468 FRAGMKNTS OF 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 fr&m 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 musk 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 otoliths 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 brain thrown 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 



