But here is just the puzzle: at what point does will or determination enter into the scheme? Contemplate a brain cell, whence originates a certain nerve-process whereby energy is liberated with some resultant effect; what pulled the detent in that cell which started the impulse? No doubt some chemical process: combination or dissociation, something atomic, occurred; but what made it occur just then and in that way?
I answer, not anything that we as yet understand, but apparently the same sort of pre-arrangement that determined whether the stone from the cliff should fall on point A or point B—the same sort of process that guided the pen to make legible and effective writing instead of illegible and ineffective scrawls—the same kind of control that determines when and where a trigger shall be pulled so as to secure the anticipated slaughter of a bird. So far as energy is concerned, the explosion and the trigger-pulling are the same identical operations whether the aim be exact or random. It is intelligence which directs; it is physical energy which is directed and controlled and produces the result in time and space.
It will be said some energy is needed to pull a hair-trigger, to open the throttle-valve of an engine, to press the button which shall shatter a rock. Granted: but the work-concomitants of that energy are all familiar, and equally present whether it be arranged so as to produce any predetermined effect or not. The opening of the throttle-valve for instance demands just the same exertion, and results in just the same imperceptible transformation of fully-accounted-for energy, whether it be used to start a train in accordance with a time-table and the guard's whistle, or whether it be pushed over, as if by the wind, at random. The shouting of an order to a troop demands vocal energy and produces its due equivalent of sound; but the intelligibility of the order is something superadded, and its result may be to make not sound or heat alone, but History.
Energy must be available for the performance of any physical operation, but the energy is independent of the determination or arrangement. Guidance and control are not forms of energy, nor need they be themselves phantom modes of force: their superposition upon the scheme of Physics need perturb physical and mechanical laws no whit, and yet it may profoundly affect the consequences resulting from those same laws. The whole effort of civilisation would be futile if we could not guide the powers of nature. The powers are there, else we should be helpless; but life and mind are outside those powers, and, by pre-arranging their field of action, can direct them along an organised course.
And this same life or mind, as we know it, is accessible to petition, to affection, to pity, to a multitude of non-physical influences; and hence, indirectly, the little plot of physical universe which is now our temporary home has become amenable to truly spiritual control.
I lay stress upon a study of the nature and mode of human action of the interfering or guiding kind, because by that study we must be led if we are to form any intelligent conception of divine action. True, it might be feasible to admit divine agency and yet to deny the possibility of any human power of the same kind,—though that would be a nebulous and at least inconclusive procedure; but if once we are constrained to admit the existence and reality of human guidance and control, superposed upon the physical scheme, we cannot deny the possibility of such power and action to any higher being, nor even to any totality of Mind of which ours is a part.
I do not see how the function claimed can be resented, except by those who deny "life" to be anything at all. If it exists, if it is not mere illusion, it appears to me to be something whose full significance lies in another scheme of things, but which touches and interacts with this material universe in a certain way, building its particles into notable configurations for a time—without confounding any physical laws,—and then evaporating whence it came. This language is vague and figurative undoubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we have not yet a theory of life—we have not even a theory of the essential nature of gravitation; discoveries are waiting to be made in this region, and it is absurd to suppose that we are already in possession of all the data. We can wait; but meanwhile we need not pretend that because we do not understand them, therefore life and will can accomplish nothing; we need not imagine that "life"—with its higher developments and still latent powers—is an impotent nonentity. The philosophic attitude, surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, both what it can and what it cannot achieve, and to realise that our present knowledge of it is extremely partial and incomplete.