so it has not been
given. It is too simple to imagine that the bodily heat is, like the
body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that
inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a
fit dwelling-place for itself--this explanation is too simple and too
idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are
told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital
phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for
gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for
electric and chemic phenomena. Modern science (and ancient science,
too, apparently) which sees well enough that an idealistic or a
materialistic explanation would equally account for the nexus of the
phenomena of the universe, deliberately and almost invariably prefers
the materialistic explanation. She is anxious that we should be kept
free of superstition. But the superstition that forces are the effects
of things does not seem to distress her at all. And so we are told
that gravitation is a property of matter, and are forbidden to think
that perhaps gravitation, a force, procreates matter, a thing, in
order that the effects of the fore may be perceived by dull sense. We
are told that the function of the liver and the brain depends on the
structure of the liver and the brain respectively and we are not
allowed to think that perhaps the force of animal life, feeling the
need of an instrument to secrete bile, on the one hand, and to secrete
cerebral lymph to act as a vehicle for the conveyance of thought and
emotion and higher things, on the other, introduces the liver with its
elaborate structure and the brain with its still more complicated
structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be
well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and
among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth
and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic
force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses
chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are
unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower.
Properly speaking, science is out of her sphere, though she does not
seem to know it, in making these suggestions. When she keeps herself
to the investigation of facts, their exposition, their sequence and
their laws, in her painstaking and accurate manner, we accept h