468 FRAGMENTS OP SCIENCE. 
the combination and separation of insensate atoms deduce 
all terrestrial things, including organic forms and their 
phenomena. Let me tell you in the first instance how 
far I am prepared to go with you. I admit that you can 
build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force; 
that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly won- 
derful structures which are thus produced. I will go 
further and acknowledge that even a tree or flower might 
in this way be organized. Nay, if you can show me 
an animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it 
also might be put together by the suitable play of molec- 
ular force. 
"Thus far our way is clear, but now comes my diffi- 
culty. Your atoms are individually without sensation, 
much more are they without intelligence. May I ask you, 
then, to try your hand upon this problem. Take your 
dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead 
carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phos- 
phorus atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of 
shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine them sepa- 
rate and sensationless; observe them running together and 
forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely 
mechanical process, is seeaUe by the mind. But can you 
see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that 
mechanical act, and from these individually dead atoms, 
sensation, thought, and emotion are to rise? Are you 
likely to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the 
Differential Calculus out of the clash of billiard-balls? I 
am not all bereft of this Vorstellungs-Kraft of which you 
speak, nor am I, like so many of my brethren, a mere 
vacuum as regards scientific knowledge. I can follow a par- 
ticle of rnusk until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can 
follow the waves of sound until their tremors reach the 
water of the labyrinth, and set the qtolrths and Corti's 
fibers in motion; I can also visualize the waves of ether as 
they cross the eye and hit the retina. Nay more, I am 
able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted 
at the periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of 
the braiTTEhrown into tremors. My insight is not baffled 
by these physical processes. "What baffles and bewilders 
me is the notion that from those physical tremors things 
so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought, 
and emotion can be derived. You may say, or think, that 
