76 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
and which I have to convey to you symbolically by means of bodily 
signs. 
When I move my arm, it is obviously nothing .forming part of my con¬ 
sciousness, nothing of mental consistency, which affects your senses and 
arouses in you the perception of a bodily arm in motion. Now, what 
we desire to knovf is, whether this bodily arm is mechanically, automat¬ 
ically moved, or whether I, myself, volitionally move it by dint of free 
sel f-determination ? 
This is the decisive question. 
The ancient Roman eulogist of the atomic materialism of Epicurus, 
the illustrious poet Lncretius, was already fully aware of the inexorable 
fatalism involved in the purely mechanical conception. He says: “If all 
motion is connected and dependent, a new movement perpetually aris¬ 
ing from a former one in definite order, the primordial elements never 
deviating from the straight path to give rise to fresh springs of action, 
potent to subvert the laws of fate and break the rigid chain of cause 
on cause in infinite succession, whence comes the freedom of will to all 
animals in the world; whence, I say, the liberty of action wrested from 
the Fates, by means of which we go wheresoever inclination leads each of 
us, moving not at any fixed time, nor in any fixed part of space, but just 
as our mind prompts us?” 
The problem before us. after the lapse of 2000 years, could hardly be 
more forcibly expressed. 
If my body is really a machine, that is a peculiarly collocated con¬ 
geries of parts, acting mechanically upon one another, and set in mo¬ 
tion by heat derived from the combustion of food-particles, then never 
anything but purely mechanical effects can be expected from the per¬ 
formance of such a contrivance; and the link between its motions and its 
conscious states remains as inscrutable as it was to Descartes and his fol¬ 
lowers. 
Julius Robert Mayer, the first promulgator of the doctrine of the cor¬ 
relation and transmutation of forces, enunciated, also, the heat-engine 
doctrine of our vital activities. According to it, vital structure, the 
muscle for example, is, in Mayer’s own words, “only a machine through 
whose instrumentality is brought about the transformation of force.” 
“The muscle is not, itself, the material by means of whose chemical met¬ 
amorphosis the mechanical effect is produced.” 
This modern prevalent notion of the organism being a machine, set 
going by extraneous, non-vital force, is, despite its scientific aspect, just 
as preposterous as the ancient mystic notion of vital spirits. It is an 
out-and-out unphysiological and altogether mistaken conception. My 
own studies of motility in protoplasmic individuals, and in muscular 
fibers in particular, published in Pfleuger’s Archiv, have visibly demon- 
