Life and Mmd 61 



LIFE AND MIND. 



Robert W. McBride, Indianapolis. 



We live, and we think. What is life? What is that we call mind, 

 of which thought is a product? 



Science gives us no satisfactory answer to either query. The best it 

 can do is to surmise, to speculate, and imagine; or, in other words, to 

 guess; and some of the guesses seem to me extremely wide of the mark. 

 While I am not learned in any department of science, I look with in- 

 terest on the efforts of the real students of science to solve the riddle 

 of the universe. But when the scientist reaches a point where he can 

 only surmise, speculate, and imagine, I feel justified in making my own 

 guess. 



Modern science has opened for us wonderful vistas in every direc- 

 tion. It reaches out into space and tells us with certainty of suns so 

 far away that light can only bridge the distance in more than a hun- 

 dred thousand years. What this means can be appreciated, when we 

 remember that light in eight minutes leaps across the ninety-three mil- 

 lions of miles that separate us from the sun. With equal certainty 

 science delves into the depths of the infinitesimally small, until its dis- 

 coveries stagger even imagination. It has made the earth's strata an 

 open book, in which we read the story of the ages. It has harnessed 

 the powers of earth and air and made them our servants. Wherever 

 science leads us we find an apparently homogeneous universe, homogene- 

 ous in the sense that matter in the distant sun, as revealed by the spectro- 

 scope, does not differ from matter as we know it on this insignificant 

 atom — our world, all apparently obeying uniform, unchanging, and un- 

 varying laws that rule everywhere and everything, from the mighty 

 sun as it wheels in distant space, to the tiniest animalcule revealed by 

 the microscope. Such laws tell Vis unmistakably of an intelligence beyond 

 our possible comprehension. While finite mind can only imagine in- 

 finity, we find in these things what seems to us infinity in space, in- 

 finity in duration, and infinity in that Power which lies back of and 

 apparently originates that controlling law. That law is therefore the 

 product of "Infinite Mind." 



But with all its accomplishments, has science as yet succeeded in 

 explaining any fundamental reality? Thus, the universe is composed 

 of what we call matter. Science, explaining matter, long ago told us, 

 with an air of absolute certainty, of ultimate atoms, the most minute 

 particle into which matter could be divided, of molecules, and of many 

 elementary substances. It now tells us that the atom is not the ulti- 

 mate thing they once thought it, but that back of the atom lies the 

 electron. It tells us that instead of the many elementary substances 

 of which we were once assured, it is possible or it may be probable that 

 there is only one single elementary substance, and that the so-called 

 many elementary substances are simply due to the manner in which the 

 electrons are arranged or grouped. The reasoning impresses us, but 

 it comes to us with the frank admission that no one ever saw an electron. 



"Proc. 38th Meeting-, 1922 (1923)." 



