SCIENCE, MATTER, AND 

 IMMORTALITY 



CHAPTER I 



THE FABRIC OF MATTER THE ATOMIC THEORY 



IN ITS FIRST BEGINNINGS 



Probably the coarsely convoluted brain within a 

 Neanderthal skull had no very definite and clear- 

 cut sense of personal identity, nor of the modern 

 distinctions between mind and matter — between 

 the living and the dead. Ideas of personal identity, 

 definitions of the living and the dead, are really very 

 complex mental operations, and " Nature's insur- 

 gent son," chipping his flinty eolith at the side of a 

 glacier, took much more interest in mammoths and 

 woolly rhinoceroses than in questions of physics 

 or metaphysics. For thousands and thousands 

 of years, getting food and begetting progeny 

 were man's chief concerns ; and he had so little 

 idea of the nexus between body and mind, and of 

 the criteria of life and death, that the dawn, and 



I 



