HORIZON LINES 



process is inseparable from the physical processes; 

 it supplements or controls them, but is more than 

 they are. Life is not a spirit, but a form of energy 

 potential in matter, and developed and active when 

 the conditions are right. A living body is moved by 

 a new force just as truly as a piece of magnetized 

 steel is moved by a new force, or as truly as a 

 new force streams through the telegraph-wires — 

 a transformation of other forces, and behaving in a 

 new way, and producing new results. There is noth- 

 ing new under the sun; all are made of one stuff; but 

 there are endless transformations and permutations 

 of this one stuff, and one of them is the phenomenon 

 of life, or vitality. 



Electricity is not matter, but it is the most un- 

 mistakable and ubiquitous form of energy known 

 to us. The human mind is a phenomenon of mat- 

 ter; how related to the electro-magnetic world we 

 know not, but undoubtedly in some way bound up 

 with it. 



To discuss the soul or attempt to interpret it in 

 terms of these mundane forces will, of course, offend 

 the so-called spiritualists. So long have we been 

 taught to look upon the soul as belonging to an- 

 other world, another order of things from that of the 

 body. Whitman says that soul and body are one, 

 and leaves his puzzled reader to solve the riddle as 

 best he can. Heaven and earth are one in the same 

 sense — there is nothing alien or irreconcilable be- 



249 



