390 
Feeling and Energy. 
[July, 
sensibility appears to diminish as the circulation is lowered, 
especially when it is withdrawn from the higher organs of 
feeling, namely, the co-ordinating and generalising organs 
that make lip the brain. 
Death would seem to bring about the perfedt condition of 
equilibrium of the complex system of feeling and adting 
organs and the supervention of the inorganic state. 
Inorganic matter, stridtly defined, is a condition of matter 
in which feeling and adting organs are not arranged to 
operate in connedted series or groups. Now, although 
all elements that receive energy must by the hypothesis 
feel and adt somewhat like nerves individually , yet, inas- 
much as these feelings have no grouping organ to connedt 
them, in the case of inorganic matter they must feel as 
individuals. And since individual feelings are not feelings 
of feelings, so to speak, from the want of a grouping 
organ, they are therefore destitute of intelligence (sense of 
difference), which can alone arise in a grouping organ — an 
organ connedted with several organs so as to feel their dif- 
ferent states, or to have their different states communi- 
cated to it or combined with its own. But the condition of 
the inorganic world, commonly so-called, may be the seat of 
organisation of the kind necessary to intelligence in a degree 
of which we have never yet dreamt, just as the tissues of 
some Medusae, destitute of nerves in the ordinary sense of 
the term, have been discovered by Mr. Romanes to be the 
seat of virtual nerves or lines of organised molecular 
adtivity. This, however, is for future investigation. 
Possibly, by the aid of the microphone and extensive research, 
much truth may yet be gained to connedt the so-called 
inorganic world with what is appresent called organic. Life 
will then be regarded as pervading all Nature, and a Cosmic 
Philosophy will become possible. 
The most formidable objections, however, which the 
hypothesis of alternation has to answer are objections 
arising from the custom of regarding the mental condition 
of the thinking and feeling substance, matter, as something 
quite unique, and opposed to every other condition of that 
substance. 
Mind has been defined by one representative of this mode 
of thought, namely, Professor Bain, as “ opposed to the 
external world.” Pie says — “ The External or Objedt World 
is distinguished by the property called Extension. The In- 
ternal or the Subjedt World is our experience of everything 
not extended . A tree which possesses extension is a part of 
the objedt world ; a pleasure, a volition, a thought, arefadts 
