Part 6

Assuming the density of the earth to be 5·5, its weight would be 6,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons, and its impact—by the formula given above—would be 1,025,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 foot-tons. Making the same supposition as in the case of our cannon-ball, the final pressure would be that here stated.

Footnote 15:

TYNDALL, J., Heat considered as a mode of Motion; Am. ed., p. 57, New York, 1863.

Footnote 16:

RANKINE (The Steam-engine and other prime Movers, London, 1866,) gives the efficiency of Steam-engines as from 1-15th to 1-20th of the heat of the fuel.

ARMSTRONG, Sir WM., places this efficiency at 1-10th as the maximum. In practice, the average result is only 1-30th. Rep. Brit. Assoc., 1863, p. liv.

HELMHOLTZ, H. L. F., says: “The best expansive engines give back as mechanical work only eighteen per cent. of the heat generated by the fuel.” Interaction of Natural Forces, in Correlation and Conservation of Forces, p. 227.

Footnote 17:

THOMSEN, JULIUS, Poggendorff’s Annalen, cxxv, 348. Also in abstract in Am. J. Sci., II, xli, 396, May, 1866.

Footnote 18:

American Journal of Science, II, xli, 214, March, 1866.

Footnote 19:

In this calculation the annual evaporation from the ocean is assumed to be about 9 feet. (See Dr. BUIST, quoted in Maury’s Phys. Geography of the Sea, New York, 1861, p. 11.) Calling the water-area of our globe 150,000,000 square miles, the total evaporation in tons per minute, would be that here given. Inasmuch as 30,000 pounds raised one-foot high is a horse-power, the number of horse-powers necessary to raise this quantity of water 3½ miles in one minute is 2,757,000,000,000. This amount of energy is precisely that set free again when this water falls as rain.

Footnote 20:

Compare ODLING, WM., Lectures on Animal Chemistry, London, 1866. “In broad antagonism to the doctrines which only a few years back were regarded as indisputable, we now find that the chemist, like the plant, is capable of producing from carbonic acid and water a whole host of organic bodies, and we see no reason to question his ultimate ability to reproduce all animal and vegetable principles whatsoever.” (p. 52.)

“Already hundreds of organic principles have been built up from their constituent elements, and there is now no reason to doubt our capability of producing all organic principles whatsoever in a similar manner.” (p. 58.)

Dr. Odling is the successor of Faraday as Fullerian Professor of Chemistry in the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Footnote 21:

MARSHALL, JOHN, Outlines of Physiology, American edition, 1868, p. 916.

Footnote 22:

FRANKLAND, EDWARD, On the Source of Muscular Power, Proc. Roy. Inst., June 8, 1866; Am. J. Sci., II, xlii, 393, Nov. 1866.

Footnote 23:

LIEBIG, JUSTUS VON, Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Physiologie und Pathologie, Braunschweig, 1842. Also in his Animal Chemistry, edition of 1852 (Am. ed., p. 26), where he says “Every motion increases the amount of organized tissue which undergoes metamorphosis.”

Footnote 24:

Compare DRAPER, JOHN WM. Human Physiology.

PLAYFAIR, LYON, On the Food of Man in relation to his useful work, Edinburgh, 1865. Proc. Roy. Inst., Apr. 28, 1865.

RANKE, Tetanus eine Physiologische Studie, Leipzig, 1865.

ODLING, _op. cit._

Footnote 25:

VOIT, E., Untersuchungen über den Einfluss des Kochsalzes, des Kaffees, und der Muskelbewegungen auf den Stoffwechsel, Munich, 1860.

SMITH, E., Philosophical Transactions, 1861, 747.

FICK, A., and WISLICENUS, J., Phil. Mag., IV, xxxi, 485.

FRANKLAND, E., _loc. cit._

NOYES, T. R., American Journal Medical Sciences, Oct. 1867.

PARKES, E. A., Proceedings Royal Society, xv, 339; xvi, 44.

Footnote 26:

SMITH, EDWARD, Philosophical Transactions, 1859, 709.

Footnote 27:

Authorities differ as to the amount of energy converted by the steam-engine. (See Note 16.) Compare MARSHALL, _op. cit._, p. 918. “Whilst, therefore, in an engine one-twentieth part only of the fuel consumed is utilized as mechanical power, one-fifth of the food absorbed by man is so appropriated.”

Footnote 28:

HEIDENHAIN, Mechanische Leistung Wärmeentwickelung und Stoffumsatz bei der Muskelthätigkeit, Breslau, 1864.

See also HAUGHTON, SAMUEL, On the Relation of Food to work, published in “Medicine in Modern Times,” London, 1869, Macmillan & Co.

Footnote 29:

HEIDENHAIN, _op. cit._ Also by FICK, Untersuchungen über Muskel-arbeit, Basel, 1867. Compare also “Nature,” i, 159, Dec. 9, 1869.

Footnote 30:

DU BOIS-REYMOND, EMIL, On the time required for the transmission of volition and sensation through the nerves, Proc. Roy. Inst. Also in Appendix to Bence Jones’s Croonian lectures.

Footnote 31:

MARSHALL, _op. cit._, p. 227.

Footnote 32:

MELLONI, Ann. Ch. Phys., xlviii, 198.

See also NOBILI, Bibl. Univ., xliv, 225, 1830; lvii, 1, 1834.

Footnote 33:

The apparatus employed is illustrated and fully described in Brown-Sequard’s Archives de Physiologie, i, 498, June, 1868. By it the 1-4000th of a degree Centigrade may be indicated.

Footnote 34:

LOMBARD, J. S., New York Medical Journal, v, 198, June, 1867. [A part of these facts were communicated to me directly by their discoverer.]

Footnote 35:

WOOD, L. H., On the influence of Mental activity on the Excretion of Phosphoric acid by the Kidneys. Proceedings Connecticut Medical Society for 1869, p. 197.

Footnote 36:

On this question of vital force, see LIEBIG, Animal Chemistry. “The increase of mass in a plant is determined by the occurrence of a decomposition which takes place in certain parts of the plant under the influence of light and heat.”

“The modern science of Physiology has left the track of Aristotle. To the eternal advantage of science, and to the benefit of mankind it no longer invents a _horror vacui_, a _quinta essentia_, in order to furnish credulous hearers with solutions and explanations of phenomena, whose true connection with others, whose ultimate cause is still unknown.”

“All the parts of the animal body are produced from a peculiar fluid circulating in its organism, by virtue of an influence residing in every cell, in every organ, or part of an organ.”

“Physiology has sufficiently decisive grounds for the opinion that every motion, every manifestation of force, is the result of a transformation of the structure or of its substance; that every conception, every mental affection, is followed by changes in the chemical nature of the secreted fluids; that every thought, every sensation is accompanied by a change in the composition of the substance of the brain.”

“All vital activity arises from the mutual action of the oxygen of the atmosphere and the elements of the food.”

“As, in the closed galvanic circuit, in consequence of certain changes which an inorganic body, a metal, undergoes when placed in contact with an acid, a certain something becomes cognizable by our senses, which we call a current of electricity; so in the animal body, in consequence of transformations and changes undergone by matter previously constituting a part of the organism, certain phenomena of motion and activity are perceived, and these we call life, or vitality.”

“In the animal body we recognize as the ultimate cause of all force only one cause, the chemical action which the elements of the food and the oxygen of the air mutually exercise on each other. The only known ultimate cause of vital force, either in animals or in plants, is a chemical process.”

“If we consider the force which determines the vital phenomena as a property of certain substances, this view leads of itself to a new and more rigorous consideration of certain singular phenomena, which these very substances exhibit, in circumstances in which they no longer make a part of living organisms.”

Also OWEN, RICHARD, (Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species, forming the 40th chapter of his Anatomy of Vertebrates, republished in Am. J. Sci., II, xlvii, 33, Jan. 1869.) “In the endeavor to clearly comprehend and explain the functions of the combination of forces called ‘brain,’ the physiologist is hindered and troubled by the views of the nature of those cerebral forces which the needs of dogmatic theology have imposed on mankind.” * *

“Religion pure and undefiled, can best answer how far it is righteous or just to charge a neighbor with being unsound in his principles who holds the term ‘life’ to be a sound expressing the sum of living phenomena; and who maintains these phenomena to be modes of force into which other forms of force have passed, from potential to active states, and reciprocally, through the agency of these sums or combinations of forces impressing the mind with the ideas signified by the terms ‘monad,’ ‘moss,’ ‘plant,’ or ‘animal.’”

And HUXLEY, THOS. H., “On the Physical Basis of Life,” University Series, No. 1. College Courant, 1870.

_Per contra_, see the Address of Dr. F. A. P. Barnard, as retiring President, before the Am. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, Chicago meeting, August, 1868. “Thought cannot be a physical force, because thought admits of no measure.”

GOULD, BENJ. APTHORP, Address as retiring President, before the American Association at its Salem meeting, Aug., 1869.

BEALE, LIONEL S., “Protoplasm, or Life, Matter, and Mind.” London, 1870. John Churchill & Sons.

Footnote 37:

For an excellent account of this distinguished man, see Youmans’s Introduction to the Correlation and Conservation of Forces, p. xvii.

Footnote 38:

DRAPER, J. W., _loc. cit._

Footnote 39:

HENRY, JOSEPH, Agric. Rep. Patent Office, 1857, 440.

Footnote 40:

WATTERS, J. H., An Essay on Organic, or Life-force. Written for the degree of Doctor of Medicine in the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1851. See also St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal, II, v, Nos. 3 and 4, 1868; Dec. 1868, and Nov. 10, 1869.

Footnote 41:

LECONTE, JOSEPH, The Correlation of Physical, Chemical and Vital Force, and the Conservation of Force in Vital Phenomena. American Journal of Science, II, xxviii, 305, Nov. 1859.

Footnote 42:

LOMBARD, J. S., _loc. cit._

Footnote 43:

NOYES, T. R., _loc. cit._

Footnote 44:

WOOD, L. H., _loc. cit._

_AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC._

PREFATORY NOTE.

The substance of the greater part of this paper, which has been in the present form for some time, was delivered, as a lecture, at a Conversazione of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, in the Hall of the College, on the evening of Friday, the 30th of April last.

It will be found to support itself, so far as the facts are concerned, on the most recent German physiological literature, as represented by Rindfleisch, Kühne, and especially Stricker, with which last, for the production of his “Handbuch,” there is associated every great histological name in Germany.

EDINBURGH, _October, 1869_.

AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC.

It is a pleasure to perceive Mr. Huxley open his clear little essay with what we may hold, perhaps, to be the manly and orthodox view of the character and products of the French writer, Auguste Comte. “In applying the name of ‘the new philosophy’ to that estimate of the limits of philosophical inquiry which he” (Professor Huxley), “in common with many other men of science, holds to be just,” the Archbishop of York confounds, it seems, this new philosophy with the Positive philosophy of M. Comte; and thereat Mr. Huxley expresses himself as greatly astonished. Some of us, for our parts, may be inclined at first to feel astonished at Mr. Huxley’s astonishment; for the school to which, at least on the philosophical side, Mr. Huxley seems to belong, is even notorious for its prostration before Auguste Comte, whom, especially, so far as method and systematization are concerned, it regards as the greatest intellect since Bacon. For such, as it was the opinion of Mr. Buckle, is understood to be the opinion also of Messrs. Grote, Bain, and Mill. In fact, we may say that such is commonly and currently considered the characteristic and distinctive opinion of that whole perverted or inverted reaction which has been called the _Revulsion_. That is to say, to give this word a moment’s explanation, that the Voltaires and Humes and Gibbons having long enjoyed an immunity of sneer at man’s blind pride and wretched superstition—at _his_ silly non-natural honor and _her_ silly non-natural virtue—a reaction had set in, exulting in poetry, in the splendor of nature, the nobleness of man, and the purity of woman, from which reaction again we have, almost within the last decennium, been revulsively, as it were, called back,—shall we say by some “bolder” spirits—the Buckles, the Mills, &c.?—to the old illumination or enlightenment of a hundred years ago, in regard to the weakness and stupidity of man’s pretensions over the animality and materiality that limit him. Of this revulsion, then, as said, a main feature, especially in England, has been prostration before the vast bulk of Comte; and so it was that Mr. Huxley’s protest in this reference, considering the philosophy he professed, had that in it to surprise at first. But if there was surprise, there was also pleasure; for Mr. Huxley’s estimate of Comte is undoubtedly the right one. “So far as I am concerned,” he says, “the most reverend prelate” (the Archbishop of York) “might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand; for, so far as my study of what specially characterizes the Positive philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism.” “It was enough,” he says again, “to make David Hume turn in his grave, that here, almost within earshot of his house, an instructed audience should have listened without a murmur while his most characteristic doctrines were attributed to a French writer of fifty years’ later date, in whose dreary and verbose pages we miss alike the vigor of thought and the exquisite clearness of style of the man whom I make bold to term the most acute thinker of the eighteenth century—even though that century produced Kant.”

Of the doctrines themselves which are alluded to here, I shall say nothing now; but of much else that is said, there is only to be expressed a hearty and even gratified approval. I demur, to be sure, to the exaltation of Hume over Kant—high as I place the former. Hume, with infinite fertility, surprised us, it may be said, perhaps, into attention on a great variety of points which had hitherto passed unquestioned; but, even on these points, his success was of an interrupted, scattered and inconclusive nature. He set the world adrift, but he set man too, reeling and miserable, adrift with it. Kant, again, with gravity and reverence, desired to refix, but in purity and truth, all those relations and institutions which alone give value to existence—which alone _are_ humanity, in fact—but which Hume, with levity and mockery, had approached to shake. Kant built up again an entire new world for us of knowledge and duty, and, in a certain way, even belief; whereas Hume had sought to dispossess us of every support that man as man could hope to cling to. In a word, with _at least_ equal fertility, Kant was, as compared with Hume, a graver, deeper, and, so to speak, a more consecutive, more comprehensive spirit. Graces there were indeed, or even, it may be said, subtleties, in which Hume had the advantage perhaps. He is still in England an unsurpassed master of expression—this, certainly, in his History, if in his Essays he somewhat baffles his own self by a certain labored breadth of conscious fine writing, often singularly inexact and infelicitous. Still Kant, with reference to his products, must be allowed much the greater importance. In the history of philosophy he will probably always command as influential a place in the modern world as Socrates in the ancient; while, as probably, Hume will occupy at best some such position as that of Heraclitus or Protagoras. Hume, nevertheless, if equal to Kant, must, in view at once of his own subjective ability and his enormous influence, be pronounced one of the most important of writers. It would be difficult to rate too high the value of his French predecessors and contemporaries as regards purification of their oppressed and corrupt country; and Hume must be allowed, though with less call, to have subserved some such function in the land we live in. In preferring Kant, indeed, I must be acquitted of an undue partiality; for all that appertains to personal bias was naturally, and by reason of early and numerous associations, on the side of my countryman.

Demurring, then, to Mr. Huxley’s opinion on this matter, and postponing remark on the doctrines to which he alludes, I must express a hearty concurrence with every word he utters on Comte. In him I too “find little or nothing of any scientific value.” I too have been lost in the mere mirage and sands of “those dreary and verbose pages;” and I acknowledge in Mr. Huxley’s every word the ring of a genuine experience. M. Comte was certainly a man of some mathematical and scientific proficiency, as well as of quick but biased intelligence. A member of the _Aufklärung_, he had seen the immense advance of physical science since Newton, under, as is usually said, the method of Bacon; and, like Hume, like Reid, like Kant, _who had all anticipated him in this_, he sought to transfer that method to the domain of mind. In this he failed; and though in a sociological aspect he is not without true glances into the present disintegration of society and the conditions of it, anything of importance cannot be claimed for him. There is not a sentence in his book that, in the hollow elaboration and windy pretentiousness of its build, is not an exact type of its own constructor. On the whole, indeed, when we consider the little to which he attained, the empty inflation of his claims, the monstrous and maniacal self-conceit into which he was _exalted_, it may appear, perhaps, that charity to M. Comte himself, to say nothing of the world, should induce us to wish that both his name and his works were buried in oblivion. Now, truly, that Mr. Huxley (the “call” being for the moment his) has so pronounced himself, especially as the facts of the case are exactly and absolutely what he indicates, perhaps we may expect this consummation not to be so very long delayed. More than those members of the revulsion already mentioned, one is apt to suspect, will be anxious now to beat a retreat. Not that this, however, is so certain to be allowed them; for their estimate of M. Comte is a valuable element in the estimate of themselves.

Frankness on the part of Mr. Huxley is not limited to his opinion of M. Comte; it accompanies us throughout his whole essay. He seems even to take pride, indeed, in naming always and everywhere his object at the plainest. That object, in a general point of view, relates, he tells us, solely to materialism, but with a double issue. While it is his declared purpose, in the first place, namely, to lead us into materialism, it is equally his declared purpose, in the second place, to lead us out of materialism. On the first issue, for example, he directly warns his audience that to accept the conclusions which he conceives himself to have established on Protoplasm, is to accept these also: That “all vital action” is but “the result of the molecular forces” of the physical basis; and that, by consequence, to use his own words to his audience, “the thoughts to which I am now giving utterance, and your thoughts regarding them, are but the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena.” And, so far, I think, we shall not disagree with Mr. Huxley when he says that “most undoubtedly the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic.” Still, on the second issue, Mr. Huxley asserts that he is “individually no materialist.” “On the contrary, he believes materialism to involve grave philosophical error;” and the “union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy” he conceives himself to share “with some of the most thoughtful men with whom he is acquainted.” In short, to unite both issues, we have it in Mr. Huxley’s own words, that it is the single object of his essay “to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic;” and that, accordingly, he will, in the first place, “lead us through the territory of vital phenomena to the materialistic slough,” while pointing out, in the second, “the sole path by which, in his judgment, extrication is possible.” Mr. Huxley’s essay, then, falls evidently into two parts; and of these two parts we may say, further, that while the one—that in which he leads us into materialism—will be predominatingly physiological, the other—or that in which he leads us out of materialism—will be predominatingly philosophical. Two corresponding parts would thus seem to be prescribed to any full discussion of the essay; and of these, in the present needs of the world, it is evidently the latter that has the more promising theme. The truth is, however, that Mr. Huxley, after having exerted all his strength in his first part to throw us into “the materialistic slough,” by _clear necessity of knowledge_, only calls to us, in his second part, to come out of this slough again, on the somewhat _obscure necessity of ignorance_. This, then, is but a lop-sided balance, where a scale in the air only seems to struggle vainly to raise its well-weighted fellow on the ground. Mr. Huxley, in fact, possesses no remedy for materialism but what lies in the expression that, while he knows not what matter is in itself, he certainly knows that casualty is but contingent succession; and thus, like the so-called “philosophy” of the Revulsion, Mr. Huxley would only mock us into the intensest dogmatism on the one side by a fallacious reference to the intensest scepticism on the other.

The present paper, then, will regard mainly Mr. Huxley’s argument _for_ materialism, but say what is required, at the same time, on his alleged argument—which is merely the imaginary, or imaginative, impregnation of ignorance—_against_ it.

Following Mr. Huxley’s own steps in his essay, the course of his positions will be found to run, in summary, thus:—

What is meant by the physical basis of life is, that there is one kind of matter common to all living beings, and it is named protoplasm. No doubt it may appear at first sight that, in the various kinds of living beings, we have only _difference_ before us, as in the lichen on the rock and the painter that paints it,—the microscopic animalcule or fungus and the Finner whale or Indian fig,—the flower in the hair of a girl and the blood in her veins, etc. Nevertheless, throughout these and all other diversities, there really exists a threefold _unity_—a unity of faculty, a unity of form, and a unity of substance.