CHAPTER III

THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF MORALITY

Morality is a restraint which the community imposes on each of its members. It demands from the individual the sacrifice of his transitory and momentary comfort in favour of his general welfare which is dependent on that of the community. It prohibits the pleasure of gratifying his desires in order that by this unpleasant renunciation his lasting well-being may be ensured. Subjectively experienced and viewed, therefore, Morality always implies the limitation of free will, the curbing of desire, opposition to inclinations and appetites, and the diminution or suppression of free, or let us rather say of unbridled, action. Before Morality can profit the community, it disturbs and incommodes the individual, it rouses in him disagreeable sensations which may reach such a pitch as to be intense pain. It is only after deep reflection, of which not everyone is capable, that the individual realizes that Morality is an essential condition of the life of society, and that the preservation of society is an essential condition of his own life; before he investigates, before he even meditates on Morality, the individual feels it directly to be unpleasant, laborious, stern--nay, hostile.

The control which Morality exercises over the actions, and indeed in many cases over the most secret thoughts of the individual, appears at the first glance to be somewhat paradoxical. It is by no means obvious why the individual should always take sides against himself and, adopting a defensive and disapproving attitude, hold his instinctive tendencies in check. Moral conduct would be intelligible if the community were always ready with means of coercion and could constrain the individual by brute force to place its interest before his own pleasure. But the individual does not wait for police intervention on the part of the community. He frowns upon himself with the awful severity of the law. He threatens himself with a cudgel. He divides himself into two beings, one of which wants to follow its instincts, while the other curbs them vigorously; one is a rearing, often a refractory, horse, the other a rider with bridle, whip and spur.

This reduplication of the ego, one-half of which establishes control over the other, one-half of which tries to remain true to itself, while the other divests itself of its identity and denies itself--this is the inner process, the outward manifestation of which is moral conduct. This demands investigation and explanation. We must show how the organism could develop from within itself the power to paralyse, or completely repress, its own elemental activities, and how Morality was able to become an integral part in the general scheme of life processes.

The mechanism whereby the mind, appraising, foreseeing and judging, checks the first movement of impulse, is inhibition or repression. Without inhibition moral conduct would not be possible. The mind would have no method of indicating the path and prescribing rules to the organism's instinct. It would have no means of making its insight prevail over the desires of the senses. It would have no weapon with which to force its being to actions opposed to its organic inclinations. Without inhibition the individual would never give precedence to the demands of the community and lay himself open to disagreeable emotions in order to please the community. Inhibition was the necessary organic preliminary to the phenomenon of Morality. It had to be pre-existent in the individual, so that Morality could make itself at home in his intellectual life, so that it could acquire creative, ruling and practical power among the elect, and become an unconscious and easy habit among the average. Morality took possession of a pre-existent organic aptitude and made it serve its own purposes. But organic aptitudes are not alike in all individuals. In some cases they are more or less perfect; in others they may be lacking altogether. Indeed only individuals with highly developed powers of inhibition are capable of that heroic Morality which liberates them from the weakness of the flesh and makes them independent of the demands of the body; those in whom this power of inhibition is scantily developed evade the influence of Morality entirely, and it has no authority over them.

That which is called character is at bottom the name we give to the power of inhibition. Where it is weak we speak of lack of character, whereas by strength of character we mean that the power of inhibition is great. The will makes use of inhibition. With its help the will guides the living machine in a certain direction and urges it to perform given tasks. At the first glance it may not seem obvious that positive actions can come of repression, which is something negative. But if we analyse psychologically the actions demanded and promoted by the will, and trace them back to their organic origins, we shall find that, as a rule, the first elements consist in the prevention of impulsive movements, and that the impetus to positive effort is given by the will, which converts these movements into contrary ones. A few instances may make this psychic process clearer. Winkelried, at Sempach, cleaves a path through the cuirassiers while they bury their lances in his breast; he becomes capable of this great deed of self-sacrifice in that, by a mighty effort of will power, he suppresses the strongest of all instincts, that of self-preservation, and forces all his energies, which are naturally directed towards flight from danger, to challenge danger and yield completely to it. The lover who overcomes his passion and renounces its object, because his idol is the bride of his best friend, begins with the determined inhibition of the impulse which urges him towards the woman, and attains renunciation by the suppression of his desire; this renunciation finds expression in positive actions, in the rupture of relations which bring him happiness, the avoidance of meetings which would prevent the wound in his heart from healing, and so on. The brave rescuer who plunges into the waves to save a drowning man, or enters a burning house to save a fellow creature threatened by the flames, must first overcome his natural shrinking fear of the water and the fire; and not till after the suppression of strong impulses to avoid the uncanny adventure, does he succeed in making his muscles obey the impulse to save life.

Inhibition, therefore, is the organic foundation on which Morality builds, not only that Morality which consists in abstention from certain actions, but that which is manifested in active virtue. But inhibition is a faculty which the organism has developed for its own ends, the better and more easily to preserve its own life, and to render its power of achievement greater. Morality makes use of this faculty, which it finds ready to hand, for the ends of the community, and very often against the immediate interests of the individual for whose advantage it is nevertheless intended. Now the individual would not put up with this inexpedient use, one is tempted to say this clever misuse, of one of its organic capacities, if this yielding up of the mechanism of inhibition to Morality were not beneficial to life and therefore came within the sphere of the biological purpose of inhibition. By being grafted on a pre-existent organic faculty Morality becomes such itself; it forms a link in the chain of biological processes within the individual organism; it ceases to be purely a product of society forced upon the individual to his molestation and in spite of his annoyance; it acquires the character of a differentiation of inhibition in order to help the individual, or even to make it at all possible for him to adapt himself to life in a society.

That under the present conditions obtaining on our planet the human individual can only live in society demands no proof. And as he can only live in society if he submits to its rules of good and bad, Morality, which urges him to this submission, aids and even preserves his life. We shall now show that inhibition, of which Morality is a differentiation making it easier for the individual to adapt himself to the conditions of social life, is of the greatest value to the individual from the biological point of view.

The lowest forms of life it is possible for us to observe show nothing which can be interpreted as inhibition. All external influences to which they are not indifferent invariably produce the same effects. They respond to every stimulus with a reflex action which reveals nothing that we should be justified in describing as an activity of the will. The reaction follows with strictly automatic regularity upon the stimulus, and nothing intervenes between the two which would permit the conclusion that in the simple organism there is any faculty that could delay, modify or change the reaction to the external stimulus.

Just as iron filings always respond to the attraction of a magnet in the same way, just as certain combinations of mercury at the impact of a blow flare up with an explosion, just as ice when warmed melts and becomes water, and water when cooled to a definite point freezes into ice, so do the simplest living things seek out certain rays in the spectrum, certain temperatures, certain chemical conditions and avoid others. Not only unicellular organisms do this, but also comparatively highly developed animals, such as the daphniæ, for if light is sent through a prism into a vessel containing water, these little creatures collect at the violet end of the spectrum; such as the wood-lice, which hate the light and creep into dark crevices; such as gnats, which are attracted by the sun and dance in their hundreds in its rays. Moreover, we meet with a similar phenomenon in man. We, too, in winter and spring seek the sun and in summer the shade; in the cold season the warm stove attracts us; bad smells put us to flight, sweet scents of flowers allure us. The simplest automatic reflex actions are at the root of these attractions and repulsions, exactly the same as with the daphniæ, wood-lice and gnats. Only we are able to control and suppress these reflex actions which the lower animals apparently cannot.

Anthropomorphic modes of thought easily mislead us into thinking that the processes we observe in lower animals are due to an exercise of will power. We draw near to the fire in winter because it is pleasant, but we can quit it if duty calls us into the cold streets. One is apt to imagine that the simple organisms also experience pleasant and unpleasant feelings, that they try and avoid the latter, that the daphnia seeks the violet rays because it likes them, that the wood-louse flees the light because it dislikes it; in fact, that these creatures possess a consciousness which becomes aware of and distinguishes between pleasing and displeasing impressions, and that they possess a will which responds to these impressions with suitable reactions. Very distinguished scientists have been unable to resist the temptation to assume in the lower animals, even in unicellular organisms, the existence of processes with which we are familiar in the human consciousness. William Roux introduces us to a "psychology of protista," and W. Kleinsorge goes so far as to maintain the existence of "cellular ethics," and to devote himself to research into its laws. The work of both these biologists is as fascinating as the most beautiful fairy-tale, but it is probably the creation of a lively and fertile imagination, just as the fairy story is.

More prosaic and less imaginative scientists do not see evidences of psychology in the signs of life in the protista, or ethics in the movements of a cell, but merely the effects of universal chemical and physical laws which also control lifeless inorganic matter. To these laws they trace the tropisms of simple organisms which tempt the imagination, prone as it is to anthropomorphism, into errors; such tropisms, that is to say, as their tendency to seek moderate warmth, certain rays of light and weak alkaline solutions, or to avoid acids, heat and ultra-violet rays. The little organisms probably do not obey these impulses for reasons of pleasure or pain any more than the iron filings obey the attraction of a magnet for such reasons. They do not fly to it because it gives them pleasure; the little metal leaves of an electroscope do not move apart because contact with each other displeases them. All forms of tropism, chemicotropic, thermotropic, phototropic manifestations, active and passive tropisms clearly show that minute organisms involuntarily and unresistingly respond to the influence of natural forces, just as if they were inanimate particles.

Microscopic investigations reveal many phenomena which one is tempted to consider signs of life, but which cannot be such, as they occur in connexion with inanimate matter. The Brownian movements are rhythmical molecular changes of position, not due to any mechanical impulse emanating from the surroundings, nor to a current in the fluid in which the object of investigation is immersed, but arising from the object itself, mostly very finely divided, tiny balls of mercury. A very small drop of chloroform introduced into a fluid of different density behaves exactly like a unicellular organism. It sends out pseudopods, wriggles and draws them in again. The pseudopods seem to feel and examine particles of matter with which they come in contact, and then either to withdraw quickly from them or to surround and incorporate them in the drop. This is deceptively similar to the behaviour of a living cell absorbing food, though there can be no question of this in the case of the drop of chloroform. In the latter it is merely a question of the effects of surface tension, that is, of the normal behaviour of matter in accordance with the laws governing the forces of nature, the investigation of which lies in the domain of chemistry and physics.

Impartial thought comes to a conclusion about these phenomena different from that derived from anthropomorphic delusions. It does not try to smuggle dim, dark life into the collections of mercury molecules apparently obeying some inner impulse, or into the seeking or feeling about of a pseudopod of chloroform. On the contrary, it understands life as the play of natural forces under the conditions supplied by a living organism, as the automatic working of a machine-like apparatus to which natural forces supply the motive power. Similar manifestations in inanimate matter and in elementary organisms seem to justify the conclusion that the distinction between living and non-living matter is arbitrary, that there are only forces, or perhaps one single force, that is to say, one movement, in the universe, whose activity is manifested in the most manifold forms, of which life is one. Modern Monism has come to this conclusion, but it is not alone in so doing. Long before Monism there was a philosophy which conceived all cosmic energies to form a unity; and really it is only an obstinate quarrel about words, for the Hylozoists regard the universe as something living and ascribe life to all matter and all atoms of which matter is made up, while the Materialists regard life as a play of forces in matter. Fundamentally the Hylozoists and Materialists hold the same views, only that the former call force life and the latter call life force; just as the only point of difference between them and the Pantheists is that these have given the majestic title of God to the universal life they assume--as Spinoza has it, "_Omnia quamvis diversis gradibus animata sunt_."

The question, what is life? is the greatest that the human understanding can ask of itself. For thousands of years man has cudgelled his brain over this, and is as far from finding an answer to-day as he was on the first day. The definition most often repeated runs thus: Life is the ability possessed by certain bodies to react to stimuli, to absorb nourishment and to reproduce themselves. That is a statement of observed facts, but it is no explanation. It informs us that we are familiar with bodies which behave in a way distinguishing them from other bodies; but why they conduct themselves differently from others, what the particular thing is which is present in certain combinations of matter and absent in others--that is an impenetrable secret.

Science has tried by the most varied methods to solve the problem. It seemed a triumph of research that Woehler produced urea, that chemists later on manufactured carbohydrates, that Fischer is on the high road to the production of synthetic albumen. What is gained by these discoveries? We bring about the same combinations as the living cell does. That is, no doubt, an interesting achievement, but its value as an addition to our knowledge on this point is infinitesimal. For we accomplish the production of sugar, urea and amine in a manner very different to that of the living cell, and he who copies the things turned out in a workshop has contributed nothing to our knowledge of the workman who plies his trade in the workshop. The dividing line between life and lifelessness was supposed to have been obliterated when elementary manifestations of life were proved to exist in inanimate matter; the Brownian movements in the smallest particles; the growth of crystals immersed in a solution of the same chemical composition as themselves; crystallization itself which represents a kind of very simple organization of matter, and at any rate proves the sway of a regulating and directive force; the tendency of certain elements to combine, which has been called their affinity. But this name is only a poetical metaphor which no one will take literally. The growth of crystals in their mother liquor is merely mechanical precipitation on their surface, an external addition of layers of the same material; but not growth by the incorporation of such matter, that is, through the absorption of nourishment.

These and similar results of observation do not suffice absolutely to justify the assumption, seductive though it be, that life is a fundamental attribute of matter, that it is present everywhere though graduated in intensity, that therefore apparently inanimate matter differs not qualitatively, but only quantitatively from living beings, that life stretches in an unbroken line from the block of metal or rock, in which it is completely obscured, to man, the most highly developed organism we know of; and that at a certain point in its range it reveals itself in a form which permits no distinction between organic and inorganic matter.

The origin of life is as completely unknown to us as its essence. For thousands of years the assumption was lightheartedly made that under certain, somewhat vague circumstances, life originated of its own accord. Pasteur showed that a _generatio spontanea_ cannot be proved to exist, that every living thing comes from another living thing, a parent organism, and that the old philosophers were right in propounding "_omne vivum ex ovo_" as a law, although they only guessed it and had not proved it experimentally. A very few critics, who are hard to convince, still dare to assert in a small voice that Pasteur's work and all the facts established by microbiology do not prove conclusively that life does not nevertheless originate from inorganic matter under conditions which we cannot nowadays reproduce in our laboratories. No answer can be made to this objection. An experiment is only conclusive for the conditions in which it is made, and not for others. All that we can positively assert is that on earth the genesis of life without a demonstrable parent organism has never been observed. To go farther, and to assert that a _generatio spontanea_ is absolutely impossible under any conditions, on earth or elsewhere, is arbitrary, just as it is to assert the contrary.

Those who are supporters of the theory that life can be developed from non-living matter for a long time thought they had conclusively proved their case; they argued as follows: At the present time life exists on our planet; according to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis our planet was formed from a cosmic nebula and passed through a state of fluid incandescence; in this state life is impossible; therefore life must have originated spontaneously one day after the Earth had cooled down; consequently either the Kant-Laplace hypothesis is wrong or the assertion that life can only be generated by life is erroneous; the two assumptions are incompatible. This conclusion no longer presents any insuperable difficulties. It has been observed that spores which have been kept for months at the temperature of frozen hydrogen, that is, very nearly at absolute zero, have retained their germinative power and have developed when they were brought back to a favourable temperature. Therefore they would not be killed by the cold of interstellar space on their way from one heavenly body to another, and could become the seeds of life on another hitherto inanimate star. That large numbers of tiny particles of matter exist in interstellar space and are precipitated on the heavenly bodies is proved by the cosmic dust that arctic explorers have collected from the surface of snow and ice. Therefore the Earth may well have been in an incandescent state, and may yet have received from interstellar space the germs of life which developed and multiplied when the Earth's crust had cooled sufficiently to provide the conditions favourable to their existence; and these germs may have been the ancestors of all the life that exists on earth to-day after a period of evolution lasting hundreds of millions of years.

This would account for the origin of life upon the Earth, but not of life in general. The germs, which travel as carriers of life from an older heavenly body to a younger one, must have sprung from parents, and however far back we trace their genealogical tree we are always finally faced by this dilemma: either life did, after all, originate at one time from something lifeless, and what has happened once must be able to happen again, now and always; or life never originated at all, but has always existed; it is eternal like matter, in forms whose variety we cannot even dimly grasp, its threads, having neither beginning nor end, wind through eternity. Of these two assumptions the latter is incomparably more in harmony with our present-day views on the universe. We believe the matter of which the universe is built up to be everlasting. It costs no great effort to believe life to be eternal too. True, the idea of eternity is inconceivable to us; it is a dim conception which has given rise to a word, a tone picture which portrays something indefinite, but within the bounds of the inconceivable there is room for both semi-obscurities, the everlastingness of matter and the everlastingness of life.

But the most enigmatical point in the riddle of life is not life itself, which is a form of being, and is neither more nor less comprehensible than the existence of an inanimate object, of a stone, of water, of the air; it is consciousness. Descartes proves his own existence to himself by the fact that he thinks. Life must be accompanied by consciousness in order to convince the living being that it exists. The formula: "_cogito ergo sum_" has been admired for hundreds of years. It certainly is specious. But how many questions it leaves unanswered! Has it the right to deny life to an entity that does not conceive itself? Must it not be completed by the proof that life without thought, that is, without consciousness, does not exist, that consciousness is the necessary complement of life? And, above all, ought not Descartes to have given us an explanation of what thought and consciousness are?

I will attempt to answer the questions left unanswered by Descartes. But I must premise one thing. Every definition of consciousness implies a postulate: life. Though at a pinch we can picture life without consciousness, consciousness without life is absolutely inconceivable. I do not undertake to explain what life is, any more than I attempted it above. We must take it as something given. Consciousness, then, is the subjective realization of something objective, the inward realization of something outside. If in a living being a picture of its surroundings is developed, then it absorbs something which is not a necessary part of itself. Of course, this inner image must not be understood to imply an absorption of matter. It is a process in the matter of which the living being is built up. But, all the same, the image of the outer world in the inner being does signify a penetration of the latter by the former. This image, which follows the changes of the outer world and repeats them in the inner being, is consciousness. It may be shadowy and blurred, or clear and distinct; it may in rapid succession be formed and pass away, and it can be preserved as a memory; it may reflect a greater or a lesser portion of the outer world; consciousness is accordingly duller or sharper; its contents are scant or plentiful, it retains the images of a shorter or longer series of conditions in the surrounding world. Between nutrition, which is recognized as an essential phenomenon of life, and consciousness a surprising parallelism subsists. Both consist in an absorption of the outer world by the organism; nutrition is the assimilation of matter, consciousness that of stimuli. In the process of nutrition the organism digests small quantities of the outside world; in consciousness it digests the world as a whole.

This parallelism is no mere play of the intellect. If it is followed out it leads to significant ideas if not to actual knowledge. What penetrates from the outer world into the inner being of the organism is vibration, movement, force. Is the matter which is absorbed as nourishment ultimately anything different? Here we come up against the ultimate problems of physics, the various hypotheses regarding the nature of force and matter, the theories that in addition to matter there is an ether, or that the ether is a different, more subtle, form of matter, or that neither matter nor ether exist, but atoms out of which everything is built up, which themselves consist of electrons which are centres of force, motions without material consistency. All these theories, of which the last cannot be grasped by the human understanding, we can leave severely alone. This is not the place to investigate them. But the attitude of the living organism towards the outer world from which it absorbs nourishment and impressions, converting them into power to drive the life machine and transmuting them into consciousness, lends peculiar support to the supposition that force and matter are not only inseparable but identical, that in them we must seek a principle, or perhaps regard them themselves as a principle, which must be of the same nature as consciousness, for otherwise it could not be transmuted into the latter.

The senses are the means by which the outer world penetrates as an image into the inner being. Before the senses are differentiated the living organism possesses a general sensitiveness; that is to say, that under the influence of the outer world its cell protoplasm undergoes a process of regrouping, resulting in chemical and dynamic changes. The chemical results of stimulus are anabolism and katabolism, a building up and breaking down of the cell content; the dynamic results are movements which in the lowest forms of life are purely mechanical, but in the higher forms adapt the organism to the external influence in so far as they place it either so as to be affected by the latter as long and as powerfully as possible, or else so as to evade it. The living organism can experience no stimulus and respond to it without absorbing and transmuting it, converting it into a chemical process or a movement. This inner process is a subjective realization of something objective, a penetration by the outer world, therefore an elementary consciousness. In proportion as the general sensitiveness becomes differentiated into specific ones, as the image of the outer world filters through the different coloured glass panes of the various senses into the inner being of the organism, this image becomes multicoloured and varied.

It lies in the nature of this mechanism that the subjective image is not identical with the objective original, but is modified and even distorted by the panes through which it penetrates to the inner being of the organism. What the subject perceives is never anything but a symbol of the object, never the object itself; but this symbol suffices to enable the consciousness to form an idea of the object, just as letters enable the reader to take in words and thoughts. We must conceive the development of consciousness to go hand in hand with that of the senses. The more windows the organism can open to the outer world the more easily and the more clearly does its image penetrate. The number of objects which the subject can take in is the measure of the perfection of its consciousness. The protista, lacking specific sense organs and possessing only the general sensitiveness of protoplasm, can form only to a very limited extent and with very little variety an inner realization of the stimuli of the outer world. Its consciousness is necessarily very restricted and exceedingly dim. Consciousness is enlarged and grows clearer as the organism develops and its general sensitiveness is differentiated into specific senses, until we reach the level of man whose consciousness embraces far more of the outer world than does that of any other living creature; because, lacking new senses, he has succeeded in amplifying and enlarging those he possesses, and has by artificial means made himself capable of perceiving stimuli to which he is not directly susceptible and which therefore would have remained unknown to him; to a certain extent he has translated them into a form which his senses can perceive.

I do not overlook any of the difficulties which my attempt to explain consciousness leaves untouched. On all sides the most urgent and disquieting questions arise. Above all, the fundamental question, the most enigmatic of all: how is an external stimulus, that is a movement, a vibration, converted into a sensation, a perception? Further: must we in the consciousness distinguish between the frame and its contents, the conceptual mechanism and the concept? Or do the two coincide? Is there no consciousness without a conceptual content? And is it the movement entering into the organism, the inner realization of the outer world which, transmuting itself in an incomprehensible manner into a concept, creates consciousness, becomes consciousness? Is the consciousness of the man standing upon the highest plane of intellectuality the greatest consciousness possible? Does there exist anywhere in the universe a more abundant, perhaps an infinitely more abundant consciousness than that of human beings on the Earth, and will the latter ever rise to this height? It is obvious that a development is in progress. There was a time when the most comprehensive, the clearest consciousness on earth was that of the trilobite or the cephalopod. Evolution has gone as far as man. Does it stop at that or will it continue?

According to Herbert Spencer evolution is progress from the simple to the complicated. Let us accept this definition. Have we the right to set up a scale of values and place the complicated above the simple? Is the latter not the more perfect because it has more power of resistance, greater durability, and can hold its own triumphantly against all destructive influences? Is not evolution, then, a retrogression from the perfect, because simple, to the more complicated, and therefore more fragile, more easily upset and less capable of resistance to harm? Is it not sheer egocentrism if we appraise the value of living beings according to their greater or less resemblance to ourselves, and judge them to be less or more worthy in proportion to their disparity with us? Are the fish which, living in the sea wherein we cannot exist, can inhabit the greater part of the globe, are wild duck which fly, swim and walk, not more perfect than we, who have had to conquer the air and the water by artificial means? Is not the mouse's hearing sharper than ours? The eagle's sight keener? The dog's scent incomparably more delicate? Has not the carrier pigeon an infinitely better sense of locality than we have? Are not many beasts physically stronger, more nimble and agile than man? His only claim to superiority rests on the greater perfection of his consciousness. Why do not all living creatures participate equally in the evolution to which this superiority is due? Why does it not take place in every organism and lead the unicellular living being in an unbroken ascent to the level of Goethe or Napoleon, or to a still more lofty one, if such an one exist anywhere in the universe?

If one could believe in a Ruling Power and the plan of the universe as its work, would it not be terribly cruel and revoltingly unjust that this power, instead of treating all living beings alike, should make a kind of selection of grace and lead some up to a higher level while it condemned others to lasting lowliness, and that it should ordain that on the road from the unicellular organism to man, countless connecting links should be left hopelessly behind and not be permitted to continue their ascent? Or must we admit the humiliating conclusion that a greater amount of consciousness does not necessarily imply higher rank and greater dignity, and that a protista, with its almost unimaginably pale and narrow consciousness, can have just as great a feeling of well-being as man with his immeasurably superior intellectual life; that therefore the protista suffers no wrong if it never gets beyond its present stage of evolution; and finally that the amount of the outer world which man can absorb in his consciousness is as far removed from the entirety of the universe as the contents of the protista's consciousness are from that of the human mind? No answer can be found to these questions. Whatever purports to be an answer, be it introduced as theology or as philosophy, is visionary or nonsensical. We must resign ourselves to moving in a very small circle moderately illuminated by Reason, while all around, if we seek to penetrate beyond it, we perceive gruesome darkness.

Evolution, that is a progress from the comparatively simple to the more complicated, is a striking fact--I say comparatively simple advisedly, for even in the unicellular organism the processes are far removed from the absolutely simple. We do not know from what part of the organism the impulse to evolution comes. Here we meet with the same mystery which shrouds growth, its duration, its measure and its bounds. As the conception is lacking, a word has been found, viz., entelechy, which Driesch introduced into biology, the co-operation of all parts of the organism for the purpose not only of preserving it but also of making it more efficient in the matter of self-preservation and more perfect. A critical investigation of entelechy would involve the broaching of the whole question of life. It does not come within the scope of this work. I shall therefore content myself with a very few remarks. Entelechy works as if it were reasonable and acted with a set purpose. If you think it out exhaustively it forces you to the assumption that life is an intellectual principle, even in the protoplasm of the cell, long before there is any perceptible trace of consciousness; that this intellectual principle makes use of matter, builds it up, organizes it, moulds it into material and tools for construction, and sets up a mechanism in which and by which it develops itself. As far as we can see the purpose of life is life itself. Entelechy directs all the work of the organism in such a way that it becomes more and more capable of self-preservation, that its efficiency becomes greater, that it can absorb more of the outer world and can react more vigorously upon the outer world. In other words, life strives continuously to make its embodiments more permanent, securer, richer and more manifold.

However, if we do not know how the impulse to evolution originates, we can at least form an idea of the mechanism of evolution. Fundamentally life consists in the absorption of cosmic movements or vibrations, and their transformation into another form of movement. The living cell is a machine which makes use of cosmic energy for physio-chemical work. Metabolism, warmth, electric manifestations, movement, and as their concomitant a graduated consciousness, are the result of this work which is carried out by cosmic energy in the cell power machine.

To start with, this machine works in the very simplest fashion. It uses up its motive power as fast as it acquires it. Energy flows in and immediately flows out again in another form. The organism is like a pipe or a vessel without a bottom, so that its contents cannot be stored. The lower organisms which obey tropisms are such bottomless vessels. They are continually and inevitably subjected to the same attractions and repulsions and have no means to withstand them. But at a certain stage of evolution--how? why? Driesch replies: Entelechy!--a new part is developed in the machine, something like the cam on a cogwheel which forces it to come to rest. Or, to keep to the earlier simile, the bottomless vessel acquires a bottom with a tap that can be opened and closed. With this arrangement the organism is able to store the energy it has received and then to make use of it according to its needs, to do much more or much less work with it, to achieve much greater or much smaller effects, than it would be capable of doing with the amount of energy it receives from outside in a given unit of time. It is obvious how much more efficient the organism becomes if it can store up energy and can adapt to its needs the amount used up. This new part of the machine is Inhibition.

It appears early, and takes part in the general development of the organism; it is indeed the strongest factor in this development. Before Inhibition intervenes the organism has only one response to stimulus: reflex action. This is of the character of an electric discharge. It may be stronger or weaker, but is uniform in kind. It varies quantitatively but not qualitatively. In the lower organisms it is a contraction of the cell protoplasm, a movement. In the higher organisms, in which the life processes are carried out on the principle of the division of labour and which have developed various organs for this purpose, each organ performs the action of its specific function; the muscle contracts, the nerve sends out a nervous impulse, the gland forms a secretion, and so on. All reflex actions have this in common, that they serve no other purpose than that of relaxing tension in the organism. They do not imply any co-ordinated effort to promote the comfort and the welfare of the living being. They cannot fulfil any complicated task. They exhaust the organism which, after a series of reflex actions, becomes insensitive to stimuli and must rest for a time before it can react again.

Beginning from that stage of evolution where inhibition intervenes, reflex action loses the character of an automatic response to impulse and becomes disciplined. Inhibition tries to suppress reflex action. Its success is more or less complete according to the sensitiveness and life energy of the tissue receiving the stimulus and the degree to which the mechanism of inhibition is developed. The organism retains its tension, remains charged with energy, and is able to carry out work for definite purposes. In place of anarchistic reflex action which occurs regardless of the needs of the organism, we find economy of energy, co-ordination of effort, movement directed to a profitable end. It is only inhibition which can raise the organism from its state of passivity, its helpless dependence upon tropism, to a being in which a will is beginning to dawn and which by its will becomes self-determinative. Inhibition is a function of the will; it is the will's tool. Even Plato dimly perceived this, and he expresses it in the metaphorical language peculiar to himself, when, in the "Republic," he compares a human being to a creature made up of three animals: a hundred-headed sea-serpent which must at one and the same time be fed and tamed, a blind lion, and a man who tames the serpent by means of the lion. These three animals are desire ([Greek: epithumia]), courage ([Greek: thumos]), and mind ([Greek: nous]). We say in biological language, reflex action, inhibition, and will or volitional reason.

All the concepts that are referred to here: purpose, co-ordination, inhibition and will, are every one of them dependent upon one fundamental concept, consciousness. Without it they are unthinkable. Schopenhauer's unconscious will is a word without meaning. I have postulated consciousness as the inseparable concomitant of life. It is probably the essence of life. In its lowest stage it is too dim, its contents too meagre and blurred, properly to distinguish the organism in which it dwells from the world around. In a higher state of development, when it gradually grows clearer and begins to be filled with more sharply defined ideas, it learns to keep its organism and the surrounding world apart, and tries to make the attitude of the former to the latter one of self-defence, self-preservation and self-development. From this stage of development onward, concepts begin to connect and group themselves in such a way that consciousness contains not only an image of the immediate present, but also memories of the past and a forecast of the future. The ability to prolong the present into the future, to understand the actual as a cause of the effects that follow and to foresee these effects, that is the starting point of logic and reason. It is the necessary antecedent of the will, which would have no meaning if it were not the effort to realize a conception of actions and their consequences, previously worked out by consciousness. Will is a function of consciousness which, in pursuance of the well-known biological law, creates an instrument for its purposes, and this instrument is inhibition. The higher an organism stands on the ladder of evolution the more energetically and surely does inhibition work, the nicer and the more masterly does its intervention in the original reflex actions grow.

Thanks to the piling up of reserves of energy, which is a result of inhibition, the organism can carry out its work of differentiation, can develop organs and organic systems, and obtain the power to perform more complicated functions; these render it ever more independent of the outer world and enable it to affect the outer world to an increasing extent. Inhibition plays an important part in differentiation. Its apparatus becomes organized. The nerve centres from which the inhibition proceeds form a ladder of which each rung is subordinate to the next. The peripheral nerves are controlled by the nerve centres in the spinal cord, these again by the centres in the medulla oblongata, and then in succession by the cerebellum and the cerebrum, and finally by the corticle. On the principle of least resistance, on which all life is based, the highest centres of inhibition unburden themselves by granting the lower ones a certain measure of independence. The reaction to the most ordinary and frequent stimuli is controlled and organized in its character and strength by the apparatus of inhibition, so that it ensues automatically, and no active inhibition, that is, no conscious effort of the will, is required. The simplest of these automatic reflex movements take place below the level of consciousness.

Those organized complexes of movement, however, which we call instincts, are carefully watched by the consciousness and subjected to severe check if they appear to run counter to the supposed interest of the organism. The hereditary complexes of movement constituting instinct are highly organized and oppose inhibition, only yielding to it when it is stronger than they are. This can be observed in animals which are capable of taming and training. All the artificial actions and omissions that man teaches them are triumphs of inhibition over automatism. Among human beings it is only the elect who can vigorously suppress their instincts by inhibition directed by Reason. The being that has attained the summit of organic evolution on earth is man, in whom only the lower, vegetative life processes are liable to the influence of tropism and primary reflex actions, while all the higher and highest functions are the work of Reason, which arms the will with inhibition and suppresses all impulses and actions that hinder its purposes. It is characteristic of these functions that they are first worked out as concepts by the consciousness before they are realized as movements.

It was essential for Morality to find this whole organic structure ready to its hand before it could become a factor in human life. This structure had been developed and perfected by the organism for its own purposes, for the defence and enrichment of its life, to ward off painful and obtain pleasurable feelings. Morality took possession of it and used it for its own ends, which do not at the first glance coincide with the aims which the individual immediately perceives and imagines, and may indeed be diametrically opposed to these, preventing pleasurable emotions, causing him pain and even endangering his life.

But Morality, which is a creation of society, was only able to dominate the individual and gain control of the organic apparatus of his vital economy, because its purpose is directed towards the same goal as the tendencies of the individual organism, prolonging them beyond the individual's scope, aiming at his preservation, and thus coinciding with his instinct for self-preservation.

Morality limits the individual's vainglory and subordinates him to the community; it is the condition on which the community allows the individual to participate in the mightier and more varied means of protection and the enrichment of existence which it has to offer. But apart from this somewhat remote advantage of Morality, there is another immediate one for the individual: it consists in the continual exercise and consequent strengthening of inhibition; therefore, as we have learnt to see in inhibition the main factor in the development and differentiation of all living creatures, it offers a means of raising the individual to biological perfection. The faculty of inhibition, being in a continual state of strong tension, makes automatic reflexes subject to the will, makes blind impulses obedient to the somewhat less blind reason, and helps man along the path of evolution from the status of a creature of instinct to that of a thinking personality of strong character, capable of judgment and foresight, a personality which does not seek to attain the pleasurable emotions necessary to every living creature by pandering to his senses and satisfying the appetites of the flesh, but achieves them by gratification of a higher order, by the triumph of the intellect over vegetative life, by strengthening the will in relation to the stimuli of the outer world and the organs, by taking pleasure in the fact that the will is content with its sway. These are harsh but subtle pleasures which, when they continue to preponderate in the consciousness, bring about that state of subjective happiness which is in the highest degree beneficial to life.

Morality is an arrangement which has arisen from the needs of society; that is to say, it is not innate, but is an artificial institution of the race. However, it grafts itself upon the natural organs and attributes of man, and thus, from being a sociological phenomenon, it becomes a biological one. The idea that Morality is something absolute, a cosmic force, and that it would still exist and be valid if there were no human beings, and even if the earth had no existence, I have refuted with scorn. We must hold fast to the fact that Morality is a law of human conduct, that it is in force only among mankind, and that apart from mankind it is unthinkable. As, however, it becomes a differentiated function of the apparatus of inhibition, it participates in the general processes of life and leads us to that point where, indeed, we face the unnerving outlook upon the absolute and the question of eternity.

My arguments have led me to many phenomena that can be established and interpreted as facts of experience, but the explanation of which lies beyond the power of the human mind. We have examined the riddle of life, and we have distinguished therein a number of inexplicable things: the lack of a beginning, sensitiveness to stimuli, consciousness, the transformation of vibrations into sensations and concepts, the will, and inhibition. We are forced to the conclusion that the only discernible aim of life's activities is the preservation of life, or, more shortly, that life is its own aim and object. Morality, too, either openly or by implication, sets itself the one clearly demonstrable task of ensuring to the individual the preservation and security of his existence in a higher sphere than that of individual vegetative life processes. Thereby it fits into the scheme of existence, its mysteries and aims, and becomes an integral part of the cycle of life which emerges from eternity and returns to it.