If any one should care to say that unless I have bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I could not do what I would, that is well enough: but to say that I act as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which my mind acts, and not from choice of the best, why, that is a very careless and idle way of speaking. _Plato._
There are signs that the life of the body is even in the lower animals to some extent imbued with the free creative spirit. There are creative efforts of determination, changes of direction, triumphs over circumstance, that find their enlightening context in the more emancipated life of man.
A sea-urchin's egg, for instance, begins its development by dividing into two cells. Normally these cells, by a like division, share between them the making of the respective halves of the creature's body. If you remove one cell after the first division of the egg you may expect (you certainly should and will if you take your stand with the mechanistic theorists) to find that you have mutilated the creature. You may or will expect to see the remaining half of the egg grow to a half-embryo. Under some circumstances you will see what you expect; but if you are very skilful and are acquainted with the new methods you will have the disturbing joy of seeing the half-egg—you may even see a quarter-egg—take on the work of the whole, and grow to a complete though small embryo; and not only to an embryo but to a larva. You may do the same with a newt's egg or a frog's. With your mind's eye, then, you may if you like, and if you thus interpret things, watch the sea-urchin's, the frog's, or the newt's life, overcoming, according to a 'primary purposiveness' of its own, your effort to thwart its intention. You may watch it determining new contrivances from within to meet an unexpected emergency that threatens to mar the complete whole it means to be, changing a normal to an abnormal course of activity, that it may still attain its end—in short 'working out its own salvation,' as a morphologist remarks, 'upon original and individual lines.'