Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/289

Rh equilibrium, which there is an immediate effort to restore. The effort, incessantly defeated—for the waves continue to pour in—is incessantly renewed; in the molecular struggle, matter is gathered from the soil and from the atmosphere, and built, in obedience to the forces which guide the molecules, into the special form of the tree. In a general way, therefore, the life of the tree might be defined as an unceasing effort to restore a disturbed equilibrium. In the building of crystals, Nature makes her first structural effort; we have here the earliest groping of the so-called "vital force," and the manifestations of this force in plants and animals, though, as already stated, indefinitely more complex, are to be regarded of the same mechanical quality as those concerned in the building of the crystal.

Consider the cycle of operations by which the seed produces the plant, the plant the flower, the flower again the seed, the causal line returning with the fidelity of a planetary orbit to its original point of departure. Who or what planned this molecular rhythm? We do not know—science fails even to inform us whether it was ever "planned" at all. Yonder butterfly has a spot of orange on its wing; and if we look at a drawing made a century ago, of one of the ancestors of that butterfly, we probably find the self-same spot upon the wing. For a century the molecules have described their cycles. Butterflies have been begotten, have been born, and have died; still we find the molecular architecture reproduced. Who or what determined this persistency of recurrence? We do not know; but we stand within our intellectual range when we say that there is probably nothing in that wing which may not yet find its Newton to prove that the principles involved in its construction are qualitatively the same as those brought into play in the formation of the solar system. We may even take a step further, and affirm that the brain of man—the organ of his reason and his sense—without which he can neither think nor feel—is also an assemblage of molecules, acting and reacting according to law. Here, however, the methods pursued in mechanical science come to an end; and if asked to deduce from the physical interaction of the brain-molecules the least of the phenomena of sensation or thought, we must acknowledge our helplessness. The association of both with the matter of the brain may be as certain as the association of light with the rising of the sun. But whereas in the latter case we have unbroken mechanical connection between the sun and our organs, in the former case logical continuity disappears. Between molecular mechanics and consciousness is interposed a fissure, over which the ladder of physical reasoning is incompetent to carry us. We must, therefore, accept the observed association as an empirical fact, without being able to bring it under the yoke of a priori deduction.

Such were the ponderings which ran habitually through my mind in the days of my scientific youth. They illustrate two things: a