Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/687

Rh and foster that very disease, and consequent mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious organ would have avoided."

I can imagine the bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument. He was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the consideration of a point of this kind. After due consideration, and having strengthened himself by that honest contemplation of the facts which was habitual with him, and which includes the desire to give even adverse facts their due weight, I can suppose the bishop to proceed thus: "You will remember that in the 'Analogy of Religion,' of which you have so kindly spoken, I did not profess to prove anything absolutely, and that I over and over again acknowledged and insisted on the smallness of our knowledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as regards the whole system of the universe. My object was to show my deistical friends who set forth so eloquently the beauty and beneficence of Nature and the Ruler thereof, while they had nothing but scorn for the so-called absurdities of the Christian scheme, that they were in no better condition than we were, and that for every difficulty they found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty was to be found on theirs. I will now, with your permission, adopt a similar line of argument. You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and separation of atoms deduce all terrestrial things, including organic forms and their phenomena. Let me tell you in the first instance how far I am prepared to go with you. I admit that you can build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force; that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star, are truly wonderful structures which are thus produced. I will go further and acknowledge that even a tree or flower might in this way be organized. Nay, if you can show me an animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it also might be put together by the suitable play of molecular force.

"Thus far our way is clear, but now comes my difficulty. Your atoms are individually without sensation, much more are they without intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem? Take your dead hydrogen-atoms, your dead oxygen-atoms, your dead carbon-atoms, your dead nitrogen-atoms, your dead phosphorus-atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless; observe them running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion, are to arise? You speak of the difficulty of presentation in my case; is it less in yours? I am not all bereft of this Vorstellungskraft of which you speak. I can follow a particle of musk until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can follow the waves of sound until their tremors reach the water of the labyrinth, and set the otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can also visualize the waves of ether