done all the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with
which, for some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of
the soul and design, the ideas which of all others were most
distasteful to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time,
but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an
absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they
were travelling would never lead them to it. They were driving life
up into a corner, but they were not eliminating it, and, moreover,
at the very moment of their thinking they had hedged it in and could
throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and
perched upon the place of all others where they were most
scandalised to see it--I mean upon machines in use. So they retired
sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed.


Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter,
and indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands,
there appears in Nature {144a} a letter from the Duke of Argyll,
which shows that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed
above--I mean that the real object our men of science have lately
had in view has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes
of evolution. The Duke says:-

"The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this
theory (natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which
it could never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the
least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious
perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were
seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to
blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not