There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity about the theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It is so easy to say that the world is nothing but a machine nicely constructed of atoms, running smoothly and undeviatingly under the mechanical laws of motion; to deny that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to disarrange the regularity demanded by science; to dispose of the passions and appetites and the very consciousness of man as mere products of atomical reaction. It was the kind of simplification that promised to solve for us all the annoying problems of life, exactly the kind of bait that the Demon of the Absolute loves to dangle before a mind unprotected by the humility of common sense. Certainly if ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in their pockets, it was this particular group of mid-Victorians who married the atheistical philosophy of the eighteenth century to the physical discoveries of the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of simplification has led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to keep the machine going that long ago the plain man, if he dared, would have scouted the whole conception as a fantastic dream. And here Mr. Whitehead, by virtue of his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an authority for which the plain man must be very grateful. “The physical doctrine of the atom,” he says, “has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.” In all conscience, is it not true that to accept the more recent developments of scientific mechanism requires about the same sort of credulity as was demanded of the theologian in the Middle Ages when asked to debate the number of angels who could stand together on the point of a needle? And as the mechanistic theory, when used to explain the inner workings of matter, instead of simplifying science, breaks down under a weight of infinite complications, so, when applied to the nature of man, it shatters itself on what Mr. Whitehead rightly calls certain “stubborn and irreducible facts”--the most stubborn and irreducible of these facts being, as every unperverted mind knows, that we are not pure machines, and that any argument which would subject the human will and consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void because based on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of Darwinian materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics of which still circulate in the backwaters of the biological laboratory), as against all forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or scientific, “Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages: ‘My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be mistaken.’”