r a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is too
vast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is one
of the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can take
no step beyond that.

VIII

There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogy
which William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain the
relation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric current
which it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which it
conveys.

Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wire
that transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transient
relation to any outside material through which it passed. But if we
know anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part of
the human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, it
and the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one.

The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the current
originates is the only logical or permissible one.

IX

Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:

The insect does not belong to our world. The other
animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life,
and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something, on
the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to
the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One
would be inclined to say that the insect comes from
another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more
insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.

Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for
instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The
scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land
animals outside the insect world.

The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little
conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little
people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular
constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our
coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse
and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they
exceed three thousand a sec