could not do what I would, that is well enough:
but to say that I act as I do because of them, and
that this is the way in which my mind acts, and not
from choice of the best, why, that is a very careless
and idle way of speaking.
Plato.
There are signs that the life of the body is even in the lower animals to some extent imbued with the free creative spirit. There are creative efforts of determination, changes of direction, triumphs over circumstance, that find their enlightening context in the more emancipated life of man.
A sea-urchin's egg, for instance, begins its development by dividing into two cells. Normally these cells, by a like division, share between them the making of the respective halves of the creature's body. If you remove one cell after the first division of the egg you may expect (you certainly should and will if you take your stand with the mechanistic theorists) to find that you have mutilated the creature. You may or will expect to see the remaining half of the egg grow to a half-embryo. Under some circumstances you will see what you expect; but if you are very skilful and are acquainted with the new methods you will have the disturbing joy of seeing the half-egg—you may even see a quarter-egg—take on the work of the whole, and grow to a complete though small embryo; and not only to an embryo but to a larva. You may do the same with a newt's egg or a frog's. With your mind's eye, then, you may if you like, and if you thus interpret things, watch the sea-urchin's, the frog's, or the newt's life, overcoming, according to a 'primary purposiveness' of its own, your effort to thwart its intention. You may watch it determining new contrivances from within to meet an unexpected emergency that threatens to mar the complete whole it means to be, changing a normal to an abnormal course of activity, that it may still attain its end—in short 'working out its own salvation,' as a morphologist remarks, 'upon original and individual lines.'
It would seem difficult not to recognize in these changes a likeness to what you know in yourself as intelligent action. Studying them it is hard for any but a confirmed mechanist to resist the contention of men who tell us that the vital is the intelligent. Whereas purely material changes, if they are left to themselves, follow the way of least material resistance, life, whether in the cell or in the organism, moves in an opposite direction. The living vegetable cell raises carbon and other elements from relative inertness to a condition charged with newly available power. And in these developmental changes the organism seems to manifest itself as in very truth 'a living, active, responsive thing, quite capable of relinquishing at need the beaten track of normal development,' like ourselves as we make our bodily, intellectual, moral and spiritual decisions. The mechanist is ready with his retort when we say this, but it is a poor retort. He tells us of mysterious 'specific organ-forming substances' which are not ordinary chemical substances of any kind; and which no research is able to detect, except it be as pictured behind the very processes of growth that are telling us of the organ-forming determination of a specific mode of life. For both us and the mechanist there is the same process and result. He sees, but only with his mind's eye, these utterly mysterious 'substances' he has himself invoked; we see, with our mind's eye, the sea-urchin's, or the newt's, life issuing in that purposeful endeavour which always and everywhere, we say, is a mark of the life we know. We may even admit the possibility of the existence of his organ-forming substances, but only as conditions of life's organ-forming, not as effective causes—a distinction of fundamental importance for the careful thinker not content to be arrested by the look of things, however scientific. We cannot rest in a mechanical interpretation which at best only thrusts the problem one stage farther away, as does the pseudo-physicist-philosopher's ether-God. Life to us seems effective, and under all conditions determining, within the limits of those conditions. Organ-forming substances there may be; but they are either the co-operative servants of life (if they exist at all) like other substances, or they are no better than names for the modes in which life is at work. To us life seems, from its first entrance into possession of a body, when it gave to material substances a higher status, to have worked always towards dominance over the established laws and customs (that is the habits) of matter, as no substances have ever worked. At first it did little more with matter than lift physical or chemical elements upward in heightening states of energy, within a body, against physical or chemical tendencies that would take them downward to their physical or chemical equilibrium; later it went on, through the organizing of an ever more and more complex and variable nervous system, to a man's brain, where the control of intelligence over the living instrument that is its very active servant became strong enough to guide into ever-widening relations and possibilities an activity seeking spiritual advance. An activity, straining for liberation against some resistance by which nevertheless it was itself made effectual, could—we are driven to think—do no other than find its way imperfectly and by slow degrees; yet on its way it has shown even in very lowly creatures signs of what it really is. That any 'substance' the mechanist can acknowledge has done this of its own motion and power, we take leave to doubt. And we have learnt to understand the mechanist.