98 BIOLOGICAL LECTURES. 



cannot under ordinary physical conditions. In other words, 

 there is nothing which was not there before. One is not get- 

 ting out of the machine what was not in it, but what was in it, 

 and there is no quarrel with the doctrine of the conservation 

 of energy. That doctrine, if true, would only insure conti- 

 nuity, regularity, and certainty of dependent relations. 



Still more than this. It is important to recognize how much 

 energy there may be in a microscopic mass of matter, and also 

 what an amount of intelligence may be there too ! Think of the 

 intelligence shown by a common ant : he lives in a community 

 having common interests, and where the duties of individuals 

 are appointed and faithfully executed, duties of securing 

 food, of protecting and caring for the young, of defending the 

 community as a whole. They make war, and slavery is the 

 price of peace ; they have a language of some sort and a 

 degree of civilization superior to some tribes of men, and all 

 this the outcome of a brain so small that no balance we have 

 is delicate enough to weigh it. It is plain proof that if mind 

 does require some material habitat, its requirements are not 

 excessive ; indeed, if one will remember that in a mass of mat- 

 ter only the thousandth part of an inch in diameter there are 

 thousands of millions of atoms, he will see that the possibility 

 of variety of form, of position, and of relations is almost infinite, 

 and if mind depended upon these in any measure, the possi- 

 bilities would also be nearly infinite. There is nothing in all 

 this that implies that what is called death ends all, rather the 

 contrary, for it is plainly in accordance with all we know to 

 hold that the so-called ego is a real material thing, a mole- 

 cule too minute to be seen or identified, but which absorbs all 

 experiences and holds them as memory, which can be disso- 

 ciated from the rest of the body, but which cannot itself be 

 disrupted any more than atoms of the ordinary sort can be, 

 which is as durable as we believe others to be, but differs from 

 them chiefly in having been educated by being in such a posi- 

 tion that all sorts of reactions took place in its environment 

 and in itself. 



Formerly mind was supposed to be honored by degrading 

 its material habitat; now we are confronted with the knowledge 



