A conscious pianola, even if we supposed it to possess the endowment of memory, would only recognize itself as a succession of sensations. The hegemonic faculty, the sense of command and control, which Plato[136] laid his finger on, as indicating the difference between a human personality and a musical mechanism, and which Hermann Lotze,[137] in the full light of modern science, still thought valid for the same purpose, would be wanting. Man does not live in the moment. As Goethe wrote in some of his greatest lines—lines that read like hammer-strokes nailing up the charter of human right:— Nur allein der Mensch Vermag das Unmögliche; Er unterscheidet, Wählet und richtet; Er kann dem Augenblick Dauer verleihn.[138] Behind the mechanism of the pianola, behind the mechanism of the brain, there stands this living directive force of which we can give no scientific account whatever—we can only say that it is there. Indeed, it is just at this point that all comparison between mechanism, as usually understood, and vital action of any kind must break down. But the fact is that mechanism is usually not understood at all. I spoke above of a piece of mechanism taken by itself. But in truth we cannot take it by itself. Nothing in nature can be truly isolated, it only exists in relation to other things. Every machine has a soul, the soul of the man who made or who works it. Without that it would be merely scrap-iron; and even as scrap-iron it has relations with things about it—air, water, acids, and the like. In these relations we detect the soul of nature. Nothing exists by itself—nor even, permanently, _as_ itself. The living universe of our experience is not a Being but an Acting and a Becoming. It is precisely this fact which, on the one hand, imposes a mysterious limit on the intellect, and, on the other, opens a boundless horizon before the will. The human brain, the most highly organized form of protoplasm known to us, may be called in one sense a machine through which the personal will, the moral emotions, the æsthetic sense, the faculties of reasoning, have to assert themselves in action. But to say that they would never have existed but for this special form of protoplasm is to say that they were created by it out of nothing. And, no doubt, one can say that, one can _say_ anything; but one cannot think it. I do not see how to represent the matter to our thought except by supposing that every stage in physical evolution is accompanied by what has been called ‘involution,’ a drawing in, from the potentialities of Being, of powers and faculties of living for which the opportunity to become actual had ripened.