And Huxley:
"I know nothing, and never hope to know anything of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected. The two things are on two utterly different platforms, the physical facts go along by themselves and the mental facts go along by themselves."
While Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (the biologist who was working out the theory of Natural Selection simultaneously with Darwin, both unaware that the other was working in the same direction) attributes to a Creative act of God, all the moral and intellectual qualities which have been super-added in man to those lesser and simpler ones he possesses in common with the higher animals. Wallace describes this as a "Divine Influx," and regards it as being wholly distinct and apart from the slow and gradual processes of Natural Selection.
But yet, in point of fact, what was it that inspired and energised the earlier processes, if not this same Divine Influx? The simpler processes must, from their earliest rudimentary beginnings, have been leading up to the later and more complex. And the later and more complex were, surely, continuous with the simpler—since Nature abhors miracles, and works by slow progressive biological sequences.
Nothing shows as more impersonal than a crystal; cold, hard, senseless, motionless. And yet in crystals is the element of Life, even the power of reproduction, showing factors of sex already operative in them. While living bodies, charged with warmth, mobility, sentience, intelligence, have Inorganic Matter for their basis of construction. And that Inorganic elements are very far from being the impersonal things they seem, but are linked by subtle correspondences to living Mind and vital powers, is shown by their effects on living processes and consciousness. Given as medicines, digestion (which is a species of rapid evolution from lower to higher forms of energy) develops such vital inherences within them as prove their apparent impersonality to contain a principle continuous not only with living processes, but with the highest mentality.
Professor Leduc observes in his illuminating book, "The Mechanism of Life," "the ordinary physical forces have, in fact, a power of organisation infinitely greater than has been hitherto supposed by the boldest imagination."
Coralline structures and beautiful shells, fungi, leaves, and plants bearing coloured, flowerlike blooms spring into growth when a formless fragment of calcium salt is dropped into a chemical solution. And these "Osmotic growths," artificially produced, possess far greater complexity of structure and of function than do the simpler living organisms of Nature.
The evidences of a Vast Stupendous Plan, which every further scientific discovery still further emphasises, are slowly forcing from our men of Science the confession that behind the marvellous phenomena their findings reveal, and which they are powerless to explain, must lie a Cause, occult and irresistible, an Impulse, all-pervading, incomprehensible.
Bergson describes an élan vital—a living impetus—determining such phenomena.