might find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.
These facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,
would be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.
They would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature
were no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper
than that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose
that nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,
and has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a
stopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied
with some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their
collisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts
discoverable, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the
only sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If
somebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of
the atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God
that they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have
thrown a bright light on the subject.

Yet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical
vitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by
two different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some
molluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of
vision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the
propulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the
developments, which, being divergent, would never have led to
coincident results, but the double development must have been guided
by a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in
a laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.
Bergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would
then be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the
other conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;
just as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that
puddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from
heaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would
not have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed
the presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in
inexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound
insight when he proclaims in her a _te