says,

The physical order of nature--the inorganic world--where mechanism
reigns supreme. (2) There is the vital order of nature--the world
of organisms--where mechanism proves insufficient. (3) There is the
physical order of nature--the world of mind--where mechanism is
irrelevant. Thus there are three fundamental sciences--Physics,
Biology, and Psychology--each with characteristic questions,
categories and formulae.

Now, however earnestly Huxley's statement calls for criticism, it is
clear to us that nothing useful in that direction is offered by Prof.
Thomson. It is quite plain that the abstract possibility of such a
calculation as that named by Huxley can never be ruled out by science,
since such a conception lies at the root of all scientific thinking.
After all, want of knowledge only proves--want of knowledge; and Sir
Oliver Lodge would warn Prof. Thomson of the extreme danger of resting
an argument on the ignorance of science at any particular time.[4]

I note this statement of Professor Thomson's chiefly because it
illustrates a very common method of dealing with the mechanistic or
non-theistic view of the universe. In this matter Professor Thomson may
claim the companionship of Sir Oliver Lodge, who says, "Materialism is
appropriate to the material world, not as a philosophy, but as a working
creed, as a proximate, an immediate formula for guiding research.
Everything beyond that belongs to another region, and must be reached by
other methods. To explain the psychical in terms of physics and
chemistry is simply impossible.... The extreme school of biologists ...
ought to say, if they were consistent, there is nothing but physics and
chemistry at work anywhere." With both these writers there is the common
assumption that the mechanist assumes there is a physical and chemical
explanation of all phenomena. And the assumption is false. There is a
story of a well-known lecturer on physiology who commenced an address on
the stomach by remarking that that organ had been called this, that, and
the other, but the one thing he wished his students to bear in mind was
that it was a stomach. So the mechanist, while firmly believing that
there is an ascending unity in all natural phenomena, is never silly
enough to deny that living things are alive, or that thinking beings
think.

But unless Professor Thomson does impute this to the mechanist, we quite
fail to see the relevance