Indeed it must be recollected that no analogy will bear pressing too far. All that we are concerned to show is that known magnetic behaviour exhibits a very fair analogy to some aspects of that still more mysterious entity which we call "life"; and if anyone should assert that all magnetism was pre-existent in some ethereal condition, that it would never go out of essential existence, but that it could be brought into relation with the world of matter by certain acts,—that while there it could operate in a certain way, controlling the motion of bodies, interacting with forms of energy, producing sundry effects for a time, and then disappearing from our ken to the immaterial region whence it came,—he would be saying what no physicist would think it worth while to object to, what many indeed might agree with.
Well, that is the kind of assertion which I want to make, as a working hypothesis, concerning life.
An acorn has in itself the potentiality not of one oak-tree alone, but of a forest of oak-trees, to the thousandth generation, and indeed of oak-trees without end. There is no sort of law of "conservation" here. It is not as if something were passed on from one thing to another. It is not analogous to energy at all, it is analogous to the magnetism which can be excited by any given magnet: the required energy, in both cases, being extraneously supplied, and only transmuted into the appropriate form by the guiding principle which controls the operation.
We do not know how to generate life without the action of antecedent life at present, though that may be a discovery lying ready for us in the future; but even if we did, it would still be true (as I think) that the life was in some sense pre-existent, that it was not really created de novo, that it was brought into actual practical every-day existence doubtless, but that it had pre-existed in some sense too: being called out, as it were, from some great reservoir or storehouse of vitality, to which, when its earthly career is ended, it will return.
Indeed, it cannot in any proper sense be said ever to have left that storehouse, though it has been made to interact with the world for a time; and, if we might so express it, it may be thought of as carrying back with it, into the general reservoir, any individuality, and any experience and training or development, which it can be thought of as having acquired here. Such a statement as this last cannot be made of magnetism, to which no known law of evolution and progress can be supposed to apply; but of life, of anything subject to continuous evolution or linear progress embodied in the race, of any condition not cyclically determinate and returning into itself, but progressing and advancing—acquiring fresh potentialities, fresh powers, fresh beauties, new characteristics such as perhaps may never in the whole universe have been displayed before—of everything which possesses such powers as these, a statement akin to the above may certainly be made. To all such things, when they reach a high enough stage, the ideas of continued personality, of memory, of persistent individual existence, not only may, but I think must, apply; notwithstanding the admitted return of the individual after each incarnation to the central store from which it was differentiated and individualised.
Even so a villager, picked out as a recruit and sent to the seat of war, may serve his country, may gain experience, acquire a soul and a width of horizon such as he had not dreamt of; and when he returns, after the war is over, may be merged as before in his native village. But the village is the richer for his presence, and his individuality or personality is not really lost; though to the eye of the world, which has no further need for it, it has practically ceased to be.
CHAPTER IX
WILL AND GUIDANCE
(Partially read to the Synthetic Society in February 1903.)
The influence of the divine on the human, and on the material world, has been variously conceived in different ages, and various forms of difficulty have been at different times felt and suggested; but always some sort of analogy between human action and divine action has had perforce to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least intelligible to our conception. The latest form of difficulty is peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical science. It consists in denying the possibility of any guidance or control,—not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part of every one of his creatures. It consists in pressing the laws of physics to what may seem their logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as some have fancied, the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of the self-determined action of mind or living things upon matter, altogether. The appearance of control has accordingly been considered illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism, enveloping living things as well as inorganic nature.
And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or unable to acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical agencies, whether it be by reason of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experience and sensation to the contrary, have thought it necessary of late years to seek to undermine the foundation of Physics, and to show that its much-vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their exactitude is illusory,—that the conservation of energy, for instance, has been too rapid an induction, that there may be ways of eluding many physical laws and of avoiding submission to their sovereign sway.