Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/32

 However long the periods of time may have been, there must have been a beginning of the mere waste, and there must be an end to it. From nothing, there can come nothing.

The universe, as construed solely in terms of the efficient causation of purely physical interconnections, presents a sheer, insoluble contradiction. The orthodox doctrine of the physiologists demands that the operations of living bodies be explained solely in terms of the physical system of physical categories. This system within its own province, when confronted with the empirical facts, fails to include these facts apart from an act of logical suicide. The moral to be drawn from the general survey of the physical universe with its operations viewed in terms of purely physical laws, and neglected so far as they are inexpressible in such terms, is that we have omitted some general counter-agency. This counter-agency in its operation throughout the physical universe is too vast and diffusive for our direct observation. We may acquire such power as the result of some advance. But at present, as we survey the physical cosmos, there is no direct intuition of the counter-agency to which it owes its possibility of existence as a wasting finite organism.

Thus the orthodox physiological doctrine has the weakness that it rests its explanations exclusively upon the physical system, which is internally inconsistent.

In the animal body there is, as we have already seen, clear evidence of activities directed by