totality of things, by which everyone must admit that actions are guided, may not include the future as well as the past, and that to attempt to deduce those actions from the past only will prove impossible. In some way matter can be moved, guided, disturbed, by the agency of living beings; in some way there is a control, a directing-agency active, and events are caused at its choice and will that would not otherwise happen. A luminous and helpful idea is that time is but a relative mode of regarding things; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner, as if events necessarily happened in this order and at this precise rate. But that may be only our mode of regarding them. The events may be in some sense existent always, both past and future, and it may be we who are arriving at them, not they which are happening. The analogy of a traveller in a railway train is useful. If he could never leave the train nor alter its pace, he would probably consider the landscapes as necessarily successive, and be unable to conceive their co-existence. The analogy of a solid cut into sections is closer. We recognise the universe in sections, and each section we call the present. It is like the string of slices cut by a microtome; it is our way of studying the whole. But we may err in supposing that the body only exists in the slices which pass before our microscope in regular order and succession. We perceive, therefore, a possible fourth-dimensional aspect about time, the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part of our present limitations. And if once we grasp the idea that past and future may be actually existing, we can recognise that they may have a controlling influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the higher plane,' or the totality of things, after which, as it seems to me, we are impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of force or determinism, and the action of living beings consciously directed to a definite and preconceived end. Inanimate matter is controlled by the vis a tergo; it is operated on solely by the past. Given certain conditions, and the effect in due time follows. Attempts have been made to apply the same principle to living and conscious beings, but without much success. These seem to work for an object, even if it be the mere seeking for food; they are controlled by the idea of something not yet palpable. Given certain conditions, and their action cannot certainly be predicted; they have a sense of option and free will. Either their actions are really arbitrary and indeterminate -which is highly improbable-or they are controlled by the future as well as by the past. Imagine beings thus controlled: automata you may still call them, but they will be living automata, and will exhibit all the characteristics of live creatures. Moreover, if they have a merely experiential knowledge, necessarily limited by memory and bounded by the past, they will be unable to predict each other's actions with any certainty, because the whole of the data are not before them. May not a clearer apprehension of the meaning of life and will and determinism be gradually reached in some such direction as this? By what means is force exerted, and what, definitely, is force or stress? I can hardly put the question here and now so as to be intelligible, except to those who have approached and thought over the same difficulties; but I venture to say that there is here something not provided for in the orthodox scheme of physics; that modern physics is not complete, and that a line of possible advance lies in this direction. I might go further. Given that force can be exerted by an act of will, do we understand the mechanism by which this is done? And if there is a gap in our knowledge between the conscious idea of a motion and the liberation of muscular energy needed to accomplish it, how do we know that a body may not be moved The expression controlled by the future' I first heard in a conversation with G. F. Fitzgerald, who seemed to consider it applicable to all events, without exception. 2 This is, of course, not assertion, but suggestion. It may be erroneous to draw any such distinction between animate and inanimate. without ordinary material contact by an act of will? I have no evidence that such a thing is possible. I have tried once or twice to observe its asserted cecurrence, and failed to get anything that satisfied me. Others may have been more fortunate. In any case, I hold that we require more knowledge before we can deny the possibility. If the conservation of energy were upset by the process, we should have grounds for denying it; but nothing that we know is upset by the discovery of a novel mode of communicating energy, perhaps some more immediate action through the ether. It is no use theorising; it is unwise to decline to examine phenomena because we feel too sure of their impossibility. We ought to know the universe very thoroughly and completely before we take up that attitude. Again, it is familiar that a thought may be excited in the brain of another person, transferred thither from our brain, by pulling a suitable trigger; by liberating energy in the form of sound, for instance, or by the mechanical act of writing, or in other ways. A pre-arranged code called language, and a material medium of communication, are the recognised methods. May there not also be an immaterial (perhaps an ethereal) medium of communication? Is it possible that an idea can be transferred from one person to another by a process such as we have not yet grown accustomed to, and know practically nothing about? In this case I have evidence. I assert that I have seen it done; and am perfectly convinced of the fact. Many others are satisfied of the truth of it too. Why must we speak of it with bated breath, as of a thing of which we are ashamed? What right have we to be ashamed of a truth? And after all, when we have grown accustomed to it, it will not seem altogether strange. It is, perhaps, a natural consequence of the community of life or family relationship running through all living beings. The transmission of life may be likened in some ways to the transmission of magnetism, and all magnets are sympathetically connected, so that if suitably suspended a vibration from one disturbs others, even though they be distant ninety-two million miles. It is sometimes objected that, granting thought-transference or telepathy to be a fact, it belongs more especially to lower forms of life, and that as the cerebral hemispheres develop we become independent of it; that what we notice is the relic of a decaying faculty, not the germ of a new and fruitful sense; and that progress is not to be made by studying or attending to it. It may be that it is an immature mode of communication, adapted to lower stages of consciousness than ours, but how much can we not learn by studying immature stages? As well might the objection be urged against a study of embryology. It may, on the other hand, as W. F. Barrett has suggested, be an indication of a higher mode of communication, which shall survive our temporary connection with ordinary matter. I have spoken of the apparently direct action of mind on mind, and of a possible action of mind on matter. But the whole region is unexplored territory, and it is conceivable that matter may react on mind in a way we can at present only dimly imagine. In fact, the barrier between the two may gradually melt away, as so many other barriers have done, and we may end in a wider perception of the unity of nature, such as philosophers have already dreamt of. I care not what the end may be. I do care that the inquiry shall be conducted by us, and that we shall be free from the disgrace of jogging along accustomed roads, leaving to isolated labourers the work, the ridicule, and the gratification, of unfolding a new region to unwilling eyes. It may be held that such investigations are not physical and do not concern us. We cannot tell without trying; and as the results are physical, or at least have a physical side, it seems reasonable to assume that the process by which they are produced is a proper subject for physical inquiry. I believe that there is something in this region which does concern us as physicists. It may concern other sciences too. It must indeed concern biology; but with that I have nothing to do. Biologists have their region, we have ours, and there is no need for us to hang back from an investigation because they do. Our own science, of Physics or Natural Philosophy in its widest sense, is the King of the Sciences, and it is for us to lead, not to follow. And I say, have faith in the Intelligibility of the universe. Intelligibility has been the great creed in the strength of which all intellectual advance has been attempted, and all scientific progress made. At first things always look mysterious. A comet, lightning, the aurora, the rainbow-all strange anomalous mysterious apparitions. But scrutinised in the dry light of science, their relationship with other better-known things becomes apparent. They cease to be anomalous; and though a certain mystery necessarily remains, it is no more a property peculiar to them, it is shared by the commonest objects of daily life. The operations of a chemist, again, if conducted in a haphazard manner, would be an indescribable medley of effervescences, precipitations, changes in colour and in substance; but, guided by a thread of theory running through them, the processes fall into a series, they all become fairly intelligible, and any explosion or catastrophe that may occur is capable of explanation too. Now I say that the doctrine of ultimate intelligibility should be pressed into other departments also. At present we hang back from whole regions of inquiry and say they are not for us. A few we are beginning to grapple with. The nature of disease is yielding to scrutiny with fruitful result: the mental aberrations and abnormalities of hypnotism, duplex personality, and allied phenomena, are now at last being taken under the wing of science after long ridicule and contempt. The phenomena of crime, the scientific meaning and justification of altruism, and other matters relating to life and conduct, are beginning, or perhaps are barely yet beginning, to show a vulnerable front over which the forces of science may pour. Facts so strange that they have often been called miraculous are now no longer regarded as entirely incredible. All occurrences seem reasonable when contemplated from the right point of view, and some are believed in which in their essence are still quite marvellous. Apply warmth for a given period to a sparrow's egg, and what result could be more incredible or magical if now discovered for the first time. The possibilities of the universe are as infinite as is its physical extent. Why should we grope with our eyes always downward, and deny the possibility of everything out of our accustomed beat? If there is a puzzle about free-will, let it be attacked; puzzles mean a state of half-knowledge; by the time we can grasp something more approximating to the totality of things the paradoxicality of paradoxes drops away and becomes unrecog nisable. I seem to myself to catch glimpses of clues to many of these old questions, and I urge that we should trust consciousness, which has led us thus far; should shrink from no problem when the time seems ripe for an attack upon it, and should not hesitate to press investigation, and seek to ascertain the laws of even the most recondite problems of life and mind. What we know is as nothing to that which remains to be known. This is sometimes said as a truism; sometimes it is half doubted. To me it seems the most literal truth, and that if we narrow our view to already half-conquered territory only, we shall be false to the men who won our freedom, and treasonable to the highest claims of science. If I were asked (as I am not) to suggest any practical proposal for immediate action in the direction indicated, I should not urge anything at all revolutionary. I do not think that the time is ripe for the Royal Society, for instance, to move in the matter; the early stages of such an investigation, in which the human element is so obtrusive and perturbing, may very properly be left to a society devoted to that special end; and, thanks to the single-hearted, persistent, and admirably judicious labours of a few workers, whose names I need not mention because they are so well known, such a society exists. I do, however, think that whenever in the view of the leaders of that society the time may have come to put the scientific world in official possession of their more securely ascertained facts—for instance, by presenting a report to this or some other section-they ought not to ask in vain for some recognition of the work accomplished by them. It seems to me desirable that the work in which they have been so long engaged should be established on a more permanent basis, such a basis as scientific recognition would be likely to bestow, so that the existence of the society may not be imperilled by the mortality of individuals. I will not press the suggestion further; it may bear fruit in due season or it may not. I must return to the work of this section, from which I have apparently wandered rather far afield, further than is customary— perhaps further than is desirable. But I hold that occasionally a wide outlook is wholesome, and that without such occasional survey, the rigid attention to detail and minute scrutiny of every little fact, which are so entirely admirable and are so rightly here fostered, are apt to become unhealthily dull and monotonous. Our life-work is concerned with the rigid framework of facts, the skeleton or outline map of the universe; and, though it is well for us occasionally to remember that the texture and colour and beauty which we habitually ignore are not therefore in the slightest degree non-existent, yet it is safest speedily to return to our base and continue the slow and laborious march with which we are familiar and which experience has justified. It is because I imagine that such systematic advance is now beginning to be possible in a fresh and unexpected direction that I have attempted to direct your attention to a subject which, if my prognostications are correct, may turn out to be one of special and peculiar interest to humanity. The following Reports and Papers were read: 1. Interim Report of the Committee on Phenomena connected with 2. On the Action of a Planet upon small Bodies passing near the Planet, with Special Reference to the Action of Jupiter upon such Bodies. By Professor H. A. NEWTON.-See Reports, p. 511. 3. On the Absorption of Heat in the Solar Atmosphere. The author endeavours to determine with accuracy the ratio of the heat received from the limb and the centre of the solar disc, and thus, by taking yearly observations through a sun-spot cycle, to find out if the solar atmosphere varies in depth. The apparatus consists of a heliostat which throws a small pencil of sunlight into a dark room. It is received on a 4-inch concave silver-on-glass mirror of about 10 feet focus. A small convex mirror is placed inside the focus of the concave mirror, and thus forms an image of the sun of 80 centimètres in diameter. This image is allowed to fall on a radio-micrometer of Prof. C. E. Boys. The tube of the instrument is stopped down to nearly 1 mm. in diameter, so that only about 500000 part of the solar image is at any moment giving its heat to the instrument. A slice of limelight is allowed to fall on the mirror of the radio-micrometer, and is reflected from it on to a horizontal slit in the side of a box which contains a photographic plate. This plate during an observation is allowed to fall with a uniform rate by a piece of clockwork. Any motion of the mirror of the radiomicrometer thus records itself on the plate in a curved line. The clock of the heliostat is stopped and the image of the sun is allowed to transit across the mouth of the radio-micrometer, and the curve giving the values of the heat received from the solar disc is recorded on the photographic plate. A seconds pendulum swings across the track of the limelight, so that the photographed curve is notched into seconds of time, and a means thus given of localising the position of the instrument on the solar disc. 4. The Ultra-Violet Spectrum of the Solar Prominences. By Professor GEORGE E. HALE, Director of the Kenwood Physical Observatory, Chicago. The prominence spectrum has been photographed with a large solar spectroscope attached to the 12.2 inch equatorial refractor. Several new lines have been thus discovered, and those for which the wave-length has been deduced are given in the first column of the table. The wave-lengths of the H and K calcium lines are to be regarded as provisional only, as Professor Rowland has not yet published the final values. The other columns contain measures of the lines in the hydrogen series, all reduced to Rowland's scale. It will be seen that the first two lines are in all probability due to calcium; they are narrow and sharp, and fall at the centres of the dark bands in the solar spectrum. The next line is as yet unaccounted for, but it does not appear to be a component of the hydrogen line at 13889:14. The line at A3970-11 is marked doubtful, because it falls very nearly at the position of a ghost of H; everything points, however, to an independent origin, though the agreement with Ames' hydrogen line at A3970-25 is far from satisfactory. The remaining four lines are evidently members of the hydrogen series. Prominence forins have also been photographed through H and K, the dark shades allowing the use of a very wide slit. The research is to be continued with improved apparatus. 5. Report on Researches Relative to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. By Dr. J. LARMOR and G. H. BRYAN.-See Reports, p. 85. 6. Note on a Simple Mechanical Representation of Carnot's Reversible Cycle,1 By G. H. BRYAN. FRIDAY, AUGUST 21. The following Reports and Papers were read :- 1. Interim Report of the Committee on Researches in Electro-optics. See Reports, p. 147. 2. Note on the Electromagnetic Theory of the Rotation of the Plane of Polarised Light. By Professor A. GRAY, M.A., F.R.S.E. Sir William Thomson has explained the turning of the plane of polarised light in a magnetic field by supposing the ether to have imbedded in it a large number This note is reproduced in Par. 39 of the Report on the Second Law of Thermodynamics by the author. |