Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
If any one should care to say that unless I have
bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I
could not do what I would, that is well enough:
but to say that I act as I do because of them, and
that this is the way in which my mind acts, and not
from choice of the best, why, that is a very careless
and idle way of speaking.
_Plato._
There are signs that the life of the body is even in the lower animals
to some extent imbued with the free creative spirit. There are creative
efforts of determination, changes of direction, triumphs over
circumstance, that find their enlightening context in the more
emancipated life of man.
A sea-urchin's egg, for instance, begins its development by dividing
into two cells. Normally these cells, by a like division, share between
them the making of the respective halves of the creature's body. If you
remove one cell after the first division of the egg you may expect (you
certainly should and will if you take your stand with the mechanistic
theorists) to find that you have mutilated the creature. You may or will
expect to see the remaining half of the egg grow to a half-embryo. Under
some circumstances you will see what you expect; but if you are very
skilful and are acquainted with the new methods you will have the
disturbing joy of seeing the half-egg—you may even see a
quarter-egg—take on the work of the whole, and grow to a complete though
small embryo; and not only to an embryo but to a larva. You may do the
same with a newt's egg or a frog's. With your mind's eye, then, you may
if you like, and if you thus interpret things, watch the sea-urchin's,
the frog's, or the newt's life, overcoming, according to a 'primary
purposiveness' of its own, your effort to thwart its intention. You may
watch it determining new contrivances from within to meet an unexpected
emergency that threatens to mar the complete whole it means to be,
changing a normal to an abnormal course of activity, that it may still
attain its end—in short 'working out its own salvation,' as a
morphologist remarks, 'upon original and individual lines.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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