arViaSs/"""*' """'"»''y Library ^NIHIllillllliMi!li?L5«i!i?,,°* '^mortality / olin,anx 3 1924 031 229 861 Date Due FEB 21 949 J Ai*^-l- •> oq^ tS^p f'jun 05 iqS»5 1 a Cornell University 'S Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 924031 229861 BY THE SAME AUTHOE. STUDIES JJV GJENEMAI, SCIENCM 175 " The writer evinces admirable gifts botli as a student and a thinlier. *She brings a sincere and earnest mind to the investigation of trutli." — iV", Y. Tribune. IHE SEXES TBMOuen:- OVX NA.XVXt,E . . . 1 2S "A most valuable contribution to the literature of the subject." — Boston Globe. PiMUIied by O. P. PutnanCs Sons, New York. THE Basis of I HYSICAL IDASIS OF IMMORTALITY BY ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL Author of " Studies in General Science ;" *' The Sexes Throughout Nature," Etc., Etc. NEW YORK G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 182 Fifth Avenue 1876 COPYKIGHT. P. PUTNAM'S SONS . 1876. PREFACE. IT cannot be doubted that the great question of to-day, for Science and Religion equally, per- tains to the nature and to the duration of Personal Life. The inquiry embraces all lives ; our own, and those of other "beings who are either above or below mankind in the scale of existence ; but who may possess, like ourselves, the similar attribute of an individualized consciousness. Between Prof. Tyndall and his friends on one side and the Christian community on the other, the really vital point at issue concerns the Personality or Impersonality of Uncreated Being — the Ultimate ; Science has not proved that this Ultimate is Con- scious and Infinite Intelligence. The religious man knows that if he cannot cling to a Personal God, he must equally let go his firm and assured hold upon an immortal consciousness for himself. 6 PREFACE. Prof. Tyndall falls back reverently upon an irre- pressible, intuitive conviction that there must be a Superior Intelligence to his own. So undoubtedly do many others. But if the foundations of religious belief are to be shaken ever so slightly in the name of Science, then the first work for Science must be to search diligently for other foundations which are laid firmly in the unchanging Constitution of Nature. But there are many recognized leaders of modern thought or of scientific investigation, who are forward to argue that the nature of the Ultimate is not merely wholly unknown ; but that it is absolutely unknowable. Hence, it being removed entirely be- yond our ken, they teach us unquahfiedly, that we can expect to do nothing better than to leave the whole subject contentedly outside the pale of human knowledge, and even of rational investigation. Possibly we might do even this. But going yet a step beyond, in the name of philosophic Science, they claim to prove that all things knowable, man- kind included, are but shifting modes or manifesta- tions of one all-comprehensive force. Their argu- ments lead us squarely up to the inference — which PREFACE. 7 English speaking reasoners generally allow us to make, at our leisure, for ourselves, — that the present conscious life of each of us is a complex, fleeting relation of forces ; destined probably, to lapse again at death into the all-embracing unity, the Unknow- able. Their position, if accepted, must compel us to believe that we can have no more certainty of a continuous personal consciousness, than we can have an intelligent assurance that the Ultimate Force is a Rational Beneficent Being. When all phenomena are resolved into perpetually changing relations of force, human life can be nothing higher or more per- manent than a temporary, organized experience. We live to-day ; but life must ebb away to-morrow. As the candle burns itself out, and can exist no more as a candle forever, unless some inscrutable power recollects and recombines its scattered elements, so we shall die ; and dying, personal consciousness must cease with the dissolution of the body on which con- sciousness is wholly dependent. This is the appalling outcome which speculative science has achieved by its interpretations of " the new system of dynamics." 8 PREFACE. Other philosophers, like M. Papillon, who first reason away immortality, attempt to draw it back again through some metaphysical loophole in the chain of argument. In his view, " It is plain, and it would be childish to deny it, that any psychical or sentient manifestations, and any concrete represen- tation of the personality are impossible after death. The dissolution of the organism annihilates surely, and of necessity, the functions of sensation, motion, and will, which are inseparable from a certain com- bination of material conditions."* " Our true personality, our real /, that which may without illusion, count on a future life, is unity released from every material bond, and all concrete alloy ; it is that force, necessarily pure, which has a more or less clear consciousness of its own relations with the infinity of Uke unities, and which more or less draws near to them by thought and by love."f This personality, without "sensation, motion, and will," certainly is not the continuous personal identity which has become known to each one of us through his individual experience. Modem " djma- * Nature and Life, p. 327. f lb., p. 328. PREFACE. 9 mics " can give us no unchanging self-hood. Grow- ing with the growth of associated elements, our indi- viduality must change as they change, from infancy to age. We are never the same yesterday and to- day. Is this Nature's truth? Not to me. True personal identity, in the present and in the future, is the vested kingdom of all religious aspira- tion ! Continuous individual rectitude becomes im- possible otherwise. To exist, yet to be shorn of all that has constituted existence hitherto, explain the fact on whatever theory we may, is a woful outcome for science in this 19th century. Matter may be proved indestructible, force may be proved inde- structible, but the great question to us all is : Is there an actual, continuous, unchanging personal unity, the living me, which is also indestructible? Science and religion are equally interested in ground- ing themselves upon the basis of an imperishable self-hood, if this be possible. Then is it possible? The present work is an earnest attempt to answer this question in the affirm- ative. It claims to be in the direct line of modern science; to accept, in their fullest significance, the lO PREFACE. generally accepted facts and principles of the physi- cal universe, including the great law of " the correla- t'on and conservation of forces ; " in other words, " the new dynamism." But it presumes to offer a new theory of reconciliation between the facts of personal identity and the associated facts of the mutual convertibility of equivalent physical energies. It is worth while to majce a life-long personal study of these great questions. Everything is at stake- So long as the wisest men can neither live, nor can cease to live, for any one of us ; resolutely attempt- ing to study for oneself, directly from Nature's open book, the character and the duration of personal existence, can involve no undue presumption. And so long as science fails to come forward in the character of her accredited apostles with a def- inite answer to the question which is in every heart and on almost ever)- lip; Is my hfe, immortal life ? even the feeblest effort in this direction must be far from really contemptible. The authors of the Unseen Universe have tried to show us that immor- tality is a physical possibility, perhaps even a natu- ral probabilitj-. But more than ever the soul cries PREFACE. II out ; Give me a positive assurance that my present conscious life is so deeply grounded in the very con- stitution of Nature that while this existing order of Nature remains unchanged, I also shall continue unchanged in true personal identity ! Trusting, religious natures, who can find God and Immortality in the Scriptures and in the unques- tioned assurances of the soul's own plainest affirma- tions, may be repelled by this inquiry, at the outset. They believe that immortal life cannot be revealed to us through observation and reasoning. This slow, cold, passionless progress, to them will seem as sheer presumption. To them, this whole discussion will be but as the pitiful attempt of total blind- ness to portray to others a light of which it knows nothing. And if there is no Rational Mind behind the universe as its intelligent Architect ; if the present order of nature has arisen without plan or prevision, there can be but little expectation that human beings will be able to penetrate to a knowledge of the real nature of ultimate units of being, even if such exist. There may be no definite structures 12 PREFACE. and no indestructible unities. There may exist no order in phenomena which is not itself destructible with some new turn in the vast cycle of eternal changes. Whatever is, is. That is all. If, on the other hand, the universe is an infinite, related system of applied thought, in a sense as actual and as literal as that in which a machine or a garden are practical realizations of the thoughts of men — there must be excellent grounds of expectation that we shall yet be able to discover Nature's Basis of Immortal Life. We know that in some sense we are ourselves individualized. We have a present unity of individual consciousness. This conscious- ness, whether it is to be regarded as destructible or as indestructible, must have a definite structure or constitution. It exists and acts in connection with all the other powers of Nature. Then, by adapted methods of study, mankind can assuredly unravel the present mysteries of physical and psychical individuation. We can imagine ourselves to be indestructible unities which are conserved in the midst of all changes. But if an Infinite Beneficent Mind has PREFACE. 13 coordinated the universal constitution of all things, it is hardly reasonable that our conceptions should rise higher than his achievements. A half truth may bewilder and mislead ; but the whole truth is organic in the deepest heart of Nature. Men may yet rea- sonably hope to find a more comprehensive render- ing of the scheme through which definite units of beitig, physical and psychical, may persist as units, and yet be able to cooperate endlessly in a system of universal changes. But, if possibly this truth can be discovered, no other pursuit in life is at all comparable to this one. So I reasoned. And so I enlisted for the search fully a quarter of a century ago. During all these intervening years, life and immortality have both seemed waiting to be brought into the light of estab- lished science. They have been waiting to be proved as admitted facts in nature which could become known to us through a mass of cumulative evidence, all converging toward the truth that the ultimate elements of Universal Nature are all simple and indestructible. A class of investigators may declaim against the 14 PREFACE. warped attitude of mind which could go out in quest after a definite and greatly desired boon ; whereas any genuine student of science should be content simply to find the truth whatever that may be, searching after it without bias and without prepos- sessions. Possibly human beings may attain to a serenity of feeling which can consent to be person- ally annihilated without a pang. The absorbing joy of finding out the real state of the case, to a few minds may compensate for the annihilation of all hope of continuous living experience. To others, such impersonality is equally impossible and unde- sirable. Life, with its infinite expectations, is worth more than truth — if truth be a pitiless fatality like this. And j'et the truth, whatever that may be, will in time make itself manifest. It will be known and appreciated ! The facts of nature lie about us on every hand. It is the manifest destiny of the human mind, little by little, to learn to comprehend these facts as they exist in all the multiplicity of their rela- tionships. It is the)- which must test every theory. If a passionate desire to justify a preconceived PREFACE. 15 conviction which stood always forward as a perma- nent desired goal is to be considered a scientific dis- qualification, then I am eminently disqualified for this investigation. It culminated in a desperate reaching after — not simply immortal life — but after an abiding personal identity without which morality itself and all the nobler sentiments Cf a social exist- ence are but a bitter mockery. And what of the result ? To my apprehension the present amount of gathered evidence is as strong as demonstration. But it is not demonstration. Nor can it be made wholly in the nature of positive truth which cannot be controverted. The scientific world has not seemed ready to concede the central claim that each division of force is inseparable from its adapted division of extension ; yet the conserva- tion of every unit of being must depend upon a con- stitution in which these two ultimate elements of being mutually limit and define each other. The evidence offered in proof of this hypothesis may be questioned or proved to be inconclusive. The whole line of argument may be much less satisfactory to other minds than to my own. l6 PREFACE. The scientific data itself must be in the main such as will be generally accepted ; for I have under- stood that the great body of science laboriously brought together by many careful investigators, was the only basis on which to build, if there was to be a shadow of hope for success. In 1869 I published a work, "Studies in General Science," kindred in topics, but especially in under- lying theories, with the present discussion. The seven added years of brooding study have unfolded those earlier views without greatly modifying them otherwise. The subject has become more and more familiar to me. In the meantime there has been a remarkable growth in public thinking ; and scientific discussion has been tending strongly in the same general direc- tion. The disastrous effects upon all personal inter- ests which result from reasoning all phenomena into one ultimate — Force ; and of assigning to it the unique task of relationing itself into shifting divided centres and modes of co-operation, is steadily becoming much more clearly apprehended. It is no longer thought to be utterly impossible that nature may yet show us PREFACE. 17 that we are conditioned as indestructible conscious units. Men are everywhere appealing to science in proof that God and immortality are not disproved by physics. Others are insisting that science is in har- mony with Revelation. The theory of indivisible " mind-body,"* is becoming the accepted hypothe- sis of one class of scientific thinkers. This natural drift in the current of thought is inevitable. Physics and metaphysics, matter and mind, if they are but two phases of a common nature, must be recognized as equally legitimate depart- ments of natural science. The confident looking to Nature for a solution of controversies, and for her unraveling of the deepest problems, is a spontaneous growth in the right direction ; as the twig grows unwittingly from the live tree. It must continue to grow like any other natural product ; its roots being among the most deeply grounded of natural ante- cedents. The possibility that a writer on this class of sub- jects may gain a hearing, is much greater than even a few years ago. My chosen public, is that already * Relations of Mind and Body. Bain. 1 8 PREFACE. large and now rapidly-growing class of intelligent, independent, inquiring, and possibly half skeptical minds — some of whom are among my personal acquaintances and friends — who know something of science ; being ready to turn a quick ear if she would but speak with unquestionable authority ; but who, in the rush and hurry of active life and its duties, find only time to keenly appreciate the scientific discredit which has been brought latterly upon the subject of continuous personal life. It shall be my aim to make each point plain in language, direct in statement, and so amply illus- trated that any intelligent person may easily follow the discussion from point to point. But the way is long and intricate ; it must be pleaded in excuse that the Author of Nature has seen fit to place existences of all kinds in intimate and complex rela- tionships. Whoever desires to know how any of us can be supposed to exist as unchanging personalities, yet taking an active part in a universe of endless changes, must simply make up his mind to the atten- tive study of a vast subject. It can by no means be made so obvious in character that one may expect to PREFACE. 19 apprehend such truths as a child understands his picture-book, neither knowing nor caring about the alphabet which might help to explain the meaning. , The attempt to describe the action of a newly- discovered mountain having peculiar volcanic and magnetic relations, simply enough to make it fairly intelligible to the average reader, would be far from an easy or a brief task. With the best intentions, one might yet measurably fail. Let him begin where he will, he must begin in the very middle of a complex discussion. But conscious units of being, if such exist, exist not only in the midst of relationships which are infi- nitely involved ; but they are invisible units, destined to remain unseen to human eyes, if possibly they can be perceived by human intellects. Doing my best, then, will the people turn away from the investiga- tion as from a fool-hardy enterprise ? In any event, to the writer, these great subjects have been a perennial source of unfailing interest and contentment. They have removed the ills of life backward to an almost vanishing point in compari- son with the good which clusters about every path- 20 PREFACE. way. They have enhanced every personal relation- ship ; they have caused the wrongs of society to be borne with the equanimity of one who knows that they shall one day be righted. Whether we can find the truth or not, the search after truth is its own unfailing reward. CONTENTS PAGE Preface 5 I.— INTRODUCTORY. Value of an hypothesis. — Units of being briefly indicated. — Reasons for an appeal to Nature 27 II.— THE PROBLEM STATED. Triumphs of chemistry. — Isomeric substances. — Theory leading to discovery. — Properties dependent upon structure of mole- cules. — Carbon isomers show that structure must mean more than mere arrangement. — Chemical poles or bonds. — Physi- cal poles. — Fusel oils and crystals. — Structure in the chem- ical atom is related to many cooperative forces. — Extension and lines of force. — Is the ultimate atom, sentient or unsen- tient, indivisible and eternal ? 41 III.— ALL OF NATURE'S CHANGES ARE EXCHANGES. Nature a cooperative system. — Action and reaction equal and opposite. — Lavi^s of Motion. — No visible body can change of itself. — Motion and resistance to motion two halves of a balanced activity. — Heat ; its mechanical equivalent. — Various exchanges of motion illustrated. — Motion changed by the mode of resistance which it meets. — Energies and work. — Energy in resistance 57 22 CONTENTS. IV.— FORCE ; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. PAGE Force a practical worker. — Principles compared with details. — Force as easy of apprehension as body. — Is more akin to Consciousness. — Habits of acquiring knowledge. — Indivisi- ' ble centres of force the basis of science. — In what sense force is a unity. — In what sense force is divisible 78 v.— MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. Energies as related to work. — Different types of energies ; as heat, electricity, etc. — All energies have a tH'o-fold action. — Transformation of energy. — Equal exchange of energies. — Energies are of two classes. — Cooperative action of several forces. — Action of resistance to motion. — Pendulum-like vibrations of the ether in transmission of light. — Electricity. — Conditions influence the action and exchange of energies. — Forces are never exchanged 97 VI.— SYSTEMS OF FORCE. Several gases introduced into the same receiver will not displace each other. — The explanation. — Analogous facts in spectrum analysis. — Size of atoms. — Estimated number of molecules in a cubic incli. — Laws of action. — Explanation of molecular properties. — Action of water-vapor compared with that of its elements. — Simple systems aggregated con.stitute more gen- eral systems. — Fluids, Solids. — Balanced interaction be- tween the parts of every system 122 VII.— SYSTEMS WITHIN SYSTEMS. 'ch atom the centre to itself of the cooperative universe. — Re- peated systems in the vessel of gold-fish. — The ultimate atom regarded as a system. — It is the centre of many sys- tems unequal in kind and extent of interaction. — All inter- mediate systems are variable and destructible. — The uni- CONTENTS. -2.1 PAGE versal system is not destructible. — The atom as 7 occur, and it only, is competent to estimate the equivalent amounts of the many different kinds of possible motion. It has been diligently attempting to make such estimates, meeting everywhere with most encouraging success ; and the promise of still more ample results in the future is as certain to be redeemed as human ^ergy is to be unfaltering in its search. Visible motion is found to be interchangeable with heat, with electrical and magnetic currents and various other forms of electrical activity, with chemi- cal action, and with many kinds of vital activity. Nearly all of these very diverse kinds of motion have been repeatedly transmuted into several of the others, and where the exchange has not been directly effected between any two, it has sometimes been indirectly accomplished through the intervention of a third or intermediate motion ; as when two oppo- sitely electrified bodies together produce a current of electricity, and this current is converted into heat. Now since all these various energies are shown to be interchangeable, it necessarily follows that in ac- tion they are all modes of motion and in the reaction 68 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. they become modes of resistance to motion. Just as a blow when it strikes a fixed mass of iron be- comes heat, a motion invisible to the eye, but when it strikes a mountain of gelatine becomes a quiver- ing visible motion among the particles, and when it strikes a ball becomes a motion which sends the ball rolling along the floor ; making it evident to us that the one original kind of motion is changed by the conditions under which it meets the resisting force, so all motion is changed by the mode of the resist- ance which it meets. Ifall force in action must be regarded as either producing motion or as resisting motion, then when wires carry electrical currents in the same direction, we know that there is some unseen motion within the wires, and when the wires begin to move bodily towards each other we must infer that the original movements are changing into the visible motion of the wires. Or when bodies are oppositely electrified and there is electrical repulsion, here is another form of electrical action becoming visible motion. And when electricity is made to decompose some sub- stance, say water, tearing apart the atoms of oxygen ALL NATURE'S CHANGES ARE EXCHANGES. 69 and hydrogen of which the water is composed, and driving them in separate directions, we know that the electrical motion is changed into the repulsive motion of these atoms. It has overcome the forces which held the particles interlocked together, as -cer- tainly as the initial motion in A when it hits B and sends it flying to a distance, has overcome the resist- ing forces which originally held B at rest. When a magnet draws one body towards itself and drives another away, we are compelled to believe that unlike invisible motions are swaying the invisi- ble particles of all these bodies, and that the result- ing actions and reactions are unalterably equal and opposite. At every stage of each process, the amount of motion distributed between the acting and reacting particles must be equal and opposite, and the amount of resistance to motion must also be equal and opposite. The atmosphere or any other visible ether coming between them not only may be, but it must be, sympathetically influenced magnetically, and cooperate accordingly, since all adjacent substances are known to act and react in correlation. 70 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. One set of the magnetic currents must be con- ceived of as acting in such a way as to draw the two bodies together, while the others push them asunder. All force, and all motion which is the measure of force, must be regarded as belonging to one or the other of these two types, the result being either the further separation of the reacting bodies, or the draw- ing of them nearer together ; or, when the opposing sets of activities balance and thus for the time check- mate each other, the interacting bodies aref then held stationary, while perhaps their particles are undergo- ing a series of perpetual vibrations like so many pendulums. Such bodies are said to be in equili- brium. If their forces are still in action, as we know that they must be, their motions are invisible to our senses. They are not energies or forces capable of doing work which can be made available to mankind. We have no direct means of estimating the amount of force which is inherent in even the least atom, but which is thus balanced by forces acting against it, and holding it in apparent inaction. But the force special to each atom must be almost incal- culable ; for, however great the amount of calculable ALL NATURE'S CHANGES ARE EXCHANGES. 71 energy brought to bear upon the most apparently inert mass, it has always in reserve an adequate power which is able to manifest itself in some form of appropriate reaction. Men of science, almost equally with practical men, have very naturally turned their attention chiefly to the available energies of nature ; to the various modes of action which, by being changed from one kind of manifestation into some other and different kind, are accompanied either by definite changes in the structure of the bodies acting, or by calculable and visible motions through space. When one form of energy changes into some other form, it is thus said to perform work ; and it is often made practically useful in effecting certain desirable chan- ges which help to further the various interests of mankind. Thus heat, by driving apart the particles of water into the much more bulky and rarefied form of vapor, enables men to make use of the elastic force in this water-vapor to propel machinery of all kinds, and to perform a vast amount of necessary work in every direction. The heat motion in the coal, chan- ges in the kind of motion in the heated water, again ^2 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. in the water-vapor, yet again in the movement of the piston, and in the wheel of the machinery, and yet again when it crushes the grain between the ponderous millstones or drives forward the massive railroad train as though it were only a toy bubble for lightness. The majority of unscientific persons would be expected to take much more interest in these tangi- ble and useful changes, than in the scientific fact that at each cljange in this progressive series of motions, there has been an equivalent reactionary series of resistances. But there is also a fascination to the lovers of pure science in tracing the multi- tudes of curious and often unexpected modifications in various substances, which result from the trans- mutations of the modes of force. To be able to manipulate the forms and proper- ties of things down even to their ultimate structures ; dissolving solids into gases and building gases up again into solids with as much precision as we can add unit to unit, and place each in its right relations in a simple arithmetical equation, is an end to be sought diligently and with unremitted zeal. It is ALL NATURE'S CBANGES ARE EXCHANGES. 73 impossible to over-estimate such pursuits. Learning how to lay one's hand intelligently upon the main- springs of nature and bidding them at will to bend in this way or in that, is an object of endeavor worthy of the gods. Even in an aesthetic point of view, the study of the correlation of energies can appeal more strongly to the love of fitness, of order, and of the beautiful in every form, than anything more superficial. No painter or sculptor can harmonize colors or create forms so matchless in all respects as can the phys- icist. This is the art of arts. It is literally repeat- ing the perfect skill of the great Artist. And it is science as well. It is dropping the line and plummet into the midst of nature's subtlest energies, and learning to estimate them according to their several values. To be able to determine just how much sunshine is needed in order to rout the superfluous oxygen of the carbonic acid in the leaf, and to wheel the carbon particles into position to enable them to build up one grain in weight of the marvellous living tissue, must be work which belongs to the highest science. And yet the physicists seem 4 74 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. to be approaching even that incomparable achieve- ment. The sunshine is already held in leash ; and Mr. Crookes is driving his pith balls to and fro at will, with the sunbeams for his motive power. Cer- tainly he can learn to measure the force which he has brought so adroitly to do his bidding. But the comparatively dull and masked reac- tional energies which do nothing but resist, resist, and put on the brakes remorselessly whenever there is a stir anywhere, can never be as picturesque as the others. They are not of the pictorial class, and never can be made visible to the senses. . They can- not be made the subtle, strong and obedient servants of man. Yet they are properly energies. They accom- plish a work which is mathematically the equivalent of all the marvellous work done by the energies of motion. They are the true peers and equals of the motive forces, and at any turn in the tide of affairs, they become themselves motive forces as we have already seen ; exchanging, measure for measure, the energy of resistance for an equivalent amount of the energy of motion. Thus the interacting bodies, be- ALL STATURE'S CHANGES ARE EXCHANGES. 7S tween them, never lose any thing. The sum of their added energy of motion remains unchanged, and the sum of their added energy of resistance to motion remains equally unchanged. Or, if their apparent motive energy is all carried away, and appropriated by a third body, while they are both left at rest, then this third body has returned to them its equiv- alent in the form of energy of resistance to motion. In any case the body and its inherent force never part company ; they remain one and insepara- ble, and its force is always available instantaneously to meet every possible emergency of action or reaction to which it may be subjected. We return, then, to the position that no force acts except as the correlative of some equal and opposing force. In gravitation, the attractive force lies equally iri the two attracting particles ; they must draw each other forward in space, probably along some cooperating line of force ; and in repul- sion they thrust each other mutually asunder. The inexorable law of equal exchange, of equivalent for equivalent, enacted absolutely and under all condi- tions, is, as we have already seen. Nature's one 76 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. constant, underlying her entire system of endless change. This point of rest which is as eternal as existence itself, is the fulcrum against which we may place the lever which can raise the fact of immortal life up to the great plane of accepted science. If all action and reaction is equal and opposite necessarily between every two interacting atoms, the innate atomic force, however various and interchange- able its modes of action, must be forever unchangea- ble and forever untransferable. The atom, then, must be a permanent centre of individual existence, and of individual power. And if any atom be endowed with sentient force, this living or conscious force must also persist. It is immortal life. It is unchanging personal identity. It requires an un- broken continuity in the endless series of the indi- vidual sentient experience. But with all this, there must be physical action and reaction equal and opposite between this living centre of abiding force and all the other atoms with which it stands in the closest cooperative relationship. That force proper is not only indestructible ; but that it is also untransferable from its own atomic ALL NATURE'S CHANGES ARE EXCHANGES. 77 centre, seems to me to be susceptible of the most pos- itive proof. It will be my aim to make this clearly evident from many various points of view ; for I hold it to be the most fundamental fact which has yet been made known to us concerning the vast scheme of the existing universe. It is a simple necessary and logical consequence of the long established law of equal action and re- action. But it may also appeal to experimental tests, and it must be made clearly evident in the light of repeated illustrations. FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. Force a practical worker. — Principles compared wfth details. — Force as easy of apprehension as body. Is more akin to con- sciousness. — Habits of acquiring knowledge. — Indivisible centres of force the basis of science. In what sense force is a unity. In what sense force is divisible. THE entire subject of the correlation and con- servation of the modes of force, appears to many minds to be exceedingly difficult of appre- hension. They regard it as highly abstract and almost metaphysical in character. Nothing but actual physical demonstration would convince them that the various energies of nature can be made known to us as simply and mathematically inter- changeable. These energies do, indeed, belong to the unseen universe ; we can know them only in their effects ; they and the ultimate particles of matter to which they pertain and which they vari- ously modify, causing them to change in so many mysterious ways, are all of them, when regarded singly, wholly imperceptible to our grosser senses. FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 79 We see only those bodies which have attained to a considerable size and only those motions which are the motions of a mass of small aggregates. A large portion of the people would never have really be- lieved in the almost omnipotence of these subtle powers, if no one had taught the impalpable steam to propel the massive iron engines which send steamboats over the waters and railcars across the land ; if no one had ever felt an electric shock smit- ing him with an unseen blow, and had not received messages from distant friends written by the pro- longed electrical pen. As it is, nobody can doubt that force is force. And just as little can it be doubted that some men do know something about its mode of acting, and that they are able to guide and control it, often to extremely useful purposes. Indeed the whole subject of forces and of their various doings, taken in its broad general aspects, is in reality simple and easy enough of comprehension. If, in the details, we know very little about it, is not this equally true of every thing else ? A mere child can tell a tree when it sees one ; it can distinguish a man from a 8o THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. horse, and a carriage from a dwelling-house. Even the dumb animals can do as much as this. But could the most intelligent man descend to particulars and give a really ample description of even so much as one of these things ? The human mind is not yet able to grasp any object down to its multitudes of complicated relations. As well expect to see visibly the ultimate atoms of which it is composed. But all comprehensive features of likeness or unlikeness are so plain that he who runs may read. A tree is plainly a tree, and a horse a horse. Half a dozen different trees or half a dozen unlike horses are enough to teach any intelligent person the general aspect of trees and horses. Ex- actly so of a knowledge of forces. When we can comprehend something of the forces of collision acting between two solid bodies, and when we appreciate that it is force which resists our touch, and force which is exercised in touch itself, it will then be easy to understand the general family rela- tionship between all the various modes of force. Laws are nothing more than the expressions of broad and general facts. They may pertain either FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 8 1 to changes or to existences. The law that all action and reaction shall be equal and opposite, is as uni- versal, and no more so, than the law that all force and all substance are indestructible. It is no more difficult to understand that all force in action must always be coupled in its action with a mathemat- ically equal opposed force, than it is to understand that every living thing must either take frequent nourishment or die. Indeed the two laws are really one and the same. The appropriation of food may be regarded in a general sense as the action, and the use of it in all forms of muscular and nervous activ- ity, as the reaction. The reacting body may often seem to us to be at rest, because its motion is not visible to our senses ; but all kinds of resistance must be accompanied by motion, visible or invisible. To resist, is to repel the force which must otherwise either shove the resisting body wholly out of its former place or else penetrate it ; which would be dividing it asunder and shoving it out of its place by a different process. Hence, when the floor repels the elastic ball, it must push back in order to resist the forward motion of 4* 82 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the ball, and to actually reverse it, sending the ball back again to the hand. It is not needful to think of the whole floor as moving bodily from its place ; but we must think that the repelling particles begin to vibrate, to literally push back ; and thus to send the mtruder whence it came. It can be no more difficult to get a clear con- ception of force, or energy, than of body. If the one appeals to us chiefly through the eye, and the others through contact with the more general ner- vous system, yet the idea of resistance offered us by a solid body which counteracts all efforts of the hand either to penetrate it or to move it from its place, is as real, and it may become as definite, as the idea of the size, form and color of the resisting body. This resistance is force in one of its manifes- tations. A moving body, coming into violent collis- ion with our own, gives a striking conception of a different manifestation of force ; heat, communicated by a heated body, of still another mode ; a shock of electricity, of yet another, and the biting action of an acid or of an alkali, of still another. And when we move our own limbs or the whole FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 83 body ; when we use our eyes to see, our teeth to crush and masticate a mouthful of food, or our minds to read a printed page with an apprehension of its meaning — all these and multitudes of other manifes- tations of active force are a part, as it were, of our very consciousness itself. We know the meaning of ' a push or a pull. In reality we can have a more intimate and personal appreciation of the nature of force, of actual power, real and intrinsic, than of any visible object whatever. The force, though it be but a physical force, is more akin to our real selves. We make a voluntary and varied use of it every waking hour of our lives. It closely pertains to our own personal consciousness ; and if, as I think, it is really a part of our immutable selves, we can experi- ence what it is in a more intimate sense than we can ever experience the modes of extension or body proper. It is not hard to learn to see the world through some other sense than that of eyesight, though undoubtedly that is the child's first method ; as it seems to be the only possible method to the mere animal. 84 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. But to a rational being, to any mind -which can clearly understand that two and two make four, that two parallel lines can never meet, that justice is a moral law which is obligatory between man and man — to any such mind the study of forces can offer no more actual difficulty than the study of the bodies which are variously modified by the action of those forces. I believe it to be solely a matter of habit. The only difficulty lies in not having begun to study this class of invisible things in childhood, at the same time that we began the study of visible objects. Or, otherwise, if commencing later in Hfe, it is then necessary to start at the beginning and to first clearly master the most primitive facts. When a few modes of force are distinctly understood as to their general laws and their more common methods of working, then every other class of force, as it comes to light, will present itself like an old friend. We shall know where to place it, and shall at once comprehend something of its ways of doing as readily as we shall know that a tree is a tree, even though it be of an entirely new species. The perception may be as positive and as definite FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 8$ in the one case as in the other, though the one will have a visible and the other an invisible back- ground. But the whole science of arithmetic is an invisible science. How much more of a task is it to learn that two and two make four, than it is to learn that two apples and two apples make four apples. Principles belong as much to the existing nature of things as bodies do. Let us patiently but absolutely teach ourselves to realize this vast fact ; every real difficulty in all subsequent study of the unseen elements of the universe will be swept away by it at a single stroke ! Natural science concerns itself quite as much with the invisible things of nature as with the visible. No force can be seen except in the modifications which result from its action. Force produces mo- tion, but in the majority of cases even these motions are invisible. We must turn to other effects, to changes which the varying modes of force register in visible things or which the scientists contrive skillfully to make manifest by various delicate tests. But force is not separate from matter — that is, from bodies which have dimensions real or apparent. 86 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. After all, we are only required to learn that two and two make four, by first learning that two apples and two apples make four apples. Electricity pertains always to an electrified body, and heat to a heated body. In general, force is never separated from body, in other words from extension or the ex- tended. In this view, body and matter are exactly parallel terms ; they include the extended and also its innate, special and inseparable force. Hence, force and extension are mutually dependent and indivisible ; together they constitute matter or body. Each division of a small piece of matter possesses limited force. Atomic extension is joined to atomic force. In this view, force and extension together are held to be the whole of matter as known to us. And force, extension, and sentient or livittg force, are sup- posed to constitute the whole of mind, as known to us. But extension or extended body is often maintained to be in the last analysis, nothing besides force pure and simple. That is the hypothesis of many physicists. . It has been much argued and sometimes apparently adopted or provisionally adopted. But it is a theory FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 8/ which never has been, and never will be spoken about or thought of except by coupling the force with a conception of extended body. Every scientific writer, therefore, without exception, in order to make the subject of force comprehensible, always writes alaout both force and extension just as if they were, as I hold that they must be, two real, distinct, but insep- arable phases in the constitution of atomic matter. To that subject we shall turn in due time. At present it is not necessary to argue the point. If extensions were proved to be nothing but centres of vibrating, unextended force ; the vibrations by their prolonged effect upon the retina of our eyes producing in us the sensations of extended or con- tinuous substance — the best method, perhaps, of representing to ourselves force as producing in us the effect of real extension — still I should urge, without qualification, that no force ever is, or ever can be, separated from its own individual centre of force. It either carries its centre with it, or else it ex- changes energies (modes of action) with some other force and remains itself with its own centre. Thus an indivisible centre of forces would be the 88 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. true atom. Force itself would be individualized or divided into units. All physical force must be regarded as identical ; as one and simple in ulti- mate nature as really as all gold is like all other gold ; yet, like gold, it can be divided down to that least unit, the indivisible centre of force limited and specialized. And that centre of force, whether we regard it as extended or as unextended, has manifested itself both to the physicists and to the chemists to be indivisible and indestructible. Nei- ther can science possibly ignore the atomic centre of force. Without it there could be no intelligible theory of chemical combination ! Without it no science of physics could exist in any definite or tangible form. The ultimate atom, one and inde- structible, is the underlying basis of all science. Yet it would be too much to affirm that all scientiiic men are ready to accept the atomic theory in this definite and unqualified statement of it. Those who incline to believe that in the last analysis all things are resolvable into pure force, though driven to the hypothesis that there are and must be unextended centres of force, have yet none of them, FORCE ; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 89 SO far as I know, ventured to maintain that these centres of force must persist intact so long as force itself persists. There are obvious difficulties in the way of such a conclusion ; for if these pure force- centres persist as units, what makes them persist ? What distinguishes force from force, and makes the division of it into these definite points of force ? To effect this, there should be something differentiated from force. But, whether hypothetic points of force persist or not, there must be something in nature which is able to produce them even tempo- rarily ! What aggregates force into force-centres ? It must be a part of my effort to offer sufficient evidence that actual and indestructible centres of force do exist in nature ; and that no force is or ever can be, during the present order of natural events, separated from its own individual centre of activities. If this form of the atomic theory can be proved ; if atoms can be shown to exist and to persist in the midst of all changes, these atoms then become the unshaken basis of a personal immortality. We have only to farther show that there are centres go THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. of atomic force, some of whose modes of energizing are sentient modes, and the whole case will be gained. But we return again to force as it manifests itself to us by the changes which it effects in visible and extended, or at least apparently extended, bodies. The subject of the interchangeable relations which we proved to exist among the different modes in which force is fourtd to act, has been made unnecessarily difficult, possibly by some confusion of thought, and certainly by more or less ambiguity in the use of terms. Thus the term force is used in different senses ; and several different terms are often used to signify the same thing or with but a shade of difference in the meaning ; which becomes confus- ing to any mind which finds this whole class of topics troublesome of comprehension at the best. In one of the volumes of the " International Scien- tific Series," Prof. Le Conte, treating of " the corre- lation of vital with chemical and physical forces," refers to the above difficulty in an explanatory foot- note as follows : * " In recent works the word energy is used to de- * Appendix to The Conservation of Energy, p. 172. FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 9 1 signate active or working force as distinguished from passive or non-working force. It is in this working condition only that force is conserved, and therefore conservation of energy is the proper expression. Nevertheless, since the distinction between force and energy is imperfectly or not at all defined in the higher forms of force, and especially in the domain of life, I have preferred in" this article to use the word force in the general sense usual until recently. I may sometimes use the word energy instead. If any one should charge me with want of precision in language, my answer is : Our language cannot be more precise until our ideas in this department are far clearer than now." It is the learned Professor, not the writer, who laments as above the need of perfect clearness in the conceptions even of the most distinguished men. Entire precision is always desirable ; but not by any means easily attainable. So long as perspicuity of ideas, which themselves depend necessarily upon a multitude of most various facts, all of them more or less difficult and obscure, yet requiring to be brought into entirely harmonious relations, is not yet at- 92 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. tained, language must share of necessity in a corre- sponding want of perfect precision. To be wholly silent on a question like that of the correlations •which exist among modes of force, because one can- not see from the beginning to the end of the whole subject, would be folly. But in the general and wide sense in which one may attain to clearness of conception as to certain inclusive general truths, while yet greatly ignorant of essential details, my ideas seem to me to be neither vague nor wanting in discrimination. The term force, in my use of it, will mean force and nothing else — that is, force independent of its manyways or modes of action. The state of the force, whether active or passive, is not taken into consideration — the term referring solely to the thing itself; to that power or property in nature by virtue of which all changes are wrought. It is limited also to physical force except when otherwise indicated by the connection ; yet physical force is made to include " vital force" and that whole ciSassoi measur- able, related energies which act in living bodies and nowhere else. FORCE ; WHAT IT IS AND HO IV IT AC7S. 93 Force, thus defined, is held to be one and iden- tical in nature, to be a unit as to likeness of kind ; a simple power which is absolutely identical in all its parts ; but it is divisible into parts as really as gold or water are divisible, yet are alike in nature down to the least possible division of each. Force, then, does not differ from itself in character ; but in its many ways of acting there is an almost infinite diver- sity. These modes of force, as heat, electricity, vital action, etc., all depend not on force itself, but solely on the conditions under which it is brought into action. The same essential force acts at one time as heat, at another as chemical affinity, as vital action, or as visible motion. These modes in which force acts have often a very definite and changeless character ; this also depends on the established rela- tions which subsist among the various conditions which determine the particular mode of the force. Modes of force and energies are synonymous terms. These extremely diverse energies produce effects which are strangely unlike and which must seem, on a first acquaintance with them, to be produced by the action of powers radically unlike in their own 94 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. proper nature. A child would never dream that one identical force lies behind . the energies which work such various wonders. Can it be the same force which is flashing out vividly in the lightning ; which is bubbling, singing, burning him, pushing up the lid, shaking the whole stove, and sending out torrents of steam from the spout of the furiously boiling tea-kettle ; which is whirling and humming in his spinning top, which gives his top its color and its form and holds its minutest parts together as a firm and compact wood that stoutly resists both his small fingers and his jack-knife ; and is it the same force which is streaming down to him in sunbeams that warm, light, beautify, and give vital energy to every hving thing? Yes, it must be. AH force is force ; it is power to act, to produce changes ; there is no term in any language that is more simple or more forcible in which to express it. It is a term so generic that it must embrace not only all physical but all mental energies as well ; so that we obtain a realizing sense of what it is in kind, more from personal experience and from our own ability to will and to do, than from any other mani- FORCE; WHAT IT IS AND HOW IT ACTS. 95 festatlon of it. Yes ; force is force pure and simple ; one, but not indivisible. All water is water, and possesses the whole nature of water in all respects, down not only to the smallest drop, but down even to the smallest division which can possibly be made and yet leave the struc- ture of the substance unchanged. But vapor and ice are both equally water ; yet the energies which manifest themselves in the fluid, the solid, and the vapor respectively, are curiously unlike, working all of them by different processes. It is the same force remaining, each portion of it, with its own least par- ticle of the substance ; but the mode in which the force acts varies greatly in each of the three forms of water. As all the conditions vary, so the mode of the force varies ; and the force modifies the form of the substance in which it inheres as it is itself modified in its action. The least division of body and the least division of force can never part company. The total sum of variable conditions determines both the mode and the amount of energy which shall be called into present manifestation ; but those con- gS THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ditions themselves depend upon prior energies. All action arises out of some former activity, and the series of changes thus remains everywhere unbroken. All force must be regarded as always in action. We may run backward indefinitely to the beginning of the present constitution of the universe (supposing the present order of Nature to have had a beginning, as' I reason that it must have had) and we shall find that the same force has been forever changing its modes or forms of energy, and that these modes arise one out of another in an unbroken series of changes. It must follow not only that the total of force has produced a total series of continuous changes ; but it follows also that each least division of force must have been producing a small continuous series of its own. It must itself have taken part in one unbroken process of changes. No smallest division of force could be exempt from this necessity. But the smallest possible division of force must be re- garded as the true centre of force which is not sus- ceptible of division without utter annihilation. MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. Energies ns related to work. — Different types of energies ; as heat, electricity, etc. — AH energies have a twofold action. — Transfor- mation of energy, — Equal exchange of energies. — Energies are of two classes. — Cooperative action of several forces. — Action of resistance to motion. — Pendulum-like vibrations of the ether in transmission of light. — Electricity. — CondiHons influence the action and exchange of energies. — Forces are never exchanged. ACTIVE or working force has been called energy " to distinguish it from non-working force ; " but if all force is active or working force in reality, then the distinction lies only in the fact that the one class can be made available by mankind in the furtherance of desirable ends, while the other cannot. Thus the carbon which is stored away in coal pos- sesses itself a store of inherent force, which, when once ignited, can go on uniting with the oxygen of the air to produce heat. This joint action of the forces in coal and oxygen is called energy because it is said to do work, that is, to produce the desired heat. The action and reaction between a definite mode of force in coal and another mode of force in 5 98 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the oxygen of the air, by thus cooperating, produce a new mode of force called heat. It is obvious that whenever two opposed modes of force can together produce a third mode, by the transmutation of their joint process into a new form of process, this change is called work. Thus any transformation in kind of action, is work ; and the forces which produce the change are energies. But if force is active from the necessity of its own nature as force, and if a given amount of all force is in continual cooperation with an equal amount of opposed force, then whether they produce a change in the form of the activity or not, still they are both energies in the proper sense of that term. Their joint action becomes a mode of force. Hence I propose to define an energy to be a mode, any one of the modes, in which force cooper- ates. By this definition energies are not distinct- ively "force in action ; " but they comprise all the various modes in which force can act. They are the actions or processes of force. The reason for giving a somewhat new meaning to the word energy is that change or transmutation cannot take place between MODUS OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 99 forces proper ; since all divisions of force are abso- lutely alike. They can differ only in amount of force ; as more or less. But in action, every force works in an opposed direction to its cooperating neighbor. They may therefore exchange processes or ways of acting — that is, they may exchange energies ; though they cannot exchange themselves. They cannot each go over to its neighbor's centre for energizing ; but each must remain intact in its own proper atom. All energies act in correlation. But force in action is perpetually changing the form of its activity ; that is, it exchanges its own action for an equal amount of some opposing energy. The more special modes in which force can act have many of them a very definite and unique char- acter of their own. None of them can be easily con- founded with any of the others, since the obvious peculiarities of each generally enable us readily to distinguish it from all the rest. The principal energies are known as heat, light, electricity, gravity, visible motion, chemical action, and vital action. But each of these broad classes has distinct and definite varieties of its own. The 100 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. general type of the class is unmistakable. Visible motion or the passing of the whole visible body from one point in space to another, is not easily con- founded with any other kind of energy ; yet there are many kinds of such motion. The branches of a tree sway to and fro in the wind ; but a cannon-ball makes a regular and mathematically calculable curve until it drops to the ground. A balloon rises and an apple falls. Heat is always heat, and not to be confounded with any other form of energy ; but heat radiated from the sun, or from any other luminous body, is very different from the heat which we speak of as temperature — as the general and apparently uniform condition of the heated substance. Polarized light behaves in an extremely unlike way from ordinary light. They may be classed as distinct varieties of energy ; each, however, being easily changed into the other by the proper condi- tions. There are many distinct kinds of electrical energy ; each of them, though so nearly allied, be- ing produced by a definitely unlike, yet kindred, preceding process ; and each gliding into either of MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. lOI the others with ready facility. Magnetic action is a form of electricity. Each of these varieties belongs as undoubtedly to its own class as every tree be- longs to the group trees ; yet each is as fixed and definite in characteristics peculiar to itself alone, as an oak, an elm, and a beech. Chemical energies seem to be even more varied in kind than any of the preceding. The same elements in combination often produce the most unlike products — products which differ in every kind of manifested energy ; yet whenever all the preced- ing conditions are alike, then all the results corre- spond. Preceding conditions obviously determine both the class and the variety in all chemical action. This is even more true, or at least it is more mani- fest, more characteristic, and therefore more striking, in vital energy. A like ancestry in vital action of all kinds produces its like as certainly as the form and other modifications of the child's physical system are determined as the resultant of like characters in the parent. Yes ; all energy of whatever kind, arises directly from preceding energies. It may be but the continuation of the ancestral process, or I02 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTAUTY. it may be a transformation of such ancestral energies. That also is determined as the resultant of all the conditions. It is of the utmost importance to note, that all these energies and all other energies of every possible variety in cicry possible class are duplex or tzoo-fold ; the two moieties working together either to continue the existitig process or to change the form of the energy. There is no exception to this law. AU energj- is conserved ; but everywhere the two parent energies together produce the new atergy. This is equally true when the form of the energy is not changed, and when it is changed. The successor to the prior action is necessarily the result of opposed or unlike activities cooperating. The force acting in the wind, and the opposed force acting in the anchored roots, together sway the branches of the tree ; the projectile force of the expanding powder in the cannon, and the force of gravitation together bring the flying ball to its posi- tion at the foot of its long curve ; and then the earth and the ball between them share the trans- formed energy of heat, and together they share the MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. I03 equal energy in the form of resistance to being moved otherwise. If there were but one force in action at any time, it would, as we have seen in an earlier chapter of this discussion, act on in a straight line forever. The motion which it produced would never become either more or less, or changed in velo- city or in direction. But force is everywhere ; and no sooner does one form of activity begin to arise, than instantaneously counter energies are aroused as opposing activities. Heat is a molecular motion — the swinging of the molecules of the solid body, or of the invisible ether of the sky ; (molecules or atoms also according to the hypothesis ;) but if there were no opposed, corre- lated forces at work, every atom would fly off^ bodily into endless space. Gravitation is correlative force acting in both of the gravitating bodies ; connected probably by a physical line of cooperative vibrations. Cohesion, chemical action, in short all energy what- soever, can be shown to act as a double process which produces a corresponding resultant. An energy acting singly is impossible. Accordingly we may group all these various I04 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. double forms of opposed activities in two vast divis- ions — as the energies which produce motion, and the energies which resist that form of motion. We have found that they each tend in reality to the production of motion in opposing directions ; the forward motion in one direction calling out the back- ward motion in the opposite direction ; and that both equally resist motion in all directions except that produced by its own action. We might call them the energies of action and the energies of reac- tion, except that they are equally actions or active energies ; and that they are also equally reactions or resistances to all activities unlike their own. Their action at any moment is equal in amount ; the one possessing exactly as much energy of motion added to its energy of resistance as the other does ; so that when the one takes the other's motion, it gives at the same instant an equivalent amount of its former resistance. I can do no better, therefore, than to distinguish the one half of every joint process as the energy of motion and the other half as the energy of resistance. It must be remembered that, as a matter of fact, MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. lOS no two bodies can ever act together through their two sets of forces only, independent of all other bodies. Other bodies with their innate forces press about them on every side and take a greater or less share in their activities, whatever form these may have. Thus a ball tossed into the air is pulled down- ward by the gravity of the earth, is resisted by the atmosphere through which it passes, and is stopped at last by the wall against which it beats. The iinal outcome of the whole, is a compounding of these various energies on the principle of equal action and reaction between the ball and each of the other resisting bodies acting upon it independently. Suppose the ball to be thrown with a force equal to twenty units of motion. Then if there were no resisting force in action during its progress, it would strike the wall with a force equal to twenty units ; and if ball and wall were perfectly elastic, it would be driven back with a force equal to twenty units. But during the time of its approach to the wall, the earth pulls against it with a force equal, say, to five units. The ball must therefore lose five of its units of motion in its resistance to the downward pull of 5* I06 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the earth ; and this reaction will leave it with only fifteen units as it reaches the wall But the ball is obliged to cleave its way through the atmosphere which also resists its progress from first to last. Let us call the sum of this resistance one unit. What now is the result ? The ball will have given up six units of resistance to a forward motion. It started with twenty units and it arrives at the wall with but fourteen units of motion. But the atmosphere has gained one unit of motion in the form of atmospheric vibrations, and the earth has gained five units which have carried it infinitesimally upwards towards the ball. At this point, collision occurs. The ball strikes with a force equal to fourteen. Now if ball and wall were both perfectly elastic, as the resistance would also equal fourteen, the whole motion would be reversed ; the ball flying backward with its fourteen units of motion, undiminished. But the colliding bodies being neither of them perfectly elastic, some portion of those units of motion will be converted into heat. Let us suppose that the wall can resist the motion and turn it back with a force equal to MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 10/ ten ; but that it accepts the other four units of motion, transforming them into heat vibrations among its own particles. It must, in return, give four units of resistance to motion to the ball, together with the ten units of reversed motion. But probably one or two of the ball's remaining units of motion will have been changed, by the structure of the partially inelastic ball itself, into heat-vibrations among its own particles. This heat is motion ; but it is not now a projectile motion which can carry the ball forward in the direction to which it was turned. The ball can only go forward, therefore, with a force equal to eight or nine units ; and as the atmosphere begins its resistance afresh and the steady pull of gravity is unabated, it must soon be brought to the ground ; when the small residue of its units of projectile motion will suffer another partial rebound, and the remainder be at once converted into heat. The total of acting force in the ball during every successive stage of this process remains unchanged. By adding together its energy of motion and of resistance at any moment, the sum of the two would I08 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. be twenty. It started with no units of resistance, but with twenty of motion ; half way to the wall it had seventeen units of motion + 2\ of resistance exchanged with the earth, + \ exchanged with the atmosphere =- 20. At the moment of turning back from the wall it had given five units of motion to the earth, one to the air and four to the wall ; receiving in exchange ten of resistance ; which, added to its remaining ten of motion, one of which had been transformed into heat, is also equal to twenty. The earth, the air and the wall, each of them had also an unchanged amount of energy throughout the time of their participation. The earth exerted five units of resistance to the motion of the ball ; exchang- ing these successively for five units of its own motion in the direction of the ball. The atmosphere's re- sistance to the ball's progress became a vibratory motion caused by displacement among the air parti- cles ; and the wall whose fourteen units of energy were called out instantaneously by the colliding body, was left with ten units of heat and ten of suc- cessful resistance. But to resist being compressed or penetrated is MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. IO9 to move — to thrust back the intruding force. This forward thrust in its turn implies reaction ; impHes some variety of vibration among tlie particles of the wall. We may suppose that the wall molecules at first yielded or were driven back by the ball ; then they reacted and drove it in an opposite direction. This is exactly what an elastic body does when its motion of resistance is visible motion. Thus if a ball should strike a steel spring, the spring at first would bend backward, the ball going on with it until the elastic force in the steel spring could react, when it would return to its former posi- tion or perhaps bend a little outwards in the oppo- site direction ; and the ball would be sent flying either in the direction from which it started or in an angle of reflection equal to its former angle of in- cidence, as the case might be. We can see this visible motion of the steel spring ; but the invisible motion in the particles of the resisting wall, produce a result similar to that produced by the spring. We must conclude, therefore, that the molecular resist- ance of the wall is hke in kind to the. visible re- sistance of the steel spring. The spring and the I lO THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. wall, therefore, will both be left vibrating after the blow dealt them by the ball. These vibrations will be gradually distributed to more distant bodies. Thus the motion of resistance, like all other motion, will travel outward and outward like a wave in the water, until it meets some counter-resistance and is itself turned back or diverted into some new channel. It is apparent that the possible more or less differentiated energies or modes of the same force are unlimited. Each body must react in a manner to correspond with the action upon itself ; and the amount of its reaction will neither fall below nor exceed the amount of the initiative action. When the ball is heavy or is flying with great velocity, the bend and the recoil of the steel spring will be large, both representing equal and large amounts of energy ; but when the ball is light or when it moves slowly, it then represents but a small amount of energy and is resisted accordingly by a small amount of reaction. But if a dozen energies are acting upon the same body at the same moment, it is then reacting against them all at one and the same time. It should be clearly understood that in every pro- MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 1 1 1 cess whatsoever, the two modes of action which we call energy of motion, and energy of resistance, must take equal shares. The two together make up the energy proper — make up all those processes of nature which are called heat, chemical action, gravitation, etc. Radiated, as well as absorbed heat, must be regarded as molecular vibration among the particles which conduct or which retain the molecular, pen- dulum-like swing communicated to them by the heated body. Every separate particle of the inter- stellar ether seems to be an infinitesimal pendulum so adjusted to some of the simpler motions which make up the extremely complex vibrations in every sunbeam, that it swings to and fro through a measur- able space in a measurable time, without leaving its own appointed place among the other particles which are grouped about it, and all in active cooperation. It is found by a variety of separate experimental tests, that the pendulum of a clock is held no more securely within its appointed bounds by the corre- lated forces (correlated through human skill and prevision) which regulate its successive pulses of minutes, seconds, or halves and quarters of a second, 112 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. than the ether pendulum is by the fixed adjustment of correlated forces which control its infinitely swifter pulsations of millions on millions within every fraction of a single second. The clock pendulum is kept no more steadily in motion, its times of vibra- tion and the arc through which it passes have been no more accurately computed by the mathematicians, than are the corresponding facts relating to the par- ticle of ether which is inconceivably minute. Phi- losophers might well be excused for concluding that here at least, is a vibrating " point of force " without extension. But in advance we should have concluded that the vibrations and the length from crest to crest were im- possible of measurement. Yet by various separate careful experiments, with the necessary computations of actual measurements and observed results, the length of this ether pendulum's swing and its times of vibration have been really estimated and brought fairly within the required scientific accuracy. Probably no scientific man now doubts that these are sufficient measurements of actual existing ener- gies. That there are a practically infinite numbei MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. II3 of infinitely small pendulums taking part in these vi- brations, will be less readily accepted as a proved fact ; and yet, if force acts only in connection with matter, the vibrating ether particles are as much a necessity as the vibrations. The rates of vibration are connected with the phenomena of color, and since by means of a prism we can separate these various classes of unlike oscillations which are to- gether in the beam of white light, and can then literally see the variously colored waves of vibration, they may seem to some minds to be more real than the atoms which vibrate, but which from their ex- treme minuteness and swiftness must remain invisible to human sight. To most minds, movements, where there is nothing to move, are clearly impossible. Hence, if these estimates pertain to real energies, there must be the vibrating centres of energy, extended or unextended. The point now is, that each one of these ether cen- tres is so acted on by the aggregate of all the cooperating forces about it, that it continues to vibrate mathematically within its appointed bounds ; while yet the great wave of combined vibrations in 1 14 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the sunbeam, travels outward at the rate of nearly 200,000 miles a second. Thus it is the motion which travels, but not the moving pendulums ; each one of these giving up its motion instant by instant to its neighbor ; and accepting in return an equal amount of resistance to motion, to exchange again at the other end of its arc for a new motion.. Thus action and reaction can be shown to be equal and opposite, even in the sunbeam, at every successive stage of its progress. The sun can lose no force. Indeed, however complex any series of active changes, this law must hold good throughout its entire length. To suppose otherwise would be to subvert the most absolute and most universal law of Nature — a law which has been deduced from mil- lions of separate observations, while no shadow of proof can be brought that it ever does, or ever can fail anywhere. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. In all electrical phenomena, as well as in all chemical action, to which electricity seems to be closely allied, the correlated forces must pertain to unlike bodies. These forces must belong to sub- MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 1 1 5 stances which differ either in chemical properties or at the least in some of their physical conditions, or else electricity will not be produced by their interac- tion. When two bodies which are exactly alike are rubbed together, the form of energy which is excited will be that of heat ; but if the two bodies are dis- similar, -then the result of the friction will be elec- tricity. There are many well known methods by which electrical energy is generated, but all of them require the introduction of forces controlled and directed by conditions which are more or less dif- ferentiated. Electricity, like heat, is found to pertain to all matter. Nothing exists without heat or without a capacity to respond quickly to heat communicated from other sources ; and equally broad are the elec- trical relations of bodies universally. They all vibrate to electrical action from without, and all, whatever their condition in other respects, are found always to have electrical activity of their own. But electrical action is polarized. Every particle of matter which takes part in it ranges itself like a magnet, and for the time it seems to have become a 1 16 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. magnet with its two ends positively and negatively electrified respectively. When electrical currents are in motion they may move in the same direction, when they mutually attract each other ; but if they move in opposite directions they become mutually repulsive. It is generally assumed that there are two broadly distinguishable electricities; the positive and the negative. But whether these are two un- like subtle fluids or two differing modes of motion is still an open question. It is not needful for us to consider this point ; since, whether there is an elec- trical ether differing from the luminiferous ether or not, or whether there may be two or more of such ethereal substances, it is in any case certain that every- thing which comes into the neighborhood of electrical action is compelled to take part in the electrical processes. The electricity itself must be an energy, a mode more or less varied from the general type of electrical action ; but still distinctively a process — not a substance, but a cooperative series of vibra- tions going on among unlike substances. Electrical phenomena are more complicated than MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 117 those of light and heat. Solids, fluids, and gases, more than one of each, all combine to produce elec- tricities of different varieties ; but it remains true, here as elsewhere, that action and reaction, motion and resistance to motion, are invariably and at all stages of every form of it, equal and opposite. The eye is not adjusted to electrical vibrations as it is to the vibrations of light, and it may be long before it can be definitely settled whether electricity does or does not require the cooperation of a special ether of its own in connection with grosser forms of matter. Electricity is intimately related to all other forms of force and is readily interchangeable with many of them. Having a vital organism to work with, it can simulate vital energies so closely that it is able to move the muscles both of the dead and of the living, and to take an active part in many of the higher processes of the living organisrn. But electricity and vital action both of them being but modes of mechanical motion, are of necessity interchangeable. It is not force proper, but the method of its action, which is correlated to all other kindred methods. We have seen that the simplest forward motion Il8 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALltY. possible, like that of a moving ball, is yet one series of perpetual changes. Electrical, chemical, and vital energies, each of them a group of complex vibrations at every moment, are yet each of them set in a wonderful series of its own. It is to be expected, therefore, that just as the projectile motion of the ball became changed into a number of other equiva- lent motions, controlled by the conditions under which it acted, so these higher energies will be grad- ually transformed into each other, into heat, into any or every motion which presents itself in the line of least resistance. If a body A, is raised above another body B, and made to fall upon it, this fall will begin as visible motion ; but in the reaction, whether this motion will be changed into heat, wholly or in part, or whether B's resistance will send it back to its start- ing point — or up half way to it ; or whether B will be driven from its place and both bodies dropped down to an available lower level ; or whether they will both be made to move on more slowly with its motion shared between them ; or whether in falling they are both seconded by gravity and made to MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 1 1 9 move much more rapidly than A did originally, must depend not upon the forces of A and B, but upon cooperative conditions which control their modes of action throughout. Every energy must continue unchanged in mode or suffer a change of mode, just as the way is best prepared for it, in either channel. The attending conditions do not themselves act, but they modify action. They are not themselves forces, but they are the moulds in which forces operate and by which the acting energy is directed for the time being. On this point we shall have more to say here- after under the head of physical modifications. It must be apparent to all, that when one body exchanges its energy or mode of action with another, it does not also exchange its force. The energy be- ing the method in which the force is working at the given moment, the force gives up this method in exchange for the method of the reacting force. At one instant the two forces are working in a certain way. At the next instant they have exchanged, and each force is working according to the former way of its neighbor; but each force ha^ remained un- I20 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. changed with its own body ; and it is ready at the next instant to make still another exchange, working on now after this third method. So it will go on forever; never pausing, never resting; working even in many directions at the same moment and ex- changing its modes of work with perhaps a dozen separate forces instantaneously and continuously. But the force cleaves to its own body as it cleaves to existence itself. Separation from it would be annihilation, since the two are bound up in one unity. Each centre of force co-works with all the others ; but it gains nothing and it loses nothing ; remaining intact from the beginning amid the end- less cycle of changes in which it cooperates — on that old eternal basis of equivalent for equivalent, through every possible form of modification. Energy merges into- other energies when the black earth climbs upward in the sweet sap of living trees, refining and brightening itself into the green of delicate leaves or the bloom of many-hued blos- soms. But leaves and blossoms return again to the earth ; each particle carrying down with it its own forces neither increased nor diminished during this MODES OR ENERGIES OF FORCE. 121 whole magic round of unresting activity. Heavy, slug- gish zinc and copper can quicken each other's pulses till lightning is racing through every vein, and every thing about them is penetrated to its centre with this subtle and powerful energy. But the light- ning melts into the earth and loses itself again in clods and stones which seem to have no energy except that of dull resistance. Yet resistance is motion, so soft, so delicate, so incomparable in its refinement of activity that even science fails to recognize its significance. 6 SYSTEMS OF FORCE. Several gases introduced into the same receiver will not displace each other. — The explanation. — Analogous facts in spectrum analysis. — Size of atoms. — Estimated numher of molecules in a cubic inch. — Laws of action.-^Explanation of molecular properties, — Action of water vapor compared with that of its elements. — Simple systems aggregated constitute more general systems. — Fluids. — Solids. — Balanced interaction between the parts of every system. A GLASS flask which is entirely empty in appearance is yet filled with the atmosphere. Matter in many of its forms is invisible and must be made to manifest itself in other ways than through the sense of sight. Many of the commonest things are invisible and inappreciable also to the touch. The atmosphere crowds into every available space ; it might be expected to completely fill the glass flask, pressing against it on every side within and without ; and it is true that no more air can be made to enter the flask except upon strong compul- sion. But by the proper adjustments in the glass receiver, steam or water vapor can be introduced SYSTEMS OF FORCE. I23 with, no additional pressure and without displacing the atmosphere. The receiver will admit as much steam as though no air were present and the flask a vacuum. Afterwards we can fill it a third time with the vapor of alcohol. It will contain as much alco- hol vapor as though it were not twice filled already. Then it can be filled a fourth time with ether, and if the vessel were strong enough to resist the increased pressure, we might probably continue to fill it with different gases one after the other. It will receive as much of each as though none of the others were present. Now what explanation can be given of this very remarkable fact. Simply this ; these gases are not solid or continuous vapors. Each of them consists of minute actively vibrating molecules ; little distinct systems of force, free in movement, yet kept asunder at comparatively wide spaces by the interaction of forces operating between the different systems. Each molecule may be regarded as a small separate world occupying its own position in space and exert- ing its own internal forces unhindered ; but its reactions against all the other molecules must deter- 124 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. mine the relative distance which shall be maintained between molecule and molecule When but comparatively few molecules of any gas are admitted to the receiver, they take their places accordingly at remoter distances apart ; dis- tributing the whole space among their number with exact equity : a portion of this particular gas will be found distributed evenly through every part of the space. The interactions between like molecules is evidently not the same as between unlike mole- cules. Let us consider how much is implied in this explanation. When any vapor has furnished its proper quota of molecules for a given temperature, it can then strenuously and successfully resist the crowding in of molecules of its own class'. Thus at a tempera- ture at which water is readily vaporized, if there were fluid water lying at the bottom of the vessel it would not become vapor. A higher temperature or a great pressure in some form would be required in order to change the remainder of the water into steam. The molecular energies in the steam are exerted SYSTEMS OF FORCE. 12$ strongly against the fluid water to prevent its parti- cles from flying off from the surface in the form of vapor. If the steam were removed, the water would then be very shortly vaporized ; but because the steam opposes this process, the water continues in the fluid state. Action and reaction between the water vapor and the water fluid prevent the farther vaporization. Consider now this other curious fact. Supposing the entire state of things to remain otherwise un- changed ; in place of the fluid water let a fluid alcohol or a fluid ether be introduced at the bottom of the flask. Each of these will at once begin to vaporize under the very conditions which would compel the residue of water to remain a liquid. Whatever interaction there may be between the forces of steam and the liquid alcohol or ether, it is of a kind which does not prevent the vaporization of these latter fluids, or indeed of any fluid except that of water only. Evidently the vibrations of water- molecules and of ether or alcohol molecules at a fluid temperature, must be dissimilar. The steam which hinders the water from becoming vapor allows 126 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the vaporized particles of the other fluids to fly up into their midst unchecked. These latter apparent- ly glide past them with but little hindrance and slip into the interstices between the molecules of steam There is a well known fact very analogous to this in spectrum analysis. Each metal and metalloid, when raised to gas in a luminous condition by heat, is found to have a particular place in the spectrum which belongs to itself alone. The light which it radiates when in that condition has a degree of re- frangibility which is special to itself, so that it falls into nearly a fixed position in the spectrum and has a definite color and width of bands : enabling one to decide at a glance exactly what kind of light has been thrown upon the screen. By this means the spectrum analysts have been able to decide that about the same substances must exist in the sun and in many stars as upon the earth. The point to which I would direct attention in both of these illustrations is this. The molecules of gases are shown to have their special adapted places and kinds of vibration ; both of which are so ad- justed to other gases that they can cooperate with- SYSTEMS OF FORCE. I27 out much interference. They can be in their own positions and in the exercise of their own proper activities, surrounded on every side by their neigh- bors of other classes, yet without greatly interfering with them in any way. All their cooperative ener- gies are adjusted each to each. Yet there is some interference — some overlapping as it were of their various oscillations. It is always difficult to obtain a pure spectrum because the dif- ferent colors seem to intermingle at the edges, to run a little way into each other's beat. Perhaps it is something like mingling water and alcohol or water and sulphuric acid. The mixture is exactly as heavy as the two substances were when weighed separately. But it shrinks in size. Thus one hun- dred parts of water and one hundred parts of alcohol will shrink to about one hundred and ninety-six parts, but water and sulphuric acid will shrink fifteen parts in two hundred. The molecules of the two fluids must overlap or interpenetrate each other's spaces. The molecules of our gases in the glass receiver may interfere with each other in a similar way. 128 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. They resist the introduction- of foreign vapors to such an extent that the process of diffusion becomes more and more retarded in proportion as the space is already preoccupied. This resistance might be regarded as that of merely passive stationary im- pediments. If a number of very large men were standing about the porches and aisles of a church, they would effectually repel other large men by simply standing motionless; yet a company of ad- venturous small boys could slip in under the elbows of the men, finding room for their small feet, though it would take much longer to do this than it would to swarm in a body into an unoccupied building. But no similar explanation will answer among the gas molecules, because they are so extremely minute that if their cooperating forces would permit, many millions more of them might concentrate themselves within any given space. To our apprehension, all molecules are so incredi- bly minute, that if there were not good reasons for believing they must have a definite extension, the simplest conception would be to consider them as mere points of force absolutely unextended. A SYSTEMS OF FORCE. 1 29 grain of musk will send out odorous particles enough to perfume the atmosphere of a large room for months, yet not be itself sensibly diminished. Sir Wm. Thompson, by a series of delicate experi- ments, has been able to estimate the fact that in liquids and transparent solids the mean distance between two adjacent atoms in a molecule must lie somewhere between the ten-millionth and the two- hundred-miliionth part of ^^ of an inch. Similar estimates have been reached by others through dis- similar methods. There is a humorous statement of Haller's which must excite a smile because, think of it as seriously as we will, we cannot realize it to be anything more than a whimsical conceit. Yet it represents actual fact. He estimates that the »iiino'o4000 of o"^ grain of amber had saturated a package of papers preserved for forty years. These papers perfumed a film of air at least a foot in thickness for 11,600 days. This illustration of atomic dimensions will make it tolerably evident that when two or three gases, already occupying adapted portions of a given space, interfere to delay the introduction of another gas, it is not because of 9* I30 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. their size ; but because, in their ceaseles vibrations, their different pathways cross and recross. Every molecule is vibrating. It is estimated with an accepted scientific accu- racy, that when the barometer rnarks thirty inches, and the thermometer 32° P., in every cubic inch of gas the number of molecules is ten multiplied into itself twenty-three times. At the same pressure and temperature every kind of gas has an equal number of molecules in an equal volume of gas. It follows, if each molecule is a little separate system of forces, that each one of these small systems exer- cises an equal amount of molecular energy in main- taining its established rights of position and of vi- bration. The heavy molecules have a slower rate of vibration. When they go forward into new posi- tions they make a slower average progression ; the light ones moving with an exactly compensating ve- locity. They transmit sound on the same principle. Thus, however unlike their various molecular weights, all gases are able to exert a uniform pres- sure under like conditions. Their volume is directly proportional to a given temperature, and it is inversely SYSTEMS OF FORCE. IS^ proportional to pressure exerted upon themselves. When a vessel contains two or three different gases, the sum of the pressure is then equal to the pressure from one gas multiplied by the number of gases. Each gas and each molecule must therefore directly or indirectly exert its own pressure — equal to that of any other gas or molecule. These little worlds, when impelled in any direc- tion, move in straight lines like other projectiles. Tossing to and fro, they beat against each other or against the enclosing sides of the vessel in which they are imprisoned, now driven back to their start- ing places, now reeling off sidewise, or gliding past each other without contact ; as disturbing influence drives them about with more or less irregularity. Hydrogen will find its way through a thin partition of graphite or any similar filter about four times as rapidly as oxygen and six times as rapidly as chlo- rine ; and their atomic weights are respectively i,i6, and 35.5. Within certain limits, the repulsive force is found to vary in its action as with gravitation, inversely as the square of the distance. The movements of molecules though essentially 132 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. alike in the same gas are thus proved to be charac- teristically unlike in the different gases. They seem each to keep within their own appointed paths, each class circulating within certain lines or channels of motion appropriated to themselves ; perhaps cross- ing each other's paths as ships do at sea, when sailing in every direction. Two vapors will remain indefinitely intermingled, each forming an atmos- phere by itself penetrating to the remotest parts of the space accessible to it ; yet each keeping in its own space as rigorously as a set of chessmen move about — the dark men upon the dark squares and the light men upon the light squares — neither class ever trespassing upon the domain of their neighbors. If two vessels are placed one above the other with an open communication between them, the upper one containing nothing but hydrogen and the lower one only chlorine, about thirty-six times as heavy as the hydrogen, yet the chlorine-centres will ascend against gravity and the hydrogen molecules will descend into the midst of their comparatively ponderous neighbors until both are evenly distributed throughout the entire space — each little system SVSrSMS OF FORCE. 133 occupying its own square of the joint domain. In- teraction between molecule and molecule is more powerful than gravity. Any gas, however small its amount, will appro- priate the whole of its own portion of the space ; each tiny system probably swinging through a wider beat in cooperation with its more distant neighbors. Hence, if ever so little of one kind of gas is intro- duced into an already filled receiver occupied by several other gases, a little of this gas will be found in every part of the mixture. Hydrogen and oxygen have been known to exist together in the exact proportions in which they unite to form water ; yet when thus intimately inter- mingled, they remained for years uncombined, and were afterwards chemically united with the usual accompanying detonation. Some form of interaction must have existed between them from first to last, but it was not that intimate, nicely adapted cooper- ation which must exist between atoms which form a common molecule. Here, atom must react against atom in a dose perpetual series of vibrations in which there is an exact active balance throughout. 134 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. It is these specially adjusted, intimate vibrations, which must give to each class of molecules its partic- ular characteristics — unlike those of all other substances. How else shall we account for the different pun- gencies in pepper and turpentine, with all the rest of their isomers ? If each atom brings its own class of vibrations with it into the little molecular system, then there is good reason why the way in which they are put together should affect the whole gen- eral result. By the different groupings, unlike sets of vibrations would be acting in more immediate cooperation with each other ; and the general result- ant would necessarily be exactly what it is — a very different whole with each difference in the atomic arrangement ; yet each class of molecules would remain the equivalents in force-value of every other class possessing the same chemical elements. While action and reaction are equal between part and part throughout the molecule, they must so far satisfy each other, that their equilibriated vibrations will be equivalent to rest outside of the little system itself. But when molecule cooperates with molecule, the SYSTEMS OF FORCE. I3S interactions here will be varied according to the closer variations which are more directly inter-mole- cular. These, cooperating with our adapted nervous systems would produce the various familiar, charac- teristic sensations of taste, smell, sight and touch. Hence lavender may well affect us as a mild and pleasant odor ; pepper as hot and biting ; turpentine as turpentine ; and all the rest each after its own kind, according to the class of adjusted molecular vibrations which it is able to awaken within our readily responsive organisms. We will now return to our molecules of gas to see if we can find in their action any farther corrobo- ration of this theory. We have seen that all sub- stances, when under like conditions and in the gaseous state, exert a uniform pressure to the square inch. Thus water vapor, which is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, can exercise one unit of pres- sure ; but oxygen and hydrogen, as elementary gases, can exert one unit of pressure each. A certain amount of energy possessed by each gas is therefore locked up in the inter-activity which is exerted to hold them together in the common molecule. The 136 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. same is true as to other physical properties. The compound vapor, except in weight, is to most in- tents and purposes, possessed of no more available energy than is possessed by either of the single vapors alone ; action and reaction is proved in this way to be equal and opposite within the molecule as elsewhere. Moreover the vibrations of the water vapor can be shown to have taken on quite another kind and rate of oscillation from either the oxygen or the hy- drogen ; since a globe already filled with the com- pound vapor can be readily refilled twice again with the uncombined elements of that compound. The little systems of water-vapor, therefore, must be supposed to occupy a different position in space from either of its elements. If left comparatively undis- turbed to adjust themselves at their normal distances apart, like the interstellar ether particles, the steam would undoubtedly have a very different sweep or amplitude of vibration as well as a different time of oscillation from either of its elements. This is shown more impressively by its immense- ly greater susceptibility to the vibrations of heat. SYSTEMS OF FORCE. 137 Oxygen and hydrogen have but little power to absorb or to radiate heat ; they are nearly transparent to heat-motion of all grades, suffering the little heat- waves to filter through them and pass on their way unchanged. But water-vapor is an eager absorbent of heat ; its radiative power, by promoting its con- densation to a fluid, is largely the origin of clouds, rain, and the whole wonderful phenomena of atmos- pheric changes ; as well as of all vegetable growths. The action of a perfectly dry atmosphere upon heat is found to be not a. seventieth part of the action when the air is saturated with even the ordinary amount of water-Vapor. In this respect, the per- fectly dry air is just equal to an atmosphere of either oxj'gen or of hydrogen gas. They are all composed of elementary systems. The molecules of water- vapor are little, complex systems whose intermole- cular vibrations are akin to the vibrations of heat ; absorbing them as a stringed instrument will absorb the notes to which it is attuned. Here then is a dissimilarity of molecular action established on well known mechanical principles, and tested again and again in many different ways; by 138 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. actual measurements, and by experiment varied in every conceivable way ; till there can be no more reasonable doubt as to the exact facts than there can be doubt as to any other of Nature's plainest truths. The whole subject of separate little systems of forces called molecules has been perseveringly investigated by many of the most eminent physicists and chem- ists. There are no scientific facts better established than many of the above cited laws which govern the various gases. That these gases act from different centres of cooperation is past dispute. As to the real nature of these force-centres, there may still be different opinions. But that all substances ; gases, fluids, and solids ; otve their properties to a special combination of differentiated vibrations will not be questioned probably by any scientific authority. Gases — which are either simple elements, or which usually have but comparatively few atoms in a mole- cule, with molecules widely separated and partially independent — offer excellent facilities for investiga- ting the action of cooperating systems of forces in their simplest forms. But every solid body is a larger system of associ- SYSTEMS OF FORCE. 139 ated forces. So is every mass of fluid. There is a much closer relation between the molecules of a fluid than of a gas ; and in solids the union is still more intimate. But in a substance like water, the molecule, in its elements and in the order of ar- rangement of those elements, remains unchanged in all the three forms, solid, fluid, and gas. And yet the action of the several inter-molecular forces must have undergone successive modifications in each of these very different conditions of water. What those modifications are and how they have been effected, it is not at present our purpose to inquire — as we are concerned now only with the fact that, in every associated mass of matter there must be such action and reaction between all the different parts of the system among themselves, that to every thing outside of itself, internal processes are of no direct account. The interactive energies in the several parts mutually take care of each other, so that relatively to all the rest of the universe it is as though these cooperative actions within the system were all in a state of pos- itive rest — except in so far as they necessarily modify other communications which exist at the same time I40 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. between the system, or any of its several parts and the outside world. Every system is a centre of forces and is com- posed generally of subordinate centres in which there are sub-divisions of force. These subordinate centres cooperate together like the partially merged individ- uals associated in a corporation. Every large mass of matter is a vast commonwealth — a state composed of innumerable multitudes of partial independencies. The only simple and indestructible unit is the ulti- mate atom. The little molecule of gas is a very small sove- reignty, which regulates its own internal affairs ; but it is associated and cooperative with the whole volume of gas to which it belongs, and also with the rest of the world outside — as a town belongs to a state, and states are cooperative in the general government. In a fluid, the molecules are still measurably independent; but they are associated much more intimately among themselves than are the gas molecules. They might be compared to the several wards of a great city. The fluid particles can move about more or less rapidly in the midst of their SYSTEMS OF FORCE. I41 confreres, as they are impelled by foreign influences such as currents of heat or electricity. They may be often compared to a group of children at play — all changing hands continually in an endless chain ; each dropping a hand perpetually, but immediately taking another, and so remaining always linked to- gether hand in hand. The molecules of a solid ordinarily do not change places among themselves. Their balanced energies of alternate motion and resistance to motion, keeps them .swinging endlessly, pendulum-like, to and fro. Possibly their molecular centres of gravity sometimes remain fixed while every point of the star quivers as it stands ; never resting, ah\ nj-s moving ; always in balanced, active cooperation with all other forces about it, within and without its own s}-stem. At any rate we know b)- many unmistakable evi- dences that there are alwaj-s ceaseless vibrations of some kind among the molecules of the apparently most inert mass. Causes often arise which change the position of molecules within a solid body without any change of form externally. A non-crystallized body exposed to the action of sunshine will some- 142 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. times become crystallized in this way. Its outside appearance remains unchanged ; but on breaking it open its new crystallized structure becomes visible. There must have been complete change of position among the apparently solid and immovable particles. This change of place among the molecules must extend probably more or less throughout the system, yet its general centre of gravity is not altered ; its forces continue to work together as a unit. Action and reaction within the body has occupied and sat- isfied all internal agitations. They are all personal to the system, if we may use that expression to indicate a class of energies which, relatively to every thing outside of the system, has no more direct influence than actual and positive rest would have. Chemistry and physics are both grounded upon this important principle of balanced interaction be- tween the several parts of every system. SYSTEMS WITHIN SYSTEMS. Each atom the centre to itself of the cooperative universe. — Repeated systems in the vessel of gold-fish. — The ultimate atom regarded as a system. — It is the centre of many systems unequal in kind anil extent of interactions. — All intermediate systems are variable and destructible. — The universal system is not destructible. The atom as :■ unit of the universal whole. — Its many complex and simultaneous activities. IT has been my steady endeavor to lead up the mind to an adequate appreciation of the funda- mental fact that each atom is a centre to itself of the entire coSperative universe. This assertion is not a metaphor ; but a literal statement as to the nature of the great system of coordinations through which all existences are en- abled to coSperate. Change of every kind is a link in a chain which reaches before and after. It is also a movement in place which reaches outward in many directions. But the outward, to every centre of force, is away from itself. Itself is the nucleus of that system of activities in which it takes its individual share. Its 144 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. cooperations are carried forward in all directions simultaneously. We shall be able to appreciate this the better for fixing the attention as exclusively as may be upon motion ; upon a great number of the vast varieties of motion in which every atom of matter takes its own peculiar part. Motion is the measure of force ; it is the activity of force ; and in studying motion we are studying force in action. But it is, possibly, easier to fix the mind upon motion simply, as something real, tangible, and familiar to our every day experience. It is an old, old friend from childhood up. And motion is physical, not metaphysical. Body is moved. Let us illustrate farther the omnipotent law that in every cooperative system, large or small, the whole group of motions so balance each other that to every- thing outside of themselves they are equivalent to actual rest. Here is a hollow glass ball half filled with water in which there are a hundred gold and silver carp. It is delicately balanced on wheels, on a marble table, at rest — at rest, though the touch of a little finger from without might set it in motion. Of what SYSTEMS WITHIN SYSTEMS. MS account to the whole surrounding world is the in- cessant gliding to and fro of these hundred fishes within the little ocean of their smaller world ? Each fish is darting about like a gleam of light within the teeming water ; but in the language of Prof Stewart, from whom I have borrowed this "Vessel of Gold- fish ; " " we may rest assured that notwithstanding all the irregular motions of its living inhabitants, the globe containing the gold-fish will remain at rest, on its wheels." Again, within the system of each fish every par- ticle of every drop of fluid is in active circulation ; eveiy molecule of its solid substance is in an ener- getic sweep of vibrations; and every atom within every molecule is in an endless state of quiver to and fro — after its special atomic fashion. But of what account to any of the other fishes are these myriads of internal movements pertaining to either one of the remaining ninety-nine ? They are all important to itself; but the entire mechanism might stop moving and no other fish be sensibly disturbed by the change. All disturbance would be indirect — not direct. 7 146 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. But there are multitudes of organic cells, little complete organic centres which are so far indepen- dent of the superior organism that they are able to carry forward a small series of vital operations on their own account. Each cell performs its own functions, changing and renewing itself moment by moment, and it is to all intents a distinct little sys- tem whose internal actions and reactions are bal- anced amongst themselves to such an extent that the other cells and the general organism are not directly affected by them to the least degree. The little cell may break up and die ; it does this and other cells crowd into its place, yet all the other organic processes go on quite undisturbed. And within the cell are multitudes of those still smaller systems — the organic molecules. The bal- anced interactions within the molecule have been sufficiently considered already. Within certain limits of their own, they are as independent among themselves as any other and larger system can be. Every molecule is the smallest complete part of any substance to which it pertains, and each molecule is as absolute in its molecular independence when SYSTEMS IVITHIN SYSTEMS. 147 closely allied to other molecules of an inorganic solid, or taking its own share of various organic pro- cesses, as when it exists comparatively alone in a gaseous state. But within the molecule is the atom. Is that too a system in which action and reaction can regu- late motion between the several parts ? We have seen that according to the theory of the chemists, growing out of the carefully investigated be- havior of atoms, there is not perfect uniformity in all poles of any atom. Each atom is repre- sented as having one or more bonds or points by which it can adjust itself to other atoms. Whether these atoms of the chemist, indivisible as yet by human ingenuity, are in reality simple, indestructi- ble ultimates, is not at all essential to our argument. When we have reached the ultimate, wherever that limit may be, this ultimate should be itself a systevi whose vibrations are equilibriated among the several parts of its indivisible structure. Every vibra- tion imphes this — implies motion and reversed motion ; action and reaction, change of place and. change of form. 148 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. The atom is 9 centre of gravity. Elements uncombined weigh precisely as much as when united in a chemical compound. They resist being moved by a projectile force to the same extent under all conditions. So do all other systems, large or small ; their several forces cooperating to form one centre of gravity in common. Every ultimate atom takes its unresting share in all the varied endless move- ments which are going forward in that active little world in miniature — the glass globe, with its won- drous variation of energies. Each atom of each shining scale of our fishes, sil- ver or golden, unseen to our eyes, is fluttering like an echo to pulses which vibrate in the remote sun. Why is one silver and the other gold ? Hereditary? do we say ; and hand the marvel back to ancestral influences ? Yet how, by what physical agencies has the result which we can all so cordially admire, been brought to this perfection ? Can we hope to trace out the combined, vibrating energies which produce these and the other equally beautiful effects of color and form in the crystal of the glass and the water, and in the yet more transparent crystal of the air ? SYSTEMS WITHIN SYSTEMS. 149 They all result from cooperative movements ; and our atom, like the molecule with which it acts, undoubtedly vibrates of itself and from itself, in re- sponse to the vibrations of correlative energies almost a' hundred million miles distant. This system is a grand one in its extent ; but all its activities are balanced and correlative, as in each lesser system. Every particle of air, of water, of glass, of blood, of bone, of tissue, is found to be in active incessant motion ; yet because these motions are actions and reactions equal and opposite in their own kind and degree, the globe as a whole remains motionless upon the smoothest surface. Unless otherwise dis- turbed it is as apparently passive as a clod or a stone. Indeed it is just as passive in reality ; every mole- cule in a clod or a stone vibrating so rapidly that the eye alone can detect no movement. There is no rest throughout all Nature. Every atom vi- brates ; and vibration is balanced motion ! The glass globe is itself a system within a system yet more extended. Take away the air which presses against it on either side ; the globe would plunge forward into the vacuum. Remove the table from ISO THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. underneath it ; it would drop helplessly to the earth. Our atom is stretching always outward in coopera- tive shivers toward the air and the earth. If it cannot itself reach actually out to either, it can, and it does, join its vibrations to multitudes of others in lines of energy reacting in all possible directions. Like a tiny central star it radiates motion every- where. It receives motion also from everywhere into its own bosom, quivering in reaction at every impulse which is communicated to its infinitely sensitive structure. This endless adjustment of all activities, from the least to the greatest, offers the only explanation which can be given of the correlation of the many different modes of energy. Motion and counter- motion, whether like or unlike in kinds of vibration, are equal and opposite. If the centres of these en- ergies are millions of miles away, they are but one system to just the extent to which they cooperate in a common scheme of activities. The atom in the sun is as really and definitely allied to the atom in the earth which is found vibrating in unison with.it, as are any of the atoms which are so intimately asso- SYSTEMS U'lrm.V SYSTEMS. ISI dated in the same molecule that all their vibrations are merged and cooperative in a common substance. An atom, a molecule, a rock, an animal, the earth, the sun, the solar system, the universe — all these are systems of cooperations, each after its own kind of relationship. The lesser sj'stems are but parts of the universal whole and every atom is the centre of all those manifold operations, near and remote, in which it participates. Its vibrations quiver out and out- ward in all directions, to every planet, to the sun, to the distant fixed stars ; towards every other particle of matter however remote in space ; and from all these other centres co6rdinated to itself there come back to it wavelets of counter-motion, compounded and re-compounded with each other throughout every stage of their ceaseless journeying to and fro. Each system is measurably independent and complete in its own cooperations ; and yet any modi- fication in one. even the least sj-stem of them all, must invohe a corresponding modification throughout the whole allied universe. But all the intemnediate systems between the atom and the universe, of every kinJ and degree, are perpetually variable. All 152 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. bodies, inorganic and organic alike, which are visible to us, are in a state of perpetual change. They form aggregates only to break up again into fragments. They grow or diminish ; they undergo modifications of every conceivable variety, and yet, in so far as they cooperate directly together, their actions and reactions are so far balanced for the time that to all other systems they are equivalent to actual rest. The internal operations of the system, however, inevitably modify the system itself in all its parts ; thus all of its external cooperations are modified also. The centre of gravity of no body large or small is ever moved by its own internal forces. Working together, they produce innumerable modes of vibra- tion ; but they all cooperate to hold its centre of gravity in a state of rest. They all resist motion in every direction except their own. And the result is an established common centre of inertia. Thus the motion of translation through space can never arise from the adjusted interaction of the energies within the system. It can be moved only by foreign ener- gies. But outside influences, by disturbing the SYSTEMS WITHIN SYSTEMS. I S3 internal adjustments, may break up the system — scattering its fragments through a violent internal revolt. A gun loaded with powder and ball may be regarded as one system previous to the discharge. After the explosion, powder and ball separate from the gun. They belong to it no longer. The hand that pulled the trigger was the disruptive outside in- fluence. And the motion in the living hand was also produced at the expense of some portion of the living organism. That portion of any organic structure through which motion is effected ceases to belong to the organic system. It drifts away from it as the ball and powder are detached from the gun. All the intermediate systems of the cosmos are in a state of perpetual flux because of the outside cooperations which unite them with many other and larger systems. But the all-comprehensive universe, though changing continually in the internal arrange- ment of its parts, neither increases nor diminishes in any respect. In this sense it is immutable, indivisi- ble and indestructible. It also must be immovable in space. Its perpetual internal changes are but as the vibrations of its several parts. 7* IS4 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. The problem which we are trying to solve is this : — are the ultimate units of this substantially changeless whole, little complete types of the whole ? Are these also systems ; each complete and inde- structible ; never increasing, never diminishing, but each changing continually as the universe changes — by perpetual vibrations among its parts ? Such vibrations would enable all these units of the cosmos to cooperate among themselves and yet to remain unchanged and indivisible as persisting units. Is the cosmos a vast unity embracing the smaller units? Is each unit patterned after the whole — a little- determinate structure fashioned in its own likeness ? The answer to this question must be written unequivocally in every atom. The atomic modes of interaction ought to enable us to answer the inquiry either positively or negatively. Since every atom is a cooperative part in the total of all substance, it is either a least unit, a least division which can act as a partially independent centre of energies, or else there is a still smaller division possible. But the smallest division is the ultimate atom ; the unit of force and extension. Then if the total is indestructible, its Sy.'JTEArS WITHIN SYSTEMS. ISS least division must be also indestructible. In this way logic would answer the question. But it must be decided, in addition, by undisputed facts. The exceeding complexity of the atomic co- operations lead us to the conclusion that, simple as it must be in nature, it is yet extremely mani- fold in functions. The molecule is the unit of the physicist ; but within the molecule each atom exerts its own proper forces, many, various, and simulta- neous. Gravity is continually drawing the atom in all directions ; for it possesses gravity in its own right — not because it takes part in a mass with other par- ticles. Its vibrations of light, heat, electricity, etc., enter into the molecular vibrations and are still an active influence in the combined result. Its co- hesive forces bind it to the rest of its molecule and also to the larger body of wjiich it is one component part. Thus our ultimate atom, when it is one of the active units in a Hving organism, may be at the same moment gravitating towards the earth with_ great rapidity and .ilso actively sustaining energetic relations with a number of distant planets, and the I 56 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. sun. At the same instant it may glow with the richest color, may vibrate with heat and with a powerful electrical energy, at once attracting and re- pelling other bodies ; it may move as a projectile, exchanging motion for resistance to motion with the atmosphere ; it may bind itself to other atoms with forces more powerful than iron clamps ; and it may take its own proper share in the countless number of vital processes pertaining to its organism ; such as assimilating and diges-ting food, promoting circula- tion, muscular action of many kinds, nervous activity, etc. It may even take some part in the psychical operations which are dependent upon its organism. The inference is, that the atom which is actively part and parcel of all these many diverse but coordi- nated movements, vastly complex as they are shown to be, must be itself an extremely modifiable system of forces, held together in one bond of unity by something which is not force though inseparably allied to it. What this something else is, and how they can be supposed to co-exist in one simple and indivisible structure, it must be my next effort to indicate with as much definiteness as is possible. A NKW THEORY OF ATOMIC STRUCTURE. rr:u-lioal science accepts the eslciuled. — Voice mid extension pnrallel icixliiies. — 'llu'V condition e:\cl> other in evevy unit of being. — ll\\e\tenileil force im|Hw.-.ible in thought and in fact. — Eleetiicily :\s related to extension, — Modes of foree and extension vary in mutual relationship. — Pelininon of unit of matter. — lUustrated by atalions in the triangle. — A conditioned existence requires unlikeness in kind in (lie conditioning f.->ctors. — Matter condi- tioned by forec and extension. Minds conditioned by force, extension, and .sentient force of varying qualities. PR.VCTICAl, science assures us that all sub- st.iiicc is indestructible. It proves, so far as proof of any question of fact is possible, that no particle of matter is either orioinated or destroyed. It proves that force and extension are equalh- persis- tent ; that foice is not extension, that extension is not force ; and yet that the two are indivisible. They cooperate in a multitude of ways, the result being the most diverse forms of the extended and equally diverse modes of force — both more than the sands of the sea-shore for number. Each limits the other. All practical science deals with the properties of 1 5 8 THE PH YSICA L BA SIS OF IMMOR TAUT Y. the extended, such as weight and structure, in entire good faith ; treating them in all respects as literal relatives. It is compelled to regard them in this light. They everywhere assert themselves to be as real, as rigidly determined in their varying phases, as quantitative in every character, as mathematically related among themselves, and as accurately adjusted to cooperative forces as the modes of force are adapted among themselves. It is said to be "no longer a subject of doubt in the minds of savants who have got beyond experi- mentation, that extension is an image and a show rather than an essential constituent property of bodies." But the surveyor could not easily admit that the broad earth which he estimates by acres can be made up of mere unextended force. The chemist, like the grocer, must believe in his heart that weight represents something different from a vibration or any form of motion — that it represents something more than pure resistance. Size, and form, and structure in bodies, is something unlike in kind from the powers or active properties of bodies. The instincts of every child teach it so A NE W THEOR Y OF A TOMIC STR UCTURE. 1 59 much ; and intuitive- knowledge is never wholly at fault. It may be wanting in discrimination ; but it has never been found to originate in pure self-deception. Then if practical affairs, scientific or unscientific, must treat the extended in all of its modes as real- ities, in the same sense that the modes of force are realities, is not this the highest evidence that they are real in an exactly parallel sense ? We hold that they inhere together, mutually defining each other, in every unit of being; and that they are joint sharers in every process of change. The zeal for generalization — the absorbing love of unity, has tempted some philosophic minds to re- solve everything into the one ultimate, force. But force limited by extension; the extended limited " by force ; two phases in each indestructible unit of being, may also lead us to an all embracing unity of which these are the definite constituents. Such a unit, cooperating with others like or unlike itself, may interchange with them modes of force and forms of extension ; and yet remain unchanged in atomic constitution. Extensions and forces, being unlike in kind, cannot be transformed into each l6o THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. other ; but extensions can merge into other forms of extension, forces into other modes of force ; and being so mutually conditioned that if there is change in either there must be coordinated change in both, this bond of union is the atomic unity ; the one immutable element in the midst of all mutations. To this point we will return again. Let us now ask: Can philosophy determine with unquestionable authority that extension is nothing more than a derived, secondary property of force ? Philosophers who take this position admit that they are compelled to add extension to force, before they can either think of force, talk of it, or treat it in any way what- soever. What kind of derivative can that be which requires to be first created in illusion before its primary can be brought into consciousness either as an ideal possibility or as a real existence ? The extended seems, if possible, more real than the forceful. Mr. Spencer says : " A centre of force absolutely without extension is unthinkable." " The idea of resistance cannot be separated in thought from the idea of an extended body which offers resistance." A NEW TTfEOR Y OF A TO.VIC STRUCTURE. l6l No! neither can it be separated in reality. Mr. Spencer himself is obliged to confound actual exten- sion, the extended, with pl.ice or space, the " blank form " of extension, before he can even seem to derive either space, time, matter or motion from force alone. " Unextended positions" which do not resist are nothings, from which certainly nothing can be derived — unless it be blank space, which is nothing — except as n rel of i/ifi'rdt/fndfnf conditions. A unit thus structurally and functionally con- 196 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ditioned would occupy its own position in space ; it would have its own rates and amounts of possible internal change and variability of form, to correspond with the variability of functions ; and through its cooperation with other units, it could be variously moved and ojtherwise modified. We have seen that the most elementary substances known to us, when in a gaseous state, are such structurally independent yet externally cooperative systems. We have seen that when two or more of these unite to form a larger system, they modify each other in all their processes ; and that they even take a new third position in space. We have seen that through cooperation these various systems are able to move each other from point to point ; and to form com- pounds, with new resultant properties. Now supposing the atom to be an actual physical structure, it must come legitimately into the rank of physics. We may fairly reason from the established action of the visible body to the necessary action of the invisible one. My theory of the atom is of long standing ; it has been carefully considered as to its bearing upon many classes of admitted facts ; but PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 197 experimental science must establisli its crucial tests, if possible, and decide beyond question whether it be true or false. Here are words written years ago : " I regard the cooperation of forces as comprehending not only the push and counter-push between atom and atom, but also the push and the withdrawal of that push by every atom singly and collectively, when not impeded in the completion of the process. Every molecule, (and every atom,) it is believed, is itself endowed with the two reactionary types of the one identical force, which together keep it forever pulsing to and fro like the panting heart of a live creature, each atom a microcosm of the universe with its eternal ebb and flow, its systole and diastole." * But the axis of the atom, its centre of gravity, can never be self-moved. All its vibrations must be balanced within its own structure ; and hence, as all its quantities and rates of oscillation are held in check by allied extensions, the form of every atom would naturally be a symmetrical, a well balanced form. The molecule, an association of atoms, would * Studies in General Science, p. 90. 198 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. demand a like symmetry ; and molecule joined with molecule in visible masses, being still governed by the same adaptation of energies, should lose nothing in fundamental symmetry of structure. The theory requires visible order, balance, and symmetry in all the forms of Nature. Facts justify and confirm the theory. Nature has no forms, inorganic or organic, which are so far out of equilibrium in outward shape that they can be thought of in any other way than as produced by some steadily maintained balance of adjusted forces. Very ugly living creatures are on the earth and in the sea ; but not one is without real symmetry in the arrangement of part with part ; or without an ^equal adaptation between the creature and its sur- roundings, however various or peculiar these may be. The temptation to go into detailed illustration is almost irresistible, but the obvious fact is too familiar to require this. There are no one-eyed, one-armed, or one-sided men, except in fable. Single appenda- ges in all animals arise at the junction of the balanced members of the system, or they can be explained as arising from obvious and necessary conditions which PHYSICAL MOD/FJCjr/O.VS. I99 demand the odd member to balance the organism with its environment. A double s}-rametry — often a manifold symmetry is the universal law. Every tree, leaf, twig and flower is the embodi- ment of a solidified equilibrium — each after its own kind. An oak, an elm, and a willow has each a type of its own. Nature maintains a balance of angles in each, within certain limits, as correctly as though she were always ready with rule and dividers to measure off every least beginning of growth, to establish it in the right direction forever. From the seed upwards each growth is like the growth of its predecessor. The honored historic Elm which fell the other day on Boston Common, and whose obituary is to-day printed in many distant papers all over the land, is no higher exemplar of Nature's law and order than is the meanest weed which cumbers the ground. Balance or equilibrium of all form is an absolute principle. Apparent want of symmetry proves to be only a still higher symmetry. Arrangement of atoms within the molecule is governed by laws of geometry as unalterably as thought by laws of thought. Science has traced 200 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. equilibrium in the molecule as running often in two directions perpendicular to each other, one at right angles to the axis of grouping, the other parallel to it. Chemists who would represent to the eye any supposed possible arrangement of atoms, instinctively group them symmetrically in the absence of actual knowledge. That molecule allies itself with mole- cule in stable equilibrium of form, is beyond question. This fact has been determined by .the united testi- mony of light, heat, sound, magnetism and ejectri- city — every one of these various modes of motion being differently transmitted or otherwise affected by the direction which it pursues within the same struc- ture. Light and polarized light, electricity and the magnetic current, when they are deflected at right angles to each other, may be supposed to follow the main directions of established atomic arrangements. But even the laws of symmetry are pliant to sur- rounding conditions. Heat ordinarily enlarges bodies in all directions; but in calc spar it produces actual contraction in the direction of the secondary axis. In crystals of three unequal axes, the amount of ex- pansion differs in each of the three directions. The PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 20I angles are all changed in magnitude. Change of form in bodies subjected to any subtle energy — say to powerful electrical action — is made visible to the e}-e by polarized light. A ray of this light made to pass along the axis of a prism or cylinder of some transparent substance, as water or glass, has its plane of polarization deflected whenever the medium is subjected to the action of a magnetic current passing around it at right angles to the ray. The effect varies with the strength of the current, and it ceases when the current is broken. It is not possible to attribute the whole of these and similar effects, as it seems to me, to changed attractions and repulsions between rigid particles which remain always wooden and changeless in their own structures. The expansion or contraction is invariably the same under like conditions, so that regular tables are made out to express the definite amounts ; but this would be the result if the atomic extension were variable in form, quite as certainly as if it were absolutely rigid. The most pliant atom would not greatly change its normal shape except under a most complete change of conditions. But it 9* 202 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. might be expected to bend or sway to and fro pre- cisely as a larger mass does when powerfully acted upon. If the least particle in a magnet is itself a magnet, how can it act at all except by some kind of vibration ? and vibration implies pliancy — strain here, and compression there. Even if we call in the aid of an ether as medium between particle and particle, yet there must be ten- sion somewhere ; and to my mind tension presup- poses extension. What possible conception can we form of a strain — a contracting pull in unextended force ? But if we regard heat and electricity as " transported shivers " sent into a crystal, why may not every part of every atom, whether pertaining to the ether or to ordinary matter, be supposed to shiver in sympathy — every contraction in one direc- tion implying corresponding expansion in the op- posed direction ? The effect would be such as it now is, unequal movement in dissimilar lines, quite possible to be tracked out faithfully to the eye by the responsive polarized ray. Unlike conditions must occasion unlike results. Crystals identical apparently in molecular structure — PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 203 not simply isomeric bodies chemically identical, but built up from the same molecules, — are often unlike in external formation. Floating crystals have been seen having the primary form distinct and simple ; but when they attached themselves to the side of the vessel they assumed secondary forms, these forms clearly arising as reactions. A substance may even belong to different systems of crystalline forms. Car- bonate of lime crystallizes in the trimetric and in the hexagonal systems. Titanic acid assumes three dis- tinct forms ; carbon three, two at least crystalline, — all differing in specific gravity, specific heat, conducting power for heat and electricity, and in chemical rela- tions. Modes of force and forms of extension are modified together. Mere difference of arrangement, with no change of energies and cooperations, would certainly be powerless to effect these results. The nature of the solvent and of substances held in solution are known to be causes of secondary forms. Salt, crystallizing from pure water almost certainly assumes a cubic form ; " in a solution of boracic acid, it always occurs with truncated angles." Many successive changes have been produced in 204 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. crystallized forms by the presence of different liquids or different proportions of the same liquid in the solution. The unlike reactions give a different total result. We may insist that the molecules and atoms remain unchanged, though the lines of force vary and thus influence the general grouping ; or we may argue that marvellous, orderly phenomena like these can arise from unextended force alone ; but the plain straightforward inference is, that as the molecular forces are changed in modes of action by these foreign substances, all their physical properties change also. In a given locality the crystals generally assume like forms, showing that like producing causes have effected similar results. This inference seems still more necessary when we remember that in nature a substance is often removed by successive stages, and with equal pro- gress another is substituted in its place ; as when cubes of fluor spar are transformed to quartz ; or when the substance of vegetable fibre gives place to a mineral, in " petrified wood." The entire form of the structure, the very graining of the wood is re- tained in minutest detail. What should we con- PHYSIC.tL MODIFICATIONS. 20$ elude except that, molecule by molecule, the new elements shape themselves into the places of the old, hi obedience to the moulding influence of all the other forces about them, and that, when a complete displacement and usurpation has been effected, the new forces and their allied extensions find them- selves so equilibriated in all their vibrations of every degree, that they remain permanently as they are, constrained to masquerade in the guise of their predecessors. Nature's forms represent Nature's energies. In her domain borrowed plumes seem to imply bor- rowed functions in downright sincerity ; she tolerates no shams. She exacts measure for measure in ex- changed modes of force ; and when one substance creeps into the shoes of another, whatever its inter- nal economy, its cooperations with the outside world must be forced to adjust themselves largely to the steady outside pressure. If it cannot do this, it can- not remain a pseudomorph. The laws of symmetry have many variations, all of them tending to secure a balance of form which must be effected through balance of energies. Thus 2o6 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. when all the parts of a crystal are not similarly modified, then either half of the similar angles or edges, alternate in position, are modified independ- ently of the other half; or, otherwise, all the similar angles or edges may be similarly modified but the usual modification is left uncompleted at a point half way in the process ; or perhaps half the replacements will be much larger than the other half. How a force working outside of solid atoms could be induced to build up these structures under such variable, conditions of balanced form, it is impossible to conjecture ; but if form and force wrought together in every separate brick, the final result would not be difficult of explanation. The first atom in the molecule would be balanced on its own axis and the molecule would necessarily range itself about this central root in stable equilibrium. And again, the first molecule taking its position, all successive molecules must perforce attach them- selves about it on every side in a like equilibrium if their forces are unimpeded. Crystals, on this theory, are internally constrained to symmetry. Even the mass of shapeless inorganic PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 20/ substance which to the eye has no regular shape, is found to have the same balanced structure in its minutest grains. And yet with all this, a certain amount of irregularity in crystals is the rule in Nature — not the exception. This corresponds to the similar variability in organic forms as when trees are permanently bent by prevailing winds, or when they receive some permanent twist in the earlier st.iges of growth. Small but balanced devi- ations are almost universal. Interposition of a foreign substance will often produce in a cr}'stal what is called "oscillating combinations," parallel ridges. The curving produced in this and various other ways by foreign disturbing causes, sometimes changes the angle of the crystal, precisely, it would seem, as angles arc changed in forms of pliant growth. And the foreign matter itself is modified in turn, in adaptation to the crystal. It follows laws of sym- metry in collecting about the centre, along diago- nals, in planes between centres and edges, or in par- allel layers with some exterior plane ; often taking the form of small crystals within the larger one. In non-crj'stalline substances we find even stronger 208 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. grounds for inference that the atomic system is vari- able in form as in modes of force. Those active energies which promote chemical union — the taking hands as it were, or uniting themselves by mutually attractive " bonds or poles," are not always alike in operation. Nitrogen is found sometimes to unite chemically by three poles, sometimes by five — called trivalent and quinquivalent. Manganese is bivalent, quadrivalent, and sexivalent. Iron and other sup- posed elements have a similar variability in what the modern chemists term quantivalence. Other atoms do not vary in this way, so far as is now known. These variations involve' corresponding changes in all chemical relations, so much so that two elements dif- ferently united, will sometimes be more unlike in properties than two substances possessing different elements ; and their derivations form groups which also differ from each other as widely as if they were composed of unlike elements. Modes of interaction determine properties ! But there is the same balance of action to be noted here as elsewhere ; " at each successive step the quantivalence increases by two bonds, and never PHYSICAL MODIFICATIOXS. 209 by a single bond." * Univalent atoms become tri- valent or quinquivalent. Bivalent atoms become quadrivalent or sexivalent. Two atomic bonds are supposed to " satisfy " or equilibriate each other. Whatever explanation is given of facts like these, there is evidently involved change in modes of force and corresponding change in molecular structure sufficient to modif}- the external appearance as greatly as the internal characteristics. Each condi- tion of eveiy given atom gives invariably the same results. But as the conditions vary, must we not conclude that the atom also varies, not in essential constitution but in all of its related modes? Like physical properties everywhere accompany like man- ifestations of force. The very large number of differentiated organic compounds possessing the same or nearly the same elements, indicates that their unlikeness cannot arise from passive arrangement merely. Different powers or functions must be brought into cooperation in every unlike method of grouping. And the change is evidently carried progressively throughout the * The New Chemistjy, by Isaiah P. Cooke, Jr. p. 247. 2IO THE PHYSICAL BASrS OF IMMORTALITY. molecule — each atom bending to the influence which is brought to bear upon it and reacting accordingly. No fact is more remarkable than that each compound has a definite and eatablished constitution of its own, which is as sharply defined when two substances are almost identical as when they are extremely dissim- ilar. Combinations of energies so marked that they can maintain a characteristic nature under the widest variety of" fortunes, must require the conservative element of allied real extensions. If each mode of force is conditioned by a corre- , spending form of extension, we can in part compre- hend how each may hold the other to stable and determinate manifestations or properties under ail like conditions ; and also how changed conditions can bring with them changed affections in the same material. But if force, though inseparable from matter or extension, may yet be transferred from one portion to another in such a sense that any given substance may possess more and less force at differ- ent times, then what system of power or of machin- ery can be conceived of which is able to give to each condition of matter exactly those affections which PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 211 are adapted to that state and to no other? By what conceivable process can molecules of water be invariably split up into atoms of hydrogen and oxy- gen, of exactly a given weight, and size, and func- tion, for each atom of each class, supposing force and matter to be two vast units conditioned together as wholes, but not conditioned together as atomic units ? The bond between them, on such a theory, is utterly unthinkable ! Here are vast classes of never- varying facts under given conditions ; the conditions change and the facts change to another equally un- varying series ; but as to what the bond is between the two, we know nothing and can learn nothing. The force at one time produces one affection of matter, and then it produces another affection of the same matter ; there explanation ends. The whole subject is inscrutable. But on the new theory we understand something of the nature of force, something of the nature of extension, and also something of the nature of the conditioning influence which each imposes upon the other. We can get some conception also as to the 212 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. process through which all changes are effected. We ourselves exercise force ; it is a part of our most intimate and positive consciousness. Extension, size, dimensions, distance ; actual figure of a given kind and capacity ; let us use what terms we will to express this conception, is yet a real and positive conception. But force in action is motion of the body to which the force pertains; when confined within the unit of allied force and extension, it is vibration without change of central position ; yet even such vibration must change extensions to cor- respond with modes of energy. But our pliant structure is acted upon from with- out. Another body seeks to penetrate it or to thrust it forward in space. If the acting energy is mechan- ical and but very slight, our atom bends at first; then recoils and expels the intruder. Thus the two may vibrate together as one, may even ally them- selves in one molecule. But a great force may come and send them both forward in space. This force also comes with its extension, it deals a solid blow and both systems recoil. The recoil is heat, a new motion possibly. But it also has its reactions ; for PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 21 3 they are pressed about on every side by other systems, each acting fronn itself as it is acted upon. Now even if we suppose every one of these distinct units to be absolutely alike, still, action and reaction from unit to unit, could be conceived of as actually, setting up among them, by a process of continuous evolution, a universe as complex, as widely differen- tiated in parts, and as various in its modes of action as the existing universe. The supposition is a very different one from the theory which has imagined an ether absolutely uni- form throughout, as a possible starting point of the present cosmos. In such an essence, no motion could arise if not communicated from without. In our theory, motion is the normal expression of force con- ditioned by extension. Motion is the necessary rela- tion arising between the two. Rest or cessation from motion is a constitutional impossibility. The atomic structure is conditioned upon the principle of eternal action and reaction within and without. Equilibrium is a shifting balance of active energies, not a state of rest. Force is inherent activity ; conditioned as to its modes of action by its own actual extensions. 214 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. Should the individuahzed force move in one direction — the balance within its own structure re- quires counteractive motion in an opposed direction. It can do nothing alone but stand and vibrate. But its chemical attractions unite it, in the molecule, with unlike energies ; its atomic possibilities become changed, modified ; but they are also enlarged. They are supplemented by unlike powers ; for whether or not all ultimate atoms are identical, yet it is certain that with a definite and internally con- ditioned structure, each must possess unlike poles and be able to exercise unlike energies. Hence, atom united to atom and cooperative with it, would give enlarged scope to each. But with many cooperative molecules mutually attracting and repelling each other on the principle of equal action and reaction, we should arrive at the condition of things which now actually exists among all gases — where each small system is able to maintain its own position, yet in cooperation with all the others. But it is not proved that all units are identical ! In solids, the cooperation is still more intimate. If atoms are self centred vibrating structures, but PHYSICAL MODIFICATIONS. 215 different classes differently constituted, by more or less of force and extension balanced upon the atomic axis, it must be still easier to explain the endless variety which exists through the compounded action of these unlike units — unlike at least in quantity, and unlike possibly in the whole structural plan — as circles are unlike triangles or rectangles. But we are concerned only with facts as they are now manifest- ed to us ; in these facts we are only seeking to find evidence that force and extension are every where conditioned together in divisions or units ; in such a sense that the force acts necessarily from its exten- sion, which becomes to it a fixed basis for all of its cooperations. This position is not wholly without a claim to ground itself upon very high scientific authority. Dr. Balfour Stewart has summed up his views concerning molecules and atoms in these remarkable words : " Molecules are not at rest, but, on the con- trary, they display an intense and ceaseless energy in their motions. There is, indeed, an uninterrupted warfare going on — a constant clashing together of these minute bodies, which are continually maimed, 2l6 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. and yet always recover themselves, until, perhaps, some blow is struck sufficiently powerful to dissever the two or more simple atoms that go to form a molecule. A new state of things thenceforward is the result. " But a simple elementary atom is truly an immor- tal being, and enjoys the privilege of remaining unaltered and essentially unaffected amid the most powerful blows that can be dealt against it— it is probably in a state of ceaseless activity and change of form, but it is nevertheless always the same." * How molecules and atoms can possess these active propensities and yet force or " energy " be dissipated, degraded, or 'separated from its own division of matter, or how a universe composed of such eternally active atoms can be fitly compared to a burning lamp, it is for the learned doctor himself to determine. Our universe has many states and conditions of allied force a.nd extension, but no " waste heap." * The Conservation of Energy, p. 7, SENTIENT OR LIVING UNITS. Conscious energies perlnin to qualities of experience. — .Vbslract prin- ciples differ in kind.— Applied principles also conditioned by amount. — Qualities of experience related to i/r-givc-s of experience. —Definition of mental unit.— Its four phases.— Probabilities as to molecular state. — How physical and psychical facts are con- ditioned together.— Prof. Tyndall as authority.— Visual facts and explanation.— The relation of physics to consciousness not un- thinkable. — The testimony of consciousness. WE will suppose some few or many'of the changes constitutionally possible to an atom to be accompanied by sensations and by other states of consciousness. These varying experiences would thus be conditioned — constitutionally conditioned with varying modes of force and extension. The sentient experiences would be neither forces nor ex- tensions, nor would they be convertible into either modes of force or of extension. They belong to a new, a distinct class or phase of being which may be termed i/itrtision in discriminating it from iwteit- siofi, qualitative force as distinguished from quantita- tive force. Intensive or sentient experience is quali- 2l8 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. tative ; force or active power, being generic enough to embrace both quantities and qualities of all pos- sible energies. The forces which we have. been considering hith- ertOjCan all be reckoned by amounts, as more or less. One mode of energy is exchanged with another or is changed into another on the principle of equiva- lence in amount ; a unit of one kind being given for a unit of another kind. One unit of visible motion is equal to one unit of heat, or of electricity, or of vital energy. They are all mechanical or measurable quantities. So far as we know, the forces of matter properly so called, are all of this measurable, quantita- tive variety. But qualitative force, experience ; sensations, emotions, perceptions, thoughts, purposes; none of this class of quick, conscious or living states and energies can be measured by quantity, as more or less in themselves considered. And yet they are all related to quantity ; they are all structurally conditioned by variations in quantitative modes of force and extension. It must be possible to make this distinction plain SEXTJEyr OR LIVING UiVITS. 219 and self-evident. We cannot say that a thought is greater or less than a feeling, than a volition ; there is no possibility of comparison between them on that i^round. Neither can we say that, to think two and two equal four, requires a less amount of thought than to think that ten and ten equal twenty, or that ten and a hundred are one hundred and ten. We cannot measure the thinking in that way ; one thought is as easy as the other to any one who can think them at all. But when we come to say that two things and two things equal four things — that ton things and ten things equal twenty things, etc., liere, the latter process is a much larger one than the former. Many a child and many a savage can per- ceive the small fact, yet be totally unable to per- ceive the larger one. The quantity lies in the things. The sentient experience is forced to bring itself into relation to this quantity; the perception is conditioned by it. All perception of the external world is conditioned by the quantitative facts of the external world. We can perceive quantities where quantities exist. But when thought leaves the world of things 220 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. wholly outside of consciousness, when it thinks in principles or thought-relations pure and simple, here there are no quantities, no measuring by more or less. The purely abstract is immeasurable. Justice and injustice are not comparable in terms of quantity. Moral principles are all outside of measurable limits. They may be distinguished as true or false, as good or bad, as practicable or not practicable, etc. ; but not as more true and less true, etc. Whatever is not true is not true — that is, it is false. Whatever is not just is unjust. The quality is unlike — not the quantity. No possible manipulation can convert any abstract principle into any other. They differ in kind ; they differ in such a sense as to be forever inconvertible. But whenever thought is applied to things, it must then suffer itself to be conditioned by quantity. One mile is longer than one inch. The mile and the inch are both measures of extension. One action is more praiseworthy than another. Practical affairs lie nearly always in the domain of measure for mea- sure, but not always. A man may publish a truth to the world and yet retain the whole of it himself. SENTIENT OR LIVING UNITS. 221 When a teacher gives to his pupils a knowledge of the multiplication table, he has not thereby lost that knowledge. Pure logic, pure ethics, can know noth- ing of quantity. Applied logic, applied ethics are conditioned by quantities. We think generally in terms of quantity. We may draw the same distinction in all classes of experience. A volition is a volition — not some frational part of a volition. The sensation of sweet taste can never be merged into the sensation of sweet sound or of agreable color. The problem is not, how much larger is happiness than unhappi- nes5 ? but how do they differ ? They are two quali- ties of experience, of sentient force. And yet both qualities — all qualities are conditioned by quantity. A large mouthful of sugar gives more of the sensa- tion of sweetness than a small one. A moderate amount of musical vibration is delightful ; an excess is deafening. Pain and pleasure are always hand in hand. They are conditioned by the external. Is it not evident that all the states of conscious- ness pertain primarily to qualities, and that there are degrees of intenseness only as they are related to 222 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. measurable amounts through the quantitative phases of being? In other words, experience is not mea- surable by quantity ; and yet, as we know it at least, it is conditioned by quantity, it is acted upon by quantities. A sentient unit may be defined zs, force and ex- tension, sentient force and intension; so coordinated that to separate them or to change the equivalence of their relations would necessitate the destruction of the unit. These four phases of one existence are so conditioned together that to destroy either is to destroy the being thus conditioned. They are not four principles held arbitrarily together, but four adapted phases of one entity ; so constitutionally related that the existence of the whole is made de- pendent upon the integrity of each correlative. The forces are active ; the others passive. Changes in the modes of force and extension necessitate changes in modes of experience. Also changes in modes of experience equally necessitate corresponding modifications of force and extension. Sentience or felt energy, energy conscious of itself, may be conditioned with a few or with many of the SENTIENT OR LIVING UNITS. 223 physical changes of the atom. It may be of a low- order of sensation and instinct, or of a high order of perception and intelligent purpose. The only possible experiences of some living atoms may be changing, simple wants and sensations ; but there is need only to add greater and greater variety and scope of experiences, in mathematical rela- tion with the multiplying modes of force and extension, to reach at length an introspective self- consciousness ; with a volition dominant enough to control the allied forces of the entire organism by a conscious initiation of the requisite modifi- cations. We arrive thus at a conception broad enough to include every grade of conditioned life. Every com- plete living organism may have its indwelling senti- ent utiit of being, dominant in its own way and to a definite extent over the modes of all the allied units, but dominated by them also in turn — according to the established conditions of the alliance. The hum- bler compound structures may enfold and incorpo- rate multitudes of a more limited grade of sentient atoms, each with its own individual experiences as 224 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. completely its own as its forces and extensions are its own. The four phases of its one existence are conditioned together; they are all modified together; but they are modified in cooperation also with the entire associated organism. The living unit, like the lifeless unit, is endowed with forms of extension and with measurable and interchangeable modes of force ; these modes being measured and interchanged in neighborhood cooper- ation with all the other units of its organism and through them with the outside world. There can be no reason why, through its physical conditions, it should not ally itself to other adapted atoms and form the true physical molecule, of a type proper to itself. Judging from analogy, there can be no rea- son for supposing that such a molecule, if it exist, need be necessarily destroyed with the dissolution of the organism through which it becomes to us vis- ibly incarnated. Many organic molecules are known to pass through a multitude of organic and inorganic processes and yet so intimately are the atoms asso- ciated, that they remain together as a little com- plete system, having its own special internal SENTIENT OR LIVING UNITS. 225 economy, which is not destroyed by any of the wider cooperations in which it participates. An organism is notably heterogeneous, while most inorganic compounds are homogeneous — the one being composed of many classes of unlike mole- cules while the other is made up of a large constitu- ency of exactly similar elements. A living atom, closely associated with a compound group of materi- al atoms, whose allied energies are nicely adapted to all of its sentient needs, would be quite in accordance with all the known facts of organic structure. It might preexist and become the central germ of its organism ; and that it would, in that case, survive the destruction of the organism, is, reasoning from all known parallel facts, an almost assured certainty. Many so called eloiicnts are probably compounds. Also, as very few substances exist in Nature permanently in an elementaiy condition, the pre- sumption is that each living unit, of whatever grade, has already allied itself in some adapted compound unit which is immeasurably more permanent than its temporal')- organic relations. A molecule of salt is much less easily decomposed than a crystal of salt. 10* 226 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. A rock may be ground to powder and yet its constit- uent molecules will all remain intact; mechanical force is totally inadequate to overcome the mutual attraction between these adapted atoms; it requires some stronger counter attraction, or some more sub- tle and energetic motion, like heat or electricity, to effect molecular decomposition. The ordinary elements of vegetable tissues under- go processes of digestion and of assimilation into the tissue of animals, and the process is again repeated in the economy of the still higher organism ; yet the organic molecule may be presumed often to remain intact throughout the process. It may pass through round after round of organic changes. There is one peculiarity which attaches to all liv- ing tissue. None of its vital processes are so balanced that there is fixed, regular, pendulum-like vibration of particles which remain, as with inorganic solids, permanently within their own little orbits of motion. Each organic cell is a little independent circuit of changes which involve, not simply change of motions between particles, but change of the particles themselves as well. One particle is continually brought in and SENTIENT OR LIVING UNITS. 227 another is thrust out — this being an essential fea- ture of all vital processes. All organisms are said to be in a moving equilibrium. But by this very insta- bility and extreme mobility of substance, the sen- tient or living force is enabled, by controlling its atomic physical forces, to work through the organ- ism which is mechanically adapted to all of its many sentient needs. Its physical properties are akin to all physical properties. This is the theory of the conditioned nature of sentient with insentient phases of being. They are conditioned to exist together in the unit and to tvork to- gether in all of the many processes peculiar to either. Now can this theory be sustained by plain, un- doubted facts? Can it be shown to be even possi- ble ? Is there evidence enough in its support to make it presumably a true theory? It must be un- derstood that everything which has been predicated of matter must apply with equal force to the mental atom ; since the living unit possesses all material attri- btttes and functions and all material methods and processes of activity, and in addition, is conditioned also by another and wholly unlike class of purely 228 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. sentient processes which are both active and recep- tive. It is not probable that either the mental atom or its compound molecule, if such molecule exists, can ever become directly visible to us through the bodi ly senses. Many gases are invisible ; yet they possess most positive physical characters. The sky- ether is invisible, yet its physical properties are more like those of true solids than of fluids or gases. So mighty is it in elastic force that Prof. Jevons expressively characterizes it to be "adamantine," All living atoms evidence great and truly adaman- tine physical properties which manifest themselves through the tangible organism ; but the intellect must trace backward through these lines of cooper- ative vital processes, to discover the nature and the action of the great living mainspring which cooper- ates with and directs or regulates the whole. Prof. Tyndall has said : " I hardly imagine there exists a profound scientific thinker, who has reflected upon the subject, unwilling to admit the extreme probability of the hypothesis that, for every fact of consciousness, whether in the domain of sense, of SENTIENT OR LIVING UNITS. 229 thought, or of emotion, a definite molecular condi- tion of motion or structure is set up in the brain ; or who will be disposed even to deny that if the mo- tion or structure be induced by internal causes instead of external, the effect on consciousness will be the same. Let any nerve, for example, be thrown by morbid action into the precise state of motion which would be communicated to it by the pulses of a heated body, surely that nerve will declare itself hot — the mind will accept the subjec- tive intimation exactly as if it were objective. The retina may be excited by purely mechanical means. A blow on the eye causes a luminous flash, and the mere pressure of the finger on the external ball pro- duces a star of light, which Newton compared to the circles on a peacock's tail. Disease makes peo- ple see visions and dream dreams ; but in all such cases, could we examine the organs implicated, we should, on philosophical grounds, expect to find them in that precise molecular condition which the real object, if present, would superinduce." * Thus in effect. Prof. Tyndall explicitly declares * Fragments of Science, p. 11S-119. 230 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. that in his view, which is common to all scientific thinkers, the facts of consciousness are all condi- tioned with definite corresponding facts of " motion and structure" — that is, of force and extension. His internal causes, \ho\\^ within the organism, are on our theory as much exter7ial to the mental unit, as are any causes outside of the organism. The mind- atom, having cooperated to build up about it an adapted organism, through which it can both act and be acted upon in a definite and characteristic man- ner, any somewhat disordered action of the machine- ry must produce results very similar to its entirely normal action. In all sensation,the initiative comes from without. Any thing which can excite in the optic nerve the kind of motion which gives rise to the sensation of color, must excite the sensation of color. But in a quiet state of the nervous system, the blow gives rise to merely the sensation of color, not of colored forms. The stars and colored circles are only spread- ing waves of light-motion., But if the optic nerve is in the highly excited or reverberating state which is favorable to the passage to and fro upon it, not only SExriEXT OR urnxG vxits,.\ 231 of the direct, but of the reflected pulses of hght- motion, then one may continue to see an object long after the bodily eye has ceased to communicate with it directly. I remember once looking at a piece of white lace with round open meshes ; then, closing the eyes, I could distinctly see the outline of e\'ery separate mesh for a number of mo- ments. The meshes grew steadily larger and every separate thread grew thinner, the whole gradually widening out and vanishing by becoming more and more dim, precisel}- as light does when many times retlected. The vibrations were visibly pulsating backw.irds and forwards along the nerves of vision. Every one must remember to have seen the letters of a printed page reverberating in this way in the chambers of his brain ; probably shimmering together in great confusion, but a few letters some- times plainly visible in the shifting kaleidoscope of mechanical vision. From this echoing process to the visions of distinct forms, in a fevered state of the brain, is but a step, and that not wholly unlike in kind. Imagination becomes the initiative and in its turn produces the physical \ibrations. It is not 232 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. even necessary to believe the vision to be a reality. Like the fancies of a child, it is real yet not real. A grave theological Professor, whose name is well known to fame, affirms that he has repeatedly seen cats, distinct and perfectly visible, imaginary cats, playing about his room ; and even while he was looking at them he knew and said to himself that they were only illusions. Yet they looked entirely real and tangible. This only shows that when the mind-unit is working through a disordered machine- ry, there must be corresponding disorder in the accompanying consciousness. If sentient experience is conditioned with modes of force and extension, these results must be inevitable. They are required by the hypothesis ; and the truthfulness of conscious- ness is not invalidated by it ! It has never been claimed that this class of subjective experiences is like its producing object. " Given the state of the brain, the corresponding thought or feeling might be inferred." Given all the producing causes, and it cannot be doubted that every effect, as well as every conditioned result, could be absolutely predicted. The conscious unit, like SENTIENT on LIVING UNITS. 233 every other unit of being, is at once simple and manifold in its nature. It is one in all persisting, structural facts, many in their related modifications ; one in substance, a multitude in phenomena. In its association with all other units, it is also at once independent and dependent — independent as to its existence, dependent in all its modes of existing; independent in the quality and quantity of its being ; but absolutely dependent as to the time and the amount of its physical activity and also of its psychical evolution. Its very existence is conditioned, but here the conditions are constitutional, beyond the reach of all interfering causes ; but in cooperative energies, it is compelled to work in alliance with the universal law of equal mechanical action and reaction. Its continuit)- of action is assured ; its modes of acti\ity must be endlessly varied by outside coordinations. Nothing can be added to or subtracted from its innate capabilities ; but every line of possible devel- opment niaj- be stimulated, repressed, or grievously distorted and thrown out of proportion with other qualities of sentient experience. The immutable 234 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. within it is intact ; but every variable phase of being, modes of force, forms of extension, qualities of liv- ing energy, must be largely at the mercy of external influences with which all these are neces- sarily cooperative. But how does consciousness infuse itself into this eternal round of shifting process? In Prof. Tyn- dall's view : " The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable." He says : " Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not possess the intel- lectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other." But are we thus completely limited as to all intellectual possibility of ever relating these two phases of being ? That which has not yet been thought, is not necessarily unthinkable. I hold that whatever is, must be knowable, thinkable, to any mind which is able to perceive the fact. The relation is there ; the passage from the state of the physical brain to ^h& physical part of the mind-atom, sejvtient ok living units. 23 s coSperative with the brain, is as plain and simple as the passage of acting and reacting energy between any other two material atoms. Is it then impossible to conceive of a unit of substance, possessing several mutually limiting phases of being, each of which is conditioned with and made dependent upon all of the others? This is not, surely not, impossible. A necessary constitutional dependence of this nature is entirely thinkable. There are different qualities of experience ; there are degrees in all these qualities. Let us endeavor to comprehend that there is but one substance, yet that it has four distinct phases of modifications. Neither can ever be merged into either of the others. They all exist together ; the}' are all variable, each in its own kind ; and they are so jointly conditioned that when either changes in its mode, they must all change, each after its own kind of change, in exact mathematical correlation. Admitting these conditions, the state of the brain acting upon the ph\-sical structure of the atom and modifying it, would necessitate corresponding modi- fications in consciousness. Mind has one passive phase. 236 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. Thus when the optic nerve is thrown into vibra- tion from whatever cause, this being adapted to communicate with the mind-atom and to convey to it the same class of vibrations, and that class of vibrations being conditioned with sensations of color, the sensations arise of necessity. But the sensations are no more akin to the mechanical vibra- tions, than modes of extension are akin to modes of force. None of them are like in kind ; neither is nor can be merged into the others ; they are simply dependent each on the others. The being, so con- ditioned, is not altogether a free agent. He must accept the structural limitations inwrought in his nature. They are laws of his being; he must work under them and with them ; yet he is not altogether passive and helpless, since force is intrinsically active ; and, accepting its limitations, intelligent force can learn largely to control its allies and to direct its own interests. There is no passage from structure and vibrations in the brain or elsewhere, to sensa- tions or to any other states of consciousness, in the sense that vibrations become living energies, SEKTTENT OR LIVnVG UNITS. 237 become felt and self-appreciative experiences. The distinction between the two kinds of modification, (sentient and unsentient) is absolute. Neither can become the product of the other, yet neither does arise without the other as matter of fact, and if conditioned together, as we suppose, neither could arise without its coordinate. Quality is not quanti- ty ; intension is not extension. But we are not compelled to make these infer- ences wholly in the dark. We can comprehend something of the nature of the relation between sentient and unsentient modifications ; between con- scious and unconscious forces. Both of the latter become energies, but of the one class we ask how much? how fast? how far? in what direction? and similar questions which imply action as estimated in terms of time, space and quantity. Of the other we ask what kind of action? thought, feeling, or voli- tion ? What kind of thought ? perception, outlook toward facts perceived ? or conception, construction ; as reasoning, imagining, fancying? What kind of feeling ? sensations or emotions ? And again of each of these, are they pleasurable or painful? 238 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ' intense or otherwise? and which one of the ten thousand possible kinds and gradations in quahty of feeling ? We speak also of the quality of the volition — measuring it by its strength or intensity, as impelled by motives which are weak or powerful or otherwise qualitative. Intensions are to qualities what extensions are to quantities. In brief, there are two worlds — the one manifest- ing itself through extended forms and measurable processes ; the other through states of varying intensiveness and of unlike kinds of experiences. We belong to both. We are part and parcel of both. At every turn we.- find the one conditioning the other and becoming to it a direct and compulsory limitation. We see and feel that each is always dependent upon the other, not merely that modifi- cation of the one arises simultaneously with modi- fication of the other, but that each conditions and necessitates the other as a true correlative. We see that kinds and degrees of experience in our psychical natures, are bound together ; as forces and extensions are conditioned together in the physical world — that extensive or quantitative en- SENTIENT OF LIVING UNITS. 239 ergies also do actually condition the intensive or qualitative forces which pertain to consciousness. Together they m;\ke up one immutable complete constitution. We can see this fact ; it is difficult to put it into words, since language has been so framed that it is well nigh inadequate to express the perception. But a large amount of physical action occasions in us corresponding intensity in every adapted state of consciousness. Also intensity of feeling, strength of volition, perspicacity of thought, each invariably eventuates in a large measure of adapted physical activity. We decide to strike a heavy blow, and we strike it — at least we do if the cooperative organism is in good condition. Or we choose to tap with but the little finger; and that prolonged, extensive in- strument, the adapted muscle, is obedient to the will. We know that this will-power is conditioned with me- chanical force and that both are constituent elements of our essential being. But we do not find in consciousness the slightest evidence that a unit of motion, of mechanical force, ever i^ or ever can be transmuted into a state of 240 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. consciousness. Every physical process is complete in itself. Every psychical process is complete in itself. They are simply conditioned together as two dependent phases of one activity. They are never alike ; but they work together. We must turn to their modes of cooperation. CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. Sound vibrations conditioned by extension. — A musical instrument as conditioned. — Consdousncss, liow related to physical action. — Its iii-tive moods may control physical states. — Passive moods controlled by phj'sical states. — Adaptations. — Sound as related to sensation. — Sunbeams and their action. — Relations of motion to growth, etc. Motion not sensation. — The mind-atom as cooper- ative with its oi-jjanisra. — Heredity. — A disturbed organism. — Succession of sentient slates. They are not quantitatively ex- changed. — In what sense they are con\ertible. — Thought. — Conscience and will. — Physical and psychical activities condi- tioned to work together. A MUSICAL note is produced by a definite number of vibrations in a second ; the more rapid the vibrations the higher is the pitch of the sound. But rapidity of vibration is determined by the weight, the structure, and the form of the vibra- ting substance. Length, tlucl^^ness, density, and tension of the strings are all made to assist in regulating the concord of sounds in every stringed instrument. All sound is vibration of something which pro- duces or which conveys the sound. The process is II 242 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. vibration throughout, vibration of the sonorous sub- stance, of the atmosphere which is thrown into alter- nate pulses of motion, of the solid medium which conveys the sound, of the nerves of the ear and brain, and, finally, of the physical extension of the mind which hears the sound. But the sensation of hearing is not vibration. This pulses back as vibration and is spread throughout the organism. The physical motion remains motion forever ; but the sensation which is conditioned with each class of vibrations, is yet totally unlike it in kind. They have not one trait or feature in common. The rate of vibration in all stringed instruments is inversely proportional to the diameter of the string; it is inversely proportional to the length of the string ; it is inversely proportional to the square root of the density of the string ; and it is directly proportional to the square root of the tension of the string. Size, weight, length, and the amount of stretching to which the string is subjected — proper- ties of extension all of them — by their adaptations are made to condition the number of vibrations as to time. CO-OPERATJON; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 243 By a method which is closely analogous to that which constitutes the structure of an atom or a mole- cule in nature, the manufacturer conditions the musical machine. It may be fittingly likened to a vast molecule put together by art, by exquisite hu- man forecast, based upon observation of laws which operate throughout nature. In natural compounds, the adapted attractions of the atoms bind them into a cooperative system. Such attractions operate in the strings, the wood, the ivory ; and by adjusting all these each to each, human prevision produces a machine which can give us a magnificent unity of harmonious effects. It may be made to produce a thousand melodies as it is played upon from without ; but it can do this only according to the laws of perfect action and re- action. It is action and reaction between atom and atom in the same molecule, whether organic or inor- ganic ; whether it be the mental atom or a simply material one. There is action and reaction between the fingers and the keys ; between the keys and the strings ; between the strings and the sounding board ; between the sounding board and the at- 244 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. mosphere ; between the atmosphere and the nerves of the ear ; and finally between ear and brain, which being the most direct visible organ of mind, may stand as its physical representative ; and again be- tween brain and general organism. The conscious force does not enter into this cycle. It is conditioned with it— not a part of it. Nothing has lost force or has gained force by the whole operation, except as it has lost or gained in substance also. A series of exchanged energies have gone round in a circle — a portion of the energy, as in nearly all forms of activity, being dissipated ; carried outward in the usual broadening waves of communi- cated motion. A trifling wear and disintegration of substance, organic and inorganic, must have resulted from this musical process. It attends the activity of all destructible systems of force, but the matter is somewhere ; there is simply change of form and mode arising in exact correlation. Every atom in the musical instrument has taken part in many widely unlike processes which were in simultaneous progress ; but all cooperation with outside energies is but reaction against some form of external motion. CO-OPERA TION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 245 Vibration, shared in common by associated units, must involve change of atomic positions, and all such change must be socially effected. The sentient toill decides and initiates the musical process. The ex- tremely mobile organism being adapted to all senti- ent moods, every conscious, self-determined change, must of necessity call into action the physical ener- gies conditioned with such moods. But the will does not enter into the physical process. This is complete in itself and is confined to material changes. Physiologists have discovered that use of any part of the organic system is accompanied by a definite amount of waste in the system itself; and the kind of physical action may be very nearly determined simply by the class of substances which are thus eliminated. The mind changes its mood ; this must inaugurate that phj'sical change in brain, nerves and muscles which is adapted to the psychical change. The will directs the fingers simply by causing its own change of mood ; the fingers press upon and move the keys, the motion is carried forward to the strings, the strings change the rate and direction of the motion, 246 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. their vibrations are taken up by the surrounding surfaces and passed on and outwards in all directions, till a part reacts on the physical extension of the originating mind. A given amount of pressure produces through one string a high rapid sound, through another a slow bass note — the character of the sound being de- termined by the vibrating extensions which condition the acting force. The number of vibrations decides the question whether or not a response shall be awakened in the nerves of the ear and excite in the mind the sensation of hearing. When the number of vibrations is less than sixteen in a second, they are not blended together in the human ear ; they are heard only as so many separate shocks. But when the number exceeds 38,000 in a second, the con- sciousness of sound is not produced at all. The human ear is not adapted to take up and transmit these extremely rapid vibrations. Indeed some ears can respond only to a much narrower range of sounds, the low and the high notes failing to make themselves heard ; though the best ears, listening at the time, catch the wide range of vibra- CO-OPERATION-; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 247 tions, covering about eleven octaves. The sensation of hearing is evidently conditioned by rate of vibra- tion, and rate of vibration by extension. When the vibration is communicated to the structure of the mind, the sensation arises ; and the sensation varies as the vibrations vary. A larger amount of force exerted by the fingers, increases the amount or am- plitude — not the rate — of the vibrations in any given string of the instrument. The nerves respond ; the sensation increases in intension. A large amount of sound must produce a responsive amount of sensa- tion. So far mind is passive. It must hear when the conditions of hearing are all fulfilled. But when a mind is otherwise absorbed, the sen- sation is not excited even though all the remaining conditions are present. The nervous system conveys the sound, but the mind may be presumed to have assumed a control so supreme over its physical states that the vibration is rejected by it. It is reflected or turned back as light is reflected from a non-receptive surface. One may receive wounds and other griev- ous hurts, yet be quite unconscious of pain in any state of mental pre-occupation. A parallel rejection 248 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. of motion by other bodies when their physical state is not adapted to receive it, makes the inference that the motion is for the time effectually resisted, en- tirely legitimate as derived from the premise ; psy- chical and physical modifications must vary together. It is not that the sensation arises but is not noticed ; the sensation does not arise, because its adapted vi- bration is not produced. At other times the sensation is comparatively feeble and partial. It may be supposed that the motion was then but partially resisted. Our oft re- peated experience tells us that the mental state at the time does control the sensation, that entire ab- sorption in some opposed quality of consciousness can wholly prevent the appropriate sensation from arising under any and every form of objective stimu- lation. Martyrs who have burned at the stake in a triumphant exaltation of happiness, have thus effect- ually resisted the pain of burning. The pain was not felt, it was not there. Many a commander on a battle field has been wounded unto death without knowing it. There was not even the voluntary effort to resist suffering CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 249 because there was no suffering to resist. The active and resokitemind effectually shut out the possibihty, for the time being, of receiving those vibrations which are allied with pain. Every one must remember many things akin to this in his own experience. Words are uttered and we do not hear them, yet, after a time, they come to us like an echo ; they are an echo, a reflected vibration which comes to us as soon as the mental absorption is somewhat relaxed. A little experiment in this direction must con- vince any one that he can greatly modify and perhaps completely control his sensations in the presence of very powerful objective stimuli. We infer from these and similar well known facts that whenever the mind is attending, is in a receptive state, that it must then accept the sensation which is conditioned with the vibration received from with- out ; but that the mind is so far dominant over its material phases that it can, by the appropriate men- tal action, exert much control over and often com- pletely negative the physical states which must otherwise arise. It does this involuntarily by the exercise of those 250 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. mental moods which are adapted to resist the recep- tion of the incoming physical waves of motion ; but it may produce the same results intelligently and voluntarily. We can certainly take ourselves away from sight or sound by the exercise of will ; we can turn from a thought or feeling ; can refuse attention to any topic. But not one of these things can be accomplished except by the active use of counter energies. One cannot passively resist any form of sensation or other objective solicitation. He must act or consent to be acted upon ; he must either control the physical modification with which the psychical mood is conditioned, or he is in his turn controlled by it, for the two states must vary to- gether. They are but associated phases of one substance, of one personality. They are both mod- ifications of his very self. The mental experience is totally unlike its asso- ciated physical properties. It can be no more possible to change a sensation or an active percep- tion into a vibration of extended substance, or the reverse, than to change the strings of a piano which condition sound into the sound itself. On the con- CO-'dPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 251 trary, the conditioning principle never is, and never can be, akin to the principle which it conditions. It must be so far unlike it in kind that each can hold the other— that is, can condition it, can bind it in necessary dependence upon itself. In the nature of things the two cannot be interchangea- ble. Each is an inherent limitation of the other — a true constitutional limitation which involves modifi- cation together, but each of necessity after its own class of variation. If a conditioned existence means anything definable and permanent, it must involve permanent unlikeness in the conditioning elements. Otherwise we use words without meaning. We are variable in all the several phases of our being ; but we are so constituted that they all necessarily change together, and either phase of our richly endowed natures may take the initiative in effecting these several sided changes. The passive or receptive states must ac- cept the change. Physical force can but react as it is acted upon ; but conscious self-recognizing force can learn to so control the organism which has been adapted to its needs, that it can initiate changes 252 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. voluntarily and for its own ends. By accepting all of its limitations it can overcome them all. The voluntary motion of every limb is a tangible proof of this position. Adaptation reigns everywhere in Nature. Our mind-unit comes into an organism which has been fitted to its uses originally by no power consciously exercised by itself. It must take all of its allies as it finds them, and learn to do the best it can under the circumstances. It is greatly the inferior of many lower organizations in many important respects. Many forces have wrought together in its behalf and the result is not wholly satisfactory. Nature is teeming with countless myriads of the most admira- ble and delicate adjustments, and our Senses are adapted to respond to but very few of her countless energies. Even of these few we are restricted in our conscious cooperation within extremely narrow limits. The vision of certain birds and beasts is found to be vastly more penetrating and far reaching than our own. The hearing of some dumb animals is ex- tremely acute in comparison with ours. Others have CO-'dPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 253 a sense of smell adapted to an incomparably smaller amount or division of odorous particles than we have. The scavengers of Nature, beasts, birds, and insects, can discover a breakfast by odors which float out- wards upon the air miles away. The keen scented hound can distinguish any number of persons by the peculiarities of personal odor alone, and as a capable detective, can recognize an article which has been in the possession of a man though days or even weeks have intervened. He can readily follow the scent dropped from hasty footsteps hours or days before ; showing that no one can plant his foot upon the earth, however lightly, without leaving there some remnant of discarded tissue which was once part of his living organism. Science has discovered incidentally the strangely suggestive fact that on either side of each sense, and of every known energy, there is a vastly broader range of cooperations in ceaseless progress, in which we have no direct conscious share ; and yet upon the sustained integrity of their action our happiness is utterly dependent. Can we ever attain to a direct participation with them in these many operations } 254 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. The question is a fitting one and it may have many- practical bearings. No one at the present day can afford to wholly overlook its possible significance. Objectively, sound of every pitch is nothing but vibration more or less rapid of some material sub- stance. May we conclude that the converse of this must be true — that all vibration of material sub- stance might awaken the sensation of sound through ears adapted to re-echo its oscillations? The hum of an insect's wing enables the mathematician to calculate how many vibrations it makes in every sec- ond. Extensions everywhere condition and modify vibrations. When atomic attractions build up a molecule or a larger mass, the effect must be like that of increasing the vibrating substance ; it must change densities, tensions, diameters, length of vibration; it must definitely modify motions of every class. Every crystal which has built itself up in an en- during symmetrical structure, must be in a very literal sense a harp of many strings which is played upon ceaselessly by the varying forces of nature. Every substance is in constant vibration, and each substance is structurally adapted to rates and extent CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 255 of motions peculiar to itself. The softer' and more pliant bodies must be nothing behind the others in this respect. The posthumous works of Dr. Robert Hook, who died as early as the beginning of the last century, recorded this remarkable speculation which was destined to the fullest subsequent verification. He says : " There may also be a possibility of discovering the internal motions and actions of bodies by the sound they make. Who knows but that, as in a watch, we may hear the beating of the balance, and the running of the wheels, and the striking of the hammers and the grating of the teeth, and multitudes of other noises ; who knows, I say, but that it may be possible to discover the motion of the internal parts of bodies, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, by the sound they make ; that one may discover the works performed in the several offices and shops of a man's body, and thereby dis- cover what instrument or engine is out of order, what works are going on at several times, and lie still at others, and the like ; that in plants and vege- tables one might discover by the noise the pumps for raising the juice, the valves for stopping it, and 256 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the rushing of it out of one passage into another, and the like? I could proceed further, but me- thinks I can hardly forbear to blush, when I consider how the most part of men will look upon this ; but, yet again, I have this encouragement not to think all these things utterly impossible, though never so much derided by the generality of men, and never so seemingly mad, foolish, and phantastic, that, as the thinking them impossible cannot much improve my knowledge, so the believing them possible may perhaps be an occasion of taking notice of such things as another would pass by without regard as useless." Since this was written, two hundred years ago, by a progressive series of discoveries, and by the invention of the stethoscope, which accumulates and conducts sounds from the internal organs to the listener's ear, the science and art of distinguishing the states of health and disease by the study of sounds, has reached such perfection it is said to have " enabled the physician to see into the chest almost with as much clearness as if its walls were trans- parent." The sounds of the different organs are found to vary greatly in health and in disease. The CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 257 skillful listener can hear what part is out of order in the human system as the trained musician hears which note is out of tune in a piano. It remains to invent some instrument which can so retard the too rapid vibrations of molecules as to bring them within the time adapted to human ears ; then we might comfortably hear plant movements carrying on the many processes of growth, and possi- bly we might catch the crystal music of atoms vi- brating in unison with the sunbeams. Sound can be refracted by passing it through a lens which retards its motion. Such an improvement upon the stethoscope would reveal phenomena but little more marvellous than those already offered us by telescope and microscope. A better but possibly a slower process might add to the responsive capacity of the organic ear. The mind must respond to all the vibrations which its organism can transmit. What are the revolutions of the planets about the sun but true musical vibrations? What requisite is lacking for the composition of a grand symphony to any ear which could be attuned to this stupendous " music of the spheres." The solar system is but a 258 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. great type of every molecule ; the sun, with its in- ternal restless throbs of heat motion, the central atom, with the planets forever vibrating about it at unequal distances, all under the influence of their co- operative attractions and repulsions. They exchange energies — not forces. Bnt music-like, regular vibrations are not always addressed to the human ear. The wave theory of light and heat supposes that the sun particles, in the vigorous agitation which arises from their red hot condition, communicate motion to the ether; the ether carries forward the motion in waves, in little gusts of action and reaction — as the atmosphere passes on the slower waves of sound. When these successive pulses of motion reach the earth, they are either taken up by the bodies upon which they fall — when these bodies vibrate in unison with the received vibrations — or the motion is suffered to pass on its way directly through substances which are then said to be transparent to such vibrations; or, under a third set of conditions, the vibrations are turned back, are reflected by the body upon which they had fallen. It is these reflected rays which directed upon CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 259 our eyes, communicate adapted vibrations to the optic nerve and the brain, and awaken in us corre- sponding sensations which we distinguish as color of various hues and tints. Exactly as the pitch of a note in music depends upon the number of vibrations in a given time, so the shade of color depends also upon the number of vibrations in a given interval. The red rays are the slowest in their oscillations and the violet the most rapid, with intermediate grades between. On the outer side of the red rays are non-luminous heat vi- brations, and on the outer side of the violet, non-lu- minous chemical rays ; the scale of colors adapted to the eye being much more limited than the scale of sounds for the ear. It covers but a single octave, but the vibrations are immensely more rapid than in sound. All the substances on the earth respond to them, each accepting those motions adapted to itself and rejecting all the others. Hence the endless variety of colors which make the world so passingly beautiful. If there were organisms delicate enough to re- spond to every motion in the sunbeam, can any reason 26o THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. be assigned why every ray should not utter through them its note of endless harmony? The ultra violet and red vibrations intensify the lesson which man- kind are steadily learning — the lesson which tells us of many wondrous adaptations, each producing its own definite yet widely unlike results. Every leaf and bud responds to the sunbeam by adding particle to particle in the growth of new structure ; every prepared brick, as it were, wheeling into its place under the action of each directive vibration. We discover the' important fact not by direct vision but by an intellectual insight. Growth involves motion ; sunshine is motion. Vegetation can receive nothing from the sun for which it does not return a full and fair equivalent. Action and re- action are balanced in that process as in all others. The ether particles are but so many " middle men " through which is effected a continual exchange of the energy of heat-motion from the sun for the ener- gy of resistance to heat-motion, sent up in reacting pulses by every receptive atom on the earth. We are often told that all energy, all working force, is derived from the sun. In one sense, yes ; CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 261 in a much more important sense, no. Without sun shine, physical action and conscious Hfe, as we know them must both cease ; but so they must if any im- portant link in the chain of adaptations were to be suddenly destroyed. With no ether, there could be no sunshine ; but with no innate active force in every atom, the ether would be equally powerless to rnedi- ate between earth and sun. Annihilate oxygen or hydrogen ; destroy the most uninfluential element of matter — the entire universe must be thrown back for ages into hopeless confusion. For the sun, it is losing heat ; but it cannot lose force. The gases and cinders evolved from burnt coal are left in no state for a new burning ; but all their subtle and powerful forces are still intact and inseparable from their own extensions. Our little inch of line has not yet fathomed all the mysteries which lie at the bottom of the universal system of the transmutation of physical energies. But we do know that Nature exacts equivalent for equiv- alent. Does any substance derive its power to reject certain portions of the sun's rays directly or indirect- 262 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ly from the sun ? Does it receive its energy of gravitation, its chemical affinities, its cohesive forces from the sun ? Phrases are of little moment, but we must accept one theory or the other. Force, energy, is either a shifting principle which can be imported totally from the sun, or it is a persisting principle which must remain where its substance remains ; ex- changing its modes of action, to be transported to a distance by Nature's adapted vehicles. Surely no scientist, with a positive belief in the existence of matter or mind as any thing more than force, can deliberately maintain that essential energy is sent racing over the universe, wholly astray as to a perma- nent abiding place! — that any world or any atom can have now more and now less of actual inherent force ! But there is no middle ground. If force is insep- arable from extension, then each least division of force is inseparable from its division of extension. It must react as it is acted upon, according to its posi- tion, arising from its present relations with coopera- tive forces. It is but a unit constrained by a vast system of universal adaptations. Thus the sun CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 263 supplies the needed impulse towards the promotion of vegetable growth ; yet it can supply neither the extensions nor the proper building forces by which all vegetable tissues are organized, added to, and maintained. Sunshine is adapted to promote the formation of vegetable tissues ; electricity is adapted to promote chemical composition at one time, and at another to promote chemical decomposition ; heat of a certain temperature forwards the growth of animal tissues ; at a much higher temperature, heat destroys animal tissues. How these various results are produced, we cannot tell exactly ; but motion of a definite kind, is in each case, taken up by the substances acted upon. Motion is transformed under one set of adaptations into vital processes, under another into chemical action. At another time, motion of the white sun- beam is shivered into a thousand shades of color ; and gives rise in our consciousness to a thousand definite sensations. All of these parallel results are equally mysterious, and to about the same extent they are subject to ex- planation. Motion changes the housewife's cream 264 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. into butter and buttermilk; but the original forces and extensions of the cream are all there ; changed in mode and form, unchanged in amount. When the motion which initiated these changes is produced at the expense of muscular tissue, the tissue is de- stroyed in form and function, but the elements of which it was composed, though remanded again to the inorganic state, can have lost no inherent prop- erties. It is but the running down of a weight raised by organic processes originally. The consciousness, the felt need, either instinctively or voluntarily exer- cised, impels the physical energies both to the raising and to the lowering of the weight. The work is done mechanically. By some combination of mechanical adaptationsi the sun's forces are raised to intense heat; they also are running down to a lowered condition, but the change is wrought by a fair exchange of equal but unlike energies. A little added impulse from the weight of a clock, keeps the clock pendulum vibrating ; a little added motion "just at the nick of time " can be made to transform an apparently structureless fluid mass into CO-OPERATION: PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 265 a community of well defined crystals, each with form and angles as positive and characteristic of its kind as the properties of any chemical compound or any organic tissue. Almost every boy and girl must have looked on open-eyed while one small finger acted as fairy wand to bring out a score of shining jewels in a bowl of water which had stood undisturbed through a winter night. The marvel was wrought by a little simple stirring of the water. The child has created a firmament of stars each as shining and as perfect as the stars in heaven. But the vwitlding forces were in the water, not in the child's finger. In all these illustrations there is only transforma- tion of some mode of motion into other correlated modes. The gas in the burner and the coal in the grate must both be lighted before they can begin to burn. A sunbeam is nothing but a beautiful cluster of vibrations ; is it more marvellous that it can pro- mote growth in a leaf, by helping the right particle into the right place, than that it can give to every- thing animate and inanimate "a complexion " which is characteristically its own ? Both are mechanical processes. 13 266 THE PHYSICAL BASIS 0> IMMORTALITY. One eye is blind where another sees ; one ear is deaf when another hears ; one organism responds to a particle of odorous matter which produces no vibration in systems otherwise more highly organ- ized. These vibrations are conditioned with sensa- tions. But responsive vibrations arise in inorganic bodies, in which no accompanying sentient life can be presumed to exist ; as when a wave of motion sweeps down the room and one chord of a musical instru- ment responds though all the rest are silent. The response or non-response is in all cases dependent upon purely mechanical adaptations. Sensation is something over and above these ; conditioned with them, but not of them. A wave of rapid heat-vibrations beats on the face of a leaf and on the face of a child ; in the leaf there arises chemical action, and growth ; the child feels heated, but in his system sunshine cannot impel in- organic matter into organism. But by the storing up of balanced motion in vegetation, which the child can appropriate by definite processes, he, too, grows by sunshine. But not as a pauper. He pays for all he receives. Every physical change arises under the CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 267 universal system of adapted equal action and reac- tion. The sensation is a new creation ; it is clear gain. All motion is one, as all force is one, as all exten- sion is one. The motion indicates and measures the amount and the mode of the force with its adapted extensions. When a personal consciousness is con- ditioned in and through the physical conditions of any unit of being, then, with the physical vibration, arises thfe associated sentient experience. Thus the right motion must originate its own given state of consciousness. The converse is equally true ; con- sciousness must occasion physical motion. The same motion, objectively considered, may excite in one mind the sense of sound ; but in some other differ- ently responsive organism, the sensation may be that of light. There is no generic difference between objective hght and objective sound. They are both modes of motion. So are heat, electricity, chemical action and all vital processes. To the eye which could respond to all the myri- ads of unhke modes of motion, the whole universe would be self-luminous. There could be nothing 268 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. opaque, nothing dark; everything would present itself in an endless series of admirable cooperative adjustments. Every vibration, judging it as we must judge those motions which are adapted to our senses, might be a condition of light, and warmth, and music to any sentient nature large enough to respond to them all simultaneously. This is not theory, but legitimate deduction. But these mechanical vibrations may not be con- founded with the sensations which they everywhere condition, nor with the volitions by which they are themselves conditioned. The arm is but a pendu- lum adapted to move to and fro in all directions. The extremities of all animals, legs in walking, wings in flying, the tail of the fish, and indeed the whole body of the fish in swimming, are thrown into pen- dulum-like vibrations. * All these movements are simply mechanical ; the same laws govern natural and artificial progression. No body, acting alone, can move itself. The ground, the air, the water, act as fulcra to the limbs which are true levers ; they rotate in their sockets ; the laws of gravity cooperate, and * Animal Locomotion, by J. Bell Pettigrew, M. D., F. R. S.,etc. etc. CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 269 the living muscles supply the motive power. The mind can only excite the adapted muscles. The organized animal system is an intricate ma- chine which is adapted to move its several parts ; and adapted to locomotion as a whole. All motion, whether voluntary or involuntary, must be achieved at the expense of organized tissue. All vital pro- cesses, muscular action, nerve action, digestion, cir- culation, tissue formation and tissue disintegration — every form of cerebration, whether consciousness enters into the process or otherwise, must be re- garded as pertaining solely to physical structures ; as modified by their many coSperative higher forms of energy. The body is a true machine, an instrument. We regard all vital processes as strictly quantita- tive ; measurable, in as absolute a sense as the sim- plest visible motion is measurable ; though from the exceeding complexity of the vital process it may not be possible to be as accurate in measurements in one case as in the other. Every cooperative system, whether it be a molecule of gas, an inorganic solid, .or a living organism, must effect all of its apprecia- ble changes by borrowing cooperative motion, in ex- 2/0 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. change for resistance to motion, from without the system. To this law there can be no exception. Hence, bodies become visible to us, not by their internal operations, but by their outside cooperation with the vibrations of light. A projectile, also, is thrown against another solid body, not by its chem- ical or combining forces, not by its energies of cohe- sion ; not by any mode of internal vibration ; but solely by the energy of visible motion which it has received from without. On the same principle is the living body moved, but with this difference ; vibrations of light and projectile energy, are both motions simply ; are but modes of force acting ; the receiving body exchanges its former mode for the new one, and its force acts accordingly. But the organism incorporates new substance with its inher- ing force ; it transfers this substance, particle by particle, to the place where it is needed — so cooper- ating with it step by step through its whole progress, that when finally in its place, it is available for ex- actly the work which it is to perform. But that work performed, the particle drifts again out of the organism. A new particle comes in its CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 271 place and repeats the process. This endless round of change, involving both substance and force, is the one distinguishing characteristic of the living organ- ism. Organic compounds are brought together in the laboratory by chemical affinity. A living organ- ism has never yet been proved to originate without the intervention of a prior living organism ; and if it ever does so originate, it must be because all the conditions have been fulfilled which can enable a liv- ing: atom to establish itself as the nucleus of an unresting series of adapted organic processes. Sen- tient force is the only organic mainspring. What physical part must the living atom be sup- posed to take in all the manifold modified organic operations? Evidently, it must act and be acted upon on the uniform mechanical basis of measure for measure, exactly as every simply material atom does. All of its physical properties are quantitative ; noth- ing more and nothing different. When, therefore, it is thrown into vibration of any kind by one set of energies, it must either react and return the vibration to the channel whence it came, or else it must pass it on to some other adapted part of the organism, pre- 272 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. cisely like every other material unit. So far as the purely physical results are concerned, its operations must all take place on the quantitative plane. But its sentient needs originate the self-winding process of perpetual organic renewal in both substance and force. It may be in a very different position from any other atom in the organism ; the root of every mole- cule, especially of every large organic molecule, is on vantage ground and must have a commanding influ- ence by virtue of its position. So much we may freely concede, therefore, to the living unit as a purely physical prerogative. If moreover, it is allied to a molecule which is more permanent than its tem- porary organism ; which as we have seen must be conceded to be highly probable, judging from a wide range of accepted analogies ; then it must be consid- ered as fully equipped and provided for by sustaining physical allies, adapted to cooperate with it in every possible emergency. This is not in itself a trifling consideration. Let us recall again the group of essential oils, including the extracts from lavender, turpentine and CO-bPERATlON; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 273 pepper. Let it be remembered that the same chem- ical elements enter into each of these and many other widely unlike substances ; their different prop- erties being necessarily accounted for by a different bringing together of their unlike poles— by a dif- ferent way in each compound of literally compound- ing their several vibrations, and thus, indirectly, of modifying their action upon such external tissues as the nerves of taste and smell. This aromatic group affects us particularly; being marvellously unlike in properties to our sensations, as the colors of the solar spectrum are unlike to our sensations : but, in fact, there is probably but a very inconsiderable difference in their several rates and arcs of vibration ; this being communicated to the proper nerves produces in them characteristic vibra- tions. The several modes of vibration being condi- tioned with our sensations, the sensations must arise with the vibrations as necessarily as when enlarg- ing the third side of a triangle, we must correspond- ingly enlarge its opposite angle, though the line and the angle are totally unHke properties. So the internal vibrations of lavender and turpentine occa- 274 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. sion in us unlike sensations, though vibrations and sensations are generically distinct. But if the way in which the same small number of atoms work together can give rise to such marked differences in the result, how much must depend upon the associate atoms which co-work with our central living unit ? It might be regarded as suffi- cient to produce the whole difference, both in physical form and in mental development, between man and any one of the lower animals down even to the lowest mollusk. But there is little reason for supposing that the essential atoms, man and mollusk, are iden- tical, as viewed from the stand-point even of many evolutionists. Variety at the basis of the two worlds of associated intensions and extensions, is not im- probable, nor out of keeping with any known facts past or present. But the many curious facts pertaining to inherit- ance of qualities, physical and psychical, from one's more immediate ancestors, receive a large amount of explanation from a consideration of the influence which the associated organism, in its earlier stages, particularly, must exert upon the cooperative mind. CO-OPERATION! PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 275 Any peculiarity of structure, with its corresponding modification of energies, would tend inevitably to perpetuate itself and to correspondingly influence the sentient development. If a child had but one parent, he should, according to all the known princi- ples and facts of nature, grow as nearly into the parental image as one molecule of water becomes like another molecule of water, or as all carbon is like all other carbon. The reaction against external forces would w^ork corresponding changes. There might be several types, as charcoal and diamond, or unlike states, as ice and steam ; but growth, like all facts arising from identical conditions, would produce correspondingly identical results. Two parents greatly complicate the problem. Each must transmit the physical adaptations and dominant tendencies peculiar to himself; the new organism must arise as a resultant of these combined influences. This is not the connection in which to enter upon a detailed discussion of the facts of heredity. But granting the hypothesis that every mind is insepar- ably conditioned with a physical side of its being, in 276 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. inseparable alliance; and that the two states are made variable together, and the many complicated facts of inheritance, physical and psychical, become so intelligible that he who runs may read. The child is but the resultant of inherited phys- ical tendencies, modified by external conditions, up to the stage of development in which sentience, often involuntarily, and the Will, instinctively or design- edly, begin more and more to assume control and direction. The persistent development of special tendencies in any direction, to the exclusion of op- posed mental states, must work corresponding changes in mind and body. Sentient moods and physical modes must vary together. This law is ver- ified in every stage of our existence. Whenever we wait to be passively acted upon through either of our senses ; both the quality and the degree of the answering consciousness is then predetermined. A heavy blow must hurt us, a jan- gle of harsh discords must be disagreeable, the sky must look blue and the grass green, familiar phrases must call up familiar thoughts, a pitiable tale must appeal to the sensibility, and a noble example, once CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 277 apprehended, must excite admiration if not emula- tion. So we are constituted. We must be unmade before it can be otherwise. Every external stimu- lant, if accepted, must give rise to the state of con- sciousness which has been inseparably conditioned with it. The physical vibration and the conscious- ness are the two inseparable phases of the one fact. As the organism is but the adapted mechanism through which we are acted upon and also through which we react, when the machine is out of order, the normal results do not follow. But why ? Be- cause the appropriate physical vibration is not, in that case, communicated to the mind-atom. The right vibrations from the green leaf fall upon the eye ; but in a state of fevered nerves, these vibrations may be so interfered with and modified within the organism, that by the time they reach the mind-atom they may excite the sensations of a blood red blotch, of a black horror, or of any other externally baseless chimera. The string of a musical instrument out of tune, if it sounds with other strings, can give nothing but discord. If we are dependent upon an adapted or- 278 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ganism for all communication with the outside world, a failure at any point of the many combined adapta- tions must produce corresponding failure in the re- lated consciousness— regarded in the light of a response to the external activity. The consciousness is one, is individualized ; but the possible simultaneous states of this consciousness are many. In abnormal states of the body, these several modes may become apparently incongruous or even contradictory. Instances have been given of what appeared to be a divided or double conscious- ness ; the person living, as it were, two lives in his different states of mind. There are cases where there is apparent loss of a clear and continuous sense of personal identity — loss of a recognized unity of the consciousness as a whole. The explanation is obvious. The mind cannot command its own moods sufficiently to coordinate them in one self-consciousness, simply because its physical correlations, impelled by abnormal outward influences, are perpetually forcing upoti it irrelevant and disturbing modes of sentience, in such rapid succession, or so incongruously brought together, CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 279 that the result is a necessary confusion of jum- bled experiences. The mind has lost present self- control. Just as we must feel warm when heat-vibrations awaken their adapted sensations, or as we must per- ceive a confused medley of the seven colors of the rainbow, if we look into a revolving prism, so a feverish brain can thrust vagaries upon the cooperat- ing consciousness. Since the modes are all condi- tioned, a perceived unity in these wild experiences may be impossible at any time when the physical dominates over the sentient states ; but the sense of a distinct personality is not lost, except in some unusual and greatly disturbed condition of the ner- vous system. The same explanation would apply to dreams with all their vagaries ; to all unregulated fancies, and to all forms of involuntary cerebration. In some states of excitement we cannot stop thinking by a simple act of will. The reflex action of the awakened nerves force upon us continual repetitions and variations of the same thoughts. Or we find it impossible to control some feeling, which wears on 28o THE PHYSrCAL BASIS OF IMMORTAUTY. and on with reiterated pertinacity. In such cases, the only possible way to regain self-control is to quiet the nerves by diverting their action into some new channel. Self-control is an acquirement which must be promoted and regulated by means as purely physical and manageable as are those which are used in cul- tivating a garden or in chopping down a tree in the forest. Educators must understand that mind has a physical basis, through which it must secure all even of its own proper mental development. In dreams and reveries, when certain modes of sentient action are equi-libriated or at rest in active present consciousness, the others run riot as influ- enced by external causes, or as stimulated by the excited and related nerves, or by both acting to- gether. These results not only may occur, but they must occur. Self-control can guide its mental states at will ; but loss of it leaves the mind to be played upon by an inexorable series of measurable physical forces. It is through such forces, with their unyield- ing extensions, that consciousness is related to exter- nal nature, as well as to every other consciousness like or unlike its own. CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 28I That mind is thus necessarily, definitely condi- tioned with matter, is a theory which should be able to offer in its support the most positive proof of which the nature of the subject will admit. The facts are largely within the domain of experimental tests. The purely physical facts are measurable, and through the organism we can indirectly measure their corresponding sensations, perceptions, emo- tions, and volitions. But all mental states are more than quantitative. Here we must call in the aid of consciousness itself to help us. But the laws of thought are comprehensive ; they can relate all the phases of life in one unity. They can, perhaps, prove that laws of thought, of legitimate thought, are in necessary correlation with laws of things ; that the whole Universe is but a unity of unities. One mode of consciousness merges into another as one mode of motion is transformed into other modes of motion, or as one form of an object is changed into some other form ; but changes in the states of consciousness are not quantitative. A sweet flavor can never be measured as greater or less than the acid flavor of a moment previous. It is not 282 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the former sensation transformed in mode. Every thing which is measurable in either arises in and with the physical conditions. Consciousness has no di- rect space relations ; but it has many pure qualities and many degrees in each quality. It can normally produce any state of consciousness at will ; but it must do this through its control of the adapted physical conditions. Would it enjoy a fine landscape, it must put itself into communication with such a landscape; then its enjoyment is something which is not in the landscape, but which is yet necessarily conditioned with it. Memory may afterwards repro- duce the enjoyment ; but it can do this only by re- calling again the same nervous vibrations which were originally set in motion by the actual scene. Perception is Consciousness initiating a mood which sets in operation the physical mechanism through which the consciousness is related to the object perceived. Sensation generally merges into perception of the object which excited the sensation. Will, is consciousness deciding to relate itself to any desired end through the appropriate agencies which have become known to it by past experience. Habit CO-OPERATION; PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 283 establishes its adapted lines of effective action ; and hence, purely or partially reflex action can accom- plish many things without volition which formerly required active volition, aided by repeated and toil- some experience, to effect. Thought is a voluntary, sometimes an involun- tary, train of past perceptions or of conceptions re- lated either capriciously or according to the necessary laws of legitimate thinking. Prepossessions, will, fancy, careless methods of noting or of combining facts, must arrive at conclusions which will correspond to the method by which they were obtained. Pre- cisely as a disordered nervous action may thrust vagaries into the consciousness, so the mind, desiring to revel in vagaries, may call them up by a voluntaiy use of the appropriate agencies. Every step is con- ditioned by its adapted physical state; but as the master's hand can compel his violin to utter any strain, however whimsical or discordant, so the mind can compel its physical allies to aid in the furtherance of any discordant or fantastic moods of consciousness. Experience tells us that this can be done : our theory explains the /uyiu of its accomplishment. 284 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. " We think in relations ; " * but each step in the chain of relations must be grounded in a physical change, from which, as from a point of rest, it changes to each new mood. The thought does not relation its successor by direct action ; the act of thinking produces the needful physical state, which is condi- tioned with it through no agency of its own, and from this state it can go forward into the new mood. We stand often in amazement at the thoughts which arise most unexpectedly to ourselves ; they have a certain sequence which we may or may not be able to discover ; but the effect is almost as though an- other had thrust the conception upon us. In some sense the responsibility of thinking does not rest with ourselves ; we have not conditioned it with our physical states ; we have not voluntarily organized that most complex, sensitive, and unstable prolongation and extension of the physical apparatus of thought, the brain ; we are not altogether responsi- ble either for its normal or for its abnormal working. When, therefore, the thought arises in sequence from a multitude of adapted physical contingencies, * First Principles, by Herbert Spencer, p. 162. CO- OPERA TJONj FH YSICA L AND PS YCHICA L. 285 it springs into consciousness like a new creation. It has no element of space or of quantity. In that sense it is not made of anything which preceded it. Consciousness is individualized ; it is the all- embracing sentient nature, within which arises every fresh experience, several moods of experience being often present at the same time. But the number of these sentient moods, is limited by physical non- adaptations to their exercise. Thus one mood negatives another, or one prepares the way for its successor. In this sense, thought merges into other thoughts or into feelings ; and the sentient moods are convertible among themselves, but thej' are not convertible in the sense that so much of the one kind can be changed into so much of another. We must clearly realize the conception that sensation is not directly measurable by any relations of the ex- tended, though conditioned by them; for distinc- tions like these will otherwise seem unmeaning. Thinking without logical connection is from the nature of things as possible, according to our method of explanation, as is any other whimsical grouping of incongruities, discords, or non-adjustments of what- 286 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ever class. But thinking according to the necessary- laws of thought, like real perceptions, on which such thinking, if applied to the objective world, is always grounded, must be in true accord with external realities ! Moods of consciousness are as definitely related to the physical universe, are related through con- ditions which are as inherent and immutable as the parallel conditions which make force and extension the two phases of one material substance. As every atom must vibrate in response to the sun's vibra- tions, because their physical properties are in adap- tation, so must consciousness respond to objective facts. A hundred contingencies may prevent direct cooperation between the physical atom and the re- lated atoms in the sun ; but when they are in relation they must cooperate. And when the mind is brought into a normal relationship with the objective world, it must act in response. It must see things as they are, not only through sensation, but also through the intellect. Objective truth and subjective truth are one. The laws of things and the laws of thought are one. CO-OPERATION: PHYSICAL AND PSYCHICAL. 28/ Eiich can be made to verify the other ; to interpret and explain the other. The laws of normally condi- tioned thinking can detect and correct all make-be- lieve, illogical thinking. The mind itself knows that such thought is like the fancies of a child, a mere factitious seeming, some form of temporary illusion. And the mind can correct its own misapprehensions of external facts. But it must take the established means of relating itself to a wide range of vision, and whenever it can avail itself of these necessary adap- tations, its vision, whether it be the vision of pure logical thought or a vision gained through sensation, its affirmations of consciousness must harmonize with the objective reality. Emotions might be termed esthetic and moral sensations. They arise from an appreciation of adaptations which give rise to a sense of the beauti- ful and the good ; to the apprehension that there is a vivid living consciousness in others, which is kindred with its own and subject to like conditions, with like enjoyments. Moral sentiments have their physical conditions. Conscience, like the Will, is conditioned by matter ; and, like it also, through the proper use 288 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. of its functions, it can control and overrule material limitations. They are both at once free and necessi- tated, but not in the same sense ; and the necessity and the freedom exist in mutual dependence. They both arise in the conditioned nature of iinite exist- ence. In cooperation with. Nature's laws, all things are possible ; since the active consciousness is inhe- rent force. The receptive or passive consciousness, which we have called intension, intensiveness, must be con- trolled by its intellectual and moral energies. The physical organism has been specially adapted to enable it to secure this intelligent and voluntary control. Every sentient want or need, every mental appetency ; as hunger, thirst, the enjoyment of pleasant sensations and craving for every variety of satisfactory mental experience, is the natural motive power which, acting instinctively, continually brings new substance and force into the system ; which uses and rejects the right adapted tissues ; and which thus creates and maintains a living organism as distinguished from an inorganic or non-living organism. CO-QPERATION: PHYSICAL A.VD PSYCHICAL. 289 The consciousness must work with and through its own physical phases of beiny;; they work through adapted nerves and muscles. The sun directly helps vegetable growth ; indirectly aids the growth of ani- mal tissues. It helps to wind up the energies in every physical system as literally as it raises the vapor of water into the air to become clouds, to con- dense and fall again to the earth. We must, if we would learn to become the true sovereigns of the states of consciousness, as well as of material nature, begin to attach a " rigid mechan- ical signification " to all the joint activities of the mind-unit and its body. Between the iiftiiij^ force- of the sunbeam working with its many physical allies, and all physical activit)', there arc definite, necessary, measurable interactions. Heat and light, Nature's great lifting powers, are related to the every-day welfare of human beings in many ways which we have been much too little accustomed to consider. Every sunbeam is an active lever, and in almost every molecule it can find both its fulcrum and the weight to be lifted. Without its continuous help, directly or indirectly given, to elevate or wind up 13 290 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the forces with their extensions, in every part of every organic structure, no vegetable growth would be possible, no chick could mature in the egg or begin to run about ; no arm could move, and no brain could promote thought. Mental power is represented physically by the structure and size of the brain and nervous system, as also by the size and structure of the entire organism, as really as the gravitative force in a cannon ball is represented by its weight and the height to which it has been elevated. Mind must work through its organism ; it must accept and use the conditions imposed upon it by the material side of its nature. Its physical and its psychical activities must work together; for they are but the jointly conditioned phases of one indivisible, individualized existence. CONCLUSION. Universality of the atomic relations. — The body a true physical ma- chine. — Position of Prof. Bain. — Of Prof. Fiske. — The material and the mental equally permanent. — Organic and inorganic allies. — Variability of mental with material states illustrated by geometrical units. — The argument from consciousness. — Ex- tended consciousness. — Sleep ; its possible relations to mind and organism. — Organic substances not organisms. — Gauging thought by waste in brain tissue. — Organic matter receives no increase of essential force. — Various phases of mechanical action. — Memory. — Possible organism within the organism. — Various analogies. — Conclusion that life has a physical basis and is immortal. — Quo- tation from Pascal. THE majority of readers undoubtedly prefer to have the bearing of the alleged facts dis- tinctly indicated, while to others this must be quite superfluous. The golden mean is, therefore, but a shifting point, varying as all eye-glasses must vary, to suit the need of different eyes. It seems best to freely repeat such thoughts as are most needed in connection with remaining suggestions, to give, in summing up, a fairly complete outline of the argu- ment, which attempts to show that a conscious immortality for each mind must be an abiding con- 292 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. stitutional fact. The interests at stake would justify even unneeded iteration. We claim that each ultimate atom, — whether conditioned by physical properties only ; as unques- tionably all simply material units may be, so far as anything is now known to the contrary, though we may not have evidence enough to determine this point from sufficient data ; or whether conditioned by both physical and psychical properties, as all atoms must be when they possess the capacity to live, to be thrilled by any kind of felt experience, whether of a low or of a high order, — we claim that every atom in the universe, without exception, is, to itself, the axis or centre of the entire universe, in such a sense that it can and does cooperate with all other units in all directions, radiating its influence outward like a true central- star; giving and receiv- ing' various modes of activity on all sides, and ex- changing with its neighbors always on the rigid mathematical basis of equivalent for equivalent of working energy. In proof of this position, we appeal directly to well known and admitted facts. Whoever is still CONCLUSION. 293 doubtful as to the value of the evidence already offered on this point, must take up the subject for himself. He can surely determine in his own mind how any centre of force is able to co-work with other centres of force. With the attention concentrated on any one simple point of departure, if our theory is tenable, all the remaining units of the cosmos will be ranged about it as the sheaves of Joseph's brethren were around about Joseph's sheaf, bowing down before it ; they all vibrate in response to its vibra- tions. But it responds to them all with equal cour- tesy ; for in the great commercial mart of material nature there are no privileged traders enriching themselves at the expense of their fellows. If we can satisfy ourselves that substances ex- change, not innate forces, but modes or ways of working, that they exchange motive tendencies, opposed in direction, in rate or circuit of vibration, or in some occult trait of motion, which can enable them to share equitably in the results, we shall then find no difficulty in comprehending that we ourselves may be each a true material unit ; taking unconscious- ly a full and fair continuous share in the manifold oper- 294 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ations of the body and of its environment. The body is certainly worked, like any other machine, accord- ing to the established laws of material nature. Is consciousness, then, conditioned with the ma- terial me ; dependent upon it, limited by it, and its conscious states necessitated to change with every coordinated change of the physical side of its being? Experience must answer, it is. " From the ingress of a sensation, to the outgoing responses in action, the mental succession is not for an instant dissevered from a physical succession." * We can test this simultaneousness of the mental and material modifi- cations in a multitude of ways. The most skeptical may convince himself of the fact that they necessa- rily occur together; conditioning each other in time. But the physical succession is complete in itself. The mental succession is also complete and distinct in its kind. I cannot do better than to make another pertinent selection from Prof. Bain ; whose position, as Professor of Logic and Mental Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen ; the author of a number of able works treating of this question, and the leading * Appendix to Conservation of Energy ; by Alexander Bain, p. 211. CONCLUSION. 295 influence in projecting the new Quarterly called " Mind ; " to be devoted to a consideration of the relations of Mind and Body ; must give weight to his conclusions. " Walking in the country in spring, our mind is occupied with the foliage, the bloom, and the grassy meads, all purely objective things ; we are suddenly and strangely arrested by the odor of the May-blos- som ; we give way for a moment to the sensation of sweetness ; for that moment the objective regards cease ; we think of nothing extended ; we are in a state where extension has no footing ; there is, to us, place no longer. Such states are of short duration, mere fits, glimpses ; they are constantly shifted and alternated with object states, but while they last and have their full power we are in a different world ; the material world is blotted out, eclipsed, for the instant unthinkable. These subject moments are studied to advantage in bursts of intense pleasure, or intense pain, in fits of engrossed reflection, especially reflection upon mental facts ; but they are seldom sustained in purity beyond a very short inter- val ; we arc constantly returning to the object side 296 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. of things— to the world where extension and place have their being." Prof. Bain does not attempt to indicate what the connection is between mind and body. He accepts the alliance as a fact, and leaves it there ; but he forcibly insists that " mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted ; they cannot be compared, they have nothing in common except the most general of all attributes, degree, and order in time." * In the March number of the Atlantic Monthly, (another indication of the drift of current thought,) Prof. John Fiske, writing on the Unseen World, takes the position that a " world consisting of purely psychical or spiritual phenomena would be demar- cated by an absolute gulf from what we call the material universe, but would not necessarily be dis- continuous with the psychical phenomena which we find manifested in connection with the world of matter." How fresh experience could be gained in the new state is " utterly and hopelessly inconceivable because it is without foundation in experience ; " but, he * The Relations of Mind and Body. CONCLUSION. 297 argues, "the entire absence of testimony does not raise a negative presumption except in cases where tes- timony is inaccessible." Prof. Fiske is disposed to think, with Berkeley, that consciousness is the reality, and material nature an orderly product of conscious- ness ; presently to be cast off as an unneeded garment. The often proposed suggestions, on one side that material nature is but an appearance, a phantasma- goria, to be presently abolished : and on the other, that consciousness, arising as a temporary manifes- tation of underlying causes, is to disappear with a new combination of the unknown realities, are both wofully unsatisfactory ; if not equally abhorrent to every instinct of our natures. A negative belief, a belief based upon nothing except the bare fact that it is " necessary to one's comfort " has no more solidity than a girl's fancy that her doll is enjoying a deli- cious breakfast. It is a pleasant coveted illusion — that is all. To know that a great hope cannot be positively disproved on the testimony of Nature, is certainly not valueless. But as we can assuredly gain a clear 13* 298 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. conception of a necessary mutual dependence be- tween the physical and the psychical phases of being which can give to both an underlying reality, and an immutability which shall guaranty the eternal conservation of both. Consciousness works through brain, nerves, and general organism ; but it can be shown that there is vastly " more reason for supposing that consciousness survives the dissolution of the brain, than for supposing that the pungent flavor of table-salt survives its decom- position into metallic sodium and gaseous chlorine.'' My consciousness is working now through the pen held in my hand, and through the drop of ink flow- ing from the point of the pen ; it controls the ener- gies in this solid machine and in this fluid drop as undoubtedly as it controls the hand or the brain. Why should it not survive the destruction of the cooperative organism as easily as it may survive the destruction of its inorganic co-workers ? A mind, as a unit conditioned and modified by the dependent interaction of the several cooperative phases of its being, must find in an adapted organ- ism a means of sentient development and an aid in CONCLUSION. 299 conscious energizing, as it must find in it also the physical forces which supplement its own. But I find the same aids in this pen and ink ! My views of the nature and the amount of evidence in proof that each one of us must accept the boon of a personal immortality, have been greatly enlarged through the attempt to express them in words, with the mechan- ical assistance of writing materials. Pen and paper are a prodigious means of human development. The changing body is as purely mechanical as this pen. It is not a part of consciousness. If an atom of sodium can survive the destruction of the molecule salt, of the crystal of salt, of the bowl of water which holds it in solution, of the bread into which it enters as a constituent, of the organic pro- cesses of digestion, circulation, etc., in which it takes its share of work with the rest of the organism, then why should not the mind-unit equally survive its incarnation ? its manifold organic cooperations ? The difficulty is no greater in the one case than in the other. The sodium does survive all these and end- less other changes ; we know that ; science accepts the fact that it exists still, the identical sodium that 300 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. it was in the beginning, with all of its properties perfectly intact. Science must yet admit the con- stitutional indestructibility of every mind. The organic processes are generically unlike the inorganic only because they are more directly adapted to the psychical changes. A touch upon any part of the body is immediately recognized by the mind ; but when the pen is held in my hand, the touch of its point upon the paper is also recognized in the mind. A continuous chain of communication arises between the paper and the mind. If consciousness has not gone out into the pen's point, and its phys- ical extension been put into actual contact with the paper, yet it is as undoubtedly interacting with the paper, as pen and paper are cooperating. It directs their cooperation. The mind and the paper are interacting in several distinct lines of exchanged vibrations ; in that which passes along the pen ; in another which passes through the fingers that rest upon the paper beneath the pen ; in another through the other arm and hand, and in still others passing through the nerves of vision and the intervening air. Consciousness is CONCLUSION. 301 directly cognizant of all these simultaneous connec- tions between the mind and tiic paper. But undoubtedly there must be what might be termed, a solid bundle of exchanged physical vibra- tions, radiating from every point in the paper; re- ceived and returned unconsciously from every point of the organism. The purely physical character of these cooperative energies cannot be generically different, whether consciousness does or does not take part in the process. If the mind, though a unit, is yet a real physical structure, possessing its definite unlike poles, each radically conditioned with special sensations, then, whenever these physical poles are thrown into vibration, the special sensations must accompany the vibrations, but not otherwise. Chemists find that all the material units with which they have made acquaintance in the laboratory, do possess definite special poles ; each having its own determinate functions, which remain always the same under like conditions. Physicists, find a similar class of facts in their department of research. All atoms ally themselves in larger and larger systems, by lines of extended cooperations in which they take 302 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. an active part ; and in all of these many lines there is simple and equal exchange of physical motion. Why should not the mind take its physical share in all this ; like other physical atoms ? Why may it not have form, extension, and measurable force? Why not have definite physical poles which relate it to nerves of sound, of vision, of taste, smell, and touch? Sensations which might be thus produced, we doubt- less have. Perceptions we have. They all come through the physical nature ! Does this reduce mind to the material level? Assuredly not. Consciousness works in and with its physical properties ; it indifferently accepts and con- fers atomic modifications ; but sentience, living ex- perience, is totally distinct in kind from all possible physical operations. It gives all true value to existence. Then is a mind, constituted at once by qualities and intensions, varying modes of an ever-living indi- vidual consciousness ; and by quantitative states of unsentient force and extension reacting in compelled response to every impulse from without, yet con- ditioned with and varying with the conscious moods CONCL US/ON. 303 — is such a mind a " thinkable " possibility ? It is, if we can realize the conception in thought. We must turn once more to our geometrical units, though the illustration now, as indicating the compli- cated atomic structure adapted to changing human experience, must be so halting and inadequate, that I may well hesitate about bringing it forward ; yet a tangible illustration, however faulty, has many advantages. Let us suppose that substance in the form of a triangle, is endowed with a consciousness, is alive. So far the proposition is entirely thinkable. We can suppose that this consciousness, as a whole, is a unit ; so that whenever any new mood of expe- rience arises, it must come in as a part of the general sentient condition. Let us further suppose that the form of the triangle can be so acted upon as to change it into either of the three triangular types, equilateral, isosceles, or scalene. Is it, then, impos- sible to think that a different quality of experience may be conditioned with each of the three types ; and that whenever the triangle is varying from one to the other, there may be degrees of intension ; in exact mathematical adjustment to the varying 304 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. form of the triangle? Properties so coordinated would condition each other exactly as our nnental and material states are supposed to do. So far from finding trouble in supposing that the physical and psychical characters might be made thus to modify each other_ in a triangle or in any more complicated geometrical unit, if it was a sub- stantial unit and gifted with consciousness, all mathematical dependence of parts would be mean- ingless or superficial if sentient moods and physical modes were not made mutually dependent in all their possible variations. Otherwise, the conscious- ness could be but an outside affair — not an integral part of the mathematical unit. Now let the angles of our triangle represent chemical poles, possessing attractions which could ally the triangle to other geometrical units, like or unlike itself; with every variation of form, there must still be variation in conscious experience ; the living triangle might find itself allied to a million of other geometrical units, yet it must still work under the laws of its own constitution ; it might survive a thousand alliances ; its own nature would remain an cOxVCLUsroN^. 305 indestructible unit in the midst of all possible changes. It is structurally conditioned by depen- dent, unlike phases of related change. It ^\•ould appear, then, that wholly dissimilar f/iasi's of bciii^ viigJit be so conditioned togctlicr that change in either must imply allied ehange in all. Such might be the constitutional limitations of each ultimate atom. To eficct this coordination, there must be at least two unlike phases, which could mutually define and give characteristics to each other ; there might be several such differentiated classes of dependent modifications. We are here brought back again to existing facts. Are we conditioned by several phases of being, each dependent upon all of the others ; yet not exchangea- ble with any of them ? I have already stated many facts, all tending to answer this question in the affirmative ; but happily, evidence in this direction is unlimited and easily tested by each one of us for himself. What doubt can exist that sensation and perception are related to the object-side of Nature by an inherent connection which is as neces- sary as the relation of inside to outside, or any other 306 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. similar, double phased, mutually dependent fact? Early June foliage excites the lively sensation of fresh verdure ; and charcoal, with its greedy capacity to absorb light and heat, looks to us black. Why? Because the essential me, having both a physical and a psychical side in its essential individuality, can literally take up and echo these various outside vibra- tions; and with each such echoing of an outward motion, springs forth the living consciousness — which feels each change because the change is a part of its complete self. Philosophers like Prof. Fiske and M. Papillon, suggest that although consciousness is now condi- tioned by physical properties, it may yet be sepa- rated from them in the future. It can not and yet remain our personal consciousness ! Prof Bain's expression, " the extended consciousness," must rep- resent an abiding fact. We ourselves have exten- sion, have positive physical force, which consciousness accepts as its true physical possession ; through which it allies itself to the external world. We each have a real position in space, and that position is not an unextended point ; there is right and left, up and COlfCLUSION. 307 down, in even the innermost sensation, if we attempt to relate it to our complete selfhood. Our physical properties are not objective to our consciousness ; they arc perceived in consciousness as determining its sentient moods and as controllable in turn by its volitions. No fact seems more certain to me than that we all do positively and necessarily recognize ourselves to be units, possessing both physical and psychical attributes, which are so constitutionally indivisible that to separate them would be to sepa- rate necessary correlations — which of course would be to destroy utterly both terms of the one relationship. For example : I have a sensation in my hand or foot; this sensation cannot pertain to the physical member ; the mind's sensation, then, must relate the consciousness in place, in various divisions of space. Now whether the mind does or does not occupy every part of its organism, it recognizes its sensa- tions as allied to and as conditioned by bodies extended in space. It is " an extended conscious- ness " ; a better phrase may be, it is the consciousness of an extended unit, co-working with other extensions. It is utterly impossible to think of ourselves 308 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. without space relations ; we can think of conscious states, one phase of ourselves, without space rela- tions ; but the completed me is conditioned in space, in time, in quantity, and in quality of being ; and each phase of its modifications must determine every other phase — all varying together each in its own kind. Consciousness, as a whole, is a containing recognition of the many-sided fact. But the moods of consciousness come and go. Several of them may coexist ; but any greatly ab- sorbing mood negatives or partially negatives all the others. One listening to music with which he is greatly delighted, cannot at the same time be think- ing intently. His nature is not large enough for this ; or his physical aids are inadequate. Definite hard work, mental or physical, persevered in, must draw off the mind from any great grief ; from any foreign interest. Thus habit becomes a moulding influence. It is the great educator which can carry down the lesson even to the next generation. So it is that our " fine spun theorizing" may become the most practical of all practical truths ; the corner- stone of daily routine. coA'CLcrs/OA'. 309 Any theory which attempts to ground itself in the permanent constitution of the most ultimate unit of being must ramify in all directions ; but a pro- longed discussion even of the testimony of conscious- ness as to its various interdependent states, would be out of place in a popular treatise. Elsewhere I have considered more at length many of the relations and consequences which must arise from the conditioned action of the physical and mental natures.* Each reader must now accept for himself the responsibil- it)- of deciding whether or not his nature embraces both mind and matter, " njind-body " in one unity. If it does he can relate himself to all phenomena, for he is a part of all. If it does, his conscious im- mortality and the immortality of his true physicsd self are both assured facts. Nothing which he justly prizes need be lost in his future" life. But we do not forget that consciousness is sus- pended for some hours daily in natural sleep ; that di- gestion, assimilation of food, the entire process of tissue building, and many involuntary movements of the body are conducted mainly, if not entirely, without * Studies in General Science. 310 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. the intervention of conscious states. These purely physical processes are not more mysterious than those which build up the inorganic crystal, through the self-acting cooperation of adapted energies. Consciousness, with its felt appetencies, can do noth- ing more in the earlier stages of organic growth, than instinctively, with every recurring want, to relate its physical states to the adjusted sources of organic supply ; they must carry on the process accordingly, step by step, to the upbuilding of the mature body with all of its differentiated organs and functions. All visible bodily activities are physical — not mental. Then can mind rest while its organism is phys- ically active — supposing the organism to be, in effect, but a prolongation of its own extension ? The tele- scope, in a similar sense, is a prolongation of the optic nerve ; but we use it, or lay it aside at pleas- ure. Until we know more of the internal economy of our bodies, we cannot know that the mind might not suffer its body to renew its energies undisturbed, as is done in sleep, while it retires within itself and closes the channels of communication between them. But there are facts which indicate that even in a CONCLUSION. 311 dreamless sleep some faculty of the mind is still alert. Dr. Brown-Scquard has pointed out the watchfulness of a power which is always alert to ward off danger. We fall asleep bidding ourselves awake at a certain hour ; and we awake. Some state of the living unit must have been playing sentinel. Atten- tion is now being strongly directed to the solving of these mysteries of the inner life. Doubtless we shall yet reach explanations which are fully satisfactory. As motion seems equivalent to rest when me- chanical forces hold each other in equilibrium, so consciousness may possibly become, as it were, la- tently active, under parallel conditions. Revery and absent-mindedness seem to be conscious phenomena which are much akin to sleep. A similar state can be produced by anaesthetics, or by an injury to the brain. The conditioned physical and mental states must change together in mutual dependence within the mind-atom ; but between it and its organic adaptations there is no necessary connection. A cessation of interaction between them may be com- plete or partial, temporary or final. Their cooper- ation arises from an atomic adjustment of energies ; 3 1 2 THE PII YSICA L BA SIS OF IMMOR TA LITY. and any radical change in the mode of energizing might drive them asunder, as a magnet can attract a substance at one moment and yet repel it at the next. The chemist, by a skillful manipulation of ele- ments when the multitude of accessories are in conjunction, can create a great number of organic compounds. They are truly organic compounds, but they are not organisms ; they have no adapted organs able to carry forward their own vital pro- cesses through continuous integration and disinte- gration of working material. The sentient appeten- cies of a living unit with recurring needs and instincts, on our theory, is indispensable to the beginning and to the continuity of this phase of vital process ; but the process being purely physical, might go forward for a time after the withdrawal of the initiative influ- ence. Its changing moods do nothing more than modify its own physical states ; these set in action the adapted machinery, which thus builds up and operates itself through its own coordinated atomic energies. Dr. Hammond thinks it quite feasible to gauge COXCLUSWN. 313 the kind and amount of thought, by an analysis of the waste in brain tissue. Modern physiology is com- ing more and more fully to indorse this sanguine expectation ; whatever difficulties lie in the way must be of a practical class ; such as the difficulty of taking into account all of the factors. Each given mood of mind should require an identical or at least an equivalent grouping of physical allies to further its action. A machinist may condition the chords of a musical instrument in several ways, and yet obtain the same essential results ; but these different methods must be true equivalents. An organism can possess no more force when in the full tide of vital activity, than when it lies a crushed and shapeless mass at the waj-side; or than the aggregate of its particles would have if they all returned again to inorganic elements. The identical atomic forces, changed in nothing except in their modes of action, and changed in these only because now they are acting and reacting in a wholly unlike series of operations, — the identical atomic forces, at one time hold the little molecule to its proper action and right position among its fellows in the receiver 14 3 1 4 THE PH YSICA L BA SIS OF I MM OR TALI TV. filled with unlike gaseous vapors ; at another, they co-work to build up a rigid symmetrical structure of enduring stone ; at another they mould themselves into " protoplasm " and finally build up their ever- docile extensions into living tissue and help to for- ward the vast cycle of vitalized activities. When we begin with the simpler combinations, the more complex become greatly more intelligible. Atomic forces and extensions being conditioned together and adjusted to unlike action of the several parts of the same atom, and being also conditioned to react as acted upon from without, every new com- bination must produce determinate but unlike results ; the greater the number of units and the more varied the several classes cooperating in any perpetually movable system, like every organism, the more apparently marvellous, although equally mechanical and predetermined, must be the result. It is simple action and reaction throughout. The marvel lies in the structure of the atom ; in the wonderful system of ever-widening adaptations ; in the great plan thus substantially effected. We can comprehend the mechanical action. We CONCLUSION. 315 know how force is modified in its action by exten- sions ; we know that the same kind and amount of energy communicated to a light body and to a heavy one, sends the hght one forward rapidly, the heavy one slowly. The weight of each multiplied into its velocity, gives the same total of acting energy. Or, when they are fixed bodies and made to vibrate, the vibrations, as with vibrating strings, arc conditioned by their allied extensions. These principles, applied to all compound and complex bodies, inorganic and organic alike, can be made to definitely, mathe- matically, explain the action of every system, living or lifeless. Consciousness directs the activity ; it is not of it, but conditioned with it. The living expe- rience is an ever new creation ! When there is repetition of any mood of feeling, we are accustomed to speak of it as like the former mood ; but when the repetition is a thought, we call it the same thought, and the reproduction of it is assigned to memor)-. But if thought and feeling- arise with material vibrations which condition them, renewal of either must depend on renewal of the ap- propriate vibrations. The mood of consciousness is 3l6 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. new, as the vibration is new ; the one being quanti- tative is made out of preceding quantities ; the other, as quaUtative needs no substantial predecessor ; it arises as a fresh acquisition of the ever-living con- sciousness ; as a fresh action of the ever active conscious energies. It is not something arising from nothing ; but something arising with physical changes by which it is conditioned ; it is living personal force in the exercise of its true prerogative ; acquiring new stores of experience. Thus is life a perpetual gain. Thus can immor- tality become a perpetual good — a growth of ever freshly acquired states of the living, all-embracing, consciousness. But these states are dependent on physical changes. The thought or feeling, out of consciousness, can only be recalled at will through a properly adapted organism. The mind must relate itself to the external world through some organ adapted to receive the modes of vibration which be- long to the objective. Growth of experience is. de- pendent on adapted extensions. A train of associations will often bring back with it many mental states previously associated. Habit, CONCLUSION. l\7 repetition, can make the task an easy one ; but often we beat about gropingly, till the right line is set in motion at last, and the desired mood arises with it. To be of value, therefore, immortality of experience must ally itself to an immortality of adapted phys- ical cooperations. It will need — not Uterally a spirit- ual body — but a truly material one through which it can communicate with universal matter and with the universe of minds also. It should need growing facilities. But all known analogies point to the strong prob- ability that, as the visible body enlarges and is brought under the control of the mind, the " mind- body " is able to ally itself to adapted atoms, material also, but of a more ethereal character, like itself; with these it may enter into its future life, not maimed and helpless, but fully equipped for its new destiny. All matter is not visible matter. No physicist can dispense with the interstellar, ether and yet ex- plain a fraction of the phenomena of universal Nature. If several vapors can occupy adapted por- tions of a given space without interference ; if waves of ether called light and heat, can penetrate, pass 3l8 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. through, work with, and give most various shades of color to solids, fluids and gases ; if we must call in the action of a refined class or classes of matter to explain the transmission of all the more rapid and subtle forms of energy, as electricity, and gravity, then the supposition that every mind may have a more permanent ethereal body which mediates be- tween it and its grosser organism, cannot involve a shadow of scientific absurdity. It even becomes highly probable. Since the luminiferous ether can exist with and work with ordinary matter, now rarely found in an elementary state ; and especially as it must have sev- eral distinct functions, like the transmitting of light and gravity, we can hardly regard it as one simple, homogeneous substance ; all other matter, with no exception in the entire realm of known elements, tends perpetually to intimate molecular association, generally with substances adapted to supplement while yet unlike itself This is Nature's invariable method of evolution. She carries on all her processes through an ever growing heterogeneity of compounds and of cooperations. coxcr.csioAr. 319 The mind, if material in any sense, must be re- garded as more akin and therefore as likely to form more intimate and more permanent alliances with the less ponderable forms of matter than with the grosser visible organism. Circumstances apparently favor its continuous adaptation to an enlarging ethereal or- ganism ; analogy must point towards a probable increase of the inner and the outer bodies simulta- neously ; use, exercise of any function tending always to build it up, to perpetually strengthen and enlarge its capabilities. This would be but another illustra- tion of the general plan which builds up system within system throughout material nature, and es- pecially in every department of organic nature. The ordinary physical brain, it is well known, is steadily enlarged, and added to in convolutions, with the growth of the intellect ; it changes in form with change in the character of the habitual mental activ- ity ; as with men savage or civilized, and with the differing nationalities. There is, moreover, considerable and various re- liable evidence that the mind is not necessarily wholly dependent on the normal action of the visible 320 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. brain. One in feeble health can often control the mind with a power which seems superior to any thing properly pertaining to the shattered body ; the strangely luminous state which often precedes death would seem to be of this order. That there are psychological states of mental activity with bodily torpor is certain. In old age, too, when the stiffened members move so wearily that the mind seems falling into dotage, at times it can arouse itself to an accu- rate memory of the past, and to eager and rapid action. The drowning man and one falling from a great height often find the mental powers become preternaturally active. Such facts make our hypoth- esis seem the more probable. They are not proof. Chemists find, as a rule, that organic substances have very many more atoms in the molecule than inorganic. The beautiful dye stuffs, which they rival Nature, or rather imitate Nature, in manufacturing, are often very complex in molecular structure. Turn to Prof. Cooke's theory and explanation of the structure and action of nitro-glycerine — in " The New Chemistry ; " we shall come to the conclusion that available energy must be allied with delicately CONCLUSION. 321 adjusted, structural adaptations ; and that, in every process of change, the atomic attractions of matter universally, since always seeking, will gradually find the higher and broader alliances adapted to them and thAt finding these satisfactorily, the relation is of a very permanent nature. Granite is durable, a metal is to us indestructible ; the great worlds which shine out nightly in space are slow to break asunder ; every organism is tenacious of its continuous maintenance. Is the mind-unit likely to be the only exception to this physical in- stinct, to the innate attraction, which is always seek- ing for a permanent alliance? What more probable than that, co-acting with its ever changing organism it is able to steadily provide itself with allies which shall outlast the perishable form with which it is temporarily associated. Still this is but tracing possible analogies. It all very possibly, very probably, may be ; we cannot say positively that it actually is. But we can, as I think, assume without a shadow of doubt, from sufficient evidence of an affirmative character, that there is an indestructible atomic identity for every ultimate atom ; 322 THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. that in minds, physical and mental properties inhere together in mutual dependence. In what way con- sciousness will associate itself with cooperative ener- gies in the future, where and in what state we have been in the past, must, at present, be matter of sur- mise. But that life, in all orders of being, has a physical basis through which it can ally itself to a willingly cooperative universe, is not left to any contingency. Does an atom infinitesimally small seem too minute to be the eternal abiding place of a living consciousness ? We have no knowledge of the size of the ether units ; none of mind-units. But mere dimensions are valueless. In the language of Pascal, — " Let man investigate the smallest things of all he knows ; let this dot of an insect, for instance, exhibit to him in its diminutive body parts incomparably more diminutive, jointed limbs, veins in those limbs, blood in those veins, in that blood humors, and drops within those humors — let him, still subdividing these finest points, exhaust his power of conception, and let the minutest object his fancy can shape be that one of which we are now speaking — he may, perhaps, CONCLUSION. 323 suppose that to be the extreme of minuteness in Nature. I will make him discover yet a new abyss within it. I will draw for him not merely the visible universe but all besides that his imagination can grasp, the immensity of Nature, within the confines of that imperceptible atom." I would gladly prove to him that this least exist- ence is indestructible ; that it is destined to relate itself continually more intimately to the all ; learning steadily to apprehend alike the deepest mysteries and the broadest truths, as itself a living part and parcel of every process ; I would show him that in this merest speck of life is embodied a scheme of thought, a scheme of delicate nicest adaptations, perfect in every least division ; part fitted to part ; each hanging upon the other ; the least here allied to the greatest there, in so complete a unity that if either droppeid out from the infinite plan, the most exact order would become but hopeless confusion ; I would show him that every smallest change, every possible mode of variation, is so fully wrought out in the scheme that it must spread like a subtle wave of resistless influence, as action and as passion, as giv- 324 l^HE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. ing, as receiving — responsive through every phase of the many-sided whole ; I would single out the self- conscious mind, enabled steadily to acquire wisdom, to grow in happiness, to gain in power ; learning to guide its own destinies, yet leading always by the hand the weak and the erring towards a better emi- nence ; I would convince him that this vast delicate incarnation of beneficent purpose, of manifested thought, of embodied adaptation, must hang but as a fringe upon the garment of the Infinite Thinker. There must be a Maker of the conditioned universe, himself unconditioned. To Him we may reasonably look for a continuation of the existing order of Na- ture, with the furtherance of all the interests which are bound up within it as part of its eternal process. THE END.