to the most diverse conditions of
existence and their influences, and harmonising with them, nevertheless
carries implicitly and infallibly within itself the laws of its own
expression, and especially the necessity to develop upwards into higher
and higher forms, is expressly suited for teleological consideration, and
we can understand how it is that the old physico-teleological evidences of
the existence of God are beginning to hold up their heads again. They are
wrong when they try to demonstrate God, but quite right when they simply
seek to show that nature does not contradict--in fact that it allows room
and validity to--belief in the Highest Wisdom as the cause and guide of all
things natural.

As far as the question of the right to interpret nature teleologically is
concerned, it would be entirely indifferent whether what Korschinsky calls
"the tendency to progress," and the system of laws in obedience to which
evolution brings forth its forms, can be interpreted "mechanically" or
not; that is to say, whether or not evolution depends on conditions and
potentialities of living matter, which can be demonstrated and made
mechanically commensurable or not. It may be that they can neither be
demonstrated nor made mechanically commensurable, but lie in the
impenetrable mystery inherent in all life. Whether this mystery really
exists, and whether religion has any particular interest in it if it does,
must be considered in the following chapter.

CHAPTER VIII. THE MECHANICAL THEORY OF LIFE.

What is life--not in the spiritual and transcendental sense, but in its
physical and physiological aspects? What is this mysterious complex of
processes and phenomena, common to everything animate, from the seaweed to
the rose, and from the human body to the bacterium, this ability to "move"
of itself, to change and yet to remain like itself, to take up dead
substances into itself, to assimilate and to excrete, to initiate and
sustain, in respiration, in nutrition, in external and internal movements,
the most complex chemical and physical processes, to develop and build up
through a long series of stages a complete whole from the primitive
beginnings in the germ, to grow, to become mature, and gradually to break
up again, and with all this to repeat in itself the type of its parent,
and to bring forth others like itself, thus perpetuating its own species,
to react effectively to stimuli, to produce protective devices again