ychology is making towards a
junction with physiology and general biology, biology with chemistry,
and chemistry with physics. That there is an unbroken continuity in
existence is becoming a postulate of modern science, almost as truly as
the "universality of law" or "the uniformity of nature." Nor is the
postulate held less firmly because the evidence for the continuity of
nature is not yet complete. Chemistry has not yet quite lapsed into
physics; biology at present shows no sign of giving up its
characteristic conception of life, and the former science is as yet
quite unable to deal with that peculiar phenomenon. The facts of
consciousness have not been resolved into nervous action, and, so far,
mind has not been shown to be a secretion of brain. Nevertheless, all
these sciences are beating against the limits which separate them, and
new suggestions of connection between natural life and its inorganic
environment are continually discovered. The sciences are boring towards
each other, and the dividing strata are wearing thin; so that it seems
reasonable to expect that, with the growth of knowledge, an unbroken way
upwards may be discovered, from the lowest and simplest stages of
existence to the highest and most complex forms of self-conscious life.

Now, to those persons who are primarily interested in the ethical and
religious phenomena of man's life, the idea of abolishing the chasm
between spirit and nature is viewed with no little apprehension. It is
supposed that if evolution were established as a universal law, and the
unity of being were proved, the mental and moral life of man would be
degraded into a complex manifestation of mere physical force. And we
even find religious men rejoicing at the failure of science to bridge
the gap between the inorganic and the organic, and between natural and
self-conscious life; as if the validity of religion depended upon the
maintenance of their separating boundaries. But no religion that is free
from superstitious elements has anything to gain from the failure of
knowledge to relate things to each other. It is difficult to see how
breaks in the continuity of being can be established, when every living
plant confutes the absolute difference between the organic and
inorganic, and, by the very fact of living, turns the latter into the
former; and it is difficult to deny the continuity of "mind and matter,"
when every human being is relating himself to the outer world in all hi