"The Loom of Time is complicated by a multitude of free agents who can modify the web, making the product more beautiful or more ugly according as they are in harmony or disharmony with the general scheme. I venture to maintain that manifest imperfections are thus accounted for, and that freedom could be given on no other terms, nor at any less cost."
"I will not shrink from a personal note summarising the result on my own mind of thirty years of experience of psychical research, begun without predilection—indeed, with the usual hostile prejudice." "The facts so examined have convinced me that memory and affection are not limited to that association with matter by which alone they can manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists beyond bodily death."
Of the debates on the subsequent days those on "Radiation" and "The Origin of Life" were, perhaps, the most remarkable. At the former the point at issue was the amount of truth contained in Planck's "famous hypothesis that energy was transferred by jumps instead of in a continuous stream." Sir Joseph Larmor evidently expressed the prevailing opinion when he said that "some advance in that direction had become necessary, and old-fashioned physicists like himself had either to take part in it or run the risk of becoming obsolete."
For the discussion about "Life," the three sections of Physiology, Zoology, and Botany were combined. Professor Moore stood stoutly for the older views, and "believed that he could demonstrate a step which connected inorganic with organic creation." Then he gave an abstruse and highly technical account of a process by which in "solutions of colloidal ferric hydroxide, exposed to strong sunlight," compounds could be formed similar to those to be found in the green plant. With a proper grouping of molecules it might be imagined how "colloidal aggregates appeared," and eventually "organic colloids" which "acquired the property of transforming light energy into chemical activity." The speakers who followed seemed to be agreed that, even were such "potentially living matter" to be produced, we should have reached, not the discovery of the secret of life, but only the construction of "its physical vehicle." Professor Hartog strongly protested against the notion that there was "a consensus of opinion among biologists that life was only one form of chemical and physical actions which could be reduced in the laboratory." He wished it to be understood that "the preponderance of weight among scientific men" was opposed to such a position.
CONCLUSION
It is dangerous to generalise; and, when as in this survey we are attempting to indicate broadly the trend of the thought of an age, we have more than ordinary need to be on our guard lest we should sacrifice truth to the desire for a seeming completeness of logical presentation. For fear, then, of misunderstanding, let it be clearly remembered that in what has been said we have had no wish to suggest that all minds have moved at the same pace, or even in the same direction; but only that certain strong tendencies were observable, which gave colour and character to the mental stream at the particular stages in its course. It is with a full sense of the possibility of exaggeration, and of the necessity of holding the balance even, that we shall now make our final attempt to sum up as concisely as possible what we have been able to gather in regard to the thought-movement of the period we have had under review. There can be no danger of misstatement in saying that, all throughout, the chief thoughts of the time were intensely occupied with the greatest of all questions, those about GOD AND THE WORLD. And, further, it has not been difficult to perceive that there have been three distinct stages in the sequence of these thoughts.
In the first stage we can see, as we look back, that the Religious feeling was dominant, while the scientific temper could scarcely have been said to exist; certainly it did not exist upon any extended scale. But, though the desire to be reverent was widespread, we are bound to allow that the ideas about God were somewhat crudely conceived. As a legacy, no doubt, from the Deistic controversies of the preceding century, the general thought did not rise above the notion of a Supreme Mechanist and all-powerful Ruler of all things. The Divine Being was regarded as having originated the universe by a fiat of His will, fashioning its several contents one after another as He pleased, and appointing that each and all should be subjected to the laws He had ordained; always reserving to Himself the right to intervene by some signal display of wisdom and power, when such intervention was required, either to remedy a defect, or yet further to set forth His glory. Men were very ready to admit the idea of the Supernatural, but it was in the merely superficial and popular sense of power working without means, rather than what we now feel to be the far truer sense of superhuman knowledge of means, and power to use them.[[1]] It followed, and this was the weakest point in the Paleyan system of Natural Theology, that God's action was looked for not in the normal, but in the exceptional processes of Nature. The need of the Divine was only felt when no other explanation was forthcoming; with the result, of course, that as other explanations were found, the necessity for recognising its operation grew ever less and less. And, even apart from such a consequence, the effects of the conception could not be otherwise than injurious to religious faith; for, as it has been truly and reverently observed, "a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence."[[2]]