To life and truth, that the masterpiece’s provenance
Is a cosmic Mind that energizes the arts.¹
But where in mechanics is there scope for chance?
Where in the prison-house is freedom’s room?
Mind is no creator; but body is mind’s womb
And final rest, dust its inheritance.
Mind did not evolve from alphabet soup,²
From an ordered consommé, from antecedent Mind:
Life sprang from molecular dodgems, and we find
That evolution drove all before it, from a scoop
Of proteins by viral RNA in a wind
Of lipids (the proto-cell) to microbes and multi-celled,
As the brook of metabolizing protoplasm swelled
To a mighty river that flowed on to mind -
A mind inseparable from body and brain.
What mind imparts to the richness of existence
Is evolution’s pledge of quality and excellence;
But as higher emerged from lower, so train
Subtly our minds shall all brute sapience,
While we look to the lower orders of the universe,
To lab mice and genes to be wisdom’s nurse,
To atoms to give us the shape of our intelligence.
‘Explanations at one level by reference to a lower
Fail,’ some say, ‘like literary appraisement
By brain physiology - the more tangible the referent
The less meaningful.’ Are contemplative lives a bestower
Of such self-understanding and spiritual content?
But, reasoning that Nature embosomed the meat ³
³The reductionist here cynically questions whether intelligence is the fundamental reality in the universe, rather than matter-in-motion. But matter only makes up 5% of the cosmos; dark matter 20%, energy 75%. As the reductionist proceeds by reducing complex phenomena to simple terms, the over-simplifying tendency runs out of steam when he runs out of matter to reduce down to.