I] OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 13 



the little band of travellers. We need not wonder if the way be 

 hard to follow, and if these wayfarers have yet gathered little. 

 A harvest has been reaped by others, and the gleaning of the grapes 

 is slow. 



It behoves us always to remember that in physics it has taken 

 great men to discover simple things. They are very great names 

 indeed which we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, 

 the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup. 

 It is but the shghtest adumbration of a dynamical morphology that 

 we can hope to have until the physicist and the mathematician shall 

 have made these problems of ours their own, or till a new Boscovich shall 

 have written for the naturahst the new TheariaPhilosophiaeNaturalis. 



How far even then mathematics will suffice to describe, and 

 physics to explain, the fabric of the body, no man can foresee. It 

 may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, 

 and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain 

 the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For my 

 part, I think it is not so. Of how it is that the soul informs the 

 body, physical science teaches me nothing; and that living matter 

 influences and is influenced by mind is a mystery without a clu'e. 

 Consciousness is not explained to my comprehension by all the 

 nerve-paths and neurones of the physiologist ; nor do I ask of physics 

 how goodness shines in one man's face, and evil betrays itself in 

 another. But of the construction and growth and working of the 

 body, as of all else that is of the earth earthy, physical science is, 

 in my humble opinion, our only teacher and guide. 



Often and often it happens that our physical knowledge is in- 

 adequate to explain the mechanical working of the organism; the 

 phenomena are superlatively . complex, the procedure is involved 

 and entangled, and the investigation has occupied but a few short 

 lives of men. When physical science falls short of explaining the 

 order which reigns throughout these manifold phenomena — an order 

 more characteristic in its totality than any of its phenomena in 

 themselves — men hasten: to invoke a guiding principle, an entelechy, 

 or call it what you will. But all the while no physical law, any 

 more than gravity itself, not even among the puzzles of stereo- 

 chemistry or of physiological surface-action and osmosis, is known 

 to be transgressed by the bodily mechanism. 



