e
apparently simpler and clearer knowledge of "Nature," and, if possible, be
subordinated to its phenomena and laws, if not indeed derived from them.
As it is impossible to regard consciousness itself as corporeal, or as a
process of movement, naturalism must at least attempt to show that the
phenomena of consciousness are attendant and consequent on corporeal
phenomena, and that, though they themselves never become corporeal, they
are strictly regulated by the laws of the corporeal and physical, and can
be calculated upon and studied in the same way.

But even the domain of the natural itself, as we know it, is by no means
simple and capable of a unified interpretation. Nature, especially in the
realm of organic life, the animal and plant world, appears to be filled
with marvels of purposefulness, with riddles of development and
differentiation, in short with all the mysteries of life. Here most of all
it is necessary to "reduce" the "teleological view" to terms of the purely
causal, and to prove that all the results, even the evolution of the forms
of life, up to their highest expressions and in the minutest details of
their marvellous adaptations, came "of themselves," that is to say, are
quite intelligible as the results of clearly traceable causes. It is
necessary to reduce the physiological and developmental, and all the other
processes of life, to terms of physical and chemical processes, and thus
to reduce the living to the not living, and to derive the organic from the
forces and substances of inanimate nature.

The process of reduction does not stop even here. For physical and
chemical processes are only really understood when they can be resolved
into the simplest processes of movement in general, when all qualitative
changes can be traced hack to purely quantitative phenomena, when,
finally, in the mechanics of the great masses, as well as of the
infinitely small atoms, everything becomes capable of expression in
mathematical terms.

But naturalism of this kind is by no means pure natural science; it
consciously and deliberately oversteps in speculation the bounds of what
is strictly scientific. In this respect it bears some resemblance to the
nature-philosophy associated with what we called the first type of
naturalism. But its very poverty enables it to have a strictly defined
programme. It knows exactly what it wants, and thus it is possible to
argue with it. The religious conception of the world must c