104 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



" Thank God I am protected against the worst, 

 and now for further reflection ! " 



This complex mass of action, emotional, in- 

 tellectual, aud mechanical, is evoked by the im- 

 pact upon the retina of the infinitesimal waves 

 of light coming from a few pencil-marks on a 

 bit of paper. We have, as Lange says, terror, 

 hope, sensation, calculation, possible ruin, and 

 victory, compressed into a moment. "What 

 caused the merchant to spring out of his 

 chair ? The contraction of his muscles. What 

 made his muscles contract ? An impulse of 

 the nerves, which lifted the proper latch, and 

 liberated the muscular power. Whence this im- 

 pulse ? 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. Expla- 

 nation, therefore, is conditioned by knowledge. 

 You have probably heard the story of the 

 German peasaut who, in early railway days, was 

 taken to see the performance of a locomotive. 

 He had never known carriages to be moved ex- 

 cept by animal power. Every explanation outside 

 of this conception lay beyond his experience, and 

 could not be invoked. After long reflection, 

 therefore, and seeing no possible escape from the 

 conclusion, he exclaimed confidently to his com- 

 panion, " Es miissen doch Pferde darin sein" 

 ("There must be horses inside "). Amusing as 

 this locomotive theory may seem, it illustrates a 

 deep-lying truth. 



With reference to our present question, some 

 may be disposed to press upon me such con- 

 siderations as these : Your motor nerves are 

 so many speaking-tubes, through which mes- 

 sages are sent from the man to the world ; 

 and your sensor nerves are so many conduits 

 through which the whispers of the world are 

 sent back to the man. But you have not told 

 us where is the man. Who or what is it that 

 sends and receives those messages through the 

 bodily organism ? Do not the phenomena point 

 to the existence of a self within the self, which 

 acts through the body as through a skillfully-con- 

 structed instrument ? You picture the muscles 

 as hearkening to the commands sent through the 

 motor nerves, and you picture the sensor nerves 

 as the vehicles of incoming intelligence ; are you 

 not bound to supplement this mechanism by the 

 assumption of an entity which uses it? In other 

 words, are you not forced by your own exposition 

 into the hypothesis of a free human soul ? 



Is this reasoning congruous with the knowl- 

 edge of our time ? If so, it cannot be called un- 

 scientific. On the same ground the anthropo- 

 morphic notion of a creative architect, endowed 

 with manlike powers of indefinite magnitude, is 

 to be regarded with consideration. It marks a 

 phase of theoretic activity, which the human 

 race could not escape, and our present objection 

 to such a notion rests on its incongruity with our 

 knowledge. " When God," says the great Jesuit 

 teacher, Perrone, " orders a given planet to stand 

 still, he does not detract from any law passed by 

 himself, but orders that planet to move round and 

 round the sun for such and such a time, then to 

 stand still, and then to move again, as his pleas- 

 ure may be." You notice that a modicum of 

 science has entered even the mind of Perrone. 

 At an earlier period he would not have said, 

 " When God orders a planet to move round the 

 sun," but " When God orders the sun to move 

 round a planet." And why, unless the com- 

 mands of the Almighty are hampered by consid- 

 erations of mass, should he not give this latter 

 order ? Why, moreover, has he suspended his 

 orders, and abandoned sun and planets to the law 

 of gravitation during those particular ages when 

 the human intellect was most specially prepared 

 to appreciate the wonder ? The case, to say the 

 least, is suspicious. In Joshua's time such an 

 hypothesis was allowable, and the error of Per- 

 rone is simply a sin against the law of relativity. 

 He, and such as he, transport into the nineteenth 

 century the puerilities of a by-gone age. No won- 

 der that our Catholic youth from time to time re- 

 bel against such teaching. 



But to return to the hypothesis of a human 

 soul, offered as an explanation or simplification of 

 a series of obscure phenomena. Adequate reflec- 

 tion shows that, instead of introducing light into 

 our minds, it increases our darkness. You do not 

 in this case explain the unknown in terms of the 

 known, which, as stated above, is the method of 

 science, but you explain the unknown in terms 

 of the more unknown. Try to mentally visualize 

 this soul as an entity distinct from the body, and 

 the difficulty immediately appears. From the side 

 of science all that we are warranted in stating is 

 that the terror, hope, sensation, and calculation 

 of Lange's merchant are psychical phenomena 

 produced by, or associated with, the molecular 

 processes set up by the waves of light iu a pre- 

 viously-prepared brain. 



When facts present themselves let us dare to 

 face them, but let us equally dare to confess igno- 

 rance where it prevails. What is the causal connec- 



