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vol. title: vol. period: 1881 pages in vol.: 439 |
< A Philosophy of Materialisation (continued from page 11-338) >
fact of the variation of external order and the attending manifestations of energy, is after the analogies supplied by the physical sciences, and then to apply their methods with as little innovation as possible to the subject matter and data offered by our now Science.
Experience shows us that apart from a reasonable amount of exhaustion, the practice of mediutnahip is not destructive to life, so that we may say that at the end of the sitting when the medium has been restored to his normal consciousness and functional activity, matters are in just the same state as at the beginning of the seance, consequently a cycle of operations has been gone through, and, ranking abstraction of the machinery employed, work has boon done is the room, such as the lifting of musical boxes, chairs, &c., and all the permanent record of the energy externalised, is the disorder produced. The great advantage of this method of regarding the question of mediumship is, that we are not called upon to state in so many words what is the force or physical cause which is in operation during the manifestations. The medium having gone through a cycle of operations, has all through manifested vital activities, so that, no matter how strange soever the results of these activities bars shown themselves to be, nothing inhuman or unnatural has occurred; consequently we ore justified in our endeavour to follow the vagaries of the animal economy through its various changes by the application of the argument by analogy from the bettor known to the less known, provided in this endeavour we do not contradict established principles or introduce hypotheses incapable of verification either by direct observation or deduction there from.
As physicists and physiologists have to deal with facts, and not with causes, we must be content to accept the mundane aide of the situation, and we must in our first approximation attack the port of the problem that will boar the application of their methods of reasoning before we attempt those higher flights into regions the very existence of which is denied by thorn, from their neglect to provide themselves with appropriate instruments of analysis. For these reasons I prefer to start from the normal condition, and attempt to follow the physiological process round to the normal condition again by the application of known principles and the introduction of reasonable hypotheses, leaving out of consideration affairs which may or may not is intrinsic but which I am unable to grasp in a perfected conception.
Work is done in an extraordinary way by a medium; that is a matter of fact, and further, it is equally a matter of fact that it must be represented in term· of food digested by him, or by somebody also, which, at the start, was locked up within the limits of an animal body and which, under ordinary circumstances, would have boon set free through the intermediacy of the muscular system, under the directive action of his will in each individual case.
The following Quotations are from Dr. Bonce Jones’ Third Croonian Lecture on Matter and Force, and will show the reader the necessity of following closely the lines laid down for our guidance by groat workers in the past, if our now branch of Natural Science is not to pass from our hands into those more competent workmen, actually before we have perceived its import and recognised that it is a complex of physios, physiology and biology in the widest sense of the term, not to mention it as the link between nature and spirit—a true metaphysic.
“Matters in a state of tension, and ready for chemical motion are constantly going into the body in the food and air. The quantity of active and latent energy which goes in, ought exactly to balance the quantity which comes out, deducting that which remains latent in the chemical substances, or becomes active in the actual warmth of the body itself.
“The chemical changes of the matter within the body (that is, the decrease of potential energy or tension) give rise to different forms of motion. These motions appear as the functions or work of the body.
“By far the greater part of the potential energy or tension which goes in is ultimately changed into warmth. Other modes of motion, as electricity and mechanical work, take but a small part of the total income. The balance-sheet at present can give an idea of the form which the account will ultimately take; but it cannot tell the items with any approach to accuracy.
Whatever form of motion or tension proceeds from the body, let us regard it not as created or destroyed, but as the representative and equivalent of that energy which went into the body.
“The different kinds of apparatus or organs which the animal possesses for the conversion of energy determine in what form of motion the expenditure of energy can take place.”
I proceed to show that the above is a statement that the principle of conservation of energy applies to living beings in a particular sense as well as to inanimate systems in nature. These are said to be conservative systems, in relation to energy, when the mutual forces between the parts always consume or always perform the same amount of work during any motion whatever, by which the system can pass from and return to any particular configuration. When a conservative system has the position of its parts altered, on return to original configuration there is a restoration of actual energy equivalent to the work spent on the previous alteration of form due to expended energy, and this re-appearance is due to the exhaustion of the potential energy possessed by the system at the instant of the commencement of the return process, and which depends not upon the motion, but on the configuration of the system. In such a system the sum of the energies of motion and position equals a constant.
But to apply the principle of conservation of energy as thus expressed, to the physical system of the individual animal body, it is necessary that the criterion of reversibility be applicable. This demand is answered by the fact of nutrition; for an animal not only transforms blood energy into heat and work, but it also takes in food which the nutritive process makes part of the working system, whereby the actual work done, heat radiated, or potential exhausted, is, as it were, allowed to return instantaneously to the system by another path; otherwise, though the conservation of energy would hold universally in the living system, there would be an exhaustion of potential energy equivalent to dissipation of energy, as far as the individual was concerned, with the inevitable result, a tendency to death.
But, in consequence of this moving equilibrium through exchange it is necessary in applying physical principles by the method of analogy to the study of vital phenomena, to consider the income and the outcome conjointly, and to remember that the animal system is truly conservative only in prospect of the expected supply which is to replace waste.
Thus, as the conservative character of an animal system does not depend alone upon its own intrinsic energy, but also upon that introduced from without, the work which it does or the direction in which it moves itself is indifferent, since all work done by an animal is represented by products of combustion, by ashes, in fact, cast out as worthless, but which ashes have their <... continues on page 11-340 >