THE SEVEN WORLD-PROBLEMS. 437 



La Mettrie, and sin against one of the first rules of philosophizing 

 " Entia non creanda sunt sine necessitate" ; for what purpose does 

 consciousness serve, what mechanism ? And if the atoms feel, what 

 need of organs of sense ? He furthermore overlooks the difficulty 

 that I have fully pointed out, of comprehending how the numerous 

 " atom-souls " can give rise to the aggregated consciousness of the whole 

 brain. 



A more accomplished morphologist might he excused for not being 

 able to distinguish the ideas of will and force, for misconceptions simi- 

 lar to this have been shown even by better-schooled men. Philoso- 

 phers and physicists have attempted to explain the distant action of 

 bodies upon each other through presumably empty space by means of 

 a will dwelling within the atoms. A wonderful will, indeed, that 

 must always belong to two ! that must will whether it wills or not, 

 and that in the direct ratio of the product of the masses, and the in- 

 verse ratio of the square of the distance ! a will, the projected sub- 

 ject of which must move in a conic section a will that reminds us 

 of the faith that can move mountains, but which has never been taken 

 account of in mechanics as a cause of motion. 



At all events, the opposition that has been offered to my assertion 

 of the incomprehensibility of consciousness on a mechanical theory, 

 shows how mistaken is the idea of the later philosophy that that in- 

 comprehensibility is self-evident. It appears, rather, that all philoso- 

 phizing upon the mind must begin with the statement of this point, 

 and thus with one of my corresponding arguments ; if mechanical 

 consciousness were comprehensible, there would be, in the strict sense, 

 no metaphysics. 



A more recent effort to enlarge the barriers of knowledge and 

 throw light upon the nature of matter proceeds from the Scottish 

 mathematico-physical school, from Sir William Thomson and that Mr. 

 Tait whose chauvinism renewed the dispute over Leibnitz's part in the 

 discovery of the infinitesimal calculus, and who went so far as to call 

 Leibnitz a thief, and to whom, therefore, the honor of being named in 

 this hall does not properly belong. Sir William Thomson and Mr. 

 Tait believe that certain important peculiarities that we must ascribe 

 to atoms may be derived from the remarkable properties which Herr 

 Helmholtz has discovered in the vortices of fluids. While it would be 

 rash lightly to reject this theory because it may fall short on some 

 points, it can be safely asserted that it is as little competent as any of 

 the previous theories to reconcile the contradictions which our under- 

 standing encounters in its efforts to comprehend matter and force. It, 

 moreover, acknowledges the second of the difficulties that oppose our 

 conception of the world, by granting that the vortex-movement either 

 has existed from eternity or has arisen through a supernatural impulse. 



We may count and distinguish seven of these difficulties, of which 

 I call those transcendental which appear insurmountable when we 



