f the sciences. It is too early to
speak with any great certainty of the results that it has achieved,
though these are probably more substantial than is commonly supposed.

Anyhow, it will be best that, as before, we should give some
characteristic statements of the investigators themselves, rather than
attempt to make unauthorised summaries of our own.

And, first of all, Sir Oliver Lodge shall tell us what he understands
by the Soul. "The soul is that controlling and guiding principle which
is responsible for our personal expression and for the construction of
the body, under the restrictions of physical condition and ancestry.
In its higher developments it includes also feeling and intelligence
and will, and is the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its
instrument and organ, enabling it to receive and to convey physical
impressions, and to affect and be affected by matter and energy."[1]

How the soul acts by means of the body is thus explained.

"The brain is the link between the psychical and the physical, which in
themselves belong to different orders of being."[2]

{89}

"A portion of brain substance is consumed in every act of
mentation."[3] "Destroy certain parts of brain completely, and
connexion between the psychic and the material regions is for us
severed. True; but cutting off or damaging communication is not the
same as destroying or damaging the communicator; nor is smashing an
organ equivalent to killing the organist."[4]

M. Bergson does not differ from this when he says that, "the
soul--essentially action, will, liberty--is the creative force _par
excellence_, the productive agent of novelty in the world." He goes on
to speak of the way by which souls have been differentiated and raised
to self-conscious existence. "The history of this great effort is the
very history of the evolution of life on our planet. Certain lines of
evolution seem to have failed. But on the line of evolution which
leads to man the liberation has been accomplished and thus
personalities have been able to constitute themselves."[5] Like many
another, M. Bergson cannot bring himself to believe that death is to be
the end of all that has been thus painfully achieved during this
process of attainment. "When we see that consciousness is also memory,
{90} that one of its essential functions is to accumulate and preserve
the past, that very probably the brain is an instrument of
forgetfulness as much as o