s?

I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both ends of his argument did
not quite meet when he contended for the truth of determinism--that
there is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and at the same
time set man apart from the cosmic order, and represented him as working
his will upon it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of his
earlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of living things, as
contrasted with the student of inert matter, the aspect of nature is
reversed. "In living matter, incessant, and so far as we know,
spontaneous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the anomaly, to be
accounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend to no
equilibrium," except the equilibrium of death. This is good vitalistic
doctrine, as far as it goes, yet Huxley saw no difference between the
matter of life and other matter, except in the manner in which the atoms
are aggregated. Probably the only difference between a diamond and a
piece of charcoal, or between a pearl and an oyster-shell, is the manner
in which the atoms are aggregated; but that the secret of life is in the
peculiar compounding of the atoms or molecules--a spatial arrangement of
them--is a harder proposition. It seems to me also that Haeckel involves
himself in obvious contradictions when he ascribes will, sensation,
inclination, dislike, though of a low order, to the atoms of matter; in
fact, sees them as living beings with souls, and then denies soul, will,
power of choice, and the like to their collective unity in the brain of
man.

A philosopher cannot well afford to assume the air of lofty indifference
that the poet Whitman does when he asks, "Do I contradict myself? Very
well, then, I contradict myself"; but he may take comfort in the thought
that contradictions are often only apparent, and not real, as when two
men standing on opposite sides of the earth seem to oppose each other,
and yet their heads point to the same heavens, and their feet to the
same terrestrial centre. The logic of the earth completely contradicts
the ideas we draw from our experience with other globes, both our
artificial globes and the globes in the forms of the sun and the moon
that we see in the heavens. The earth has only one side, the outside,
which is always the upper side; at the South Pole, as at the North, we
are on the top side. I fancy the whole truth of any of the great
problems, if we could see it, would reconcile all our half-truths,