Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/18

16 a song, the recitation of a poem, the playing of a musical instrument, by one who is interested in doing entirely different things. That is, in each of us there are systems of habits po.tent to awaken in others experiences of groups of sensations moving in a spiral or rotatory order in case others become interested in observing them. The interests of every well organized life rest upon the energies of habits potent as the inmost core of all these interests, and potent to awaken automaically an experience of routine movement for those interested in the abstract observation of them. The same would be true of the greatest spiritual reality of all.

The inorganic elements, their compounds and relationships, being identified with the habits and the interhabital relationships in a spiritual reality more advanced than man, would be organized in systems more or less stable, and such as are manifest to us in organic forms. These organic forms as observed by us would be due to the energies or habits in the interests of the higher spiritual reality, to interests which have also been largely automatized, but not so largely as in the case of the habits which give rise to our experience of the inorganic elements and compounds, just as the interests automatized in a proverb or song are not so stable as are those in a word or elementary sound. Nevertheless, these more stable habits which support our experience of the inorganic elements could not well have come into existence, or at least could not have maintained their existence, save in relationship to the growing organic forms in which they become organized. And this conclusion has been confirmed by the chemist Henderson who, after a thorough examination of the properties of the three elements, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, concludes: "There is, in truth, not one chance in countless millions that the many unique properties of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. and especially of their stable compounds, water and carbonic acid, which chiefly make up the atmosphere of a new planet, should simultaneously occur in the three elements otherwise than through the operation of a natural law which somehow connects them together, There is no greater probability that these unique properties should be without due (i. e. relevant) cause uniquely favorable to the organic mechanism." At another time the same chemist says:

“Yet the connection between these properties of the elements, almost infinitely improbable as the result of contingency, can only be regarded, is in truth only fully intelligible even if