Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/800

776 cases, even those at the extremity of the scale, is almost identical in composition. And the one other fact on which he insisted was, that every living action, from the vibrations of cilia by the foraminifer to the imagination of Hamlet or the composition of the Messiah, is accompanied by, and in a sense finds an equivalent expression in, a definite waste or disintegration of material tissue. Thus it is no less certain that the muscles of a horse are strained by a heavy load, than it is that the brain of a Shakespeare undergoes molecular agitation, producing definite chemical results, in the sublime effort of imagination."

But, at first blush, such statements produce a shock in the minds of most readers. They are reluctant to be told that the soul never acts by itself apart from some excitement of bodily tissue. It seems monstrous that thought and love, which in one direction find their expression in the majesty of eloquence, should in another direction find their expression in evolving carbonic acid and water. Such a union between soul and body seemed to amount to identity. And yet the soul was conscious that, whatever might be said, it was not one of the chemical elements, nor all of them put together.

The mental anxiety referred to has been aggravated by the hold which has been taken on most inquiring minds, by the doctrine of development. Whether natural selection is or is not sufficient to account for the origin of species, the idea of successive acts of creation out of nothing has been virtually abandoned by all whose observations of Nature have been on such a scale as to entitle their opinions to any weight. What was once the property of a few isolated thinkers has been made completely accessible to minds of common intelligence. But the terrors which have been awakened by the popular reception of novel scientific theories are entirely founded on the assumption that matter and spirit are fundamentally distinct in their nature. It has been the general belief that matter was something heavy, lifeless, inert, something that forms the hidden basis of the ethereal vision of the world. But, argues the author, if that assumption be the mere creature of false analogy, and is wholly incongruous and unthinkable, it does not indeed follow that materialism, in a fair sense of the word, is impossible, still the conclusion cannot be avoided that materialism and spiritualism would then exhibit only different aspects of the same everlasting fact, and physical research might henceforth unfold to us only the energies of Infinite Life self-governed by eternal law.

But, admitting the universal action of molecular mechanics, the author adduces numerous instances which show that the explanation they offer of the phenomena of sensation cannot be realized in consciousness. Nothing is really an explanation which cannot be reproduced in consciousness as such. We demand a cause from which the effect can rationally be educed. The perception of distance, for example, is explained by the action of the muscular sense and the experience of touch. This is an adequate explanation, for it can be realized in consciousness. But the case is far otherwise with the explanation of sensation by molecular mechanics. Physical research lands us in a dead inert substance called matter, which, though without soul or meaning in itself, produces by its vibrations the most beautiful visions and sublime emotions in our consciousness. But the external phenomena, inseparable from our consciousness of sight or sound, cannot be rationally connected with the consciousness that gives them all their interest. No one to whom the Hallelujah Chorus utters the joy of heaven, or for whom a sonata of Beethoven gives a voice to the unutterable, can make it seem real to himself that his mind is invaded by mere waves of vibrating air. At no point in the chain of vibrations, not even the point most deeply buried in the brain, can we conceive that molecular action is converted into any thing besides material movement, or resistance to movement. But this does not exhaust the consciousness. The emotional, imaginative, and moral wealth of human life opens a world of reality immeasurably greater than can be contained in mere mechanical movement.

Assuming, then, the fact of a nature in man, of which the molecular laws are not the substance, but the condition, the author takes up the inquiry as to the essential nature of religion. This he defines to be the endeavor after a practical expression of