FIELD AND STUDY 



§ 

 How to connect our psychic life with the physical 

 is just as hard a problem to science as how to con- 

 nect physical life with inorganic nature. The breach 

 of continuity seems the same in both cases. How the 

 spiritual can arise out of the material, and connect 

 with it, is beyond the reach of science to explain. 

 The life of man, the life of the soul, seems as limited 

 and uncertain, when seen on the vast background 

 of vegetable and animal life, as does the latter when 

 contrasted with the volume and permanence of the 

 inorganic order. Man's supreme gift of reason was 

 long in coming to the race, and it* is long in coming 

 to the individual, and it comes in full measure to 

 one, and in scant measure to another. It is like an 

 extra and fortuitous gift. The great mass of human 

 life is merely a complex of animal instincts and in- 

 heritances; free intelligence play^ but a very small 

 part in the sum total. How easily is the reason de- 

 throned and the mind reduced to chaos; a fall, 

 a blow on the head, fear, misfortune, overstrain 

 of any kind, and reason may be gone. 



§ 

 If light is not a substance, or an independent 

 entity, but only a process or a mode of motion, in a 

 substance, the effect of which upon the eye we call 

 light, why may we not think of mind or soul in the 

 same terms? — a molecular motion in the brain 

 which gives rise to the phenomena we call mental? 



