Perhaps the experiment was not conclusive. In these days of model atoms no doubt somebody can construct a model egg, each atom of which is, potentially, a complete chicken. But what troubled Driesch was the immediate necessity of violating a primary principle and being compelled to be extravagant in the matter of hypotheses. Even a model egg required a great many changes in Haeckelianism. Now if Driesch had been of an older generation or of a different persuasion, he would have found the ideas of Haeckel, not the idea of exterior design, extravagant. For one of the most ancient hypotheses in the world assumes that the design for everything lies outside of its material self. And I sometimes wonder if the principle of economy should not have been earlier applied, before so many of us abandoned this grand old major synthesis which found its highest expression in a belief in God. If it did not explain everything, it at least left room for the explanation of everything. All we had to do was to struggle for a truer and clearer conception of what it meant. Astronomers, for instance, would not now be so hard put to it in the matter of inventing Big Star theories, nor physicists in making model atoms which neither work nor exist, if they were at liberty to suppose that a forceful spirit lay behind phenomena, lending a guiding hand to all. Intellectually that would be at least as satisfactory as points of force surrounded by highly abstract hairs. But the idea of God as it emerged from the nineteenth century presented itself to many minds as the idea of a rather ridiculous monster--the monster that Sinclair Lewis dared to strike dead,--the monster that Stephen Crane once fancied as lying “dead in heaven,” and at another time warned not to shake its bloody spears at him if its “sublime ears” did not wish to “hear curses.” Neither Crane nor Lewis need have shocked anybody. They had each seen a straw man set up, and were but proceeding to knock it down. The only shocking thing was the idea, the deformity, which had been presented to them. Where it came from it is not my present purpose to enquire. Astronomers and physicists have now gone far beyond Crane and Lewis and are looping back--saving their faces (i.e., hypotheses) as much as possible--and picking up ever more and more of the ancient belief thrown away in the hour of materialistic extravagance. Chemists, too, are beginning to realize that there is no use going on and pretending that our thoughts, our feelings, our every manifestation, can be reduced to a mechanical basis, since not even a sea-urchin or a pismire can be so reduced. This something which we call life shows itself, ordinarily at least, only when certain physical elements are present. But it shows sufficient independence of these elements to make it impossible for any rational, unprejudiced being with the facts before him to continue to confound life with matter.