machines must have what all other machines have if they are machines
at all--a designer, and some one to wind them up and work them; but I
thought this might wait for the present, and was perfectly ready
then, as now, to accept a designer from without, if the facts upon
examination rendered such a belief reasonable.

If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only machines
of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us to cut the
difficulty and say that that kind of mechanism was "being alive," why
should not machines ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at
any rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be indeed as
living as it was in the nature of anything at all to be? If it was
only a case of their becoming more complicated, we were certainly
doing our best to make them so.

I do not suppose I at that time saw that this view comes to much the
same as denying that there are such qualities as life and
consciousness at all, and that this, again, works round to the
assertion of their omnipresence in every molecule of matter, inasmuch
as it destroys the separation between the organic and inorganic, and
maintains that whatever the organic is the inorganic is also. Deny
it in theory as much as we please, we shall still always feel that an
organic body, unless dead, is living and conscious to a greater or
less degree. Therefore, if we once break down the wall of partition
between the organic and inorganic, the inorganic must be living and
conscious also, up to a certain point.

I have been at work on this subject now for nearly twenty years, what
I have published being only a small part of what I have written and
destroyed. I cannot, therefore, remember exactly how I stood in