceding the one just 
 quoted, as " an appearance of reality, as distinct 
 from being the whole and ultimate reality." When 
 we translate this statement out of the technical 
 language of philosophy into the language of every- 
 day life, it means (a) that the social analogies and 
 metaphors through which ordinary religious thought 
 expresses itself cannot be taken literally, as if they 
 were either plain statements of fact or ultimate 
 philosophical - truths. And (b) it means, more 
 especially, that the theist's concept of God, as the 
 will for good against evil, is still too much coloured 
 by this antithesis of good and evil to be adequate 
 to a Reality which, as a whole, is perfect. Thus 
 there is a subtle change in this reading of religion. 
 This comes out clearly in that Bosanquet does not 
 regard religion as specially connected with the 
 supernatural, or even the divine (soil., as conceived 
 by theists). It is, for him, the attitude to whatever 
 one at once fears and approves, i.e., worships. 
 " Whatever makes us seem to ourselves worthless 
 in our mere private selves, although or because 
 attaching ourselves in the spirit to a reality of 
 transcendent value, cannot be distinguished from 
 religion." This view is explicitly intended to 
 provide for false religions, i.e., it allows that this 
 attitude of self -surrendering attachment and worship
 
 may be directed to an object undeserving of such 
 devotion. 1 What object, then, is deserving ? The 
 answer gives us Bosanquet's meaning of " God," 
 or rather what he would mean by " God " if he 
 did not on the whole avoid the term because of 
 its theistic associations. His own strict language 
 is studiously impersonal : he means by " God " 
 Reality as a whole, conceived as perfect, and as 
 transcending and transforming within itself the 
 opposition of good and evil. In this perfection 
 man participates, and religion is his sense of this 
 participation, of his fragmentariness made whole, 
 of the evil in him overcome, of his life, for all its 
 failures and blemishes, filled with value. " Every 
 satisfaction and achievement every self-transcen- 
 dence in which we become united with something 
 which was beyond us may be religiously felt, if 
 it is taken as involving recognition of a higher 
 perfection, that is, as coming to us not in our own 
 strength, but as a pledge of our absorption in the 
 greater world." 
 
 Compared with the concrete imagery of current 
 theology, such a rendering of religion will inevitably 
 seem pale. The theist's language has the advantage 
 there. But it is to be noticed that the pallor of 
 the language reflects not thinness of experience, 
 
 1 Patriotism, for example, will be religious by this formula, and 
 it would be an interesting question, whether, or under what 
 conditions, it is a " false " religion.
 
 202 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 but a fullness and intensity to which the more 
 f amiliar terms of religious speech seem inadequate. 
 
 (3) Our third type of philosophy of religion 
 Alexander's shares the modern approach : 
 " Religion is not the sentiment which is directed 
 upon God, but God is that upon which the religious 
 sentiment is directed. The datum of experience 
 is that sentiment, and what God is is known only 
 by examining its deliverances. " " What we worship, 
 that is God." But it takes a highly original turn 
 by treating " deity " or " divine quality " as a 
 term more fundamental than God. " God " is the 
 name for any being (there may be more than one) 
 which possesses " deity." Deity, moreover, is a 
 metaphysical term ; in other words, it belongs to 
 philosophy to show, by an examination of the whole 
 system of things, that what religion worships as 
 God really has the quality which alone justifies the 
 religious passion. The metaphysical argument by 
 which Alexander tries to establish the locus, so to 
 speak, of deity in the scheme of things may be 
 briefly outlined as follows : He conceives the 
 universe as in process of evolution, creatively 
 bringing forth qualities which are not only new, 
 but form a hierarchy, an ascending scale of perfec- 
 tion. Not to go back to the beginnings in 
 " space- time," which, for all Alexander's skill in 
 exposition, are very obscure, we may enumerate
 
 first the secondary qualities, then life, then mind, 
 as to date the latest stages in this evolution towards 
 greater perfection. " Deity " is the next level of 
 perfection, in the birth-throes of which the world 
 is now travailing. It follows that " God," as the 
 possessor of the quality of deity, does not yet exist. 
 He is only about to be. " God is the whole world 
 as possessing the quality of deity. . . . But this 
 possessor of deity is not actual but ideal. As an 
 actual existent, God is the infinite world with its 
 nisus towards deity, or, to adapt a phrase of Leibniz, 
 as big or in travail with deity." Religion is our 
 sense of participating in this creative nisus of the 
 world towards becoming God. In us, in fact, this 
 nisus is at its intensest. Mind is, so to speak, 
 the growing-point towards God. There lies the 
 solid certainty and significance of religion. 
 
 Fascinating as is in many ways this essay in 
 theology, and concordant, too, in its emphasis on 
 the reality of time, on creative evolution, on progress 
 towards perfection, with marked tendencies of 
 modern thought, yet most critics have been puzzled 
 whether to take it seriously. And rightly for it 
 breaks, in effect, with every great historical religion. 
 It satisfies neither the theist nor the absolutist. 
 For, the one holds that God is real here and now, 
 and the other says the same of the perfection of 
 the universe. In this, both of them seem truer than
 
 204 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Alexander to the deliverances of the actual religious 
 consciousness, which is fundamentally an attitude, 
 not towards a reality about to be, but to- 
 wards a reality which endures and is, in fact, 
 " eternal." 
 
 7. Our survey of contemporary philosophy of 
 religion would be incomplete without a brief mention 
 of the problem of immortality. 
 
 Traditionally, immortality stands next to the 
 existence of God among the truths which religion is 
 held to guarantee, and with the defence of which 
 its own existence is held to be bound up. But it 
 must be recorded that, on the whole, recent philo- 
 sophy does not assign to immortality so central 
 or fundamental a place. In fact, nothing is more 
 striking than the hesitancy and almost lukewarm- 
 ness with which the subject is handled. It is not 
 uncommon even for those who, like McDougall, 
 defend the belief in immortality, to disclaim any 
 personal desire for it. Even Webb makes a some- 
 what wry face over it and confesses to " a prejudice 
 against a belief which jars upon and distresses my 
 imagination and from the consideration of which 
 my mind has an instinctive tendency to turn aside." 
 Survival, in fact, for some of the most thoughtful 
 modern minds has ceased to be a thing to be con- 
 fidently expected and longed for : it has become a 
 mere possibility not infrequently contemplated
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 205 
 
 with aversion. Apart from neo-scholastic thinkers, 
 no philosopher now thinks of deducing immortality 
 a priori from the definition of the soul as a single, 
 indivisible, indestructible spiritual substance. Few 
 philosophers share McDougall's view that belief in 
 survival is essential to morality. The attempts 
 to obtain direct evidence of survival from com- 
 munications with " departed spirits " through 
 mediums, even supposing such evidence genuine, 
 are commonly recognized as alien in spirit to 
 religion, though Sir Oliver Lodge and many others 
 think otherwise. The advance in scientific know- 
 ledge of the bodily basis of consciousness has greatly 
 increased for us the difficulty of accepting survival 
 as a fact. In general, a philosopher will make his 
 assent to the doctrine depend very largely on the 
 nature of the supposed life after death. But this 
 question takes us either into a region of more or 
 less mythological speculation reincarnation, trans- 
 migration of souls, resurrection of the body, and so 
 forth or else brings us back in imaginative form 
 to the fundamental problem, What kind of life is 
 truly worth living ? But once we ask what the 
 values are which make existence supremely desirable 
 and satisfying, we may be led on to consider, on the 
 one hand, whether these values are not within our 
 reach here and now, in " this life," and, on the 
 other, whether what we care about fundamentally
 
 206 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 is not the survival, or eternity, of these values 
 rather than the survival of our personal selves. 
 Some such shift of emphasis is noticeable in Webb's 
 remark that " the only form of the hope which it 
 is profitable to indulge is that which is directed, 
 not upon our own eternal life, but upon God's ; 
 and only upon our own as involved in his." And 
 Bosanquet, accepting the consequences of his whole 
 position, directly declares that the criticism of our 
 desires which makes clear to us what as reasonable 
 beings we really want, leads us, not towards the 
 prolongation after death of our individual existences, 
 but towards the assurance that the fundamental 
 values are " eternally real in an ultimate being and 
 in the universe of appearances." 
 
 Time and eternity, the transitory and the 
 enduring, that which passes and that which is 
 stable these are for us moderns, as they were for 
 the ancient Greeks, two of the poles round which 
 our thought revolves. Whether the individual 
 self is transitory or enduring, that is the problem 
 of immortality. On the whole, modern philosophy 
 seems as profoundly impressed with the transitori- 
 ness of human life hi the succession of generations, 
 as with the presence in that life of something which 
 is untouched by time or death. What this some- 
 thing may be has been variously defined, from 
 soul-substance to eternal values. Different thinkers
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 207 
 
 will, no doubt, continue to estimate these 
 alternatives differently. But it is not a bad view 
 which bids us, rather than fix our hopes upon the 
 future beyond death, to remember that we are 
 mortal and to seize our opportunity here and 
 now of filling our lives with the things that are 
 eternal. 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The literature on the philosophy and psychology of religion 
 is so extensive as to make it more than ever necessary to warn 
 the reader that the following list is only a selection, though it 
 includes, among others, most of the books from which the 
 lecturer is conscious of having learnt to appreciate the philo- 
 sophical problems which religion raises. 
 
 1. Alexander, S. Space, Time and Deity. (Macmillan & Co., 
 
 1920.) 
 
 2. Bosanquet, B. The Value and Destiny of the Individual. 
 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1914.) 
 
 3. Bosanquet, B. What Religion is. (Macmillan & Co., 1920.) 
 
 4. Hocking, W. E. The Meaning of God in Human Experience. 
 
 (Yale University Press, 1912.) 
 
 5. James, William Varieties of Religious Experience. (Long- 
 
 mans, Green & Co., 1902.) 
 
 6. James, William The Will to Believe. (Longmans, Green & 
 
 Co., 1903-) 
 
 7. James, William A Pluralistic Universe. (Longmans, Green 
 
 & Co., 1909.) 
 
 8. Pringle- The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philo~ 
 Pattison, A. S. sophy. (Oxford Univ. Press, 1917.) 
 
 9. Webb, C. C. J. Problems in the Relations of God to Man. 
 
 (Nisbet & Co., 1911.) 
 
 10. Webb, C. C. J. God and Personality. (George Allen & 
 
 Unwin, 1919.) 
 
 11. Webb, C. C. J. Divine Personality and Human Life. (George 
 
 Allen & Unwin, 1920.)
 
 208 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 12. Merz, J. T. 
 
 13. Merz. J. T. 
 
 14. Ward, James 
 
 15. Sorley, W. R. 
 
 1 6. Royce, J. 
 
 17. Royce, J. 
 
 1 8. Balfour, A. J. 
 
 19. H6ffding, H. 
 
 20. Galloway, G. 
 
 21. Collingwood, 
 
 R. G. 
 
 22. Rashdall, H. 
 
 23. Martineau, J. 
 
 24. Radha- 
 krishnan, S. 
 
 25. Pratt, J. B. 
 
 26. Stratton. 
 G.M. 
 
 27. VonHOgel, 
 Baron F. 
 
 History of European Thought in the Nine- 
 teenth Century, Vol. IV. (W. Blackwood 
 & Sons, 1914.) 
 
 Science and Religion. (W. Blackwood & 
 Sons, 1915.) 
 
 The Realm of Ends. (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 1911.) 
 
 Moral Values and the Idea of God. (Camb. 
 Univ. Press, 1916.) 
 
 The World and the Individual, 2 Vols. 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1904.) 
 
 The Problem of Christianity, 2 Vols. (Mac- 
 millan & Co., 1913.) 
 
 Theism and Humanism. (Hodder & Stough- 
 ton, 1915.) 
 
 Philosophy of Religion, tr. B. E. Mayer. 
 (Macmillan & Co., 1906.) 
 
 Philosophy of Religion. (T. & T. Clark, 
 
 1914-) 
 
 Religion and Philosophy. (Macmillan & 
 
 Co., 1916.) 
 " Personality, Human and Divine," in H. 
 
 Sturt, Personal Idealism. (Macmillan & 
 
 Co., 1902.) 
 A Study of Religion. (Oxford Univ. Press, 
 
 2nd Edit., 1900.) 
 The Reign of Religion in Contemporary 
 
 Philosophy. (Macmillan & Co., 1920.) 
 The Religious Consciousness. (Macmillan 
 
 & Co., 1920.) 
 The Psychology of the Religious Life. (George 
 
 Allen & Unwin, 1917.) 
 Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of 
 
 Religion. (J. M. Dent & Co., 1921.) 
 
 The views of Alexander (No. i), Bosanquet (Nos. 2, 3), 
 Hocking (No. 4), James (Nos. 6, 7), Pringle-Pattison (No. 8), 
 Webb (Nos. 9, 10, n), Ward (No. 14), Rashdall (No. 22), have 
 been touched on in the text. But I would draw special attention 
 to chs. viii-x in the second volume of Bosanquet's Gifford 
 Lectures (No. 2). The psychology of religion was, as our 
 American friends would say, " put on the map " by James's 
 Varieties (No. 5). Its closing chapter (ch. xx), with its use of 
 F. W. H. Myers's concept of the " subliminal " to explain the
 
 RELIGION & THE MEANING OF " GOD " 209 
 
 contact of the individual mind with the cosmic consciousness, 
 has given a powerful influence to the tendency to regard religion 
 as close to the primitive moving-forces of life, to the &lan vital, 
 to the libido of the Freudians (of which it is in varying degrees 
 the sublimation), to the instincts many of which it synthesizes 
 within itself (cf. W. McDougall, Social Psychology, ch. vii). 
 Among the numerous American books on the psychology of 
 religion, those by Pratt (No. 25) and Stratton (No. 26) are 
 perhaps the best. The former especially is to be recommended. 
 Merz's account (No. 12) of the philosophy of religion during the 
 last century is full of learning. No. 1 3 brings out the importance, 
 for the development of a theistic religion, of the fact that persons 
 are the first objects to be discriminated by the child. No. 14 
 contains a typical exposition of the grounds for a " spiritual 
 pluralism," i.e., for maintaining the ultimate distinctness (and 
 therefore finitude) of individual minds, human or divine. C. A. 
 Richardson's recent Spiritual Pluralism (Camb. Univ. Press, 
 1920) is another good statement of the same type of view, 
 whilst No. 24 is a lively criticism of " pluralistic theism " in 
 favour of " monistic idealism." Sorley's book (No. 15) is 
 especially valuable for making conveniently accessible much of 
 the work which has been done of recent years on the theory of 
 value. In No. 16, Royce expounds his own version of the type 
 of " idealism," which identifies the " Absolute " of philosophy 
 with the " God " of religion, and he argues for the immortality 
 of individual souls as each embodying an eternal purpose of 
 God's. In No. 17 he finds the essence of religion rather in 
 participation in the life of the " beloved community " and, 
 consequently, emphasizes in Christianity rather the Church 
 than, as is usual in Protestantism, the personality of Christ. 
 Collingwood's essay (No. 21) is fresh and thoughtful, and 
 deserves much more notice than, owing to its appearance in the 
 midst of the war, it has received. Its " realistic " position, 
 however, no longer represents its author's present views. In 
 No. 1 8 Mr. Balfour, with matchless dialectic, once more tears 
 down " naturalism," in order to erect theism in its place. But 
 the critical part of his argument far outweighs the constructive. 
 Martineau (No. 23) was a religious genius and so is von Hugel 
 (No. 27), and what they have to say on religion is said at first 
 hand, and will always remain worth reading. Nos. 19 and 20 
 are both competent and instructive general treatments of the 
 problems of the philosophy of religion. 
 
 In general, the reader should bear in mind that there is no
 
 210 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 subject on which it is more important that he should, whilst 
 studying all views, use his own judgment in selecting that view 
 which seems to him best to interpret his own religious life. But 
 the existence of other views should help to remind him how many 
 are the forms of religion, and how necessary are mutual sympathy 
 and tolerance.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ALEXANDER, S., 23, 155, 161 ; 
 Space, Time and Deity, 22, 
 42, 163, 207, 208 ; on 
 " Deity," 196, 202-207 
 
 Animism, 32, 167 
 
 Aristotle, on the " soul," 149 ft., 
 155 
 
 B CON, Francis, on knowledge 
 as power, 14 ; on barrenness 
 of final causes, 120 
 
 Balfour, A. J., 175, 208, 209 
 
 Behaviourism, 101, 138, 140, 
 155. See also MIND, PSYCH- 
 OLOGY, and SOUL 
 
 Bergson, Henri, Creative Evo- 
 lution, 22 and note, go n., 125 
 163 ; on the living boay, 95 
 elan vital, 100, 115-6, 153 
 against " fmalism," 119, 126 
 on mind as " overflowing ' 
 body, 1 66 
 
 Berkeley, G., on " matter," 
 48, 49, 62, 63 n., 75 ; Prin- 
 ciples of Human Knowledge, 
 75 n., 85 
 
 Bifurcation, fallacy of, see 
 NATURE 
 
 Biology, philosophical problems 
 raised by, ch. 3, passim ; 
 place of man in biological 
 theory, 89 ff. ; mechanical v. 
 vitalistic views, 91-96 ; tele- 
 ological concepts in, 117- 
 124 ; relation to physics and 
 psychology, 127 ff. 
 
 Bosanquet, B., 42, 119 ; on 
 immanent teleology in 
 
 Nature, 124, 125, 126 ; on 
 soul and body, 155 ; on mind 
 as a " world," 162, 163 ; 
 on religion and God, 199- 
 202 ; on immortality, 206 ; 
 Gifford Lectures, 195, 207, 
 208 
 
 Bose, Sir Jagadis Chunder, 128 
 
 Boyle, Robert, Disquisition 
 about the Final Causes of 
 Things, 126 
 
 Bradley, F. H., 175, 195 ; 
 Appearance and Reality, 194 
 
 Bridgewater Treatises, 33, 119, 
 124 
 
 Broad, C. D., Mechanical 
 Explanation and its Alterna- 
 tives, 103 n., 105, 125, 126 
 
 Buckle, H. T., History of Civili- 
 zation, 20 
 
 Buddhism, 169 n. 
 
 Burnet, J., 148 
 
 Butler, Samuel, 118, 119, 125, 
 126 
 
 Bury, J. B., History of the Idea 
 of Progress, 15 
 
 CAMPBELL, N., Physics : The 
 Elements, 53 n., 84 ; on 
 " universal assent " as test 
 of what is real, 55, 59, 85 
 
 Christianity, 169 ff.; 180 ff. 
 
 Collingwood, R. G., 208, 209 
 
 Consciousness, 140 ff., 151 ff., 
 158 ff. ; as " cross-section " 
 of universe, 160 ff., 162. 
 See also MIND, and PSYCH- 
 OLOGY
 
 212 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Comte, Auguste, 19 ; " religion 
 of humanity," 23 ; law of 
 progress, 173 
 
 Crawford, W. J., 136, 163, 164 
 Creativity, modern emphasis 
 on, 22 
 
 DARBISHIRE, A. D., Introduc- 
 tion to Biology, 90 ., 125, 126 
 Darwin, Charles, 19, 99, 100 
 Descartes, R., as founder of 
 modern physics, 47 ; one of 
 first " mechanists " in biol- 
 ogy, 101 ; two-substance 
 theory of body and soul, 
 
 151 
 
 Dewey, John, 21, 22 
 Driesch, H., v. Loeb, 93 ; 
 
 on " entelechy," 96, 100, 
 
 112-114 ; 125, 126 
 Durkheim, E., 180 
 
 EDDINGTON, A. J., Space, Time 
 and Gravitation, 84, 85 
 
 Einfuhlung, in 
 
 Entelechy, 96, 100, 113 
 
 Evil, problem of, 176-180. See 
 also MELIORISM 
 
 FREUD, S., 143, 160 
 
 GALLOWAY, G., 208, 209 
 
 Galton, Francis, 20 
 
 Gibbs, Willard, 123 
 
 God, ch. 5 ; hypothesis of, in 
 Science, 33, 98-100 ; proofs 
 of existence of, 120, 190-204 ; 
 and mysticism, 178 ; mean- 
 ing of, 193 ff. ; as personal, 
 196-199 
 
 HALDANE, J. S., on biologist's 
 point of view, 109, no, in, 
 116; Mechanism, Life and 
 Personality, 125, 126 
 
 Haldane, Viscount, The Reign 
 of Relativity, 84, 85 
 
 Hall, G. Stanley, 141 
 
 Hegel, F., on " actuelle Seele," 
 
 155 
 
 Henderson, L. J., The Fitness 
 of the Environment, 121, 125, 
 126 ; The Order of Nature, 
 121, 124, 125 ; on organisms 
 as " systems " and on " pre- 
 paration " for life, 121-124 
 
 Hocking, W. E., on " prag- 
 matic " test of religion, 185 ; 
 The Meaning of God, 194, 207, 
 208 ; on knowledge of God, 
 198 ff. 
 
 Horfding, H., 195, 208, 209 
 
 Holt, E. B., 151 ; on " be- 
 haviour," 155 ff., 157, 162, 
 164 ; The Freudian Wish, 
 1 60, 163 
 
 Hugel, Baron F. von, 208, 209 
 
 Humanism, 21 
 
 Hume, D., Treatise on Human 
 Nature, 85, 120 and note; 
 on " economy " of Nature, 
 122 ; on " soul," 152 
 
 Huxley, T., 20, 108 
 
 IMMORTALITY, and morality, 
 167 ; recent theories of, 204- 
 207 
 
 Instrumentalism, 21 
 
 Introspection, 158 
 
 JAMES, William, 21, 176, 207, 
 208 
 
 Jennings, H. S., Contributions 
 to the Study of the Behaviour 
 of Lower Organisms, 89 
 
 KANT, I., Critique of Pure 
 Reason, 85, 120 and note ; 
 on " Rational Psychology," 
 152 ; on proofs of existence 
 of God, 120, 192 ff. 
 " Kluge Hans," the, 136 
 Knowledge, 2, 24, 37 ; of 
 religion, 188 ft. 
 
 LAIRD, J., A Study in Realism, 
 42, 161, 164
 
 INDEX 
 
 213 
 
 Lansing, R., The Peace Nego- 
 tiations, 132 n. 
 
 Life, ch. 3, passim ; concept of, 
 93, 109. See also BIOLOGY 
 
 Locke, John, 62 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, Raymond, 
 
 165. 2 05 
 
 Loeb, Jacques, 91 ; v. Driesch, 
 93 ; on mechanistic explana- 
 tion in biology, 106 ; on "trop- 
 isms," 128 ; Organism as a 
 Whole, 102, 125, 126 
 
 Lorenz, L., on " macroscopic " 
 v. " microscopic " pheno- 
 mena, 103 
 
 McDouoALL, W., Body and 
 Mind, 153, 164 ; on belief in 
 immortality, 167, 204-5 on 
 the soul, ibid., 209 
 
 Mach, Ernst, 60 ; Analysis 
 of Sensations, 76, 84, 85 
 
 Martineau, J., 208, 209 
 
 Marvin, F. >., 17 n., 42 
 
 Matter, philosophical criticism 
 of, ch. 2 ; meanings of, 48- 
 65 ; v. God, 49 ; v. mind, 
 62 ; v. the unreal, 54 ; as 
 electromagnetic, 57 ; as ex- 
 cluding sense-data, 59 ; as 
 cause of sensations, 60 ; as 
 a false theory of what, and 
 how, we perceive, 65-73 ; 
 history of theory of, 73-75 
 
 Mechanism, ch. 3 ; as a protest 
 against theologizing in 
 science, 97-102 ; mild and 
 rigid forms of, 103-8 ; 
 Driesch' s criticism of, 112 
 
 Meliorism, 22, 176. See also 
 EVIL 
 
 Merz, J. T., History of European 
 Thought in the Nineteenth 
 Century, 42, 125, 126, 127 ; 
 Fragment on Human Mind, 
 163 ; Science and Religion, 
 208 ; introduced term " syn- 
 optic," 43. 
 
 Metchnikoff, E., 20 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 19 ; Essays 
 on Religion, 23 ; criticism of 
 theism, ibid. ; Examination 
 of Sir William Hamilton's 
 Philosophy, 85, 175, 176 
 
 Mind, as epiphenomenon, 87 ; 
 in biology, ch. 3, passim ; 
 nature and function of, ch. 
 4 ; as a quality or power 
 admitting of degrees, 131 ff. ; 
 as both creative and logical, 
 134 ; problem of relation 
 to body, 137, 143 ff., 154 ; 
 technical language of, 138 ff. ; 
 as a " world," 162 
 
 Myers, F. W. H., 208 
 
 NATURE, as object of science, 
 ch. 2 ; as " what we perceive 
 by the senses," ibid. ; as 
 " closed to mind," 25 ; and 
 moral values, 26 ff. ; an- 
 thropomorphic and anthropo- 
 centric theories of, 29 ff. ; 
 mechanical theory of, ch. 
 3 ; philosophy of, ch. 2, 
 passim ; " bifurcation " of, 
 72, 74, 107, 114 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 120 and note 
 
 ORGANIC, used differently by 
 biologist and chemist, 109 
 
 PALEY, W., Evidences, 120 
 
 Plato, i, 148, 149 
 
 Pearson, Karl, 60 ; Grammar 
 
 of Science, 76, 84, 85 
 Perry, R. B., 16 n. 
 Pessimism, 189 
 Philosophy, as synoptic, ch. i ; 
 
 relation to science, ibid. ; 
 
 relation to religion, chs. i 
 
 and 5 ; systems of, 5 ff. ; 
 
 lack of, in education, 36 ff. ; 
 
 as " defender of faith," 172 
 
 ff., 183-190 
 Physics, as an empirical science, 
 
 5i 
 Positivism, 173 ff.
 
 214 MATTER, LIFE, MIND, AND GOD 
 
 Poynting, J. H., 84, 85 
 
 Pragmatism, 21, 22 
 
 Pratt. J. B., 178 ., 186, 187 ; 
 
 The Religious Consciousness, 
 
 208, 209 
 Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 42 ; 
 
 Idea of God, 194, 207, 208 
 Psychical Research, 56. See 
 
 also SPIRITUALISM 
 Psycho-Analysis, 21, 142 flf., 
 
 1 60 
 Psychology, ch. 4 ; 35, 51 ; 
 
 present-day conflicts in, 130, 
 
 134-145 ; animal, 136 ff. ; 
 
 " without a soul," 152 ; value 
 
 of concept of behaviour for, 
 
 155 
 
 RAMAKRISHNA, 178 and note 
 
 Rashdall, H., 177, 208, 209 
 
 Realism, 43 
 
 Religion, chs. i and 5 ; 
 " religion of humanity," 16, 
 2 3> 175 ; relation to philos- 
 ophy, 170 ff., 182 ; not to be 
 judged by non -religious stand- 
 ard, 171 ; and creed, ibid. ; 
 attacked by Positivism, 173 
 ff. ; defended by philosophy, 
 
 183 ff. ; not departmental, 
 
 184 ; as " attitude," ibid. ; 
 indefinable, 187 ; and God, 
 192. See also SCIENCE, and 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 " Rolf " (a trained dog), 136 
 Radhakrishnan, S., 208 
 Richardson, C. A., Spiritual 
 
 Pluralism, 164, 209 
 Royce, Josiah, 198 n. ; 208, 209 
 Russell, Bertrand, 17, 42, 84, 86 
 Rutherford, Sir Ernest, 65 
 
 SCHILLER, F. C. S., 21 
 
 Science, ch. i ; method of, 2 ff. ; 
 relation to "religion of human- 
 ity," 1 6 ff. ; emancipation 
 from theology, 24 ff., 33 ff. ; 
 as power, 14 ff. ; as theory, 
 24 ff. ; as dealing with 
 
 " Nature," 25 ff. ; as abstract, 
 26, 52 
 
 Socrates, 148 
 
 Soddy, F., 20, 42 
 
 Sophocles, A ntigone, 2nd 
 chorus, 13 ff. 
 
 Sorley, W. R., 42, 208, 209 
 
 Soul, history of concept of, 145- 
 153 ; as principle of life, 
 146 ; as spirit separable from 
 body, 147 ; as something to 
 be " saved," 148 ; Aristotle's 
 theory of, 149 ff. ; as " con- 
 sciousness," 151 ff. ; as 
 " behaviour," 153, 160 ff. ; 
 as " overflowing " body, 167 ; 
 immortality of, 167, 204-7 
 
 Spinoza, B., Ethics, 6 ; on tele- 
 ology, 1 20 n. 
 
 Spiritualism, 135 
 
 Stratton, G. M., 208, 209 
 
 Subconsciousness, see CON- 
 SCIOUSNESS 
 
 Synoptic vision (of philosophy), 
 ch. i, passim; 45 ff. 
 
 TANSLEY, A. G., The New Psych- 
 ology, 164 
 
 Teleology, ch. 3 ; 23, 33, 89, 
 112, 117-124 
 
 Theism, revival of, 194-199 
 
 Theology, and science, 24 ff. ; 
 theologizing in science, 33 ff. ; 
 and philosophy, 171. See 
 also RELIGION, and GOD 
 
 Thomson, J. A., 42, no, 126; 
 System of Animate Nature 
 39, 93. 98, 1 1 6, 125 ; on intel- 
 lect and feeling in study of 
 Nature, 39 ff. 
 
 Tyler, E., Primitive Culture, 
 167 
 
 UNIVERSE, 36 
 
 VARISCO, B., The Great Prob- 
 lems (quoted), 166 
 
 Vitalism, Vital Force, Vital 
 Energy, ch. 3, passim
 
 INDEX 
 
 215 
 
 WALLAS, Graham, on the 
 " Great Society," 18 ; on 
 social psychology 21 n. 
 
 Ward, James, 118, 125, 126, 
 177, 208 
 
 Watson, John B., 153, 158, 159 ; 
 Psychology from the Stand- 
 point of a Behaviourist, 
 164 
 
 Webb, C. C. J., on definition of 
 religion, 187, 190 ; on exist- 
 ence of God, 192 ff. ; Gifford 
 Lectures, 174, 207, 208 ; on 
 
 God as personal, 197 ; on 
 immortality, 204, 206 
 
 Wheeler, R. M., 92 
 
 Whitehead, A. N., 29, 31, 42, 
 48, 5i, 52, 53. 56, 58. 60, 72, 
 73. 75 I on different kinds of 
 objects, 68, 81 ff. ; on Nature 
 as a " passage of events," 
 76-84 ; on life, 27 n., 84, 109 ; 
 affinity to Bergson's views, 
 8 1 ; Concept of Nature, 25, 
 47, 84 ; Principles of Natural 
 Knowledge, 27 n., 47, 77, 84
 
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