s the dew forms and the rain falls. When
the rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall,--a time which
science predicts,--then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish from
the earth. Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves,
as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still not
exempt from the operation of the universal physical laws. It came by
them or through them, and it must go by them or through them.

The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all these things as the lay
mind cannot be, used to the searching laboratory methods, and familiar
with the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, dealing with
the wonders of chemical compounds, and the forces that lurk in molecules
and atoms, seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution of the
earth, only the operation of mechanical and chemical principles; seeing
the irrefragable law of the correlation and the conservation of forces;
tracing consciousness and all our changes in mental states to changes in
the brain substance; drilled in methods of proof by experimentation;
knowing that the same number of ultimate atoms may be so combined or
married as to produce compounds that differ as radically as alcohol and
ether,--conversant with all these things, and more, I say,--the strictly
scientific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the mechanistic
conception of all life phenomena.

Science traces the chain of cause and effect everywhere and finds no
break. It follows down animal life till it merges in the vegetable,
though it cannot put its finger or its microscope on the point where one
ends and the other begins. It finds forms that partake of the
characteristics of both. It is reasonable to expect that the vegetable
merges into the mineral by the same insensible degrees, and that the one
becomes the other without any real discontinuity. The change, if we may
call it such, probably takes place in the interior world of matter among
the primordial atoms, where only the imagination can penetrate. In that
sleep of the ultimate corpuscle, what dreams may come, what miracles may
be wrought, what transformations take place! When I try to think of life
as a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mystic
dance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people taking
hold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing all
sorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's