146 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



causes a great deal of general speculation, covering the whole field to be made, 

 from a point of view that is really restricted. Then there has sprung up a de- 

 mand for sensational science just as there has sprung up a demand for sensational 

 fiction, and if it cannot be met by facts in existence, something has to be invent- 

 ed, for the number of half starved scientific men who are trying to find the secrets 

 of nature is by no means small. Moreover a great deal of supposed scientific 

 truth is vague and does not mean one-half what is supposed. I don't know to 

 what extent science is to be blamed, but not a few of those who have pushed specu- 

 lation to its utmost have been literary men, and some of them had studied theol- 

 ogy as well. An agnostic, you know, is literally one who doesn't know. As 

 one of them has expressed the idea, "the existence of a God is unthinkable." 

 The agnostic, while saying less than the atheist, means scientifically more, and 

 steels himself against argument by saying it cannot be reasoned about at all. In 

 the true sense no scientific man can be an agnostic. There are few of us, per- 

 haps, who will refuse to accept the creed, "I exist," although there are some who 

 might limit it, and yet our personal existence is a thing most incomprehensible, 

 especially in regard to its beginning and its ending. 



We are in a boundless space and time, wfth the beginning of either a mys- 

 tery, so that it is scarcely possible for any one to admit their own existence with- 

 out arousing a vestige of the rehgious idea. In personal existence is involved the 

 question whether or not the vastly complex bodily organism is the first or only the 

 outer shell. We cannot but admit that the body is vastly more mysterious since 

 science took it up. There is a class of philosophers who think it will simplify 

 matters to consider the individual as a material substance with two sets of prop- 

 erties. If by a material substance is meant a combination of elements there is no 

 such material in existence having the qualities of mind ; if it mea>is the whole be- 

 ing, the statement amounts 1o nothing. We must admit there is something more, 

 and that is life. Nutrition, reproduction, sensation and voluntary motion are its 

 functions, the last two being restricted to animal life. Herbert Spencer says life 

 is "the continuous adjustment of internal and external relations," but that is very 

 vague and only touches the surface. I think myself that life has the same rela- 

 tion to organisms that force has to matter. It is some energy, whether a combi- 

 nation of physical energies, or the same but correlated only with organization. 

 It is all very well to find fault with calling the living organization "a machine," 

 but a machine has to be made by some one and for a purpose, and there is an 

 enormous lot of theism in the idea. Who ever heard of a machine made by no- 

 body for nothing in particular ? What is the use in talking about protoplasm as the 

 basis of life when in point of fact protoplasm depends on life as its basis ? All 

 the white of an egg is protoplasm, but life is in the embryo cell. Protoplasm may 

 go to make feathers and flesh and tissue, and yet the life that constitutes the 

 chick may be elsewhere. Going further, science fails to correlate the power of 

 the human will with any physical force. It is an energy that operates only on 

 living organs and through them on other things. Then comes the question, are 



