ation to the central store
from which it was differentiated and individualised.

Even so a villager, picked out as a recruit and sent to the seat of
war, may serve his country, may gain experience, acquire a soul and a
width of horizon such as he had not dreamt of; and when he returns,
after the war is over, may be merged as before in his native village.
But the village is the richer for his presence, and his individuality
or personality is not really lost; though to the eye of the world,
which has no further need for it, it has practically ceased to be.

CHAPTER IX

WILL AND GUIDANCE

(_Partially read to the Synthetic Society in February 1903._)

The influence of the divine on the human, and on the material world,
has been variously conceived in different ages, and various forms of
difficulty have been at different times felt and suggested; but always
some sort of analogy between human action and divine action has had
perforce to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least
intelligible to our conception. The latest form of difficulty is
peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical
science. It consists in denying the possibility of any guidance or
control,--not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part of every one
of his creatures. It consists in pressing the laws of physics to what
may seem their logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the
conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as
some have fancied, the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of
the self-determined action of mind or living things upon matter,
altogether. The appearance of control has accordingly been considered
illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism,
enveloping living things as well as inorganic nature.

And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or unable to
acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical agencies, whether it be
by reason of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experience and
sensation to the contrary, have thought it necessary of late years to
seek to undermine the foundation of Physics, and to show that its
much-vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their exactitude is
illusory,--that the conservation of energy, for instance, has been too
rapid an induction, that there may be ways of eluding many physical
laws and of avoiding submission to their sovereign sway.

By this sacrifice it has been thought