identical with perfect freedom.

If we could grasp the totality of things we should realise that
everything was ordered and definite, linked up with everything else
in a chain of causation, and that nothing was capricious and
uncertain and uncontrolled. The totality of things is, however, and
must remain, beyond our grasp; hence the actual working of the
process, the nature of the links, the causes which create our
determinations, are frequently unknown. And since it is necessary
for practical purposes to treat what is utterly beyond our ken as
if it were non-existent, it becomes easily possible to fall into
the erroneous habit of conceiving the transcendental region to be
completely inoperative.

CHAPTER X

FURTHER SPECULATION AS TO THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF LIFE[6]

_Preliminary Remarks on Recent Views in Chemistry._

It is a fact extremely familiar to chemists that the groupings possible
to atoms of carbon are exceptionally numerous and complicated, each
carbon atom having the power of linking itself with others to an
extraordinary extent, so that it is no exceptional thing to find a
substance which contains twenty or thirty atoms of carbon as well as
other elements linked together in its molecule in a perfectly definite
way, the molecule being still classifiable as that of a definite
chemical compound. But there are also some non-elementary bodies which,
although they are chemically complete and satisfied, retain a
considerable vestige of power to link their molecules together so as to
make a complex and massive compound molecule; and these are able not
only to link similar molecules into a more or less indefinite chain,
but to unite and include the saturated molecules of many other
substances also into the unwieldy aggregate.

[6] An article reprinted from the _North American Review_ for May
1905.

Of the non-elementary bodies possessing this property, _water_ appears
to be one of the chief; for there is evidence to show that the ordinary
H-2-O molecule of water, although it may be properly spoken of as a
saturated or satisfied compound, seldom exists in the simple isolated
shape depicted by this formula, but rather that a great number of such
simple molecules attach themselves to each other by what is called
their residual or outstanding affinity, and build themselves up into a
complex aggregate.

The doctrine of residual affinity has been l