It was because they turned nature into an
unmanageable jungle, in which trees, bushes, and parasites of a thousand
kinds wildly interlaced. There was nothing for it, if science was to
proceed, but to clear the ground and replant with spruce in rows: to
postulate a single uniform nature, of which there should be a single
science. Now neither probatology nor cynology could hope to be [18]
universal--the world is not all sheep nor all dog: it would have to be
hylology; for the world is, in its spatial aspect, all material. Let us
say, then, that there is one uniform material nature of things, and that
everything else consists in the arrangements of the basic material nature;
as the show of towers and mountains in the sunset results simply from an
arrangement of vapours. And let us suppose that the interactions of the
parts of matter are all like those which we can observe in dead manipulable
bodies--in mechanism, in fact. Such was the postulate of the new
philosophers, and it yielded them results.

It yielded them results, and that was highly gratifying. But what,
meanwhile, had happened to those palpable facts of common experience from
which the whole philosophy of substantial forms had taken its rise? Is the
wholeness of a living thing the mere resultant of the orderly operations of
its parts? Is a bee no more essentially one than a swarm is? Is the life of
a living animal indistinguishable from the rhythm of a going watch, except
in degree of complication and subtlety of contrivance? And if an animal's
body, say my own, is simply an agglomerate of minute interacting material
units, and its wholeness is merely accidental and apparent, how is my
conscious mind to be adjusted to it? For my consciousness appears to
identify itself with that whole vital pattern which used to be called the
substantial form. We are now told that the pattern is nothing real or
active, but the mere accidental resultant of distinct interacting forces:
it does no work, it exercises no influence or control, it _is_ nothing. How
then can it be the vehicle and instrument of my conscious soul? It cannot.
Then is my soul homeless? Or is it to be identified with the activity and
fortunes of a single atomic constituent of my body, a single cog in the
animal clockwork? If so, how irrational! For the soul does not experience
itself as the soul of one minute part, but as the soul of the body.

Such questions rose thick and fast in the minds of the se