When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing
some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking
nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a
potentiality of disobeying.
No objection can lie to our supposing potential or elementary volition
and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their action would
be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if they had not.
By giving them free will we do no more than those who make them bound to
obey fixed laws. They will be as certain to use their freedom of will
only in particular ways as to be driven into those ways by obedience to
fixed laws.
The little element of individual caprice (supposing we start with free
will), or (supposing we start with necessity) the little element of
stiffneckedness, both of which elements we find everywhere in nature,
these are the things that prevent even the most reliable things from
being absolutely reliable. It is they that form the point of contact
between this universe and something else quite different in which none of
those fundamental ideas obtain without which we cannot think at all. So
we say that nitrous acid is more reliable than nitric for etching.
Atoms have a mind as much smaller and less complex than ours as their
bodies are smaller and less complex.
Complex mind involves complex matter and vice versa. On the whole I
think it would be most convenient to endow all atoms with a something of
consciousness and volition, and to hold them to be _pro tanto_, living.
We must suppose them able to remember and forget, i.e. to retain certain
vibrations that have been once established—gradually to lose them and to
receive others instead. We must suppose some more intelligent, versatile
and of greater associative power than others.