Mr. Wallace. To quote only one more authority, we refer to the eminent nat- uralist Wallace, the friend and associate of Darwin, and the zeal- ous defender of his theory. " If," says he, " a material element, or a combination of a thousand material elements in a molecule, are alike unconscious, it is impossible for us to believe, that the mere addition of one, two, or a thousand other material elements to form a more complex molecule, could in any way tend to pro- duce a self-conscious existence. To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception. You cannot have, in the whole, what does not exist in any of the parts ; . . . . either all matter is conscious, or consciousness is something distinct from matter ; and in the latter case, its presence in material forms is a proof of the existence of conscious beings, outside of, and inde- pendent of, what we term matter." ^
Vital and Physical Forces not Convertible.
2. A second argument against the doctrine of the correlation of vital and physical forces is that in fact they are not convertible. Motion and heat are said to be correlated, because one can be changed into the other, measure for measure. But no one has ever changed death into life, dead matter into living matter. This Professor Huxley admits. If the simplest living cell once dies, all the science in the world cannot make it alive. What is dead can be made alive only by being taken up and assimilated by that which is still living. The life, therefore, is not due to the chemi- cal properties of that which is dead. So far as chemistry is con- cerned, there is no known difference between protoplasm dead and protoplasm alive ; and yet there is all the difference between them of life and death. That difference, thei-efore, is not chemical. Until scientific men can actually change heat and electricity into life, and go about raising the dead, men will be slow to believe that heat and life are identical ; and until they can transmute physical force into intelligence and will, they cannot convert "thinkers" into Materialists.
3. Another argument against this theory is the inadequacy of the cause to the assumed effect. The doctrine is t'lat the relation
1 Coniribulions to the Theory of Natural Selection. A series of Essays. By Alfred Rus- sel Wallace, author of The Malay Archipelago, ^ic, etc. McMillan & Co., Lou'lon, 1870, p. 3G5.
296 PART I. — THEOLOGY. [Ch. IH. — Anti-Thkism.
between correlated forces is quantitive ; so much of the one will produce so much of the other. But we know that great mental agitation may be produced by the mere sight of certain objects, and that these mental states may call into action Anolent muscular force. A'ccording to the hypothesis, the impression on the nerves of sight or hearing is first transformed into mental force, and that again into muscular and molar energy. This, President Barnard, who presents this argument, pronounces to be absurd, " since it makes a small force equivalent to a large one." ^
President Barnard further argues against this theory from the fact that the mental states produced by impressions on the senses are, at least in many cases, obviously due not to the physical im- pression, but to the idea therewith connected. If you insult a Frenchman in English, it produces no effect ; if the insult be ex- pressed in his own language, it rouses him to fury. The meaning of the words is not a physical force, and yet it is to the meaning the effect is due. Dr. Barnard says, "• when it is demanded of us to pronounce as physicists that spiritual existence is an absurdity and religion a dream, it seems to me that no choice is left us but to proclaim our dissent, or to be understood by our silence to ac- cept the doctrine as our own. When such is the alternative, for one I feel bound to speak, and to declare my conviction that as physicists we have nothing to do with mental philosophy ; and that in endeavouring to reduce the phenomena of mind under the laws of matter, we wander beyond our depth, we establish nothing cer- tain, we bring ridicule upon the name of positive science, and achieve but a single undeniable result, that of unsettling in the minds of multitudes convictions which form the basis of their chief
ness.
2
happi
4. Physicists cannot carry out their own theory. Even those least susceptible of the force of the supersensuous, are compelled to admit that there is more in mental and vital action than blind phys- ical force can account for. Dr. Carpenter, as we have seen, as- sumes the presence of " a directive agency ; " the Germans of an " architectonic principle " unknown, and uncorrelated, in living matter, to explain undeniable facts for which physical force fur- nishes no solution. Others, whose spiritual nature is not so en- tirely subjected to the sensible, break down entirely. Thus Pro- fessor Barker, of Yale College, after devoting his whole lecture to prove that vital force and even thought " are correlated to other natural forces " (^. e., identical with them), ccmes at the end to
1 Barnard's Address, p. 45. '^ Ibid p. 49.