which from
its invisible watch-tower looks forth upon the whole spectacle. It is
necessary to take for granted the long historic stream of
evolutionary development. It is necessary to regard this
development in its organic totality as the sole reality with which we
have to deal.

The invisible mental witness being eliminated, it becomes
necessary, if instinct is to be thus made supreme, to regard the
appearance of the soul as a mere stage in an evolutionary process,
the driving-force of which is the power of instinct itself. Planets
and plants, men and animals, are seen in this way to be all dominated
by instinct; and instinct is found to be so much the most important
element in evolution, that upon it, rather than upon anything else,
the whole future of the universe may be said to depend.

Having made this initial plunge into shameless objectivity, having
put completely out of court the invisible witness of it all, we find
ourselves reduced to regarding this "blind" instinct as the galvanic
battery which moves the world. Thus isolated from the other powers
of the soul, this mysterious energy, this subterranean driving-force,
has to bear the whole weight of everything that happens in space
and time. A strange sort of "blindness" must its blindness be, when
its devices can supply the place of the most passionate intellectual
struggles of the mind!

If it is blind, it gropes its way, in its blindness, through the
uttermost gulfs of space and into the nethermost abysses of life. If
it is dumb, its silence is the irresistible silence of Fate, the
silence of the eternal "Mothers."

But the "instinct" which is one of the basic attributes of the complex
vision is not quite such an awe-inspiring thing as this. To raise it
into such a position as this there has to be a vigorous suppression, as
I have hinted, of many other attributes of the soul. Instinct may be
defined as the pressure of obscure creative desire, drawn from the
inscrutable recesses of the soul, malleable up to a certain point by
reason and will, but beyond that point remaining unconscious,
irrational, incalculable, elusive. That it plays an enormous part in
the process of life cannot be denied; but the part it plays is not so
isolated from consciousness as sometimes has been imagined.

There is in truth a strange reciprocity between instinct and
self-consciousness, according to which they both play into each
other's hands. This is above all true of great a