125. The last question is a crucial one, which must be met at the outset. It must be noticed that the ordinary conception of organisation, as we apply it in the interpretation of nature, implies that agents may be instrumental in the attainment of an end or the fulfilment of an idea of which there is no consciousness on the part of the organic agents themselves. If it is true on the one hand that the interpretation of nature by the supposition of ends external to it, with reference to which its processes are directed, has been discarded, and that its rejection has been the condition of growth in an exact knowledge of nature, on the other hand the recognition of ends immanent in nature, of ideas realised within it, is the basis of a scientific explanation of life. The phaenomena of life are not ideal, in the sense in which the ideal is opposed to that which is sensibly verifiable, but they are related to the processes of material change which are their conditions, as ideas or ideal ends which those processes contribute to realise, because, while they determine the processes (while the processes would not be what they are but for relation to them), yet they are not those processes, not identical with any one or number of them, or all of them together. Life does not reside in any of the organs of life, or in any or all of the processes of material change through which these pass. Analyse or combine these as you will, you do not detect it as the result of the analysis or combination. It is a function or end which they realise according to a plan or idea which determines their existence before they exist and survives their disappearance. If it were held, then, that the state were an organised community in the same sense in which a living body is, of which the members at once contribute to the function called life, and are made what they are by that function, according to an idea of which there is no consciousness on their part, we should only be following the analogy of the established method of interpreting nature.