IT is safe to say that science will never accept the astral body—by that name: at any rate not until philosophy accepts the prototypal Ideas of Plato.
Yet the evidence, if not for them, then for something discharging the same function and therefore after all for them—is irresistible.
One thinks first of the growth of living animal tissues in glass jars, demonstrated at the Rockefeller Institute. Removed from the body to which they belong and placed in nutritive fluids which they can absorb, they attain a size that would constitute them fatal diseases if they were in situ at home. They would in fact be malignant growths of highly organized types.
Why don't they grow to that size? Because "the nervous system" restrains them within the limit of usefulness. How does "the nervous system" know that limit? Has it a picture in its "mind," a plan according to which it works, according to which it variously restricts or encourages?
When some of the molluscs are cut in two each half grows the part it has lost, the head an after-part, the after-part a head. Two animals result, each exactly like the original. As the severed cells are called upon to perform and do perform new and unexpected work, what and where is the architectural plan by which they do it?
The cells of a leaf have finished their growth. Now comes their work, the fixing of carbon from the air, transpiration, and so on. But cut off, say, a begonia leaf and place it on damp soil properly protected. It proceeds at once upon a wholly new program, sending down roots, sending up stalk, fresh leaves, and finally flower. It is obviously working according to a plan. When a germ cell or seed does that the problem can be concealed by talking about its chemical constitution and so forth. We are told that the seed behaves as it does because it is constituted by nature to do so, molecularly arranged for just that function. But the cells of the leaf were not arranged for that but for quite other functions. How come they to be able to stop their proper line of work and follow this one, generating not only leaves like themselves but all other parts of the plant including seeds?
We are of course pressing the problem of heredity, the persistence of racial and family type. But heredity is only a word that expresses the observed facts without a gleam of explanation.
The consciousness of the mollusc, as an individual, and that of the leaf on a lower plane, can be only sensational. They do not intelligently arrange and design what they are doing. But to ascribe it to molecular mechanism only, is no better than to say God did it. Either is such a form of mere words as unwise parents throw at a too questioning child to stop, without satisfying, its mind. No idea corresponds. The gap in conception remains exactly what it was.