y7inc lo, iSSo] 



NATURE 



121 



two magnets many miles apart. The action of the force appears 

 to have been somewhat more vigorous at Stonyhurst than at 

 Vienna, yet not only the gieat inflections, bnt even the slight 

 irregularities of the curves were synchronous. 



The trace of the Vienna magnetograph is taljen from the May 

 number of the Zcitschiift dcr ostcrnichischen GescUschaft far 

 Meteorologic, kindly forwarded by Dr. Haun. 



The range between the maximum and primary minimum at 

 5h. 45m. p.m. G.M.T. was 33'7 at Vienna, .and 42''! at 

 Stonyhurst ; and between the same maximum and the secondary 

 minimum at loh. 4Sm. p.m. was 24'' i at Vienna, and 34' 'O at 

 Stonyhurst. 



Both the self-recording magnetographs were made by Adie, 

 and the time-scale is the same for both curves ; it is therefore 

 very easy to identify the synchronous movements. 



At Stonyhurst G.M.T. is adopted, and the longitude of Vienna 

 is ih. jm. 31 '3^. E. of Greenwich. S. J. Perry 



Stonyhurst Observatory, M.iy 27 



Luminous Painting 



Nil itoz'i sub sole. — The Japanese, nine hundred years ago, 

 seem to have been practically acquainted with the art of 

 luminous painting, and thus to have anticipated Mr. Balmain. 

 In looking through the article "ye" (pictures) in the Sinico- 

 Japanese Encyclopaedia, " Wakan san sai dzu-ye" (illustrated 

 Description of the Three Powers, i.e., Heaven, Earth, and Man), 

 I recently came upon a passage, of which the following slightly 

 condensed rendering may perhaps be of some interest to your 

 readers : — 



"In the Rui-yen (Lei-yuen, Garden of Sundries — a sort of 

 Chinese Collectanea) we read of one Sii Ngoh, who had a 

 picture of an ox. Every d.ay the ox left the picture-frame to 

 graze, and returned to sleep within it at night. This picture 

 came into the possession of the Emperor T'ai Tsung, of the Sung 

 dynasty (a.d. 976-99S), who showed it to his courtiers, and 

 asked them for an explanation, which none of them, however, 

 could give. At last a certain Buddhist priest said that the 

 Japanese found some nacreous substance within the flesh of a 

 kind of oyster they picked up when the rocks were bared at low 

 tide, and that they ground this into colour-material, and then 

 painted pictures with it which were invisible by day and luminous 

 by night." 



" No doubt," adds the author of the Encyclopaidia, "when 

 it is said that the ox left the picture-frame during the day to go 

 a-grazing, it is meant simply that during the day the figure of the 

 ox was not visible." Fredk. V. DicKlNS 



Arts Club, June I 



Brain Dynamics 



There are probably among the readers of Natijre some 

 believers in the Freedom of Volition, to whom the discussion on 

 the above subject has not hitherto appeared to reach the knottiest 

 point of the controversy. 



The more old-fashioned supporters of the doctrine of Free 

 Will frequently insisted on the sense of Responsibility as the 

 crucial proof that the w ill is free, probably because few of their 

 opponents were ready to face the possible, or supposed, moral 

 consequences of the denial of responsibility. The proof is 

 essentially weak, and Mr. Romanes has well exhibited its weak- 

 ness in Nature, vol. xxii. p. 76. His " Prince of Denmark " has 

 indeed so little of method inhismadness that I am not disposed to 

 think it curious that both Prof Clifford and Mr. Tolver Preston 

 should have left him out of their play. He may well exclaim : 

 " What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and 

 heaven? We are arrant knaves all ; believe none of us." Surely 

 the sense of Responsibility is not the origin, but is one of the 

 results of the Sense of Freedom. Logically the Sense of 

 Freedom is the justification of the sense of responsibility. His- 

 torically it is, no doubt, its antecedent ; for while both are, as 

 much as any other faculties of brute and man, results of evolu- 

 tion, the refinement of the conception of morality, and therefore 

 probably the conception itself, has evidently originated long after 

 the conscionsness of volition. Experimentally the sense of re- 

 sponsibility is weakened or destroyed, either psychol jgically, as 

 where the freedom of the actor is controlled, or physiologically, 

 as where volition is suspended in sleep, or is impaired by lesion 

 of the anterior lobes of the brain, in all which cases the sense of 

 responsibility suffers corresponding loss. It seems to me strange 



that Mr. Romanes should suppose the doctrine of Free Will to 

 have been conceived and continued in order to justify that Moral 

 Sense \i'hich is essentially a consequence of it (though capable 

 finally of being presented as one among other motives in certain 

 acts of volition). It lies ^vith those who think with Mr. Romanes 

 to account, on their own hypothesis, for the development of so 

 universal, obtrusi\-e, irrational, and indeed "nonsensical" an 

 instinct as, according to that hypothesis, the sense of responsi- 

 bility is. Others will see in it a result of the Sense of Freedom 

 of Volition, when combined with the intellectual perception of 

 the consequences, to the individual or to the race, of human 

 acts (the latter perception being the cumulative result of inherited 

 experiences). This Sense of Freedom of Volition is the real 

 Hamlet. 



We possess, or appear to om\selves to possess, the conscious- 

 ness of the power of choosing between alternative motives. It 

 is unsafe merely to give the lie direct to this consciousness, 

 lest we thereby destroy the validity of the evidence, also derived 

 through consciousness, of all those facts on which any law of 

 nature, and Causal Sequence itself, is based. The consciousness 

 of power is derived from the sense of work done, as against 

 resistance, e.g., the consciousness of muscular power is derived 

 from a class of sensations produced on the organism by resistance, 

 these sensations being created by, and consequently associated 

 with, the conversion of potential energy stored up in the brain 

 into kinetic energy transmitted through the nerves and muscles, 

 and it bears no psychological resemblance to the consciousness of 

 sensations of which the brain is the passive recipient. Similarly, 

 the consciousness of the power of volition is derived from the 

 sense of \\ork done, in this case whoUy within the brain, in the 

 selection between alternative motives, and it bears no psycho- 

 logical resemblance to the consciousness of the motives them- 

 selves. And so, too, just as the sense of lassitude is produced by 

 excess of work done as against physical resistance, so is -a sense 

 of discomfort produced by expenditure of potential energy, when 

 acts of volition are performed against powerful emotions. 



It appears to me that the Necessitarian should be able on his 

 part to show that this sense of work performed in ehoosing between 

 motives is fictitious, or that the energy above mentioned has no 

 existence. This will not be done solely by holding even the 

 terrors of omnipotent Caus.'l Sequence over the head of the advo- 

 cate of Free Will. The latter considers volitions to be, not indeed 

 "uncaused" in the sense of occurring without antecedent emo- 

 tions, or without expenditure of energy in choosing between the 

 emotions, yet not to be rigidly determined by those emotions. 

 He need not inquire w hether a man be "unfortunate" in the 

 capricious character of human acts as compared with other 

 phenomena. But he on his part has to show (and certainly no 

 scientific mind will unden-ate the magnitude of the task) that 

 phenomena of volition do, paradoxical as it may seem, constitute 

 a class by themselves, their relation to physical causation being 

 perhaps comparable to that in which the phenomena of life 

 stand to the laws of inorganic chemistry, a relation of addition, 

 not of contradiction. W. Clement Ley 



I SHOULD like to state, in reply to Mr. George Romanes' 

 letter (Nature, vol. xxii. p. 75), that the question of "Respon- 

 sibility" was left out of my letter (Natuke, vol. xxii. p. 29) 

 partly because it seemed to me a separate or somewhat distinct 

 subject, and partly from the fact that this matter had been 

 already considered by me in connection with a paper on " Natu- 

 ral Science and Morality," to be pnblished in the Journal of 

 Science for July next ; and to this, therefore, I would venture to 

 refer those \\ho may be interested in this question. 



I may merely conclude by saying that, while otherwise fully 

 endorsing Mr. Romanes' letter, there is only one point on which 

 I should be disposed to disagree with him, viz., in regard to his 

 suggested view that the doctrine of strict causal sequence in 

 nature would tend to show the feelings of Responsibility, Praise, 

 and Blame to be "destitute of any rational justification." For 

 there a])pear to me to be grounds for believing that a scientific 

 and rational explanation of these feelings exists. 



London, June S. Tolver Preston 



Vortex Atoms 



While thanking Mr. G. II. Darwin for his observations on 



one or two passages in my paper "On the Physical Aspects of 



the Vortex-Atom Theory," which, as they stand, may no doubt 



tend to convey an inexact impression, I may state that the illus- 



