412 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. 11. 



is the absorption of vital energy which was originally solar. 

 Sunlight stimulates animals indirectly, as in the case of 

 actiniae which are made more vivacious when neighbouring 

 sea-weed, smitten by sunbeams, pours oxygen into the water 

 in which they move; and also in the case of hard-worked 

 men who gain vigour from the judicious use of vegetable 

 narcotics. The waves of motor energy which the human 

 organism absorbs in whiffs of tobacco-smoke, are but a 

 series of pulsations of transformed sunlight. 1 But animals 

 are also directly stimulated by the solar rays, as in the cases 

 of insects which begin to fly and crawl in early summer, and 

 of hybernating mammals which emerge from their retreats at 

 the approach of warm weather. By its stimulating effect on 

 the retina, and thence on the medulla oblongata, sunlight 

 quickens the breathing and circulation in higher animals, and 

 thus facilitates the repair of tissue. In the night we exhale 

 less carbonic acid than in the daytime. Again the stunted 

 growth and pale sickly faces of men and women who live 

 in coal-mines, or in narrow streets and dark cellars, are 

 symptoms traceable to anaemia, or to a deficiency of red 

 globules in the blood. Whence it seems not improbable that 

 the formation of red globules, like the formation of sap in 

 plants, may be in some way directly assisted by solar undu- 

 lations. 



Mysteriously allied with the vital phenomena of nutrition, 

 innervation, and muscular action, are the psychical pheno- 

 mena of feeling and thought. Though (as previously hinted 

 and as I shall hereafter endeavour to prove) the gulf between 

 the phenomena of consciousness and all other phenomena is 

 an impassable gulf, which no future extension of scientific 



1 As the poot-ph.'losopher Redi says of wine : — 



•• Si bel sangue e un raggio acceso 

 Di quel Sol che in del vedete ; 

 E limase awinto e preso 

 Di piii grappoli alia rete." 



Bacco in Toscaua; 0$:re, torn. Lp. 1 



