The old argument of Socrates, as on the last day of his life he sits discoursing with his friends, still holds good.  He is discussing the same old question, whether there is anything more than force, material, mechanism in the world.  He says that one might assign as “the cause why I am sitting here that my body is composed of bones and muscles; that the bones are solid and separate, and that the muscles can be contracted and extended, and are all inclosed in the flesh and skin; and that the bones, being jointed, can be drawn by the muscles, and so I can move my legs as you see; and that this is the reason why I am sitting here.  But by the dog, these bones and muscles would long ago have carried me to Megara or Booetia, moved by my opinion of what was best, if I had not thought it more right and honorable to submit to the sentence pronounced by the state than to run away from it.  To call such things causes is absurd.  For there is a great difference between the cause and that without which the cause would not produce its effect.”

If there is no intelligence or love of truth in the cause, how can there be anything higher in the effect?  And if Socrates had been only bone and muscle, he ought to have run away.

Our problem stands somewhat as follows:  We have given protoplasm, a strange substance of marvellous capacities, which we call functions, and possessing a power of developing into beings of ever higher grades of organization.  Environment proves to be a combination of forces working for the higher development of functions in a certain orderly sequence.  And every lower function in the ascending line demands the development of the next higher.  Digestion demands muscle, and muscle nerve, and nerve brain.  We shall soon see that mammalian structure had to culminate in the family, and the family demands unselfishness and obedience.  Environment therefore proves from the beginning to have been unceasingly working for the highest end; never, even temporarily, merely for the lower.  For we have seen that environment works most unsparingly against those who, having taken certain of the steps in the ascending path, fail to continue therein.

But in order to attain this highest end for which it has always been working, an immense number of subsidiary ends have had to be attained.  These are not merely digestion and brain, but a host of others:  e.g., in vertebrates, vertebrae of the right substance, position, form, arrangement, and union.  And in the ascending line, for whose highest forms it has continually worked, the difficulties of attaining each subsidiary end have been successively solved, and through this host of subsidiary ends the animal kingdom has advanced straight to its goal of intelligence and righteousness.  Now the whole process is a grand argument for design.  But I would not emphasize the process so much as the end attained.  This especially, when attained by conformity to that environment, demands more than mere mindless atoms in or behind that environment.  Can we call the ultimate power which makes for righteousness “it?” Can we call it less than “Him, in whom we live and move and have our being?”