Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/28

 None the less we are asked to believe that it is false, because otherwise the mechanical theory cannot be upheld. Granting then for the moment that our sense of activity is illusory, we have at least in turn the right to ask how the illusion can have arisen. Pure mechanical science recognises neither activity nor passivity, but only mass that is inert and motions that are reversible. But inertia is a negative term and becomes meaningless if we have no experience of activity. Such activity, however, as the historical world implies could not be found in the physical world unless that showed signs of being intelligently directed: but then such evidence could only be appreciated by beings who were themselves active. Moreover that evidence would be fatal to the mechanical theory itself — for a mechanism admitting of direction could not be a closed system — and so with the fall of the theory would fall also the objections to our common-sense conviction that were based upon it.

All this however is negative argument; but positive arguments are not wanting. For instance, we say that ‘knowledge is power,’ and so ‘to be forewarned is to be forearmed.’ In proof we can point to instances innumerable in which the very knowledge of what in ‘the natural course of things’ will inevitably happen is the sure means of falsifying such a forecast. To take the very simplest illustration: lifeless masses do not get out of one another’s way as masses under living guidance almost invariably do. Were it otherwise, the actual course of things would be vastly more calculable but would cease altogether to be intelligible. Solely because, though inviolable, what we significantly call the