Both possibilities will always remain open, because however far
mechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension
presents them, will always remain irreducible to any common
denominator with the rest; and on the other hand, wherever the actual
reduction of the habits of animals to those of matter may have
stopped, we can never know that a further reduction is impossible.
The balance of reasonable presumption, however, is not even. The most
inclusive movements known to us in nature, the astronomical, are
calculable, and so are the most minute and pervasive processes, the
chemical. These are also, if evolution is to be accepted, the earliest
processes upon which all others have supervened and out of which, as
it were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention,
therefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate
processes are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The
appearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is
easily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in
terms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous
to what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them
is hidden from us, as is that of our bodies, we suppose that these
passions which we find on the surface in ourselves, or read into other
creatures, are the substantial and only forces that carry on our part
of the world.
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