Another difficulty is that the force seems to act instantaneously; every body in the universe takes cognizance of the change of position of every other body and moves accordingly. Another difficulty is that the force is not obstructed by any intervening body, but all bodies are transparent to it.

If to escape these difficulties we change our theory and assume that gravitation is accounted for by molecular action and so is correlated with all energy, the difficulties remain. Hypotheses accounting for gravitation in this way are at present little more than fancies, guesses or suggestions; but as the best work of keen, scientific minds, they strikingly exemplify the truth of my proposition.

If the ether is supposed to be continuous, filling all space, the old question of the plenum and the vacuum returns. If matter is continuous, filling all space, how is motion possible? And if possibility of motion is still affirmed, have we not essentially changed the very idea of matter as solid or occupying space?

If, however, the ether is discontinuous, composed of atoms of a second order finer than those of gross matter, we are no nearer a satisfactory explanation.

Suppose, for example, that the energy of gravitation is transmitted through space by the impact of the atoms of the ether; we do not escape the necessity of action at a distance; for, as Clerk-Maxwell says, we have no evidence that real contact ever takes place between two bodies . . . and all that we have done is to substitute for a single action at a great distance a series of actions at smaller distances between the parts of a medium; so that we cannot even thus get rid of action at a distance." Also, according to this second form of the theory of the universe as mechanism, potential force could no longer be recognized; for force would exist, not as inherent in bodies, but only as energizing in motion and communicated in the impact of bodies.

Nor do we escape the difficulties as to the expenditure and accumulation of force. Of the hypothesis accounting for gravitation by molecular action, the one most completely worked out appears to be that of Le Sage. He supposes corpuscles, so small that they very rarely collide with one another, streaming in all directions into our universe from beyond its limits. A body alone in free space would be so equally bombarded on all sides by these corpuscles that it would not be moved. But when two bodies confront each other, the confronting sides will be partially screened from the bombardment, and the excess of corpuscles impinging on the outer sides drive the bodies towards each other. It has been calculated that the rate at which energy would be thus spent in order to maintain the gravitating property of a single pound, would be at least millions of millions of foot-pounds in a

second. A large part of this immense amount of energy which the corpuscles bring with them they do not carry away. It is not transformed into heat; for "if any appreciable fraction of this energy is communicated to the body in the form of heat, the amount of heat so generated would in a few seconds raise it, and in like manner the whole material universe, to a white heat." What becomes of it remains unaccounted for. It must either be annihilated or its continuous influx must increase the amount of energy in the universe. Clerk-Maxwell, from whom I take the account of Le Sage's hypothesis, has examined it and two other molecular theories of gravitation, and finds it impossible by any one of them to account for gravitation in accordance with the law of the persistence of force.

Similar difficulties are involved in all attempts to explain, in accordance with this law, cohesive attraction and chemical affinity, either as properties of matter or as results of molecular action, and also all interaction of matter, molar or molecular. The changes in nature are effected by complex causes, each modifying the other. They act together like a swarm of bees building and filling their honey-comb, or crowds of coral zoophytes working together through many generations, building a brain-coral or a Neptune's cup. The several bodies are never in perfect contact. If the several molecules or other agents each exerts its power continuously, acting on whatever comes within its range, then there is continuous expenditure without resupply and without exhaustion, and a continuous increase of the sum total of force. If, on the other hand, the force sinks inactive into potentiality until the other agent comes near, how is the presence of the other agent signaled across the intervening space? The energy exerted by a body varies with its varying conditions. Chemical substances in their nascent state exhibit powers which they exert at no other time. Some substances have no affinity at a low temperature, but readily combine when heated to certain higher degrees. A force which thus depends on conditions, and which comes and goes, cannot be an inherent property of the body. We should have to say that the body had this power down to a certain temperature, or within certain conditions, and otherwise had it not; as Galileo, when told that water cannot be raised in a pump above thirty-two feet, replied that he supposed nature abhorred a vacuum to the distance of thirty-two feet and beyond that did not abhor it. Thus the mechanical theory in its second form fails to explain the interaction of bodies, whether molar or molecular, and their co-action in a complex of causes. It seems impossible that an unconscious atom or mass of matter, whose force is inactive in potentiality, should suddenly emit it at the approach of a body separated whether far or near in space, and every moment adjust it instan

taneously and with mathematical exactness to the varying distances and conditions of all the atoms or masses on which it acts the action being adjusted not only to a single body and its conditions but to a great number of bodies, molar or molecular, changing at every

moment.

As physical science pushes its researches farther and farther it is noticeable that its explanations of facts solely by mechanism become artificial, complicated, and sometimes inconceivable and seemingly contradictory. This of itself creates a presumption that the mechanical theory is inadequate and must give way to a scientific exposition less affecting extreme simplicity as a theory and involving less intricacy, artificiality and difficulty in its detailed explanation of facts.

III. Scientists themselves have recognized in various ways the necessity of some power other than matter and force to account for and explain the known facts of personality and also of the physical or material world.

This is involved in the conclusion to which Mr. Spencer comes: "By the persistence of force we really mean the persistence of some Power which transcends our knowledge and conception. . . . The persistence of Force is but another mode of asserting an Unconditioned Reality, without beginning or end. . . . The axiomatic truths of physical science unavoidably postulate Absolute Being as their common basis."* Others, while denying the existence of supernatural and hyper-material spirit, have found themselves compelled to recognize spirit or some force analogous to it; as in Hylozoism, or the doctrine of the soul of the world, or the world a living organism; as also by Czolbe, who, in his " Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge," (1865), supposes "a sort of world-soul which consists of sensations that are immutably bound up with the vibrations of atoms, and that only condense themselves in the human organism and are aggregated into the sum of the life of the soul." The same necessity is exemplified in the unconscious intelligence of Hartmann, in the unconscious will of Schopenhauer, and in Noiré's assumption of "a monadic Nature-essence, endowed with the attributes of extension and feeling." Scientists also find themselves compelled to recognize a directive force, as well as the energy which is manifested in motion. In explaining certain phenomena of the mixing of gases, Sir William Thomson and ClerkMaxwell suppose, as a concrete representation of this directive power, molecular "demons," having intelligence enough to open a door to particles approaching it with velocity above a certain rate on one side or below that rate on the other. Paracelsus supposed an Archeus in

First Principles, 74, pp. 255, 256.

the stomach that directed the process of digestion; besides this, Van Helmont supposed a Pylorus opening and shutting the pyloric orifice. The fact that the most skilled investigators using the severest scientific methods find a directive agency in nature which they can best represent by recurring to the medieval supposition of an intelligent agent, a molecular "demon" directing movements and opening and shutting doors, is one of the many evidences that there is in matter and energy a power other than matter and energy, without which these observed facts cannot be explained.

It may be added that the universe is more closely analogous to a living organism than to a machine. The latter is a completed structure into which no new part or function can be admitted without spoiling the machine. In a living organism, on the contrary, all the parts are subordinate to the whole and act concurrently and progressively in the realization of its plan or ideal; and there is perpetual transition, perpetual reception and emission of both matter and force. in the process. If then either of these forms of matter must be taken as the matrix in which to mold our thought of the cosmos, it must be the organism rather than the machine. And especially is this required by the theory of evolution; for it presents nature not as a rigid, completed, unchangeable machine, but as material in the highest degree plastic, never fixed in a completed arrangement, always in transition, always receptive and outgoing; and in fact it usually describes the physical process as a growth though it uses the names of development or evolution.

IV. We are, then, forced to conclude that materialism cannot account for and explain the facts of matter and motor-force, and much less the facts of personality. Du Bois-Reymond, in his lecture at Leipzig "On the Limits of the Knowledge of Nature," reaches the same conclusion: "We are not in a position to conceive the atoms; and we are unable from the atoms and their motion to explain the slightest phenomenon of consciousness. We may turn and twist the notion of matter as we like, we always come on an ultimate something that is incomprehensible if not absolutely contradictory, as in the hypothesis of forces which act at a distance through empty space. There is no hope of ever solving this problem; the hindrance is transcendental."*

Materialism, then, must admit that it cannot explain the known facts of the universe. Therein it acknowledges its own defeat. As Lange truly says: "The whole cause of Materialism is lost by the admission of the inexplicableness of all natural occurrences. If mate

* See Lange: History of Materialism; translation by Thomas. Vol. II., 309.

rialism quietly acquiesces in this inexplicableness, it ceases to be a philosophical principle."*

V. The reasonable conclusion is that man as a personal being is spirit, supernatural and hyper-material. He has knowledge of himself in his own self-consciousness as a person. Personality thus known cannot be identified with matter and the energy which manifests itself in motion. It is also legitimate, according to the common usage of science, to assume a peculiar agent manifesting itself in the attributes of personality and accounting for them. Matter and energy themselves require the assumption of some agent other than matter and energy to account for them; materialism can account for neither the facts of personality nor the facts of matter and motor-force. Thus by the severest scientific investigations the knowledge of self given in selfconsciousness is confirmed, and the result of reasoning is that in knowing myself a person I know myself as spirit supernatural and hypermaterial. And thus also the way is opened to the conclusion that the transcendent Power which is the absolute ground of the universe is the absolute Reason, the eternal Spirit, the personal God. And this knowledge fills me with reverence for myself as, by personality, in the image of God and ennobled above matter and its energies, however sublime they may be in their manifestations in the universe, and however weak and short-lived I may be in my physical connection with the material world. Pascal says: "Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but it is a reed that thinks. There is no need that the universe arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But though the universe should crush him, man is more noble than that which destroys him, for he knows that he dies; but the universe, with all the advantage which it has over him, the universe knows nothing whatever about it." And Kant says: "Two things fill my soul with always new and increasing wonder and awe, and often and persistently my thought busies itself therewith:-the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. Both I need not seek and merely conjecture as concealed in darkness or in their greatness beyond my vision; I see them before me and knit them immediately with the consciousness of existence. The first begins at the place which I occupy in the world. of sense and broadens into the immeasurable vast of space and time my connection with worlds on worlds and systems on systems. The second begins at my invisible self, my personality, and places me in a universe which has true infinitude but is perceptible only to the intellect, and with which I know myself connected, not, as in the other

History of Materialism; Thomas' Trans. Vol. II., p. 161.

+ Pascal: Pensées, Chap. ii., X., p. 132, Louandre's Ed. Paris: 1858.