ntist with an inborn idealistic strain in
him. His famous, and to many minds disquieting, declaration, made in his
Belfast address over thirty years ago, that in matter itself he saw the
promise and the potency of all terrestrial life, stamps him as a
scientific materialist. But his conception of matter, as "at bottom
essentially mystical and transcendental," stamps him as also an
idealist. The idealist in him speaks very eloquently in the passage
which, in the same address, he puts into the mouth of Bishop Butler, in
the latter's imaginary debate with Lucretius: "Your atoms," says the
Bishop, "are individually without sensation, much more are they without
intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem.
Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon
atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all
the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed.
Imagine them separate and sensationless, observe them running together
and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical
process, is _seeable_ by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in any
way imagine, how out of that mechanical art, and from these individually
dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise? Are you likely
to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the Differential
Calculus out of the clash of billiard balls?" Could any vitalist, or
Bergsonian idealist have stated his case better?

Now the Bishop Butler type of mind--the visualizing, idealizing,
analogy-loving, literary, and philosophical mind--is shared by a good
many people; it is shared by or is characteristic of all the great
poets, artists, seers, idealists of the world; it is the humanistic type
that sees man everywhere reflected in nature; and is radically different
from the strictly scientific type which dehumanizes nature and reduces
it to impersonal laws and forces, which distrusts analogy and sentiment
and poetry, and clings to a rigid logical method.

This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting the
physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life. It visualizes
life, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and through
matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological in
its nature. This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his "Creative
Evolution." This is the view Kant took when he said, "It is quite
certain that we cann