348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



riences ; but in these experiences this notion lies latent. When pro- 

 ducing motion in his limbs, and through them motion in other things, 

 he is aware of the accompanying feeling of effort. And this sense 

 of effort which is the antecedent of changes directly produced by 

 him becomes the conceived antecedent of changes not produced by 

 him — furnishes him with a term of thought by which to represent the 

 genesis of these objective changes. At first this idea of muscular 

 force as anteceding unusual events around him carries with it the 

 whole assemblage of associated ideas. He thinks of the implied effort 

 as an effort exercised by a being wholly like himself. In course of 

 time these doubles of the dead, supposed to be workers of all but the 

 most familiar changes, are modified in conception. Besides becoming 

 less grossly material, some of them are developed into larger person- 

 alities presiding over classes of phenomena which, being comparatively 

 regular in their order, foster the idea of beings who, while far more 

 powerful than men, are less variable in their modes of action. So 

 that the idea of force as exercised by such beings comes to be less 

 associated with the idea of a human ghost. Further advances, by 

 which minor supernatural agents become merged in one general agent, 

 and by which the personality of this general agent is rendered vague 

 while becoming widely extended, tend still further to dissociate the 

 notion of objective force from the force known as such in conscious- 

 ness ; and the dissociation reaches its extreme in the thoughts of the 

 man of science, who interprets in terms of force not only the visible 

 changes of sensible bodies, but all physical changes whatever, even up 

 to the undulations of the ethereal medium. Nevertheless, this force 

 (be it force under that statical form by which matter resists, or under 

 that dynamical form distinguished as energy) is to the last thought 

 of in terms of that internal energy which he is conscious of as muscu- 

 lar effort. He is compelled to symbolize objective force in terms of 

 subjective force, from lack of any other symbol. 



See now t^e implications. That internal energy which in the ex- 

 periences ^^he primitive man was always the immediate antecedent 

 of changes wrought by him — ^that energy which, when interpreting 

 external changes, he thought of along with those attributes of a human 

 personality connected with it in himself — is the same energy which, 

 freed from anthropomorphic accompaniments, is now figured as the 

 cause of all external phenomena. The last stage reached is recognition 

 of the truth that force as it exists beyond consciousness can not be 

 like what we know as force within consciousness ; and that yet, as 

 either is capable of generating the other, they must be different modes 

 of the same. Consequently, the final outcome of that speculation com- 

 menced by the primitive man is, that the Power manifested through- 

 out the universe distinguished as material is the same Power which 

 in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness. 



It is untrue, then, that the foregoing argument proposes to evolve 



