The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

122 THE STOIC CREED
excluding providence and all teleological reference ;
there is, next, the erection of sensation into the criterion
of truth, or test of the validity of knowledge ; and,
further, there is the characteristic doctrine of free will.
With regard to the first of these, it may be allowed
that the fortuitous clash of atoms, although origin
ally undesigned, might conceivably give
cosmos,
rise to a
in so far as the mere collocation of material
bodies is concerned their aggregation into masses,
their mechanical and chemical actions and reactions.
Modern science admits this : even Lord Kelvin, with
all his insistence on teleology as necessary
to the
explanation of the world, allowed as much in certain
recent utterances. But although this infinite dance
and collision of atoms, continuing from all eternity,
might, owing to the infinity
of combinations accident
ally stumbled into, end in the present arrangement
that we understand as the material cosmos, neverthe
less there is no explanation here of the vital and
conscious phenomena of our experience. How, from
the mere fortuitous dance and interminable clash and
jostling of dead material particles, is Life generated ?
There is more than matter and motion here ;
there
is spontaneous movement and purposive selection.
Vitalism is not mechanism, as
even great chemists like
Professor Bunge l in Germany and Professor Japp 2 in
Scotland are forward to allow. The physiologist also
1
See his Text-book of Physiological and Pathological Chemistry,
Lecture I.
2
See his Presidential Address to the Chemical Section of the
British Association, in 1898, on Stereochemistry and Vitalism.