he ingenious and subtle, but quite defensible
suggestion of Mr. Babbage, a leap is made to an assumption which cannot
be defended scientifically, but only teleologically. It is one thing
to say that every movement in the visible world transmits a record of
itself to the surrounding ether, in such a way that from the undulation
of the ether a sufficiently powerful intelligence might infer the
character of the generating movement in the visible world. It is quite
another thing to say that the ether is organized in such a complex and
delicate way as to be like a negative image or counterpart of the world
of sensible matter. The latter view is no doubt ingenious, but it is
gratuitous. It is sustained not by scientific analogy, but by the desire
to find some assignable use for the energy which is constantly escaping
from visible matter into invisible ether. The moment we ask how do we
know that this energy is not really wasted, or that it is not put to
some use wholly undiscoverable by human intelligence, this assumption of
an organized ether is at once seen to be groundless. It belongs not to
the region of science, but to that of pure mythology.

[6] Babbage, Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, p. 115; Jevons,
Principles of Science, Vol. II. p. 455.

In justice to our authors, however, it should be remembered that this
assumption is put forth not as something scientifically probable, but as
something which for aught we know to the contrary may possibly be true.
This, to be sure, we need not deny; nor if we once allow this prodigious
leap of inference, shall we find much difficulty in reaching the famous
conclusion that "thought conceived to affect the matter of another
universe simultaneously with this may explain a future state." This
proposition, quaintly couched in an anagram, like the discoveries of old
astronomers, was published last year in "Nature," as containing the gist
of the forthcoming book. On the negative-image hypothesis it is not hard
to see how thought is conceived to affect the seen and the unseen worlds
simultaneously. Every act of consciousness is accompanied by molecular
displacements in the brain, and these are of course responded to by
movements in the ethereal world. Thus as a series of conscious states
build up a continuous memory in strict accordance with physical laws of
motion, [7] so a correlative memory is simultaneously built up in
the ethereal world out of the ethereal correlatives of the molecula