635 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Soil* 

 Sound 



first being that everything is full of gods, 

 and the second (and it is this which is of 

 especial importance in our present research) 

 that "Thales, too, as is related, seems to 

 regard the soul as somehow producing mo- 

 tion, for he said that the stone has a soul, 

 since it moves iron." 



Thus we find the magnet at the very foun- 

 dation of the world's philosophy. Refusing 

 to account for the attraction of the lode- 

 stone by supernatural interposition, as the 

 priests and worshipers at Samothrace had 

 undoubtedly done centuries before, Thales 

 assumed a soul or a virtue inherent and ex- 

 isting in the magnet itself, whereby it was 

 enabled to move the iron. PARK BENJAMIN 

 Intellectual Rise in Electricity, ch. 2, p. 33. 

 (J. W., 1898.) 



3147. " SOUL OF LIFE," THE SUP- 

 POSED VITAL FORCE Physician Thought 

 To Deal with an Unseen Personality in Dis- 

 ease. The vi^al force had formerly lodged 

 as ethereal spirit, as a pneuma in the ar- 

 teries; it had . . . acquired its clear- 

 est scientific position as " soul of life," 

 anima inscia, in Georg Ernst Stahl, who, in 

 the first half of the last century, was pro- 

 fessor of chemistry and pathology in Halle. 

 . . . Stahl's "soul of life" is, on the 

 whole, constructed on the pattern on which 

 the pietistic communities of that period rep- 

 resented to themselves the sinful human 

 soul; it is subject to errors and passions, to 

 sloth, fear, impatience, sorrow, indiscretion, 

 despair. The physician must first appease 

 it, or then incite it, or punish it, and compel 

 it to repent. And the way in which, at the 

 same time, he established the necessity of 

 the physical and vital actions was well 

 thought out. The soul of life governs the 

 body, and only acts by means of the physico- 

 chemical forces of the substances assimi- 

 lated. But it has the power to bind and to 

 loose these forces, to allow them full play 

 or to restrain them. After death the re- 

 strained forces become free, and evoke putre- 

 faction and decomposition. For the refu- 

 tation of this hypothesis of binding and 

 loosing, it was necessary to discover the law 

 of the conservation of force. HELMHOLTZ 

 Popular Lectures, lect. 5, p. 215. (L. G. & 

 Co., 1898.) 



3148. SOUL, PSYCHOLOGY WITH- 

 OUT A Personality Explained by Ideas as a 

 House by Stones and Bricks. Another 

 . . . way of unifying the chaos [of men- 

 tal impressions] is to seek common elements 

 in the divers mental facts rather than a 

 common agent behind them, and to explain 

 them constructively by the various forms of 

 arrangement of these elements, as one ex- 

 plains Chouses by stones and bricks. The 

 " associationist " schools of Herbart in Ger- 

 many, and of Hume, the Mills, and Bain in 

 Britain, have thus constructed a psychology 

 without a soul by taking discrete " ideas," 

 faint or vivid, and showing how, by their 

 cohesions, repulsions, and forms of succes- 



sion, such things as reminiscences, percep- 

 tions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories, 

 and all the other furnishings of an indi- 

 vidual's mind may be engendered. The very 

 self or ego of the individual comes in this 

 way to be viewed no longer as the preexist- 

 ing source of the representations, but rather 

 as their last and most complicated fruit. 

 JAME'S Psychology, vol. i, ~ch. 1, p. 1. (H. 

 H. & Co., 1899.) 



3149. SOUL, THE, A CAPACITY FOR 

 GOD Shrinks and Shrivels without the Divine. 

 The soul, in its highest sense, is a vast ca- 

 pacity for God. It is like a curious chamber 

 added on to being and somehow involving 

 being, a chamber with elastic and contractile 

 walls which can be expanded with God as its 

 guest, inimitably, but which without God 

 shrinks and shrivels until every vestige of 

 the Divine is gone, and God's image is left 

 without God's Spirit. One cannot call what 

 is left a soul; it is a shrunken, useless or- 

 gan, a capacity sentenced to death by dis- 

 use, which droops as a withered hand by the 

 side, and cumbers Nature like a rotted 

 branch. DRUMMOND Natural Law in the 

 Spiritual World, essay 2, p. 98. (H. Al.) 



3150. SOUL TRIUMPHS OVER 

 BODY Insensibility to Pain under Strong 

 Emotion Soldier Martyr Devotee. 

 Tho we speak of pleasure and pain as fixed 

 and definite things, yet they are truly by 

 no means fixed. It is matter of familiar 

 experience that various circumstances may 

 modify our sensibility in respect to things 

 which are, in our ordinary state, painful. 

 The power of mental excitement in this re- 

 spect is well known. A soldier wounded 

 during' battle may feel no immediate suffer- 

 ing from the severest injury, and we have 

 every-day proof of the same in the failure 

 of slight accidents to pain us when we are 

 intently occupied. All strong emotions, in- 

 deed, seem to have a similar power. It can 

 scarcely be doubted that martyrs have some- 

 times gone through their flaming death in 

 ecstasy. And the accounts we have of that 

 fanatical sect in the East, one part of whose 

 devotions consists in working themselves 

 first into a frenzy, and then laying hold on 

 glowing iron, dancing with it in their hands, 

 and putting it to their lips, indicate not 

 only an absence of pain in the act, but even 

 some kind of pleasure. It would seem, in- 

 deed, that there is nothing that can be said 

 to be always or necessarily a cause of pain. 

 What we can truly say on this point is that 

 there are certain things which are painful 

 to our bodily senses when these are not con- 

 trolled or modified by the state of the mind. 

 HINTON The Mystery of Pain, p. 20. 

 (Hum., 1893.) 



3151. SOUND CAUSES TERROR 



Subterranean Thunder Unexplained. Phe- 

 nomena of sound, when unattended by any 

 perceptible shocks, produce a peculiarly deep 

 impression even on persons who have lived 



