of extreme
difficulty. Mr. Herbert Spencer affirms, "We have next to no power of
tracing up the genesis of a function considered purely as a function--no
opportunity of observing the progressively-increasing quantities of a
given action that have arisen in any order of organisms. In nearly all
cases we are able only to establish the greater growth of the part which
we have found performs the action, and to infer that greater action of
the part has accompanied greater growth of it."[97] Such being the case,
it would serve no purpose to indicate the details of a barely possible
experiment. We are merely showing, at the moment, that the question
"How do I know that I am alive" is not, in the spiritual sphere,
incapable of solution. One might, nevertheless, single out some
distinctively spiritual function and ask himself if he consciously
discharged it. The discharging of that function is, upon biological
principles, equivalent to being alive, and therefore the subject of the
experiment could certainly come to some conclusion as to his place on a
biological scale. The real significance of his actions on the moral
scale might be less easy to determine, but he could at least tell where
he stood as tested by the standard of life--he would know whether he
were living or dead. After all, the best test for Life is just _living_.
And living consists, as we have formerly seen, in corresponding with
Environment. Those therefore who find within themselves, and regularly
exercise, the faculties for corresponding with the Divine Environment,
may be said to live the Spiritual Life.

That this Life also, even in the embryonic organism, ought already to
betray itself to others, is certainly what one would expect. Every
organism has its own reaction upon Nature, and the reaction of the
spiritual organism upon the community must be looked for. In the absence
of any such reactions in the absence of any token that it lived for a
higher purpose, or that its real interests were those of the Kingdom to
which it professed to belong, we should be entitled to question its
being in that Kingdom. It is obvious that each Kingdom has its own ends
and interests, its own functions to discharge in Nature. It is also a
law that every organism lives for its Kingdom. And man's place in
Nature, or his position among the Kingdoms, is to be decided by the
characteristic functions habitually discharged by him. Now when the
habits of certain individuals are close