ng a
bird. Now, without tracing the matter further than this, let us consider
how enormous a change the will of the man has introduced, even by so
trivial an exercise of its activity. No doubt the first change in the
material world was exceedingly slight: the molecular movement in the
cortex of his brain was probably not more than might be dynamically
represented by some small fraction of a foot-pound. But so intricate is
the _nexus_ of physical causality throughout the whole domain of Nature,
that the intervention of even so minute a disturbance _ab extra_ is
obviously bound to continue to assert an influence of ever-widening
extent as well as of everlasting duration. The heat generated by the
explosion of the powder, the changed disposition of the shot, the death
of the bird--leading to innumerable physical changes as to stoppage of
many mechanical processes previously going on in the bird's body, loss
of animal heat, &c., and also to innumerable vital changes, leading to
a stoppage of all the mechanical changes which the bird would have
helped to condition had it lived to die some other death, to propagate
its kind, and thus indirectly condition an incalculable number of future
changes that would have been brought about by the ever increasing number
of its descendants--these and an indefinite number of other physical
changes must all be held to have followed as a direct consequence of the
man's volition thus suddenly breaking in as an independent cause upon
the otherwise uniform course of Nature. Now, I say that, apart from some
system of pre-established harmony, it appears simply inconceivable that
the order of Nature could be maintained at all, if it were thus liable
to be interfered with at any moment in any number of points. And if the
spiritualist takes refuge in the further hypothesis of a pre-established
harmony between acts of human (not to add brute) volition and causes of
a natural kind, we have only to observe that he thus lands himself in a
speculative position which is practically identical with that occupied
by the materialist. For the only difference between the two positions
then is that the necessity which the materialist takes to be imposed on
human volition by the system of natural causation, is now taken by the
spiritualist to be equally imposed by a super-natural volition. The
necessity which binds the human volition must be equally rigid in
either case; and therefore it can make no practical diffe