And if--to come back to our own planet--if the earth is a living organism, there will naturally be distribution of function, as there is in our own bodies. It would be absurd for the eye to deny life and perception to ear or skin just because their mode of activity is different. It is wiser to concede life and mind where-ever there is action. In the present state of affairs, not only do we get into difficulties by our rash assumption that there is no mind without protoplasm (_ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke_, as the old materialist too boldly said), but we find it impossible to draw the line between living and non-living. Drops of oil exhibit amoeboid movements, and at the lower end of life the slime-mass becomes so undifferentiated as to be very much in a borderland between the two states. Probably non-living substances gradate into living ones by imperceptible _differentiæ_, as man would be found to gradate back into an anthropoid ape or something of the kind if we could see all the stages. Nature does not make jumps. Where she seems to do so, it is only because we cannot see how she gets from one place to another distant one. But when we scrutinise the interspace, we see that there is a path. Nature does not jump. She glides. It is on this line of thought that the disagreement between the schools represented by Sir Edward Schäfer and Dr Hans Driesch respectively may, perhaps, be happily resolved. No doubt each may have to make concessions. The mechanist must not claim that mind is _only_ an affair of nitrogenous colloids, for this would be a large assumption built on a very small foundation; no biologist, however much he knows about nitrogenous colloids, can in any conceivable sense explain his joy in a sunset or a symphony by reference to those substances. Physical causes have physical effects; to say that they cause anything non-physical (_i.e._ mental) is really talking nonsense. And, on the other hand, the vitalist must not deny consciousness to non-protoplasmic Nature. Negations are dangerous. It is extremely risky to say that a Matterhorn has less spiritual significance--in itself and for the whole, and not only for us--than a cretin who wanders useless and unbeautiful about its lower slopes. The activities of the two are different, that is all we are justified in saying. True, the Matterhorn's are more calculable and predictable, but that does not prove unconsciousness. Human action also is predictable to some extent. And the more wise and unified a man is--the nearer he approximates to ideal perfection--the more accurately we can predict his response to a given stimulus. We might almost argue, on these lines, that inorganic matter has a certain superiority; for it is not capricious. It knows what it wants to do, and does it; or at least--if this is going too far--it does things, and does them _as if_ it knew very well what it wanted to do. To the same conditions and