JO SI AH WILLARD GIBBS 199 



" perhaps, into electricity, and that into some hitherto unimagined 

 mode of motion of the ether/' but no dynamic theory of the ether can 

 resolve the ether into nothing. Assuming thought to be a mode of 

 energy, the metaphysical argument that mind is at the bottom of 

 motion seems more likely, in the last analysis, than that motion should 

 be the cause of mind, for we can not conceive of a thing moving unless 

 something moves it. Mind seems almost like an assemblage or com- 

 plex of causes in itself, and is probably related to the brain as music 

 to the violin. Destroy the violin and there will be an end of its music, 

 but it needs other coefficients than the violin itself to get music out 

 of it. Ostwald has himself admitted the force of Leibnitz's argument, 

 that no mechanical explanation of cerebral action will ever account for 

 the genesis of thought or the nature of consciousness : " Nihil in intel- 

 lects quod non prius in sensu, nisi intellectus ipse." Individual think- 

 ing may be the result of physico-chemical differences of structure or 

 substance in the brain, but apart from the evidence of mind in the 

 evolution and structure of the universe, different aspects of mind, as 

 ideas, sensations and sentiments, seem to have an individual life of 

 their own so far as man is concerned, and are " things " in the sense 

 that, like external forces, they have profoundly influenced and deter- 

 mined the actions of individuals and of entire races. Human thought 

 as a function of the human brain may disappear with man himself, but 

 this does not annul the possibility of mind existing in manifold ways 

 elsewhere in the universe. The electric waves of wireless telegraphy 

 undoubtedly existed as motions in the air before man discovered and 

 labeled them and may continue to exist and be apprehended in other 

 spheres of thought when man is gone. 



Man's capacity for error in these matters is determined by his 

 anthropomorphic tendencies and by the fact that his intelligence is 

 finite. Of the possibly infinite number of attributes of eternal sub- 

 stance postulated by Spinoza, the human mind can apprehend only two 

 — thought and extension, and even here thought and sensation are the 

 fundamental facts, while. " all else is an inference and is probably 

 essentially unlike what it appears to our senses." It seems impossible 

 to break down the fact that there is no absolute causal connection 

 between the two primary categories of Spinoza, who has anticipated 

 most of modern psychology. For this reason such subjects as spirit- 

 ualism, phrenology, faith-healing, telepathy have remained in the 

 limbo of pseudo-science, although each has undoubtedly a shadowy 

 reason for existence. It is as fair as any other hypothesis, then, to 

 assume that man, in his higher mental or psychical activities, may, 

 under certain conditions, be " freed from the galling yoke of space and 

 time," or, in other words, released from the thraldom of the second 

 law. Yet such an assumption, even if made by a Kelvin, would be, in 

 our present state of knowledge, an expression of individual personal 



