136 THE INSUFFICIENCY OF PHYSICAL LAW. 



breaking connection, and this means moving something ; 

 or the cell arrangement may be like a plunge battery, 

 and this, too, means an actual movement of matter. If the 

 electricity is generated not by chemical action, but by 

 contact of dissimilar substances, this also means move- 

 ment of matter ; or if the electricity be thermal, this also 

 means movement of matter. Something has moved the 

 molecules in the cell at the tip of the nerve, that sets 

 what is probably some form of electricity in movement 

 and my hand opens or closes. What is that first some- 

 thing? Evidently it is the act of that within which we 

 call Soul, acting through that faculty which we call Will. 

 This in some way causes those molecular changes, which 

 produce force ; whether large or small, is not the ques- 

 tion, but force the will certainly causes to exist. What 

 is force ; who can answer me ? Mind, force and matter 

 are three distinct entities separated in our mental con- 

 ceptions by an impassable gulf, but in reality intimately 

 connected. True we cannot conceive of force independent 

 of or separate from matter, but just as we are logically 

 compelled to predicate a Cause antecedent to, and inde- 

 pendent of, the material world, so we are logically com- 

 pelled to recognize in that Cause the fountain of all 

 power. Hence the highest logic makes us reach beyond 

 our personal experience and accept as a fact that force 

 primarily existed without and before matter, and that in 

 the largest degree it now exists without connection with 

 matter. May it not be, after all, that the part which 

 matter plays is to make force evident to our senses? 

 May it not be that the soul retains so much of its divine 

 original that it can act directly on the nervous fluid and 

 bid it go and come from the minute cell in the brain, as 

 I, in a grosser and cruder way, let on or off the electric- 

 ity of a battery ? One may wander here in the field of 

 imagination, but in it all there is one hard fact. In some 

 way that within man which wills calls his muscles into 



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