Fragments of Science quotes

In fact it is the vehicle of their light, and without it they could not be seen. This all-pervading substance takes up their molecular tremors, and conveys them with inconceivable rapidity to our organs of vision.

It is the transported shiver of bodies countless millions of miles distant, which translates itself in human consciousness into the splendour of the firmament at night.

If the aether have a boundary, masses of ponderable matter might be conceived to exist beyond it, but they could emit no light. Beyond the aether dark suns might burn; there, under proper conditions, combustion might be carried on;

The earth rounds this portion of the curve and retreats from the sun. Tensions are now stored up, but vis viva is lost, to be again restored at the expense of the complementary force on the opposite side of the curve.

Thus beats the heart of the universe, but without increase or diminution of its total stock of force.

I have thus far tried to steer clear amid confusion, by fixing the mind of the reader upon things rather than upon names. But good names are essential; and here, as yet, we are not provided with such.

Thus, what is true of the earth, as she swings to and fro in her yearly journey round the sun, is also true of her minutest atom.

We have wheels within wheels, and rhythm within rhythm.

When a body is heated, a change of molecular arrangement always occurs, and to produce this change heat is consumed. Hence, a portion only of the heat communicated to the body remains as dynamic energy.

hence the waves generated by the glowing platinum can cross these humours and impinge on the optic nerve at the back of the eye. [Footnote: The action here described is analogous to the passage of sound-waves through thick felt whose interstices are occupied by air.]

Thus the sensation of light reduces itself to the acceptance of motion.

Up to this point we deal with pure mechanics; but the subsequent translation of the shock of the aethereal waves into consciousness eludes mechanical science.

The motion thus imparted is transmitted with measurable, and not very great velocity to the brain, where, by a process which the science of mechanics does not even tend to unravel, the tremor of the nervous matter is converted into the conscious impression of light.

Darkness might then be defined as aether at rest; light as aether in motion.

But in reality the aether is never at rest, for in the absence of light-waves we have heat-waves always speeding through it. In the spaces of the universe both classes of undulations incessantly commingle.

In the spaces of the universe both classes of undulations incessantly commingle. Here the waves issuing from uncounted centres cross, coincide, oppose, and pass through each other, without confusion or ultimate extinction.

Every star is seen across the entanglement of wave-motions produced by all other stars.

It is the ceaseless thrill caused by those distant orbs collectively in the aether, that constitutes what we call the 'temperature of space.'

As the air of a room accommodates itself to the requirements of an orchestra, transmitting each vibration of every pipe and string, so does the inter-stellar aether accommodate itself to the requirements of light and heat.

Its waves mingle in space without disorder, each being endowed with an individuality as indestructible as if it alone had disturbed the universal repose.

All vagueness with regard to the use of the terms 'radiation' and 'absorption' will now disappear. Radiation is the communication of vibratory motion to the aether;

We have now to submit these considerations to the only test by which they can be tried, namely, that of experiment.

An experiment is well defined as a question put to Nature

; but, to avoid the risk of asking amiss, we ought to purify the question from all adjuncts which do not necessarily belong to it. Matter has been shown to be composed of elementary constituents, by the compounding of which all its varieties are produced.

this motion would be carried rapidly away, and lost for ever to our planet, if the waves of aether had nothing but the air to contend with in their outward course.

But the aqueous vapour takes up the motion, and becomes hereby heated, thus wrapping the earth like a warm garment, and protecting its surface from the deadly chill which it would otherwise sustain.

Various philosophers have speculated on the influence of an atmospheric envelope. De Saussure, Fourier, M. Pouillet, and Mr.

This, in fact, is the faculty which enables us transcend the boundaries of sense, and connect the phenomena of our visible world with those of an invisible one.

Without imagination we never could have risen to the conceptions which have occupied us here today

; and in proportion to your power of exercising this faculty aright, and of associating definite mental images with the terms employed, will be the pleasure and the profit which you will derive from this lecture.

This connection is typical.

Nature is not an aggregate of independent parts, but an organic whole.

If you open a piano and sing into it, a certain string will respond. Change the pitch of our voice; the first string ceases to vibrate, but another replies. Change again the pitch; the first two strings are silent, while another resounds.

And mark the conclusion to which this leads. It proves the aether at the focus to be practically detached from the air, — that the most violent aethereal motion may there exist, without the least aerial motion.

But, though you see it not, there is sufficient heat at that focus to set London on fire.

The heat there is competent to raise iron to a temperature at which it throws off brilliant scintillations. It can heat platinum to whiteness, and almost fuse that refractory metal. It actually can fuse gold, silver, copper, and aluminium.

But is it necessary that the student of science should have his labours tested by their possible practical applications?

What is the practical value of Homer's Iliad?

You smile, and possibly think that Homer's Iliad is good as a means of culture. There's the rub.

In fact, they have had their reward, both in reputation and in those more substantial benefits which the direct service of the public always carries in its train. But who, I would ask, put the soul into this telegraphic body?

Who snatched from heaven the fire that flashes along the line?

This, I am bound to say, was done by two men, the one a dweller in Italy, [Footnote: Volta] the other a dweller in England, [Footnote:

this was a consequence of the enlargement of its particles. The cord finally disappeared, while the funnels melted into two ghost-like films, shaped like parasols. They were barely visible, being of an exceedingly delicate blue tint.

They seemed woven of blue air.

To compare them with cobweb or with gauze would be to liken them to something infinitely grosser than themselves.

Last Easter eve the Dartmoor sky, which had just been cleansed by a snow-storm, wore a very wild appearance. Round the horizon it was of steely brilliancy, while reddish cumuli and cirri floated southwards.

When the sky was quenched behind them these floating masses seemed like dull embers suddenly blown upon; they brightened like a fire.

In the Alps we have the most magnificent examples of crimson clouds and snows, so that the effects just referred to may be here studied under the best possible conditions.

In point of fact, the haze is a piece of more or less perfect sky; it is produced in the same manner, and is subject to the same laws, as the firmament itself.

We live in the sky, not under it.

These points were further elucidated by the deportment of the selenite, plate, with which the readers of the foregoing pages are so well acquainted.

SOLAR light, in passing through a dark room, reveals its track by illuminating the dust floating in the air.

'The sun,' says Daniel Culverwell, 'discovers atomes, though they be invisible by candle-light, and makes them dance naked in his beams.'

In my researches on the decomposition of vapours by light, I was compelled to remove these 'atoms' and this dust.

What, then, was the blackness?

It was simply that of stellar space; that is to say, blackness resulting from the absence from the track of the beam of all matter competent to scatter its light.

When the flame was placed below the beam the floating matter was destroyed in situ; and the air, freed from this matter, rose into the beam, jostled aside the illuminated particles, and substituted for their light the darkness due to its own perfect transparency.

When the flame was placed below the beam the floating matter was destroyed in situ; and the air, freed from this matter, rose into the beam, jostled aside the illuminated particles, and substituted for their light the darkness due to its own perfect transparency.

Nothing could more forcibly illustrate the invisibility of the agent which renders all things visible.

The beam crossed, unseen, the black chasm formed by the transparent air, while, at both sides of the gap, the thick-strewn particles shone out like a luminous solid under the powerful illumination.

that when such matter was taken into the body through the lungs, skin, or stomach, it had the power of spreading there the destroying process by which itself had been assailed. Such a power was visibly exerted in the case of yeast.

A little leaven was seen to leaven the whole lump

— a mere speck of matter, in this supposed state of decomposition, being apparently competent to propagate indefinitely its own decay. Why should not a bit of rotten malaria act in a similar manner within the human frame?

There is nothing to my knowledge in pure chemistry which resembles the power of propagation and self-multiplication possessed by the matter which produces epidemic disease.

If you sow wheat you do not get barley; if you sow small-pox you do not get scarlet-fever, but small-pox indefinitely multiplied, and nothing else.

The matter of each contagious disease reproduces itself as rigidly as if it were (as Miss Nightingale puts it) dog or cat.

Corrupted air may promote an epidemic, but cannot produce it. On the other hand, through the transport of the special germ or virus, disease may develop itself in regions where the drainage is good and the atmosphere pure.

If you see a new thistle growing in your field, you feel sure that its seed has been wafted thither.

Just as sure does it seem that the contagious matter of epidemic disease has been transplanted to the place where it newly appears. With a clearness and conclusiveness s not to be surpassed, Dr. William Budd has traced such diseases from place to place;

It is next to impossible, by artificial means, to produce a pure water. Mr. Hartley, for example, some time ago distilled water while surrounded by hydrogen, but the water was not free from floating matter.

It is so hard to be clean in the midst of dirt.

In water from the Lake of Geneva, which has remained long without being stirred, we have an approach to the pure liquid. I have a bottle of it here, which was carefully filled for me by my distinguished friend Soret.

At times the waves struck us, not with the soft impact which might be expected from a liquid, but with the sudden solid shock of battering-rams.

'No man knows the force of water,' said one of the officers,' until he has experienced a storm at sea.'

These blows followed each other at quicker intervals, the screw rattling after each of them, until, finally, the delivery of a heavier stroke than ordinary seemed to reduce the saloon to chaos. Furniture crashed, glasses rang, and alarmed enquiries immediately followed.

These blows followed each other at quicker intervals, the screw rattling after each of them, until, finally, the delivery of a heavier stroke than ordinary seemed to reduce the saloon to chaos. Furniture crashed, glasses rang, and alarmed enquiries immediately followed.

Amid the noises I heard one note of forced laughter; it sounded very ghastly.

Men tramped through the saloon, and busy voices were heard aft, as if something there had gone wrong.

The oilcloth covering was a great incumbrance; it had been made for a much stouter man, and, standing upright after my submersion, my legs occupied the centre of two bags of water. My guide exhorted me to try again.

Prudence was at my elbow, whispering dissuasion; but, taking everything into account, it appeared more immoral to retreat than to proceed.

Instructed by the first misadventure, I once more entered the stream. Had the alpenstock been of iron it might have helped me; but, as it was, the tendency of the water to sweep it out of my hands rendered it worse than useless.

He contends for the psychological element of cure. By agreeable emotions, he says, nervous currents are liberated which stimulate blood, brain, and viscera.

The influence rained from ladies' eyes enables my friend to thrive on dishes which would kill him if eaten alone.

A sanative effect of the same order I experienced amid the spray and thunder of Niagara.

I went down to the river's edge, where the weird loneliness seemed to increase. The basin is enclosed by high and almost precipitous banks — covered, at the time, with russet woods.

A kind of mystery attaches itself to gyrating water, due perhaps to the fact that we are to some extent ignorant of the direction of its force.

It is said that at certain points of the whirlpool, pine-trees are sucked down, to be ejected mysteriously elsewhere. The 'water is of the brightest emerald-green. The gorge through which it escapes is narrow, and the motion of the river swift though silent.

grind the pebble to powder, every particle will yield its modicum of green; and if the particles be so fine as to remain suspended in the water, the scattered light will be a uniform green. Hence the greenness of shoal water.

You go to bed with the black Atlantic around you. You rise in the morning, find it a vivid green, and correctly infer that you are crossing the bank of Newfoundland.

Such water is found charged with fine matter in a state of mechanical suspension. The light from the bottom may sometimes come into play, but it is not necessary. A storm can render the water muddy, by rendering the particles too numerous and gross.

Taking all the circumstances into account, you may, I think, with safety dismiss the detrital barrier as incompetent to account for the present condition of Glen Gluoy and Glen Roy.

Hypotheses in science, though apparently transcending experience, are in reality experience modified by scientific thought and pushed into an ultra experiential region.

At the time that he wrote, Sir Thomas Dick-Lauder could not possibly have discerned the cause subsequently assigned for the blockage of these glens.

True he lacked mechanical precision, but he abounded in that force and freshness of the scientific imagination which in some sciences, and probably in some stages of all sciences, are essential to the creator of knowledge.

To Agassiz was given, not the art of the refiner, but the instinct of the discoverer, and the strength of the delver who brings ore from the recesses of the mine.

That ore may contain its share of dross, but it also contains the precious metal which gives employment to the refiner, and without which his occupation would depart.

As a result of the process we obtain a mass of ice. That ice has an origin very antithetical to its own character.

Though cold, it is the child of heat.

If we removed the lamp, there would be no steam, and if there were no steam there would be no ice. The mere cold of the mixture surrounding the second vessel would not produce ice. The cold must have the proper material to work upon;

… of a magnitude sufficient to produce the conformation of the Alps, and that they followed, as the Alpine valleys do, the lines of natural drainage of the country, are assumptions which do not appear to me to be justified either by reason or by observation.

There is a grandeur in the secular integration of small effects implied by the theory of erosion almost superior to that involved in the idea of a cataclysm.

Think of the ages which must have been consumed in the execution of this colossal sculpture. The question may, of course, be pushed further. Think of the ages which the molten earth required for its consolidation.

Nor do I think it calculated to lessen that infant's reverence, or to make him a worse citizen, when his riper experience shows him that the atmosphere was his helper in extracting the first draught from his mother's breast.

The child grows, but is still an experimenter: he grasps at the moon, and his failure teaches him to respect distance.

At length his little fingers acquire sufficient mechanical tact to lay hold of a spoon. He thrusts the instrument into his mouth, hurts his gums, and thus learns the impenetrability of matter.

the consequence is that the blade loses more than it gains, and hence becomes more and more refrigerated. The light vapour floating around the surface so cooled is condensed upon it, and there accumulates to form the little pearly globe which we call a dew-drop.

Thus the boy finds the simple and homely fact which addressed his senses to be the outcome and flower of the deepest laws.

The fact becomes, in a measure, sanctified as an object of thought, and invested for him with a beauty for evermore.

With regard to the effect on the imagination, certain it is that the cool results of physical induction furnish conceptions which transcend the most daring flights of that faculty.

Take for example the idea of an all-pervading aether which transmits a tingle, so to speak, to the finger ends of the universe every time a street lamp is lighted.

The invisible billows of this aether can be measured with the same ease and certainty as that with which an engineer measures a base and two angles, and from these finds the distance across the Thames.

The professed utilitarian is unfortunately, in most cases, the very last man to see the occult sources from which useful results are derived.

He admires the flower, but is ignorant of the conditions of its growth.

The scientific man must approach Nature in his own way; for if you invade his freedom by your so-called practical considerations, it may be at the expense of those qualities on which his success as a discoverer depends.

Besides this, our factories and our foundries present an extensive field of observation, and were those who work in them rendered capable, by previous culture, of observing what they see, the results might be incalculable.

Who can say what intellectual Samsons are at the present moment toiling with closed eyes in the mills and forges of Manchester and Birmingham?

Grant these Samsons sight, and you multiply the chances of discovery, and with them the prospects of national advancement. In our multitudinous technical operations we are constantly playing with forces our ignorance of which is often the cause of our destruction.

To chasten this apparent chaos is a problem which man has set before him.

The world was built in order: and to us are trusted the will and power to discern its harmonies, and to make them the lessons of our lives.

From the cradle to the grave we are surrounded with objects which provoke inquiry. Descending for a moment from this high plea to considerations which lie closer to us as a nation — as a land of gas and furnaces, of steam and electricity:

Thus it is with the processes of nature, where mechanical and molecular laws intermingle and create apparent confusion.

Their mixture constitutes what may be called the noise of natural laws, and it is the vocation of the man of science to resolve this noise into its components, and thus to detect the underlying music.

The necessity of this detachment of one force from all other forces is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than in the phenomena of crystallisation. Here, for example, is a solution of common sulphate of soda or Glauber salt.

Puff-paste in preparation must not be handled too much; it ought, moreover, to be rolled on a cold slab, to prevent the butter from melting, and diffusing itself, thus rendering the paste more homogeneous and less liable to split.

Puff-paste is, then, simply an exaggerated case of slaty cleavage.

The principle here enunciated is so simple as to be almost trivial; nevertheless, it embraces not only the cases mentioned, but, if time permitted, it might be shown you that the principle has a much wider range of application.

The position of these bright bands never varies, and each metal has its own system. Hence the competent observer can infer from the bands of the spectrum the metals which produce it.

It is a language addressed to the eye instead of the ear; and the certainty would not be augmented if each metal possessed the power of audibly calling out, 'I am here!'

Nor is this language affected by distance. If we find that the sun or the stars give us the bands of our terrestrial metals, it is a declaration on the part of these orbs that such metals enter into their composition.

The solid incandescent coal-points give us a continuous spectrum; or in other words they emit rays of all possible periods between the two extremes of the spectrum.

Colour, as many of you know, is to light what pitch is to sound.

When a violin-player presses his finger on a string he makes it shorter and tighter, and thus, causing it to vibrate more speedily, heightens the pitch.

But let me sink excuses, and attack the work before me. First and foremost, then, I would advise you to get a knowledge of facts from actual observation.

Facts looked at directly are vital; when they pass into words half the sap is taken out of them.

You wish, for example, to get a knowledge of magnetism; well, provide yourself with a good book on the subject, if you can, but do not be content with what the book tells you; do not be satisfied with its descriptive woodcuts;

Half of our book writers describe experiments which they never made, and their descriptions often lack both force and truth; but, no matter how clever or conscientious they may be, their written words cannot supply the place of actual observation.

Every fact has numerous radiations, which are shorn off by the man who describes it.

Go, then, to a philosophical instrument maker, and give a shilling or half a crown for a straight bar-magnet, or, if you can afford it, purchase a pair of them;

Make your experiments with the darning-needle over and over again; operate on both ends of the needle; try both ends of the magnet.

Do not think the work dull; you are conversing with Nature, and must acquire over her language a certain grace and mastery, which practice can alone impart.

Let every movement be made with care, and avoid slovenliness, from the outset. Experiment, as I have said, is the language by which we address Nature, and through which she sends her replies;

but spend several at it, if necessary; and remember, understanding it is not sufficient: you must obtain a manual aptitude in addressing Nature. If you speak to your fellow-man you are not entitled to use jargon.

Bad experiments are jargon addressed to Nature, and just as much to be deprecated.

Manual dexterity in illustrating the interaction of magnetic poles is of the utmost importance at this stage of your progress; and you must not neglect attaining this power over your implements.

As you proceed, moreover, you will be tempted to do more than I can possibly suggest. Thoughts will occur to you which you will endeavour to follow out: questions will arise which you will try to answer.

The same experiment may be twenty different things to twenty people.

Having witnessed the action of pole on pole, through the air, you will perhaps try whether the magnetic power is not to be screened off. You use plates of glass, wood, slate, pasteboard, or gutta-percha, but find them all pervious to this wondrous force.

What, then, is the real nature of this wondrous change? What is it that takes place among the atoms of the steel when the substance is magnetised? The question leads us beyond the region of sense, and into that of imagination.

This faculty, indeed, is the divining-rod of the man of science.

Not, however, an imagination which catches its creations from the air, but one informed and inspired by facts;

But the sun again interposes, liberates the solidified liquid, and permits it to roll by gravity to the sea. The mechanical force of every river in the world as it rolls towards the ocean, is drawn from the heat of the sun.

No streamlet glides to a lower level without having been first lifted to the elevation from which it springs by the power of the sun.

The energy of winds is also due entirely to the same power.

the animal consumes the vegetable thus formed, a reunion of the severed elements takes place, producing animal heat. The process of building a vegetable is one of winding up; the process of building an animal is one of running down.

The warmth of our bodies, and every mechanical energy which we exert, trace their lineage directly to the sun.

The fight of a pair of pugilists, the motion of an army, or the lifting of his own body by an Alpine climber up a mountain slope, are all cases of mechanical energy drawn from the sun.

he worked also for himself, and lectured frequently at the City Philosophical Society. He took lessons in elocution, happily without damage to his natural force, earnestness, and grace of delivery. He was never pledged to theory, and he changed in opinion as knowledge advanced.

With him life was growth.

In those early lectures we hear him say, 'In knowledge, that man only is to be contemned and despised who is not in a state of transition.' And again:

Assuredly he made his profession good, and no fairer light falls upon his character than that which reveals his relations to his wife. Never, I believe, existed a manlier, purer, steadier love.

Like a burning diamond, it continued to shed, for six-and-forty years, its white and smokeless glow.

Faraday was married on June 12, 1821; and up to this date Davy appears throughout as his friend. Soon afterwards, however, disunion occurred between them, which, while it lasted, must have given Faraday intense pain.

'Clout-nail making goes on here rather considerably, and is a very neat and pretty operation to observe.

I love a smith's shop and anything relating to smithery. My father was a smith.

' This is from his journal; but he is unconsciously speaking to somebody — perhaps to the world.

'We have been to a grand conversazione in the town-hall, and I have now returned to my room to talk with you, as the pleasantest and happiest thing that I can do.

Nothing rests me so much as communion with you.

I feel it even now as I write, and catch myself saying the words aloud as I write them.'

Wood and coal can burn; whence come their heat, and the work producible by that heat? From the immeasurable reservoir of the sun.

Nature has proposed to herself the task of storing up the light which streams earthward from the sun, and of casting into a permanent form the most fugitive of all powers.

To this end she has overspread the earth with organisms which, while living, take in the solar light, and by its consumption generate forces of another kind. These organisms are plants.

'The muscle is only the apparatus by means of which the conversion of the force is effected; but it is not the substance consumed in the production of the mechanical effect.'

He calls the blood 'the oil of the lamp of life;'

it is the slow-burning fluid whose chemical force, in the furnace of the capillaries, is sacrificed to produce animal motion. This was Mayer's conclusion twenty-six years ago. It was in complete opposition to the scientific conclusions of his time;

and there cannot, I think, be a doubt that, to a person struck dead by lightning, the passage from life to death occurs without consciousness being in the least degree implicated.

It is an abrupt stoppage of sensation, unaccompanied by a pang.

.

Through some awkwardness on my part, I touched a wire leading from the battery, and the discharge went through my body.

Life was absolutely blotted out for a very sensible interval, without a trace of pain.

Ina second or so consciousness returned; I vaguely discerned the audience and apparatus, and, by the help of these external appearances, immediately concluded that I had received the battery discharge.

on a third occasion, I tried whether the act could be provoked by an assumed air of inattention. Grasping the table firmly between my knees, I threw myself back in the chair, and waited, with eyes fixed on vacancy, for the pull. It came.

For some seconds it was pull spirit, hold muscle; the muscle, however, prevailed, and the table remained at rest.

Up to the present moment, this interesting fact is known only to the particular spirit in question and myself.

You urge, in vain, that science has given us all the knowledge of the universe which we now possess, while spiritualism has added nothing to that knowledge.

The drugged soul is beyond the reach of reason.

It is in vain that impostors are exposed, and the special demon cast out. He has but slightly to change his shape, return to his house, and find it 'empty, swept, and garnished.'

It is, moreover, a state perfectly compatible with extreme intellectual subtlety and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the hardihood engendered by strong conviction, or by callous mendacity, to render them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind.

It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by, slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation.

When science appeals to uniform experience, the spiritualist will retort, 'How do you know that a uniform experience will continue uniform? You tell me that the sun has risen for six thousand years: that is no proof that it will rise tomorrow;

Since the time when the foregoing remarks were written I have been more than once among the spirits, at their own invitation. They do not improve on acquaintance.

Surely no baser delusion ever obtained dominance over the weak mind of man.

that natural agents are so related to each other as to be mutually convertible, but that no new agency is created. Light runs into heat; heat into electricity; electricity into magnetism; magnetism into mechanical force; and mechanical force again into light and heat.

The Proteus changes, but he is ever the same

; and his changes in nature, supposing no miracle to supervene, are the expression, not of spontaneity, but of physical necessity.

electricity into magnetism; magnetism into mechanical force; and mechanical force again into light and heat. The Proteus changes, but he is ever the same; and his changes in nature, supposing no miracle to supervene, are the expression, not of spontaneity, but of physical necessity.

A perpetual motion, then, is deemed impossible, because it demands the creation of energy, whereas the principle of Conservation is — no creation, but infinite conversion.

It is an old remark that the law which moulds a tear also rounds a planet. In the application of law in nature the terms great and small are unknown.

A perpetual motion, then, is deemed impossible, because it demands the creation of energy, whereas the principle of Conservation is — no creation, but infinite conversion.

It is an old remark that the law which moulds a tear also rounds a planet.

In the application of law in nature the terms great and small are unknown.

But they have also a value beyond this local and temporary one. They prepare the public mind for changes, which though inevitable, could hardly, without such preparation, be wrought without violence.

Iron is strong; still, water in crystallising will shiver an iron envelope, and the more unyielding the metal is, the worse for its safety.

There are in the world men who would encompass philosophic speculation by a rigid envelope, hoping thereby to restrain it, but in reality giving it explosive force.

I do not possess the intellectual faculty which would enable me to infer, from those data, either the goodness of the one or the badness of the other; and in the highest recorded manifestations of the miraculous I am equally at a loss.

Let us not play fast and loose with the miraculous; either it is a demonstration of goodness in all cases or in none.

If Mr. Mozley accepts Christ's goodness as transcendent, because He did such works as no other man did, he ought, logically speaking, to accept the works of those who, in His name, had cast out devils, as demonstrating a proportionate goodness on their part.

There is much in this process of pondering and its results which it is impossible to analyse. It is by a kind of inspiration that we rise from the wise and sedulous contemplation of facts to the principles on which they depend.

The mind is, as it were, a photographic plate, which is gradually cleansed by the effort to think rightly, and which, when so cleansed, and not before, receives impressions from the light of truth.

This passage from 'facts to principles is called induction; and induction, in its highest form, is, as I have just stated, a kind of inspiration. But, to make it sure, the inward sight must be shown to be in accordance with outward fact.

Newton pondered all these things.

He looked, as was his wont, into the darkness until it became entirely luminous.

How this light arises we cannot explain; but, as a matter of fact, it does arise. Let me remark here, that this kind of pondering is a process with which the ancients could have been but imperfectly acquainted.

The believers in magic and miracles of a couple of centuries ago had all the strength of Mr. Mozley's present logic on their side.

They had done for themselves what he rejoices in having so effectually done for us — cleared the ground of the belief in the order of nature

, and declared magic, miracles, and witchcraft to be matters for 'ordinary evidence' to decide. 'The principle of miracles' thus 'befriended' had free scope, and we know the result.

Skilled in all the rules of human evidence, and versed in all the arts of cross-examination, these men, nevertheless, went systematically astray, and committed the deadliest wrongs against humanity. And why?

Because they could not put Nature into the witness-box, and question her

— of her voiceless 'testimony' they knew nothing. In all cases between man and man, their judgment was to be relied on; but in all cases between man and nature, they were blind leaders of the blind. [Footnote:

And why? Because they could not put Nature into the witness-box, and question her — of her voiceless 'testimony' they knew nothing.

In all cases between man and man, their judgment was to be relied on; but in all cases between man and nature, they were blind leaders of the blind.

[Footnote: 'In 1664 two women were hung in Suffolk, under a sentence of Sir Matthew Hale, who took the opportunity of declaring that the reality of witchcraft was unquestionable; "for first, the Scriptures had affirmed so much;

… suspension of the earth's rotation, I think the right to exercise a greater reserve in accepting the miracle, and to demand stronger evidence in support of it than that which would have satisfied an ancient Israelite, will still be conceded to a man of science.

There is a scientific as well as an historic imagination; and when, by the exercise of the former, the stoppage of the earth's rotation is clearly realised, the event assumes proportions so vast, in comparison with the result to be obtained by it, that belief reels under the reflection.

The energy here involved is equal to that of six trillions of horses working for the whole of the time employed by Joshua in the destruction of his foes.

Constancy of form in the grouping of the molecules, and not constancy of the molecules themselves, is the correlative of this constancy of perception.

Life is a wave which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.

Supposing, then, the molecules of the human body, instead of replacing others, and thus renewing a pre-existing form, to be gathered first hand from nature and put together in the same relative positions as those which they occupy in the body.

How is the sense of personal identity maintained across this flight of molecules? To man, as we know him, matter is necessary to consciousness; but the matter of any period may be all changed, while consciousness exhibits no solution of continuity.

Like changing sentinels, the oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon that depart, seem to whisper their secret to their comrades that arrive, and thus, while the Non-ego shifts, the Ego remains the same.

Constancy of form in the grouping of the molecules, and not constancy of the molecules themselves, is the correlative of this constancy of perception. Life is a wave which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.

… of long-continued development, or an endowment conferred once for all on man at his creation, we find him here gifted with a mind curious to know the causes of things, and surrounded by objects which excite its questionings, and raise the desire for an explanation.

It is related of a young Prince of one of the Pacific Islands, that when he first saw himself in a looking-glass, he ran round the glass to see who was standing at the back.

And thus it is with the general human intellect, as regards the phenomena of the external world. It wishes to get behind and learn the causes and connections of these phenomena.

atom is added to atom, and molecule to molecule, not boisterously or fortuitously, but silently and symmetrically, and in accordance with laws more rigid than those which guide a human builder when he places his materials together.

Imagine the bricks and stones of this town of Dundee endowed with structural power.

Imagine them attracting and repelling, and arranging themselves into streets and houses and Kinnaird Halls — would not that be wonderful?

To use the language of an American poet, 'the atoms march in tune,' moving to the music of law, which thus renders the commonest substance in nature a miracle of beauty.

It is the function of science, not as some think to divest this universe of its wonder and mystery, but, as in the case before us, to point out the wonder and the mystery of common things.

Those fern-like forms, which on a frosty morning overspread your windowpanes, illustrate the action of the same force. Breathe upon such a pane before the fires are lighted, and reduce the solid crystalline film to the liquid condition; then watch its subsequent resolidification.

Flowers bloomed before men saw them, and the quantity of power wasted before man could utilise it is all but infinite compared with what now remains.

We are truly heirs of all the ages; but as honest men it behoves us to learn the extent of our inheritance, and as brave ones not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.

The healthy attitude of mind with reference to this subject is that of the poet, who, when asked whence came the rhodora, joyfully acknowledged his brotherhood with the flower

It is perfectly vain to attempt to stop enquiry in this direction.

Depend upon it, if a chemist by bringing the proper materials together, in a retort or crucible, could make a baby, he would do it.

There is no law, moral or physical, forbidding him to do it. At the present moment there are, no doubt, persons experimenting on the possibility of producing what we call life out of inorganic materials. Let them pursue their studies in peace;

Doubt those who would deduce from the fall of the tower of Siloam the anger of the Lord against those who were crushed. Doubt equally those who pretend to see in cholera, cattle-plague, and bad harvests, evidences of Divine anger.

Doubt those spiritual guides who in Scotland have lately propounded the monstrous theory that the depreciation of railway scrip is a consequence of railway travelling on Sundays.

Let them not, as far as you are concerned, libel the system of nature with their ignorant hypotheses.

That question still remains unanswered, and science makes no attempt to answer it. As far as I can see, there is no quality in the human intellect which is fit to be applied to the solution of the problem. It entirely transcends us.

The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence.

The phenomena of matter and force lie within our intellectual range, and as far as they reach we will at all hazards push our enquiries.

Science is mute in reply to these questions. But if the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared with a solution? To whom has this arm of the Lord been revealed?

Let us lower our heads, and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all.

Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge at some future day. The process of things upon this earth has been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the Iguanodon and his contemporaries, to the President and Members of the British Association.

Musings on the Matterhorn, July 27, 1868.

Hacked and hurt by time, the aspect of the mountain from its higher crags saddened me.

Hitherto the impression it made was that of savage strength; here we had inexorable decay. But this notion of decay implied a reference to a period when the Matterhorn was in the full strength of mountainhood.

He turned to me at length and said, 'You surely must have a theory of the universe.' That I should in one way or another have solved this mystery of mysteries seemed, to my friend a matter of course.

'I have not even a theory of magnetism' was my reply.

We ought to learn to wait. We ought assuredly to pause before closing with the advances of those expounders of the ways of God to men, who offer us intellectual peace at the modest cost of intellectual life.

There have been men who by wise attention to this point might have risen to any eminence — might have made great discoveries, written great poems, commanded armies, or ruled states, but who by unwise neglect of this point have come to nothing.

Imagine Hercules as oarsman in a rotten boat; what can he do there but by the very force of his stroke expedite the ruin of his craft?

Take care then of the timbers of your boat, and avoid all practices likely to introduce either wet or dry rot amongst them. And this is not to be accomplished by desultory or intermittent efforts of the will, but by the formation of habits.

There are Tories even in science who regard Imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed. They have observed its action in weak vessels, and are unduly impressed by its disasters.

But they might with equal justice point to exploded boilers as an argument against the use of steam.

With accurate experiment and observation to work upon, Imagination becomes the architect of physical theory.

If, therefore, you hold our President to be reasonable, it is because he behaves as if he were reasonable. As in the case of the aether, beyond the 'as if' you cannot go.

Nay, I should not wonder if a close comparison of the data on which both inferences rest, caused many respectable persons to conclude that the aether had the best of it.

This universal medium, this light-aether as it is called, is the vehicle, not the origin, of wave-motion. It receives and transmits, but it does not create. Whence does it derive the motions it conveys? For the most part from luminous bodies.

Collectively, they give us the impression of whiteness. Pure unsifted solar light is white; and, if all the wave-constituents of such light be reduced in the same proportion, the light, though diminished in intensity, will still be white.

The whiteness of snow with the sun shining upon it, is barely tolerable to the eye.

The same snow under an overcast firmament is still white. Such a firmament enfeebles the light by reflecting it upwards;

They abstract in succession the violet, the indigo, the blue, and even disturb the proportions of green. The transmitted light under such circumstances must pass from yellow through orange to red. This also is exactly what we find in nature.

Thus, while the reflected light gives us at noon the deep azure of the Alpine skies, the transmitted light gives us at sunset the warm crimson of the Alpine snows.

The phenomena certainly occur as if our atmosphere were a medium rendered slightly turbid by the mechanical suspension of exceedingly small foreign particles.

A trace of soap in water gives a tint of blue. London, and I fear Liverpool, milk makes an approximation to the same colour, through the operation of the same cause; and

Helmholtz has irreverently disclosed the fact that the deepest blue eye is simply a turbid medium.

The action of turbid media upon light was illustrated by Goethe, who, though unacquainted with the undulatory theory, was led by his experiments to regard the firmament as an illuminated turbid medium, with the darkness of space behind it.

Outside this shell we should have the deep blue firmament. Let the atmospheric space beyond the shell be swept clean, and the sky-matter properly gathered up. What would be its probable amount?

I have sometimes thought that a lady's portmanteau would contain it all.

I have thought that even a gentleman's portmanteau — possibly his snuff-box — might take it in.

This they explore with a courage not unmixed with reverence, and according to methods which, like the quality of a tree, are tested by their fruits.

They have but one desire — to know the truth. They have but one fear — to believe a lie.

And if they know the strength of science, and rely upon it with unswerving trust, they also know the limits beyond which science ceases to be strong.

The first five propositions are a fair general statement of the atomic philosophy, as now held. As regards the sixth, Democritus made his finer atoms do duty for the nervous system, whose functions were then unknown.

The atoms of Democritus are individually without sensation; they combine in obedience to mechanical laws; and not only organic forms, but the phenomena of sensation and thought, are the result of their combination.

That great enigma, 'the exquisite adaptation of one part of an organism to another part, and to the conditions of life,' more especially the construction of the human body, Democritus made no attempt to solve.

His philosophy was almost identical with that of Democritus; but he never quoted either friend or foe. One main object of Epicurus was to free the world from superstition and the fear of death. Death be treated with indifference. It merely robs us of sensation.

As long as we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.

Life has no more evil for him who has made up his mind that it is no evil not to live. He adored the gods, but not in the ordinary fashion. The idea of Divine power, properly purified, he thought an elevating one.

… attributes in a modern physical investigator — indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language which led to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while he had, as yet, failed to grasp even the elements of it.

He put words in the place of things, subject in the place of object.

He preached Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of enquiry, by passing from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the general.

The aberrations of reason were, in his view, an affair of the material brain. Mental disease is brain disease; but then the immortal reason sits apart, and cannot be touched by the disease.

The errors of madness are those of the instrument, not of the performer.

It may be more than a mere result of education, connecting itself, probably, with the deeper mental structure of the two men, that the idea of Gassendi, above enunciated, is substantially the same as that expressed by Professor Clerk Maxwell, at the close of the …

He swept the curve of discussion through the really significant points of the subject, enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument which a less compact mind would have spread over pages.

But there is one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it, however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression of the vast amount of labour, both of observation and of thought, implied in its production.

Let us glance at its principles.

This is done without a trace of ill-temper.

He moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the logical pulverisation of the objector.

But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been stilled, there is an emotion of the intellect, incident to the discernment of new truth, which often colours and warms the pages of Mr. Darwin.

and that were some of us who have pondered this question to follow a very common example, and accept testimony because it falls in with our belief, we also should eagerly close with the evidence referred to.

But there is in the true man of science a desire stronger than the wish to have his beliefs upheld; namely, the desire to have them true.

And this stronger wish causes him to reject the most plausible support, if he has reason to suspect that it is vitiated by error.

Whewell speaks of enthusiasm of temper as a hindrance to science; but he means the enthusiasm of weak heads.

There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in which science finds an ally

; and it is to the lowering of this fire, rather than to the diminution of intellectual insight, that the lessening productiveness of men of science, in their mature years, is to be ascribed. Mr. Buckle sought to detach intellectual achievement from moral force.

nor is it wanting in persons who seek their shelter, and try to persuade others to do the same. The unstable and the weak have yielded and will yield to this persuasion, and they to whom repose is sweeter than the truth. But

I would exhort you to refuse the offered shelter, and to scorn the base repose — to accept, if the choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, the breezy leap of the torrent before the foetid stillness of the swamp.

In the course of this Address I have touched on debatable questions, and led you over what will be deemed dangerous ground — and this partly with the view of telling you that, as regards these questions, science claims unrestricted right of search.

you are not urged to erect it into an idol. The inexorable advance of man's understanding in the path of knowledge, and those unquenchable claims of his moral and emotional nature, which the understanding can never satisfy, are here equally set forth.

The world embraces not only a Newton, but a Shakspeare — not only a Boyle, but a Raphael — not only a Kant, but a Beethoven — not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle.

Not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are not opposed, but supplementary — not mutually exclusive, but reconcilable.

… the mystery in accordance with its own needs — then, casting aside all the restrictions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties of man.

Here, however, I touch a theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.

To the grasp of geology, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded like potter's clay; its authority as a system of cosmogony being discredited on all hands, by the abandonment of the obvious meaning of its writer.

It is a poem, not a scientific treatise.

In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful.

Emerson. I do so mainly because in him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of Science, past, present, or prospective.

In his case Poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes her graver brother Science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter.

By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world. Our present theme is touched upon in the lines —

But you may urge that there must have been a time when the first yeast-cell was generated. Granted — exactly as there was a time when the first barley-corn was generated.

Let not the delusion lay hold of you that a living thing is easily generated because it is small.

Both the yeast-plant and the barley-plant lose themselves in the dim twilight of antiquity, and in this our day there is no more proof of the spontaneous generation of the one, than there is of the spontaneous generation of the other.

The act of fermentation, then, is a result of the effort of the little plant to maintain its respiration by means of combined oxygen, when its supply of free oxygen is cut off.

As defined by Pasteur, fermentation is life without air.

But here the knowledge of that thorough investigator comes to our aid to warn us against errors which have 'been committed over and over again. It is not all yeast-cells that can thus live without air and provoke fermentation.

For more than two thousand years the attraction of light bodies by amber was the sum of human knowledge regarding electricity, and for more than two thousand years fermentation was effected without any knowledge of its cause.

In science one discovery grows out of another, and cannot appear without its proper antecedent.

Thus, before fermentation could be understood, the microscope had to be invented, and brought to a considerable degree of perfection. Note the growth of knowledge.

This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of information regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the suffering sentient world.

We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes.

Facts like these excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be — that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and …

Without a moment's hesitation I jumped to the conclusion that these maggots had been spontaneously generated in the meat. I had no knowledge which could qualify or oppose this conclusion, and for the time it was irresistible.

The childhood of the individual typifies that of the race, and the belief here enunciated was that of the world for nearly two thousand years.

To the examination of this very point the celebrated Francesco Redi, physician to the Grand Dukes Ferdinand II. and Cosmo III. of Tuscany, and a member of the Academy del Cimento, addressed himself in 1668.

probably the population of a drop of our turbid infusion would be this many times multiplied. The field of the microscope is crowded with organisms, some wabbling slowly, others shooting rapidly across the microscopic field.

They dart hither and thither like a rain of minute projectiles; they pirouette and spin so quickly round, that the retention of the retinal impression transforms the little living rod into a twirling wheel.

And yet the most celebrated naturalists tell us they are vegetables. From the rod-like shape which they so frequently assume, these organisms are called 'bacteria' — a term, be it here remarked, which covers organisms of very diverse kinds.

the inference is — 'Therefore if a turnip infusion similarly exposed develope bacteria, they must be spontaneously generated.' The inference, on the face of it, is an unwarranted one. But while as matter of logic it is inconclusive, as matter of fact it is chimerical.

London air is as surely charged with the germs of bacteria as London chimneys are with smoke.

The inference just referred to is completely disposed of by the simple question: 'Why, when your sterilised organic infusion is exposed to optically puree air, should this generation of life de novo utterly cease?

The antiseptic system, at which I have already glanced, illustrates the manner in which beneficent results of the gravest moment follow in the wake of clear theoretic insight.

Surgery was once a noble art; it is now, as well, a noble science.

Prior to the introduction of the antiseptic system, the thoughtful surgeon could not have failed to learn empirically that there was something in the air which often defeated the most consummate operative skill. That something the antiseptic treatment destroys or renders innocuous.

The whole of his deductions, moreover, rested upon the inductions of Kepler.

Newton shot beyond his predecessors; but his thoughts were rooted in their thoughts, and a just distribution of merit would assign to them a fair portion of the honour of discovery.

Scientific theories sometimes float like rumours in the air before they receive complete expression. The doom of a doctrine is often practically sealed, and the truth of one is often practically accepted, long prior to the demonstration of either the error or the truth.

There is no solution of continuity in science. It is not given to any man, however endowed, to rise spontaneously into intellectual splendour without the parentage of antecedent thought.

Great discoveries grow.

Here, as in other cases, we have first the seed, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear, the last member of the series implying the first.

The whole of his deductions, moreover, rested upon the inductions of Kepler. Newton shot beyond his predecessors; but his thoughts were rooted in their thoughts, and a just distribution of merit would assign to them a fair portion of the honour of discovery.

Scientific theories sometimes float like rumours in the air before they receive complete expression.

The doom of a doctrine is often practically sealed, and the truth of one is often practically accepted, long prior to the demonstration of either the error or the truth.

This doctrine recognises in the material universe a constant sum of power made up of items among which the most Protean fluctuations are incessantly going on.

It is as if the body of Nature were alive, the thrill and interchange of its energies resembling those of an organism.

The parts of the 'stupendous whole' shift and change, augment and diminish, appear and disappear, while the total of which they are the parts remains quantitatively immutable.

They are mathematically equal to each other. No particle of vapour was formed and lifted without being paid for in the currency of solar heat; no particle returns as water to the sea without the exact quantitative restitution of that heat.

There is nothing gratuitous in physical nature, no expenditure without equivalent gain, no gain without equivalent expenditure.

With inexorable constancy the one accompanies the other, leaving no nook or crevice between them for spontaneity to mingle with the pure and necessary play of natural force. Has this uniformity of nature ever been broken? The reply is: 'Not to the knowledge of science.'

No engine, however subtly devised, can evade this law of equivalence, or perform on its own account the smallest modicum of work.

The machine distributes, but it cannot create.

Is the animal body, then, to be classed among machines? When I lift a weight, or throw a stone, or climb a mountain, or wrestle with my comrade, am I not conscious of actually creating and expending force?

You can readily maintain it at a white heat, or even fuse it. This is a very remarkable result. From the muscles of the arm, with a temperature of 100 degrees, we extract the temperature of molten platinum, which is nearly four thousand degrees.

The miracle here is the reverse of that of the burning bush mentioned in Exodus. There the bush burned, but was not consumed — here the body is consumed, but does not burn.

The similarity of the action with that of the Voltaic battery when it heats an external wire is too obvious to need pointing out.

so the nerves, acting on the muscles, can unlock an amount of power out of all proportion to the work done by the nerves themselves.'

The nerves, according to Mayer, pull the trigger, but the gunpowder which they ignite is stored in the muscles.

This is the view now universally entertained.

Whence this impulse? From the centre of the nervous system. But how did it originate there? This is the critical question, to which some will reply that it had its origin in the human soul.

The aim and effort of science is to explain the unknown in terms of the known.

Explanation, therefore, is conditioned by knowledge. You have probably heard the story of the German peasant, who, in early railway days, was taken to see the performance of a locomotive. He had never known carriages to be moved except by animal power.

When facts present themselves let us dare to face them, but let the man of science equally dare to confess ignorance where it prevails. What then is the causal connection, if any, between the objective and subjective — between molecular motions and states of consciousness?

My answer is: I do not see the connection, nor have I as yet met anybody who does.

It is no explanation to say that the objective and subjective effects are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This is the very core of the difficulty.

What then is the causal connection, if any, between the objective and subjective — between molecular motions and states of consciousness? My answer is: I do not see the connection, nor have I as yet met anybody who does.

It is no explanation to say that the objective and subjective effects are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides?

This is the very core of the difficulty. There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window-pane?

Why should the phenomenon have two sides? This is the very core of the difficulty. There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness.

Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window-pane?

If not, why should the molecular motion of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion — consciousness?

We are not radically different from our historic ancestors, and any feeling which affected them profoundly, requires only appropriate clothing to affect us.

The world will not lightly relinquish its heritage of poetic feeling, and metaphysic will be welcomed when it abandons its pretensions to scientific discovery and consents to be ranked as a kind of poetry.

'A good symbol,' says Emerson, 'is a missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are each remembered by its happiest figure. There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol.

The age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre-existent capacities, but it cannot create them. The worthy Robert Owen, who saw in external circumstances the great moulders of human character, was obliged to supplement his doctrine by making the man himself one of the circumstances.

It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.

How many disorders, ghostly and bodily, are transmitted to us by inheritance?

On the homely principle that "a burnt child dreads the fire," it will make you think twice before venturing on a repetition of your crime.

Observe, finally, the consistency of our conduct. You offend, you say, because you cannot help offending, to the public detriment. We punish, is our reply, because we cannot help punishing, for the public good.

Practically, then, as Bishop Butler predicted, we act as the world acted when it supposed the evil deeds of its criminals to be the products of free-will.' [Footnote: An eminent Church dignitary describes all this, not unkindly, as 'truculent logic.'

If the preacher thoroughly feel that words of enlightenment, courage, and admonition enter into the list of forces employed by Nature herself for man's amelioration, since she gifted man with speech, he will suffer no paralysis to fall upon his tongue.

Dung the fig-tree hopefully, and not until its barrenness has been demonstrated beyond a doubt let the sentence go forth, 'Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground?'

I remember when a youth in the town of Halifax, some two-and-thirty years ago, attending a lecture given by a young man to a small but select audience. The aspect of the lecturer was earnest and practical, and his voice soon rivetted attention.

To a deeper virtue belonging to human nature in its purer forms I am disposed to refer the excellence of both.

Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence.

We may admit, with Fichte, 'that superstition has unquestionably constrained its subjects to abandon many pernicious practices and to adopt many useful ones;' the real loss accompanying its decay at the present day has been thus clearly stated by the same philosopher:

if asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, 'the problem of the universe,' I must shake my head in doubt.

I compare the mind of man to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions exists infinite silence.

The phenomena of matter and force come within our intellectual range; but behind, and above, and around us the real mystery of the universe lies unsolved, and, as far as we are concerned, is incapable of solution.

The Professor continues: 'If I explain attraction and repulsion as exhibitions of mind, as psychical phenomena, I simply throw the Psyche out of the window, and the Psyche ceases to be a Psyche.'

I may say, in passing, that the Psyche that could be cast out of the window is not worth houseroom.

At this point the translator, who is evidently a man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note.

But what moved the nerve molecules which unlocked the muscle? The sense of pain, it may be replied. But how can a sense of pain, or any other state of consciousness, make matter move?

Not all the sense of pain or pleasure in the world could lift a stone or move a billiard-ball; why should it stir a molecule?

Try to express the motion numerically in terms of the sensation, and the difficulty immediately appears.