April 23, 1903] 



NA TURE 



595 



contrast to many of the blotchy " process " illustrations 

 now so common. 



The coloured illustrations are good of their kind, but it 

 needs the patience of a Bauer to do justice to such exquisite 

 flowers as those of the Calochortus, and in the present 

 instance the artist evidently prefers effect to detail. 



Mr. Nicholson's article on Magnolias is likely to be of 

 permanent value, and Mr. Carl Purdy's revision of the genus 

 Calochortus will be useful to those who have not ready 

 access to the more complete monograph in the Proceedings 

 of the California Academy of Sciences. 



" Sylva " is represented by an article on the Corsican 

 pine, concerning which so much has been written of late 

 years. Alluding to the great variation which occurs among 

 the pines, the author of the article says that the " wild 

 type of a forest tree is the best, and that sports are worth- 

 less." This is a statement that appears to require some 

 modification. In the first place, it is not easy to 

 determine what is the wild type. If we take the Corsican 

 tree as the type, are we to abandon as worthless the black 

 Austrian, the Pyrenean, the Calabrian, the Pallasian, and 

 the many other varieties of the Corsican pine? But 

 perhaps the writer does not include these as " sports." At 

 any rate, in their several ways they are as valuable as the 

 form arbitrarily taken as the type. 



Flora and Sylva promises to be a very attractive and 

 useful addition to garden literature. 



INTERACTION BETWEEN THE MENTAL AND 

 THE MATERIAL ASPECTS OF THINGS. 1 



INHERE are certain ambiguous terms, to the undis- 

 criminating use of which some misunderstandings are 

 due. One of these is the term " science," which may be 

 used either as synonymous with the unbiased and reverent 

 pursuit of truth by patient and accurate methods in all de- 

 partments of knowledge ; or as representing the generally 

 accepted notions of naturalists at any one epoch, together 

 with such positive and negative tendencies and extensions 

 into more speculative regions as may be favoured by them. 

 The distinction between these two dissimilar things is 

 hardly sufficiently accentuated by the use of a large or a 

 small initial letter for the word. 



Another ambiguous word is " faith," which may signify 

 intellectual credence attached to some doctrine, in which case 

 an emphatic and militant definite article is sometimes pre- 

 fixed to it ; or it may denote a moral, i.e. emotional and 

 conative attitude to the universe in general, irrespective of 

 intellectual cognisance of specific facts. 



A third is the term " prayer," which again may represent 

 either a submissive and devotional passive attitude of the 

 soul in presence of a higher power, or an active and ener- 

 getic petition for certain benefits or privileges, and 

 especially for aid and guidance in crises or emergencies. 



And lastly, many ambiguities, I venture to think attach 

 to the term " God," of which I will only mention three. 



First, it may signify the highest theoretical and practical 

 conception of men at any given epoch on this planet ■ a use 

 of the term appropriate to the science of theoloe-v. Second 

 it may mean the Ultimate and Infinite and Absolute, conl 

 cermng which no human predication is possible, and of which 

 no even initially adequate conception can be made. Third 

 there are signs of its coming to be used in a limited sense 

 by certain not unphilosophic persons— whether justifiably 

 or not— to denote a Being, a ruler, an administrator who 

 is striving to evolve order out of mental and moral chaos 

 and to bring gradually towards perfection a race such as 

 is competent to inhabit the surface of planets ; the manager 

 so to speak, of the process of evolution. A being infinite 

 in comparison to ourselves, but still a being with potenti- 



£ ;^ ad > and with the possibility of advance, con- 

 of as '' time r "° re '° S ° mS 6Xtent ^ What We are cons "°^ 



AH these ambiguous terms are liable to enter into on 

 \ 1 «.™ <3 i d t0 ' he S y nthetic So ciety in London on February so The nan.r 



NO. 1747, VOL. 67] 



present discussion, which concerns, I take it, fundamentally 

 the intercommunion and interaction between the divine and 

 the human, chiefly in the regions of volition and of action 

 on the physical world. The influence of the divine on the 

 human has been variously conceived in different ages, and 

 various forms of difficulty have been at different times felt 

 and suggested ; but always some sort of analogy between 

 human action and divine action has had perforce to be 

 drawn in order to make the latter in the least intelligible to 

 our conception. The latest form of difficulty is peculiarly 

 deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical 

 science. It consists in denying the possibility of guidance 

 or of control, not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part 

 of every one of his creatures. It consists in pressing the 

 laws of physics to what seems their logical and ultimate 

 conclusion, in applying the conservation of energy without 

 ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as it has seemed, the 

 possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of the self-deter- 

 mined action of mind or living things upon matter, 

 altogether. The appearance of control has been considered 

 illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure 

 mechanism, enveloping living things as well as inorganic 

 nature. 



And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or un- 

 able to acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical 

 agencies, whether it be by reason of faith and instinct, or 

 by reason of direct experience and sensation to the contrary, 

 have thought it necessary of late years to seek to undermine 

 the foundations of physics, and to show that its much- 

 vaunted laws rest upon a hollow foundation, that their 

 exactitude is illusory, that the conservation of energy, for 

 instance, has been too rapid an induction, that there may 

 be ways of eluding many physical laws and of avoiding sub- 

 mission to their sovereign sway. 



By this sacrifice it has been thought that the eliminated 

 guidance and control can philosophically be reintroduced. 



This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of an 

 attack on physics led by an American, J. B. Stallo, in a 

 little book called the " Concepts of Physics," which has at 

 various times attracted some attention. But the worst ot 

 that book was that Stallo was not really familiar with the 

 teachings of the great physicists ; he appears to have col- 

 lected his information from popular writings, where the 

 doctrines were very imperfectly laid down ; so that most of 

 the book is occupied in demolishing constructions of straw, 

 unrecognisable by professed physicists except as caricatures 

 at which they also might be willing to heave an occasional 

 missile. 



The armoury pressed into the service of Prof. James 

 Ward's attack is of weightier calibre, and his criticism 

 cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate 

 acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still 

 his Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism be- 

 tween the fundamental laws of mechanics and the possi- 

 bility of any intervention, whether human or divine. 



If this antagonism is substantial it is serious ; for natural 

 philosophers will not be willing to concede fundamental in- 

 accuracy or uncertainty about their recognised and long- 

 established laws of motion, nor will they be prepared to 

 tolerate any the least departure from the law of the con- 

 servation of energy. Hence, if guidance and control can 

 be admitted into the scheme by no means short of refuting 

 or modifying those laws, there may be every expectation 

 that the attitude of scientific men will be perennially hostile 

 to the idea of guidance or control, and so to the efficacy of 

 P r ?. y f r ' and t0 man )' another practical outcome of religious 

 It becomes therefore an important question to con- 



belief. 



sider whether it is true that life or mind is incompetent to 

 disarrange or interfere with matter at all, except as an 

 automatic part of the machine, or rather except as an orna- 

 mental appendage or dependent accessory of its workinc 

 parts. b 



Now experience — the same kind of experience as gave us 

 our scheme of mechanics— shows us that to all appearance 

 live animals certainly can direct and control mechanical 

 energies to bring about desired and preconceived results 

 e.g. the Forth Bridge. Undoubtedly our body is material 

 and can act on other matter, and its energy is derived from 

 food, like any other self-propelled and fuel-fed mechanism • 

 the question is whether our will or mind or life can direct 

 our body's energy along certain channels to attain desired 



