THE BREATH OF LIFE 



food consumed is the source of the energy in both 

 cases, but in the one the energy is muscular, and in 

 the other it is nervous. When we speak of mental 

 or spiritual force, we have as distinct a conception 

 as when we speak of physical force. It requires 

 physical force to produce the effect that we call 

 mental force, though how the one can result in the 

 other is past understanding. The law of the correla- 

 tion and conservation of energy requires that what 

 goes into the body as physical force must come out 

 in some form of physical force — heat, light, elec- 

 tricity, and so forth. 



Science cannot trace force into the mental realm 

 and connect it with our states of consciousness. It 

 loses track of it so completely that men like Tyndall 

 and Huxley and Spencer pause before it as an in- 

 scrutable mystery, while John Fiske helps himself 

 out with the conception of the soul as quite inde- 

 pendent of the body, standing related to it as the 

 musician is related to his instrument. This idea is 

 the key to Fiske's proof of the immortality of the 

 soul. Finding himself face to face with an insoluble 

 mystery, he cuts the knot, or rather, clears the 

 chasm, by this extra-scientific leap. Since the soul, 

 as we know it, is inseparably bound up with physical 

 conditions, it seems to me that a more rational ex- 

 planation of the phenomenon of mentality is the 

 conception that the physical force and substance 

 that we use up in a mental effort or emotional ex- 



4 



