Chapter III: The Organic Hypothesis

Extract

It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come as surely as the first atom has two sides.—EMERSON, Nature, 1841.

How can purposive forms of organization arise without a purposive working cause? How can work full of design build itself up without a design and without a builder?—KANT, The General History of Nature, 1755.

But there can be no reasonable doubt that living matter, in due process of time, originated from non-living; and if that be so, we must push our conclusion farther, and believe that not only living matter, but all matter, is associated with something of the same general description as mind in the higher animals. We come, that is, to a monistic conclusion, in that we believe that there is only one fundamental substance, and that this possesses not only material properties, but also properties for which the word mental is the nearest approach.—JULIAN HUXLEY, Essays of a Biologist, 1926.

The organic hypothesis holds that the world was at no time of its evolution a merely purposeless mechanical world, in which matter was prior to mind in the time order. The real original world was already and always a world of matter, life, mind, and purpose, actual or latent. Matter on this hypothesis is regarded not as an independent substance in its own right, but as the means or material through which the life and mind of the world works itself out from its potential to its actual destiny. The life-force, or mind-force, or whatever we may call it in its earlier stages, works within the sensuous material of the world, and gradually shapes and moulds this material first into what we now call inorganic formations, and then, in the ripeness of time and environment, into those organic forms in which the lifeprinciple rises into recognizable living shapes, and emerges into actual objective existence.