SALVATION BY SCIENCE

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Salvation by Science

(NATURAL SALVATION)

IMMORTAL LIFE ON THE EARTH FROM

THE GROWTH OF KNOWLEDGE

AND THE DEVELOPMENT

OF THE HUMAN

BRAIN

BY ^^

CHARLES ASBURY STEPHENS, M. D.

THE LABORATORY

NORWAY LAKE, MAINE
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By C. a. Stephens

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THE COLONIAL PRESS
C. H. 8IM0NDS & CO., BOSTON, V. S. A.

DEDICATION

Salvation by Science is addressed to all earnest
students of Life and dedicated to that greater new-
era of Humanity which Science ushers in.

CONTENTS

PART I

PAGE

At the Darkest Hour i

The Promethean Faith i6

The Cell-of-Life. Forms and Appendages of Cells. The Neuro-Electronic
Circulation. How the Unicell Became a Multicell. Cell Self and Multicellular
Self. How the Brain Cells Unite to Form the Human Intellect. The Dis-
covery of Cell Old Age. The Capillaries in Old Tissues. Sensation and Cell
Old Age. The Inference from Maupas' Observations. Conclusions Which the
Facts Necessitate. Dissolution of Self-Consciousness in Sleep. Personal Axis;
the Axis of Self-Consciousness. These Are Not New Doctrines. In the
Larger Life; the Meta-Metazoon. The Great Communal Man. A Still
Progressive Tissue. A Summary of the Facts. Immortal Life the Key-Note
of all Creeds. What Are the Tenets of Salvation by Science? Immortal
Life; How It Can Be Achieved.

PART II

The Cell of Life; Salvation under Nature .... i

Human Personality 52

Brain 76

The Ether of Space; Its Relation to Human Personality . 84

What Is the Ether? Cell Metabolism in Relation to the Ether. The Probable
Explanation of Mirage, Frost-Flowers and Ghosts. Psychical Research; a
Harsh Criticism. An Erroneous Definition. No Cells, No Consciousness.
The Biological Definition of Human Personality. Exegi Monumentum.
Where Is Spirit-Land? To What Extent Can a Past Personality Be Raised
from the Dead? Summary of Conclusions as Regards Human Personality
and the Ether of Space. Conclusions Which Have Come as a Relief.

Three Hundred Lines of Lucretius 115

The Intimate Causes of Old Age and Organic Death . . 139
Self - Conservation and Self - Maintenance 170

PART III
Laboratory Stories 199

An Enthusiast in Transit. The Prescient Discoverer. The Bio-oscillator.
An Impassioned Socialist. A Merycole.

Comment and Discussion 246

SALVATION BY SCIENCE

PART I
AT THE DARKEST HOUR

THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN

From many points of view the opening of the twentieth century
is humanity's brightest hour; the brightest, the most hopeful since
Hfe first came forward on the earth. Scientific discoveries are mul-
tiplying and open vistas of promise, which, even while they startle,
encourage us to hope great things. And other grander discoveries
are, beyond doubt, at the threshold. There is a thrill of expectancy
in the air of these opening years of the new century; a conviction
that all which has preceded will soon be surpassed.

Inventions have prodigiously increased the powers of men to
contend with nature and deal with material substances. Foodstuffs
have been improved in quality and variety. Civil liberty to live
and act has become better assured. Transportation has been made
easy, rapid and cheap. Throughout the length and breadth of the
earth, the press, telegraph and telephone diffuse intelligence swiftly,
and also enable public sentiment to find prevalent expression. The
industries are organized and systematized as gigantic agencies for
human advancement. Wealth, too, is wonderfully increased and,
despite all complaints and forebodings, was never before so evenly
and justly distributed to all men. Never even in the fabled Golden
Age have all men, irrespective of rank or birth, shared the advan-
tages which wealth confers so equally. Not that such distribution
is yet ideal or complete; far from it; but the present complaints,
forebodings and emeutes are themselves the signs of a progress in
equalization. In no former age and at no previous time has the

1

2 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

so-called " poor man " enjoyed so generous a share of the world's
wealth. The wage-earner at two dollars per diem reads the same
newspaper, rides in the same car, attends the same amusements and
eats much the same food as his wealthier fellow, and if he pleases,
may live in a house equally sanitary, if not so large, and lie down
to sleep on an equally soft spring mattress. The mere possession
of a great fortune, indeed, now gives the possessor more care,
but little advantage over his less opulent brother-man. Curiously
enough anathematized wealth comes of itself to be the instrument
for making all men equal.

When we consider the humble beginnings of organic life on the
earth — developing as it has done from the primitive unicellular
life — the spectacle presented by humanity at this epoch Is one of
reasonable promise. From the unicells multicellular organisms
have developed; and from these lower animal forms, man has
arisen. It has been the slow work of millions of years ; but it has
been done so surely and the progress has, on the whole, been so
uniform and so well defined, that it appears highly improbable that
this great evolutionary effort is to end in mortal man, incomplete
as he is, with his many capacities for further progress undeveloped.
Such stupendous balks in the order of nature occur only along the
line of catastrophism ; a cosmic cataclysm involving the solar sys-
tem might suddenly or slowly end all things terrestrial. Otherwise
a reasonable expectation obtains, that humanity will make progress
in the future as in the past.

What inclines many students of history to take hopeless views
of man's future on earth is the contemplation of races, peoples and
nations that have risen to a degree of greatness and power, and
then declined. At short range observation the Seres and Hindiis,
for example, seem to furnish evidence that man can move through
but a circumscribed arc of progress; that the Cambodia and China
of to-day inevitably succeed every upward saltus of mankind.
Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, Greece, Rome, Baghdad, all present simi-
lar instances of rise and fall. If the student restricts his view to
the history of any one nation in the past, he may be led to form
a similarly hopeless opinion. The progress of humanity cannot be
estimated by what takes place in any one quarter of the world,
during any one century, or thousand years. Contrasted with what
the world was in the days of Pericles and Augustus, who could

AT THE DARKEST HOUR 3

have seen any hope for humanity in the year 700 a. d. ? Yet the
greater era of the Anglo-Saxon, the Frank and the Teuton has
succeeded, in due time.

In the large, mankind has developed by rhythmic advances and
pauses. Collapse has followed each upward career, but always
something grander succeeds. Ten thousand years is the briefest
time period by which the progress and probabilities of the genus
homo can be correctly measured. Ten thousand years, indeed, is
but a yesterday in life's great curriculum on this planet.

Regarded in this larger light, and from the standpoint of prog-
ress in the physical sciences, art, and invention, humanity is at its
brightest hour.

Grand, hopeful, and benign as is this progress, so prophetic of
a mighty future for humanity, it is none the less tinged with an
ever-deepening sadness for each and all of us, personally. A mag-
nificent future is dawning, but we shall not see it. A few months,
a few years more at most, and personally we must close our eyes
in death, and drop back into the insentient void. In truth, it is
this very awakening of the intellect, this latter-day vision of the
future, which renders death so grievous, so inopportune, so seem-
ingly unbelievable.

It was not so with our ancestors. Life was a struggle too hard,
too grim, to be greatly prized per se; the ills of life were numer-
ous; they suffered from heat, cold, famine and the malignity of
foes. The pleasures of life, too, were chiefly sensory and fleeting;
hence their mental attitude toward death was one of comparative
indifference; continued life offered too little to be very earnestly
desired. This sentiment concerning death prevails largely to-day
in the Orient and among savage tribes. Life is not wholly desir-
able, often the reverse, it holds so little of real enjoyment, so much
of pain, fear and general misery.

The case of the well-to-do, well-lodged, and happily environed
American of our own times is wholly different. Every day may
be a pleasure, devoted to fresh achievements.

The youth of to-day, moreover, has need of vastly more time
to realize his expanding ideals. Hitherto it was a hut, food and
a wife that formed the sum of a young man's ambitions, the goal
toward which his life developed : all obtained during twenty years

4 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

of youthful effort. The aspirations of men have vastly enlarged.
Fifty years scarcely suffices to realize the plans necessary to success
in life. Formerly when the pleasures of life most sought were sen-
sory, the realization was not far to seek, and when attained the
vital incentive slackened in old age. But the pleasures most prized
by the educated young man of our times require a longer initiative,
three or four decades of patient study and sustained exertion. Life
and the purposes of life are laid on wider Hues for a loftier super-
structure — the kind of living that outgrows the brief lifetime of
our forebears.

Our ancestors, too, were solaced by pleasing illusions concerning
a mythic life-after-death. The " soul " of man was believed to live
on, disembodied and sedf-conscious, after the body died. The
founders of religious cults made skilful use of this illusion and
framed vast systems of ritual and dogma, in confident reliance on
which millions lived and died, and even rushed to death, recklessly,
battling for creed's sake. The second of the great religious systems
of our era was successfully propagated and has been maintained
by promises of paradise to those who fall fighting for the faith.
The devout Christian regulates his life with reference to " heaven,"
and dies in the hope of going thither immediately after death, —
and this although the Founder of Christianity apparently taught
that the kingdom of God was the earth.

The point here made, however, is in effect, that in past cen-
turies, so far as human beings have aspired to longer life and de-
sired continued existence, the aspiration has been satisfied by a
partial faith in " soul " life. Such belief has sufficed considerably
to assuage the pang of dying, and incidentally has led the devotee
to despise corporeal life and disdain the earth as an abiding place.
This, indeed, is the spirit and morale of Christian and Moham-
medan life. Terrestrial life is subordinate and desirable only as
a period of preparation and a point of departure for a paradise
beyond the grave. This has been the consolation and the mental
attitude of our forefathers. We are not here discussing either the
truth or the reasonableness of this faith. It is enough to say that
the consensus of scientific knowledge now precludes it and robs
us of such consolation. If the doctrine of evolution and all that
w^e know of life and living matter teach anything whatever, it is
that the dissolution of the brain and spinal cord is the end of the

AT THE DARKEST HOUR 5

conscious and subconscious life which subsisted there. Our efforts
to preserve a semblance of faith to the contrary but embarrass and
delay the growth of knowledge and the normal, onward progress
of mind. True, there are apostates from science, turn-backs from
this normal onward march of mind, men of considerable attain-
ments who, owing to indoctrination of the brain in youth, revert
to a species of second childhood as old age steals on them. Two
notable instances of such retrogression have occurred during the
past decade, yet few of us really heed these " recantations," or lay
much stress upon them. The biologist of to-day and the man of
science generally, face the fact that death is the end of personal
life; no longer the ladder to "heaven," but the brink of uncon-
sciousness. The old faith has left us. Vainly we patch the shards
of old creeds together. Nothing of it holds. At heart we know —
have always instinctively known — that death is the end of indi-
vidual life. We live on, that is to say, we continue on, in the
brain of the race, but no longer self-consciously. In the brain of
the race we sleep with our fathers; and sometime, in the far
future, our dormant personalities may waken, or be wakened and
called up, by our remote descendants. So far as present researches
go, this is all. The " eye of faith " alone sees more. This writer,
however, is not a disputant on these themes; nor is Salvation by
Science largely involved in the question of " spirit "life after death.
Salvation by Science would so transform and renew the human
organism as to make it the sedes and abode of deathless life. Even
the most ardent spiritist can have no proper quarrel with an aim
so purely scientific, neutral and non-partizan.

Touching Christianity the only claim made is that Salvation by
Science will render practical the great humane doctrines of Jesus.
It will, we hold, realize the Messianic ideal of a " kingdom of
God " on the earth and, in that consummation, will reunite the
Hebraic and Christian faiths.

Psychical Research, so called, has accomplished nothing, as yet,
to alter, or relieve the facts and conclusions as outlined above;
nor is there the slightest reason to believe that the outcome of its
labors will do more than emphasize this " hard condition of our
birth," sung by Homer four thousand years ago.

We of this generation share all of primitive man's instinctive

6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

shrinking from death — the natural abhorrence of death which all
Hfe exhibits — and, in addition to this grief, we foresee the grand
future of man on earth and perceive that for us, like the Hebrew
lawgiver, there is nothing but this early glimpse from a mountain
top afar. We live a little too early to enter the land of the great
achievement. We shall not quite pass from death unto life. For
us death will still be an irremediable evil.

But death is not an evil, many thoughtful persons rejoin, or,
if an evil, it is, at least, a necessary one. What greater calamity
could befall humanity, as human society and human civilization
are at present established, than to have the passing generation not
pass ofif, but remain on the crowded stage of human life? Even
war and the slaughter of thousands are, by not a few political
economists, regarded as a beneficial event for relieving the social
congestion of overpopulated countries. If immortality were
achieved, starvation, suicide on a national scale, infanticide, or the
execution of aged persons would ensue from a necessity.

These are views which are fairly pertinent, although, properly
administered, the natural resources of the earth are undoubtedly
adequate to the sustenance of six billions of inhabitants, without
crowding or poverty, in the place of the billion and a half who
now dwell on it. This latter reflection does not meet the objection
of over-population, however. Nor is it necessary to meet it, in
the sense of providing field for a vast population, since Nature
herself has already met it in her plan of vital evolution. The
procreatlve instinct is intensified or diminished in ratio with the
duress which human life encounters in the struggle for existence.
With the hard-worked and short-lived, children multiply rapidly.
Where all the conditions of life are hard and evil, procreation is
active.

On the other hand, education, refinement, ease, leisure and the
prospect of a long, happy lifetime redound not to increase of pop-
ulation, but rather to diminution. So markedly, indeed, has this
been found to be true, that the inference is a fair one, that were
enlightened persons, men and women, freed from the fear of death,
the cruder pleasures of procreation would be foregone, from choice,
for greater and purer joys in a life of higher type. We may,
at least, reply confidently that those who are able to achieve

AT THE DARKEST HOUR 7

greatly prolonged life for themselves will not over-populate the
earth.

More specifically, death often is not an evil, but a blessing to
the hopelessly diseased, infirm, and decrepit. Death may even be
voluntarily and logically sought by the hopeless sufferer. There
are grave doubts whether, if nothing better were to be hoped for
in the future by humanity than life as the majority of our fellow-
creatures hold it at present, — grave doubts whether unconscious-
ness were not better than the burden and pain of their lives.

These phases and negations but prove the converse of the ques-
tion, however. The primary instinct of life is to live. Nature,
ab initio, makes oath that to be is better than not to be; nor have
all the consolatory sophistries of creeds ever really convinced a
human being of normal intellect that he will live on personally
conscious, remembering and seeing, after the death and dissolu-
tion of his body. Such " faith " may assist a little to mitigate
the bitter pang of dying, but never fully reassures; the common
sense still perceives the real situation, and cannot, even in its igno-
rance and weakness, wholly believe the kindly meant promissory.
At best, we resign ourselves to lapse from life with a shudder and
a sense of awful heartbreak, and on the brink of the great darkness
shrink back, and, feebly struggling to breathe again, turn our dim
eyes to the beautiful light.

Man has literally fought his way upward; he has battled for
life and supremacy, first, with the fiercer orders of the carnivora,
the cave-bear, the machairodus, then with his fellow-man for po-
litical and moral freedom. His last grim foe is death. " The
last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." But as yet, —

" Death reigns. Dust unto dust must go.
The nations wail of their dread foe.
The bitter waters of that Wormwood star
Which burns malign, from pole to pole,
Are to be drunk. Who may console
Their mortal woe? Outwelling from afar,
The grief of worlds bewails its dying pains,
A cosmic dirge, moaning it comes, Death reigns."

To all normal, healthy life, death is unquestionably an evil.
Nature has nothing in common with those theorists who, making
a virtue of temporal misfortune, seek to persuade man that death

8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

is a blessing. Scant must be their souls. Man has developed to
live, not to die ; and time and space given, man is omnipotent.

How much of literature is a dirge, a cry of mortal anguish for
friends departed, for self departing from the joys of life! Dread
of death is the spur which will drive men to the achievement of
prolonged life.

Over all the past and the present hangs a pall, shot only by
the bright intuitive hope that death is not a final law. With the
Romans Mors was a goddess in black robes, with ravenous teeth,
hovering on sable wings over the whole theatre of life, darting
hither and thither, snatching its prey. The imagery comports
with the Roman character.

With the Greeks Thanatos was a god whose reign men mourn,
whose mission is to nip the joy of life and blast the well-springs
of hope. At his approach they shrank and cried, " Eheii! Eheu! "
The conception is characteristic of beauty-loving Hellas. Her
children ever shrank from that cold, dark realm where there was
no sun. The despairing cry of Electra utters the Hellenic senti-
ment touching death. Burdened as was their faith with the tenets
of Egypt, death was still to them the end of pleasure, the tomb
of joy. The Greek poets sometimes symbolized Death and Sleep
as brothers, twin boys, lying asleep in the arms of their mother,
Night; and again Death as a winged boy with sad, white brow
and inverted torch ; at his feet a butterfly. These last were poetic
fancies rather than popular conceptions.

The Hebraic portraiture of death was a solemn and august
angel, flying forth from God, armed with a sharp sword to slay
the children of men who had sinned. Hence, the strange descrip-
tion of death in the Apocalypse.

To the Hindu death was personified by the soul of Yarma
(Adam), the first man who died (according to their tradition),
and who thus became the monarch of the dead.

Our old Norse ancestors thought of death as a cold, misty pres-
ence, rolling darkly on, like the whirlwind storms of their own
northland, wintrily enveloping its victims and sweeping them away,
enwrapped and lost from sight forever. With them death was
associated with the bleak, elemental forces of the air, the sea, and
the night, caught in the strife of which they so often perished.

In our times and in all time the vulgar imagery of death is a

AT THE DARKEST HOUR 9

skeleton. Death makes a skeleton of man, hence man makes death
a skeleton. In such grisly representation he foresees his fate. It
was reserved for the grandeur-loving genius of Milton to draw
death at once awful and truculent : - —

" The shape,
If shape it might be call'd that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd
For each seem'd either, — black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seem'd his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on."

It is a curious fact that death, which is a nonentity, has always
been typified by substantive imagery. In a word, the utter absence
of energy, or force, has been idealized as a monster of the most
forceful character. Fancy has run away with fact. Death is
nothing in itself, the synonym of nothingness, and has never been
better defined than as the absence of life. Matter is inherently
endowed with that which may become sentient. The human intel-
lect, with this element of immortality within its grasp, shudders
and sighs to cease. When the real situation shall become evident
to human vision, a new era of mental activity will dawn. No
longer vainly praying for miraculous redemption, man will arise
to work out his own salvation, and labor for an immortality which
will have no uncertain hold on his faith. The task is mighty;
but a grand idea never yet perished for want of soldiers. Man,
at least, has this record for his encouragement. Men would not
be worthy of immortal life, would not be fit for it, if they cannot
achieve it for themselves. Whenever in the past man has risen
superior either to brute beasts or brute passions, it has been by
his own unaided exertions. However piously he may have prayed
and trusted, the fight has always been his own. Overmatched,
the good and the bad have always been crushed alike. " God "
is not on the hither side of matter. What is on its far side we
know not. Yet Right, in the long run, appears to be a better sol-
dier than Wrong. We may, if we please, fancy that " God " put
this ingredient in matter and, having done that, retired beyond
the confines of the material universe.

But during twelve hundred years the average of human life has

lO SALVATION BY SCIENCE

not been raised more than twenty years at most, what hope then,
of greatly prolonging life in ages to come?

The reply is that the outlook cannot be correctly estimated by
this past slow gain on death. Through what unwritten ages did
man wander over prehistoric continents, a wretched, fireless trog-
lodyte, a feeder on acorns and berries, yet in one brief moment
the first spark of fire was struck, — fire which made him the rich
owner of all the metals, which opened a new realm of comfort,
warmth and food, and spread the race over vast regions hitherto
uninhabitable. In that single moment man rose to a higher plane
of existence.

Within historic times, but four centuries ago, human progress
was vastly accelerated by a single discovery, which was little more
than a lucky accident. Up to the times of Gutenberg, what prog-
ress had been made for three thousand years in the art of book-
making? Till then, books had been laboriously copied with style
and pen, and so far as any one could then have foreseen, bade
fair always to be thus tediously reproduced. A copy of the Scrip-
tures cost from two to three thousand dollars, equivalent to six or
nine thousands in this century; but a single decade saw the art
of printing born.

Dogmatic unbelief may be as greatly mistaken as dogmatic faith.
The times are ripe for great discoveries touching life and its
co-relative modes of energy. The epoch — and it will be the
grandest of human epochs — when the protoplasmic molecule shall
render up its secret to human scrutiny is near at hand. Man will
then be no longer the abject serf of death, but a belligerent, con-
tending for his freedom, with the prize of unlimited life before
his eyes.

There are, it is true, degenerates who aver that all life is an
evil. There are said to be clubs that seek out, ponder, and discuss
modes of euthanasia. They should be wished success. Such pes-
simism is an evil diathesis, a mental malformation of which the
world would be well rid, by the shortest method. But we are speak-
ing of normal men, not of poseurs, perverts, drug-bemused mani-
kins and alcoholiacs.

For the normal man of science a new and sterner gospel is
requisite. The awakening from dreams of paradise has come,
and in very truth we have little enough to requite us. The dev-

AT THE DARKEST HOUR II

otee has much the more of solace, and many there are who will
prefer the sacerdotal promise to the grim reality. It is so much
easier to accept the gilded promissory of the established church
than grapple with the real problems of life! Confessing one's sins
is so much simpler than actual reformation! What wonder that
the earth groans beneath a weight of mosques and cathedrals, or
that four continents glisten with church vanes ! Devotee and priest
have this advantage : they die with great hopes and will never
learn their mistake; whereas the man of science dies with the
conviction that his course is run. Science alas, has added a pang
to death for all her children. It has dissipated the beautiful mirage
of dying men.

" Let the grand future pity those whose weakness
Had to be fostered by a foolish hope ;
Perhaps without it man had died, the Earth
Gone fallow to its dead-orb, lunar age."

Without it, perhaps, men could not have been led or driven to
work and fight. Temple and pyramid would not have been reared,
nor needful experience in architecture been gained. Greek and
Trojan would not have sailed the Mediterranean, nor the Hebrew
slave fled from bondage to seek his Promised Land.

As soon as man rose a little above his brutal ancestry, as soon
as he began to think, to ponder what he saw, he was aghast at
death. He would not face the hard fact and persuaded himself
that by prayer, burnt offerings, pilgrimages and self-denial, he
might escape extinction. The mirage of his hope rose and loomed
before his life-thirsty eyes. Erelong, then, as might be predicted,
certain guilds took up the business of exploiting the mirage. That
the guild itself was often sincere and benevolent does not mate-
rially alter the facts of its origin or its tendencies. For guaran-
teeing the mirage to be genuine Celestial landscape, priest and
Levite have been the great ones of earth. Humanity is still in
its childhood, but now approaches adolescent years, the age when
youth becomes incredulous of fairy tales. And, lo, in place of
this illusion of the world's infancy, we are opening our eyes
to the greater, grander gospel of manly endeavor and achieve-
ment.

If in these papers the writer appears to play the part of an

12 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

iconoclast, a ruthless breaker of the sacred images of human faith
and religion, it is not from any joy that he has felt in the task.
Rather pain.

It is impossible to speak without emotion of that fond Hope
of dying men which it is the thankless office of our science to pro-
nounce baseless. So much of solace has centered in it, so much
of consolation for the pangs of death; such sweet anticipation of
future reunions with dear ones dead have grown up about it, such
halos of comfort in adversity, such visions of redemption by Grace,
such long ladders of creed, ascending by which we have hoped
to scale Heaven and Immortality. Creeds so venerable to the
human heart, so firmly implanted in the woof of brain, that the
uprooting of them can but cause widespread confusion and con-
sternation.

Such consternation and pain, indeed, that not a few will deem
it illy done, if true. It has even been held that humanity would
not survive deprivation of this its fond hope of " spirit " life, but
like a flower deprived of moisture, would wither on a desiccant
earth; that mankind, thus bereft, would shrink in a premature
involution to its origins; that the genus homo, shriven of this
tenet, would decline to some bestial Ape-type, some senescent,
frustrate Order of the Earth-born.

But take heart, ye of little faith. It is but the natural growth
of knowledge. The coasts of our Race-life are strewn with the
wrecks of great Religions, the old hulks of once mighty creeds,
the flotsam of a thousand once fondly cherished tenets which
buoyed millions in life and consoled them in death. They were,
but they are not ; and this is but one illusion more. Ra and Osiris,
Baal and Zeus, Og and Duiron ; Tau and Brahm, Odin and Thor ;
and more remote in the vasty past, glimpses of a hundred ancient
cults, once very precious to man, now but vanished superstitions.
Once they rang all true to the human mind, and gorgeous the
pageant, sonorous the ritual ; for a " superstition " is but a relig-
ion outgrown; and the great plains of the past are covered with
their white bones. The Ararats of philology are overstranded with
the quaint-carven timbers of these old arks of religious safety,
arks which once carried the world's salvation, but which now lie
high and dry, deserted by man and beast. For if priest and dev-
otee could only think so, that is the best thing about religions —

AT THE DARKEST HOUR 1 3

they are left behind when the crisis or era that had need of them
is past.

There were darker aspects. It has been characteristic of each
and every great reHgion in turn that it arrogated to itself all the
truth in the Universe, denounced every other as wicked and kindled
fires of relentless persecution. Each in turn was the one and only
revelation from the true God, the others devil-born.

That, indeed, is the hardest thing about them all to forgive,
or to have charity for : their horrible intolerance of each other,
their ridiculous bigotry, their disgusting self-righteousness. Each
in turn. Christian, pagan alike, no sooner acquired power than it
reddened the earth with blood, the sky with torture-fires. Sin-
cerity there may have been, but a sincerity merciless, murderous,
abominable.

O ye who walk the Narrow Way,
By Tophet flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray " * * *

But gentleness there was none. From the Stone Age to Mecca
and Rome, innocent blood cries to heaven against them all.

It is these dark pages of man's religious history which oftenest
make us despair of his future, and which sometimes lead even
the optimist to doubt whether the great brain-ape is really worthy
of preservation in the universe.

" So many sects, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs."

It was this terribly difficult " art of being kind " that Siddhartha
sought to inculcate, yet no sooner had Buddhism become an estab-
lished religion than it inaugurated saturnalias of persecution.

It was the gospel of brotherly love, mercy, and cooperation that
Jesus taught, as the corner stone of his " Kingdom of God " on
earth. " Love one another " and " resist not evil." The early-
Christians were thrown to the lions, unresistant, and dying, pre-
vailed marvelously over the whole world ; yet no sooner was Chris-
tianity formulated as an established religion, than Christian Rome-
exceeded the cruelties of Pagan Rome, and taxed all human inge-
nuity in search of devices of torturing.

14 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

So it is well that religious systems pass. No calamity is so
great as their survival over time. Buddhism, Mohammedanism,
and the Christianity of Constantinople and Rome are now among
the greatest obstacles to human progress. Help them to pass, not
to be perpetuated.

To minds normal and unperverted, Salvation by Science is the
most natural thing in the world, the outcome of human progress
which would be expected. But it is a curious commentary on the
mental condition of people that the idea of being saved from death
by natural means ofte7i appears to them strange and unnatural!
Not unfrequently as something portentous and "wicked!" That
higher life, which can only be attained by the loftiest culture of
the human intellect, is feared to he impious! The fetters of old
creeds are still firmly riveted. A few, indeed, recognize the truth;
but a majority still cling to the fetish of ghost life, and incline
to the belief that humanity will run through a cycle of evolution,
decline toward the lower animal orders and, in the end, perish
from ofif the earth. They fail to see the significance which attaches
to the steady growth of the human brain, a growth which separates
and distinguishes mankind from all previous animal orders ; and
they ignore or depreciate the grand fact that scientific knowledge,
accumulating from generation to generation, is changing the entire
course of lower nature in man. That lower course of nature is
still their criterion for the future.

It is, in very truth, a sterner gospel into which we of this gen-
eration have to be baptized. We have partaken of the tree of
knowledge. The pleasant illusions of man's early creeds have been
brushed ruthlessly away. We face Nature's hard law with no
fairy tale to disguise its inclemency. Immortal life will be achieved
by the aid of applied science ; it is what the whole scheme of
evolution moves forward to; it is the dream of all the long-suf-
fering ages of man; it will be initiated on earth within three cen-
turies, perhaps within two, so rapid is the growth of knowledge,
so accelerated the march of discovery. But we who have to initiate
the great effort will not look upon the dawn of the achievement,
nor be among the first of the sons of men who rise superior to
death.

We can but feel, therefore, that we live at humanity's darkest

AT THE DARKEST HOUR 1 5

hour — the hour before the dawn. We live too late to be buoyed
and comforted by the illusions of religion, too soon to reach the
goal and snatch our lives from the grasp of death.

Have we the strength to work on, quite the same, and bravely
round the curve for the sake of those more fortunate who shall
come after us? Have we the devotion to face the inevitable, turn
in our best work and die, uncomplainingly? Shall we demonstrate
the spirit, intent and real meaning of the doctrines of Jesus Christ,
or see these grand doctrines lapse to a vacuous ritual?

A thousand centuries of life's hard struggle on the earth cry out
to speak through us, and bid us win the promise of evolution. We
are born to this post of honor and duty. Untold labor and pain
have confided it to us.

Are we worthy? Or shall we quit the task, malinger, turn
sensuous, skulk back to cover of illusion and cease to be pro-
gressive ?

If stronger beings on other spheres of space are watching us
from afar at this dark hour of our planet's evolution, may they
infuse patience and courage into our hearts. We have need of
them.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH

It has been said often, and said as a reproach, that modern
science, meaning the systematized growth of human knowledge for
three centuries, has invahdated religious faith and left nothing
in its place, that this self-same science controverts the creeds, par-
ticularly the Christian creed, and offers no satisfactory substitute ;
that its incessant advances sap popular belief in salvation by super-
natural grace and yield no consolation at death. In brief, that
it is of the nature of a destructive agency, an iconoclastic force,
which subverts the long-established cults of mankind, leaving noth-
ing with which to replace them.

Hence the present attitude of conservative thought, the serious-
minded thousands who have the common good at heart, who look
to the past as well as the future, and who instinctively feel the
world's needs.

All this great conservative class of minds, the class which holds
humanity together in its larger evolution and steadies it in its
onward progress in time, has long viewed this aspect of science,
the creed-subverting aspect, with a certain distrust and apprehen-
sion, fearing that not alone religious doctrines will be discredited,
but that common morality will slacken and an era of personal self-
ishness supervene in place of the higher spiritual mentality of our
fore-fathers who so implicitly believed in a life after death.

In earnest of their apprehensions, conservatives point to the
sordid self-seeking of the last half century, its money-greed, church
hypocrisy and practical atheism. Pondering it more deeply, too,
this saving, conservative sentiment contemplates with especial
dread the abrogation of faith in immortal life for the individual
man, which in some form the higher life of man demands.

Yet year by year, science has gone on, sphynxlike, nullifying
the beliefs of our fathers, until to-day little enough of them re-
mains; each of the many, well-meant efforts to "harmonize"
religion and science but disclosing more clearly the impassable gulf

16

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 1 7

between them, and the well-nigh ludicrous flimsiness of the " evi-
dences " on which faith in disembodied soul life rests. Until,
with this whole great class of conservative thinkers and well-
wishers of their race, there has come a kind of consternation as
to what can possibly result from so revolutionary a growth of
human knowledge, or in what future faith it can eventuate.

And hitherto no answer to the question has been forthcoming.
The effacement of creeds has gone on with no hint as to replace-
ment. Science, like the Hun of antiquity, has seemed to be leaving
nothing behind save ashes and desolation ; and from some quar-
ters grave fears have found expression lest with the fading out of
belief in immortal life, our civilization should wither from its
higher sources, and the genus homo revert to the lower order from
which it sprang.

Hence the reproach. Hence the distrust of science.

In a sense the reproach has been merited. Scientific knowledge
has grown slowly, impersonally, without responsibility, without
plan and without regard to results. It is the "mind and brain of
the race which has been developing and garnering data for future
use. The invalidation of old creeds has been incidental merely
to this growth in knowledge, without design or animus. These
centuries of incubation have been required, to pass forward from
the creeds of Asia and formulate a better creed, one nearer the
truth.

But the time for it has come. The reproach can no longer be
uttered. Science, the organized scientific knowledge of our era,
has now its nobler creed to offer those who are willing to accept
it. It is the purpose and object here to outline this new faith and
fruit of our scientific knowledge.

But on what grounds does it rest? What esthetic grounds?
What appeal does it make to our sense of the beautiful, the grand,
the divine? What fuller development will it call forth of all that
is best and noblest in the nature of man? Does it hold promise
of immortal life ? For it must do this, or fail. To what facts and
truths does it refer its claim?

A general statement of these grounds and summary of the facts
will be given in connection incidentally with researches made at
this laboratory, during the last twenty-five years.

Marking the progress of these researches a number of papers

1 8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

have, from time to time, been published, papers now collected as
a matter of record in Part II of this volume. Quotations are made
from them in Part I. In a general way they give utterance to
what had been done at the time they were written. Nothing more
is now claimed for them. Some of them go back fifteen years
and more.

Let it be said here that in thus mentioning his own work, the
present writer lays no undue claim to originality, or priority in
research. Often what seem to us our own discoveries are, in
reality, the latent work of those who have preceded us; their
labors paved the way. There are no purely " original " discov-
eries. Science is a communal achievement.

Laboratory Stories are a few of the humorous incidents which
have attended the progress of this line of research.

Comment and Discussion, at the end, is of the nature of an
Appendix, in which I have sought to reply to a few of the many
questions by readers, and sometimes to defend the Promethean
Faith from erroneous criticism.

A work like the present is easily misunderstood. Let it be said
therefore that there is no expectation here of discovering " philos-
ophers' stones," or " panaceas " on sale in bottles, nor that death-
less life will be attained by any one such sudden discovery, in
laboratory, or crucibles; nor is anything In the nature of a " wan-
dering Jew " existence sought for.

Nor yet again, is voice given here to any of those mystic cults,
of fads, in Parsee guise, or Hindu, which like parasitic plants
take root suddenly in the fecund soil of America, but soon wither
in the sunshine of our common sense. Salvation by Science, in-
deed, is the fruit of that American common sense.

Salvation by Science also deplores that disheartening charla-
tanry which has laid hold of these new hopes of man for personal
profit. Like the harpies of eld, the quack, the medical fakir, the
religious enthusiast, have swooped down on this nascent new
faith of science, eager to turn it to selfish uses. The advertising
columns of the public prints teem with ridiculous promises of
deathless life, at the price of a pamphlet, a lecture or a course of
treatments. This is incidental, probably, to the growth of these

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 1 9

new ideas, and what must needs be expected. The matter for
regret is, that such false promises discredit even the truth for a
time, defile it, and retard its progress.

In a wholly different sense also, it is proper — replying to many
inquiries — to delimit this purely American idea and effort from
any conjectural relations, or partnership, with the remarkably in-
teresting researches of Professor Elie Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur
Institute, at Paris, whose books are now widely read in the United
States. So far as Professor Metchnikoff's beliefs are understood
at this laboratory, he holds that human life may very probably be
prolonged for from forty to sixty years, but appears to hold that
old age and organic death are ultimately inevitable.

Salvation by Science holds the opposite of this as regards cell
old age, namely, that it is scientifically remediable, and that im-
mortal life, that fond dream of all the human ages, now bids fair
to be won by man for himself ; and that this grand development
of science is what the evolution of life on the earth looks forward
to. In the Old World, in Europe, they have not yet grasped this
conception of Life. It is a New World idea, characteristic of
America.

Salvation by Science contemplates the prolongation of human
life from a later, different view-point, namely, that such prolonged
life is coming as a result of the increase of scientific knowledge
in every field and the practical application of that knowledge ;
coming from increased capacity to live, and enjoy life; coming
naturally to us from the progressive development of mind and the
growth of the human brain; coming as the grand complement
of human evolution; coming indubitably, in time, but always with
this proviso, that if any considerable number of our fellow men
would join in the effort, earnestly, with faith in it, consecrating
their inventive powers and wealth to the task, we might achieve
this great boon and promise of life within a few years, by means
of two discoveries to be mentioned presently.

Of immortality itself — a personal life that never ends — it is
well-nigh impossible to conceive, even as of its co-relatives eternity
and infinity. What is here contemplated is greatly prolonged life,
life at will, looking toward deathless life, looking toward that ideal
immortal life which has been the highest aspiration of the human
mind for thousands of years.

20 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Greatly prolonged life signifies a greater life every way, a
broader life, a loftier life, with larger interests, higher joys. In
the natural order and sequence of things such a life would be
longer of itself; happier life signifies longer life and vice versa.

The lower orders of animals, many of them, live brief lifetimes
because their lives are circumscribed, their minds feeble, their
brains small, their mental fruition confined to mere sensory
pleasures.

In physical terms the radius of such a life about the axis of
its self-consciousness is short, its self-determining energy weak.
It does not reach out far into the world about it, and hence the
world about it does not re-act strongly on it, to drive it forward
for any great length of time. The soul eddy is small and feeble;
bad food and hostile bacteria speedily induce "old age;" and
death soon ends it.

Nor is the ground taken in Salvation by Science that greatly
prolonged life is always desirable, especially for hopelessly dis-
eased persons, or even for those who are so hopelessly situated
that life grows irksome. Life as the most of us now lead it, is
a hard contention with evil conditions. Yet it is plain that these
evil conditions can be ameliorated and ultimately removed.

Always it must be kept in view that this longer, happier life
is a higher kind or mode of life, implying mental rectification and
the elimination of evil propensities, implying the retention of the
molecule of life in the organism; in a word, the life of an im-
mortal instead of the present beast-life of man: man so lately
erected and arisen from bestial orders.

Always to be kept in view, too, a full realization of the fact
that to confer the gift of deathless life on this present beast-man
would be an endowment without meaning, a calamity. Such an
endowment, however, could not be made. The beast life cannot,
in the natural order of things, be thus endowed, since it is a lower
order of life, around an axis of self-consciousness which lacks
the power of self-renewal and completes its cycle in four score
years.

The beast-life will die out; it is a higher kind of life which
becomes immortal. Into that higher mode of life we must enter
or die. Die, too, because death is best for it and natural to it.
The passage from death unto life is a higher step in bio-physics.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 21

Life, indeed, as thousands of our fellow men live it, is not really
worth living", they live so badly, so foolishly, so futilely, so with-
out aim or ennobling purpose; the kind of life that naturally and
properly ends in disgust with life, that brings death of itself.

Naturally enough, therefore, we constantly hear it said, that
" life is not worth living." Millions of our fellow beings say that ;
and they are quite right; it is not — their kind of life. When
told they may prolong their lives to a hundred years, by careful
regimen and a change of habits, they scoff and exclaim that it
isn't worth it ; that they would not give up their habits of sensory
gratification, to live twice a hundred years ! that sixty years,
indeed, is too much ; and what they say is quite true — for
them.

None the less, there is a different kind of life which is thoroughly
enjoyable and worth living as long as possible. Nature makes
oath to this. Of biological research and progress in discovery
of the truths of nature, the writer can say in all sincerity, that
these pursuits render life a constant joy, and it is a joy which is
cumulative as years pass. As long as the universe holds new
truth to discover, no one need or will normally tire of life; — and
the universe is boundless and eternity is long.

The oft-raised question of excess of population, if death did
not rid the earth of fifty millions of humanity per annum, has
been treated elsewhere in these papers. It is one of the problems
which solve themselves and need give us no concern at present.
Procreation ceases naturally with the apotheosis of life ; nor can
there be the least doubt that in the economy of nature and of the
universe, a wiser, diviner generation of human beings, living free
from disease and death, is better than a succession of thirty-year
generations of diseased, suffering, ignorant humanity as we at
present know it.

Such a generation, indeed, can be fully trusted to take care of
this and similar problems. That greater wisdom, which comes
from longer life and the growth of scientific knowledge, can al-
ways be relied on, implicitly, to determine and regulate all such
problems for the future. To raise them now as insuperable obsta-
cles to the achietvement of immortal life on earth, is as foolish
and inconsequential as is worrying over the future coal supply,
when the sun is continuously lavishing two hundred trillions of

22 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

horse-powers on the earth's surface, which only wait being har-
nessed for human service! Imperfect solar engines, in fact, are
already in use. Yet there is always the small philosopher to whose
pessimistic wits the problem of utilizing solar heat and light looks
to be impossible, and who has his annual spasm of alarm over the
coal supply.

With perfect confidence we may believe that the generation
which follows us will know more than we do; for the greater
communal life of man into which we are now entering implies
steady growth and conservation of scientific knowledge.

Deathless life! In view of the amazing complexity of the ani-
mal organism, as inherited by human beings, and the involved,
interactive processes upon which organic life depends, the attain-
ment of perpetual life, or even greatly prolonged life, always
appears, prima facie, as chimerical. Regarded merely as a com-
plicated machine — the one and only view-point of many critics —
it is, indeed, wonderful how a human life can go on for a week
or even a single day. Yet constantly we see it going on in health
and vigor for four score years and even for a century. How is
this marvel accomplished in organisms so frail, so involved?

The answer to the question, when correctly apprehended, sets
the whole matter of life in a clearer light, and incidentally reveals
the grounds on which rests the newer, later faith in immortal life
from the sciences.

It rests solely on the cell-of-life.

It founds on the fact that animal organisms are produced by
minute, living units, each a living creature and each possessing
the power of growth and self repair. It is in this respect that the
human body differs fundamentally from a machine, a mere me-
chanical contrivance. For though it is an apparatus involving
mechanics, that apparatus is upheld continuously by the labors and
contributions of millions of tiny artisans, each self-sustaining and
self-renewing.

The secret of it, then, the faith in deathless life, lies, we repeat,
in this living cell which, under conditions of an ideal scientific
nutrition and protection, is capable of living and performing its
vital functions indefinitely, deathlessly, let us say, immortally, if
we desire it, or as long as matter keeps its present tension and
basis of reaction.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 23

Two discoveries, even two, of those now opening to view, both
well within the proper province of scientific research, will, we
hold, when associated with the co-related progress of science in
other fields, bring us vastly extended life with promise of death-
less life if we desire it, namely: —

First, a perfected nutrition of the cell-of-life in the human
body.

The way to that perfected nutrition — the vehicle and means
of it — lies, of course, through the blood stream, that veritable
river of life, along the banks of which the component cells of the
organism are collocated. We have to purify, transform, and rec-
tify this sanguinous stream of nutrient plasma, bringing it to those
higher degrees of chemical efficiency where perfect assimilation
takes place in the cell, accompanied there by accurate action and
reaction without that waste, detritus, or ash, which now induces
cell old age and resultant organic old age.

That chemism on the earth's surface furnishes such a basis of
action and reaction — as a foundation for scientifically perfect
nutrition — is now well demonstrated.

We have first to consider and to study what the organized cells
of the human body have done, co-operatively, to produce in the
blood plasma a certain desired cell food — produce it by means
of that marvelous joint effort, seen in the stomach, liver, pancreas
and intestinal glands. And we have then to take up this blood
plasma, test it experimentally and improve it by scientific methods,
till a perfect cell food is obtained. Starting forth with the blood
as we inherit it, we have now to perfect it till we make it the
vehicle of a chemically accurate cell food. That is the indicated
line of study and experiment.

Glimpses and hints how this chemically perfect nutrition may
be attained through the blood are of late numerous, from the path-
ological side, in the guise of the so-called toxins, anti-toxins, se-
rums, opsonins et al. The merest hints as yet. None the less, in
that quarter, through a transformed and rectified blood stream,
breaks a new day of great hopes for the cell-of-life.

Beyond much doubt at present the ultimate " food " of the
protoplasmic molecule of the cell consists of electrons, and the
actually living substance is " nourished," that is, reinforced, by an
influx and absorption of electrons, negative corpuscles, liberated

24 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

by the cell metabolism. Beyond much doubt, too, the future so-
matic cell will be thus nourished and maintained.

But the cell as we now have to deal with it, in our first efforts
to render it deathless, is a small organism which we inherit, with
a digestive or metabolic apparatus which we have to reckon with.
It seems probable, therefore, that a cell food, composed of, or
attempered by organic substances like the " ferments," secreted by
the glands previously mentioned, may be the desideratum, for a
time.

We inherit a large, extended apparatus for the reduction and
assimilation of such food-stuffs as the earth has offered us. That
apparatus has yet to pass through a period of involution, graduated
to scientifically improved food in lesser quantities. The inner
cavities of the organism are to be cleansed and safeguarded from
the hordes of noxious bacteria which now swarm there. That
wonderful apparatus of metabolism which we receive from our
ruder ancestry, is now ours to regulate, improve and transform
to a veritable sanctuary of life, from which everything foul and
impure must be excluded.

But first a skilfully compounded cell food, such as a few years
of experimentation with the products and ferments from the glands
of stimulation and regulation, will enable us to compound.

It is these first feeble steps which we are now essaying, with
infant eyes hopeful of the future, these first early efforts of which
the world is now so doubtful. The promise in them has not yet
unfolded, but it is there. The orient halo of it glows low on our
horizon. If only faith, faith to work together, can be awakened,
we who now live may see the glory of its dawning, see the great,
bright, beautiful, immortal universe expand ahead, without the
black shadow of death for us, personally.

Second, the discovery of the intimate nature of cell energy, par-
ticularly brain cell energy, or nerve force, enabling us to generate
it, electro-chemically, accumulate it, store it and apply it at will for
vital restoration and maintenance.

There is generation of electricity by the cerebro-spinal group of
cells, also production and projection, by will power, of a certain
sublimated, highly vitalized substance which is borne along the
nerve trunks by the electricity.

THE PROMETHEAN EAITH 25

It is this highly vitalized current which incites the somatic cell,
i. e. the organism generally, to activity. This sublimated substance
possesses the power not only to incite and stimulate, but even to
regenerate. Judge then of the effect on an aging, or invalid organ-
ism of a full current of this vivific substance, generated externally.
It is to this end that a line of research at this laboratory is di-
rected.

Old age is chronic fatigue. Life as we now lead it slowly tires
us to death, the terrestrial resistance to nutrition and the vital proc-
ess is so strong. As the organism ages, from the involution and
decline of its cell life, the normal, requisite amount of nervous
energy diminishes, nutrition slackens, the vitality flags, and in our
efforts to " keep up," we grow tired and disheartened, physiolog-
ically and morally. What that means will be readily understood
by every one who has reached the age of fifty.

Synthetic production of the brain cell emanation, or its equiva-
lent, will enable us to surcharge the organism with an adjuvant
aura, or atmosphere of energy, from without; in other words, to
rest and reinforce it at will. Nutrition can thus be quickened, the
cells re-vivified and the burden of " old age " lifted.

It is a purely physical problem; and even with our existent
knowledge, it might be done erelong, if a few hundred well-in-
structed persons could be induced to work together to this end.
Faith, enthusiasm and united effort are all that is needed.

It is one of those cases where it is the first step that costs, the
initiative that comes hard. That step and that initiative it is the
purpose of this book to take, and to promote.

For always, as all history shows, it is some great idea which
lights the human path onward; always it is personal hope and
faith which stimulate us to work ; and we repeat, that it is here —
in the cell-of-life under new scientific cultivation — that deathless
life for man will be found.

The growth of science and the pursuit of biological knowledge
now go forward steadily, it is true, but slowly, without set plan,
purpose or faith. It is a growth lacking aim, or stimulus. What
we now desire is to give it aim, hope, ambition and faith, faith
that deathless life can be attained.

Once that faith takes root, such progress in knowledge will
begin as the world has never before witnessed. An eager new era

26 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

of research will dawn. Students will be seen working for life's
sake, personal life.

And fifty years would do it, thirty perhaps.

But now most of all and first of all we need faith to light the
way, that faith which incites and inspires labor, that faith and
courage which emboldens to start forth.

How, by what practical methods, can that faith and courage
be generated?

We are now at the beginnings of this great Quest for the Grail
of Life. And because human beings have always died in the past,
the great majority of mankind believe that they will always die
in the future, that death is inevitable, and must be so. That is
ever the crass incredulity of our fellow men touching all the new
enterprises of science. Unbelief, and always, of course, from the
religious side, accusations of impiety and " atheism." That ap-
pears to be the common order of things and what must needs be
expected.

With that incredulity we have first of all to contend.

Nor is this incredulity without what appears at first view to be
a strong basis of common sense, and this among those who reason
clearly. Few persons, indeed, who adequately realize the well-
nigh amazing complications and delicacy of the physiological proc-
esses which eventuate in a human life, are inclined at first to re-
gard the concept that all these varied interactive processes may be
rendered immortal, otherwise than as visionary.

Of the human organism itself, too, which is the instrument of
these delicate functions, one has but to dissect it and study its
histology under the microscope, to become profoundly impressed
by its exceeding complexity and its frailty as a piece of enduring
mechanism.

When, therefore, the concept of rendering such an organism
permanently operative, is first stated, Incredulity is the sentiment
that naturally prevails. Only a visionary, or an ignorant person
could indulge in such a hope : so at least think most educated per-
sons of this our present generation ; and the better anatomists,
or the more skilled physiologists they are, the more skeptical they
are likely to be. Of this the author is but too well aware, having
passed through these same stages of thought and doubt, himself,
during thirty-five years' study of the subject.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 27

In the end, however, one gets past this phase and comes to the
truth of the matter. When we have delved deeper in our anatomy
and gone down a step lower in our physiological researches, a
new light, the clear light of a great truth of nature, breaks in this
former darkness, and hope, the hope of a grander immortality,
is born anew. For after we leave the realm of organic life, the
kingdom of imperfect metazoic life and animal organisms gen-
erally, we get down to another realm, the realm of the cell-of-life,
on which all organic life founds and is dependent; and we begin
to see that when this same marvelous cell-of-life is brought under
intelligent control and nourished with chemical accuracy, it is, or
may be made a deathless cell ; and that all the frailties and imper-
fections which appear, as secondary results, in the larger metazoic
organisms, may be made to disappear, as when the light of a smoky
lamp is rendered star-like by a better burner, giving perfect com-
bustion.

In Long Life; The Intimate Causes of Old Age and Organic
Death, published in 1896, the beginnings of microscopical research
to learn the deep-lying causes of old age, were described, with a
set object in view for their alleviation and removal.

In 1903 was published the first edition of Natural Salvation.
In this was depicted the long struggle of the cell-of-life to live
deathlessly on the earth and the progress toward self-salvation
which it has thus far made, under nature. This is the key note.
Here is the foundation of that greater, future, communal life of
man in which our hopes of immortal life from the grozvth of human
knozdedge are now placed.

A second, third and fourth edition of Natural Salvation, in
1904-5-7, followed, all designed to serve as prefatory to the prac-
tical methods which are here outlined with a view to actual work
and experiment now begun. For it may be added, that Natural
Salvation is not published merely to set forth a contention and
prove a point, but to herald and harbinger actual results from work
done. Except from having these practical objects in view, the
book itself would never have been written.

Let it be repeated yet again, repeated confidently, since too great
emphasis cannot be laid on the assertion, that these two discov-

28 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

eries, mentioned above, in connection with the culture and hus-
bandry of the germinal elements of the cell, will carry us to the
threshold of deathless life.

And it might come in fifty years, perhaps less, if but a few
hundreds or a few score persons of means for work and experi-
ment, would unite to do it, and combine their means and their
labors.

It is merely a matter of going into it with courage and faith.
That is all which is lacking. There is plenty of money in the
world, idle, or going foolishly astray. What we lack is courage
to begin, devotion to put our resources into it, and faith to work
together.

Salvation by Science has come to be called the Promethean Faith,
from Prometheus, the Fore-thinker of antiquity, the friend of man-
kind as against the jealous gods; from Prometheus and ^scula-
pius, who far from being purely mythic characters, originally, were
bold great geniuses of prehistoric days.

In modern times, in its present form, this faith that we can
actually win deathless life by applied science and that this is what
the evolution of life on earth points to, was first, so far as the
author is aware, announced in a little brochure, called Living
Matter; Its Cycle of Growth and Decline in Animal Organ-
isms, published from this laboratory in 1888. The researches
and studies on which Living Matter was based, were begun
sixteen years earlier, in the fall and winter of 1871-2, and pur-
sued in a desultory manner at intervals of the writer's student
life.

The central idea of the faith, namely, that immortal life must
come through the sciences, descended, so to speak, to the present
writer, from a grandsire who from little biological knowledge with
which to defend it, used often to set it forth with a high enthusi-
asm as the conviction of his sturdy, unabashed optimism and faith
in the future of the human race.

Four years later, in 1892-3, the same ideas were re-published
in a small volume entitled Pliiricellular Man. In this the com-
posite and dissoluble nature of the human " soul " was deduced
from the histology of the human brain and the manner in which
the component cells are associated.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 29

THE CELL - OF - LIFE

And what of this cell-of-life?

It is very small; but small and large are relative terms merely;
and though to the unaided eye usually less than the i-iooo of an
inch in diameter, the cell as we see it and inherit it in our tissues,
is in another sense a large organism — the standard embodiment
of terrestrial life. Compared with those low attenuations of mat-
ter which science now recognizes, the cell-of-life indeed is almost
infinitely large and complex. By virtue of its delicate, involved
organization, we see the inherent, sentient property, which all
matter possesses, raised up to a degree of intelligence, capable of
self-direction and able to inaugurate self-motion, in a word, able
to live and move about. For if there is such a thing as free will
anywhere in the universe. It is within this little cellule of living
matter : the primordial free will of the cosmos.

Amplified by our highest microscopic powers, a cell may be
made to look as large as an acorn. The protoplasm, or cytoplasm,
of which the body of it is composed, now appears as a delicate
net-work or lace-work, evidently organized for vital functions.
Within it is another little mass, also organized and more vivific,
called the nucleus. At times, too, we are able to see other bodies
within the net-work, a centrosome, chromosomes, granules and
passive plastids, also vacuoles.

Manifestly the nucleus is the inner seat of the cell life, its holy-
of-holies. When stained, the nuclear net-work reveals itself
more vividly than the cytoplasm of the cell body, in the so-called
chromatin and linin net-work. When the cell divides in repro-
duction, the nucleus also divides, after undergoing profound
changes.

We have whole volumes and courses of lectures, treating of the
changes seen to occur within this cell-of-life; but as to what actu-
ally takes place in the substance or texture of the net-work of
living matter, when the cell takes in food and assimilates it, in
order to live and grow and divide in offspring, we know very
little, as yet, and have great need to know more.

A sentient impulse, as yet unseen, unclassified, guides these proc-
esses: the low, deep, primitive life of matter itself; that impulse

30 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

which humanity has instinctively deified as God; that primordial
impulse out of which all animal life is personalized.

Months and years of patient observation have been devoted to
a study of these cell changes, as indicated to us by the microscope
and the methods of staining which have been devised to render
them visible. Nucleus and centrosome have long been objects of
closest scrutiny — why they divide, why the " spindle " and " pole-
bodies " form to usher in fission and prelude the birth of a new cell.
For when properly nourished, the cell, if no other labor is imposed
on it, tends to multiply itself and give birth to offspring. What
is of great interest to us, however, in this inquiry, is the fact that
if the wants of the entire organism of which it is a loyal unit
demand of it the function of a muscle cell, we shall see the cell
turn its energies in obedience to this demand and produce not off-
spring, but a contractile substance which makes locomotion pos-
sible.

Or if a brain cell, we may see it devote its capabilities not to
reproducing itself, but to the generation of what seem to be cur-
rents of sublimated matter for use throughout the whole organism.

But the why and wherefore of these processes, the key to it all,
remains to be demonstrated.

It is as if, hovering like an aviator above some busy factory,
we were looking down on the looms, the flying shuttles and whir-
ling spindles, with no clear notion of what the motive power was,
or what was being woven.

At such a disadvantage, indeed, is the observer, with his present
microscopic powers, that we have come to think further visual
scrutiny of the cell-of-life of little avail, and that we shall do bet-
ter to attack the problem by experimentation from the bio-chemical
side, by means of reagents of the nature of organic " ferments,"
or even of mental stresses ; for deep down in the cell we are deal-
ing not with physics, but with a sentience which is the raw material
of psychic phenomena.

Conflicting views have often found expression as to the real
character of the cell-of-life and its relation to the multicellular
animal organism. It has often been held, and is so still, that it
is the life of the organism as a whole which not only holds the
component cells in function, as we know, but which calls them

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 3 1

into existence as cells. '' The organism builds its cells, not the
cells the organism." (De Bary.)

While the first limb of this hypothesis is true in some degree
of the physiological cell, at present, it is yet difficult to understand
how the biologist who has comprehensively studied the develop-
ment of living forms on the earth's surface from early ages to
present times, can endorse the second claim, namely, that the life
of the organism calls its cells into existence, to suit its needs. To
the present writer such a claim reverses the first principles of ter-
restrial evolution.

This is said in full view and recognition of the sway, direction
and dominancy of the organic life, as a whole, over the individual
cell ; — even as the State governs but does not create or beget the
individual man.

It is held, too, that the fact that cells in certain tissues of the
organism, and in plants, are found to be connected by living fibrils
of the nature of protoplasmic bands, continuous from cell to cell,
is evidence that the cell is not a separate center of life, but a con-
fluent portion of the protoplasm of the body as a whole, with
nothing resembling autonomy of its own.

The truth of this matter, from the histological standpoint, is
that ninety-nine per cent, of all the cells of the animal body are
clearly disjunct, connected with each other only by fibrils and
processes that touch each other, or communicate cell with cell only
by means of rather elaborate end organs which strongly suggest
sentient contact, or even communication of an electrical nature.

Only a relatively very small number of cells in the animal or-
ganism are siamesed by protoplasmic bands, continuous from the
cytoplasm of one cell to that of another. It is the rare exception,
not the rule, and appears to the present writer to show merely
that the exigency for united action in such instances is so impera-
tive that these avenues have been set up the more certainly to
ensure unified activity, and by no means to disprove that the cells
are individualized centers or units of the organic life.

Fifty years ago, even Professor Huxley sought often to give
expression to his profound sense of how completely the cells of
an animal organism are dominated by the life of the organism
as a whole, and by the social environment of that organism.

32 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

We understand these things better at present and are able to
state the matter more definitely as regards this dominating aura
of the organism.

Every cell of the organism gives forth an emanation, both par-
ticulate and dynamic — sublimated matter in motion — in response
to the stress on its life from without. Blended together, millions
of them, the cell emanations form the great neuro-electronic aura,
or organic life, of the body which, acting reflexly, rules, controls
and holds each cell to its task. This composite aura is the sub-
conscious life of the body. That portion or tide of it which is
directed by the mind we term the will, and sometimes speak of
it as " nervous energy." It is the cyto-psyche, or cell soul, united
by millions in the soma-psyche, or body soul.

How futile, therefore, is the assertion that " the organism builds
its cells, not the cells the organism." The " organism," that is,
the organic life, is the united lives of the cells themselves!

That the cell-of-life is a relatively large organization of smaller
vivific bodies ("physiological units," " blophors ") has been and
remains the mature conviction of the most eminent exponents of
biology. Everything in nature points to the truth of such a con-
viction; and we may add that it is the view here endorsed.

The cell-of-life is selected here as the basis for work in the efifort
to control organic life and prolong it at will, because this little mass
of living terrestrial matter is the one which displays phenomena
which have all along been regarded as vital phenomena. It is in
the cell that we first see movements which we term physiological.
For that reason it is the logical starting-point for an effort of
research which has to deal with terrestrial bio-chemistry.

Let it be repeated, however, that the cell-of-life is by no means
treated of here as the lowest living unit in the universe of matter.
An electron, indeed, may be as " personal " as a cell, or more so ;
all matter, in fact, is living matter. Yet for the reasons cited
above, the cell is the logical starting-point of an effort to control
terrestrial life.

Nor does the fact that the cell is an organized sodality of smaller
living bodies — electrons, for example — in the least rob it of its
individual life, or personalized character, since in the cell the com-
ponent electrons are clearly organized about a personal axis, and

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH ^;^

for the time being pool their smaller lives in the greater personal
life of the cell.

FORMS AND APPENDAGES OF CELLS

When the environment and mode of nutrition permit, the cell-
of-life tends to assume the round and spherical contour. The
lowest, simplest forms of cells are globular; but when aggregated
in multicellular organisms, subject to mechanical influences, cells
are of many forms and sizes.

Both in unicellular and multicellular life, too, cells are found
to put forth numerous appendages, to accomplish nutrition and
locomotion, communicate with their fellows and unite with other
cells for communal labors.

In a general way cells may be said to have an outer skin, or
membranous envelope, formerly much referred to as the cell wall;
but this is not always present, nor actually essential. Often it
appears to be that outer stratum of the cytoplasm which has become
lifeless, owing to destructive external influences, but having become
so, assumes, incidentally, the role of a protective covering. The
delicate, sentient metabolism would, indeed, appear to need pro-
tection as well as insulation from the external world, electrical
insulation, perhaps ; for always it must be borne in mind that cell
life is a process, insulated, apart and by itself; that the cell in
order to be a living self (" soul ") must be thus separate. Other-
wise it would not be a self ; nor could the animal and human self
otherwise result from an organized federation of cells.

Sketched with a pen, as we write, are six typical forms of cells
from the brain and nervous system of a human subject, magnified
about 350 diameters. The first is what may be termed an unde-
veloped cell from one of the second deep layers of the cerebrum,
frontal convolution. It has the appearance of being a cell not,
or not as yet, very actively engaged in functions pertaining to the
personal life; and hence certain observers have been inclined to
rank this layer as a reserve layer, from embryonic life, which may,
possibly, be drawn upon for more active service later in life. The
suggestion is a fanciful one, with a grain of truth in it, perhaps.
The way to verify it will be to examine this layer from a young

34

SALVATION BY SCIENCE

subject in comparison with that from an aged subject, after an

arduous life-time, to ascertain by count, through the thickness of

the layer, whether the number of cells in the latter is markedly less.

The second cell is a bipolar cell, such as is found in great

>/

'S-

2 • S>vv«. ja,te^t,t/Vt-<3Li>i^«y^(<l<5~^e^^62.j

6-

6- i!^ eU^wivA.^::^ C*XC,jJ<^vuvv^ 'Jk.

numbers in the first deep layer below the dendrites or multipolar
cells of the cerebral cortex. The function of these cells is sup-
posed to resemble that of a sentient balance-wheel, or fly-wheel,
for equalization and steadying of the mentation, inaugurated by
the large, branched cells of the cortex. These cells put forth two
axial processes, one at each pole.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 35

The third cell Is a typical multipolar, or many-branched cell,
very numerous in the spinal cord and in various parts of the brain,
and in nerve ganglia. These cells put forth from four to fifty
processes, or branches, which are believed to be largely for asso-
ciation, by sentient contact, with other cells, and also to facilitate
nutrition. At least one process, or branch, usually makes directly
off to a relatively great distance, and in the end, after numerous
offshoots, is inclosed with others in a sheathed nerve trunk. This
latter branch is the one generally termed the neuraxone, axone, or
axis cylinder process.

The fourth is the typical dendrite, or tree cell, often termed the
large pyramidal cell, from the shape of the cell body. It sends up
a plant-like apical stalk to a relatively great height, branching to
finer and finer fibrils in mazy arborizations; minor sprouts and
fibrils also issue from other portions of the cell body. From the
base of each cell, too, as with cells of the third class, there descends
an axone which at length enters a nerve trunk and extends to dis-
tant portions of the organism.

The fifth is similar to the dendrite, yet differing in certain minor
characteristics, and found for the most part in the cerebellum and
not in the cortex cerebri. This cell is usually called the Purkinje
cell, from its discoverer. Like the dendrite, it sends down a neur-
axone, but smaller, and its functions are believed to be similar.

The sixth is often termed the basket cell, and sometimes the
spider cell, from its shape and branched processes. Strictly speak-
ing it is not a nerve cell, but one of a group of connective tissue
cells, distributed throughout the brain and spinal cord for the
purpose of supporting and sustaining the nobler multipolar cells
in position. We come upon it constantly when examining cells
of the brain and cord. Its function is clearly adjuvant; and to
this entire group the general name of neuroglia has been given.

As a rather striking illustration of the truth that a cell is a
cell, throughout nature, whatever its function may be, whether
associated with millions of others in the highly organized multi-
cell, or living an independent life as a free-roaming unicell, it is
of interest to compare an amoeba (amoeba radiosa), generally held
to be one of the simplest, most primitive forms of cell life, with
a large multipolar cell from the anterior horn of the spinal cord

36

SALVATION BY SCIENCE

of man. In form, at least, the two cells resemble each other so
closely as to suggest a common origin at the outset of life on the
earth, and also a common metabolism, internally, as regards bio-
chemical activities.

The more the cell-of-life is studied the stronger grows the con-

l^tM«e/tr^x *ftt^i.'***\.

•a-

2- .

LCV*t.

viction that what at first seem veritable miracles can be wrought
with it. Mark what it has done in the brain of the bee, or the ant.
In that tiny dot of living matter, not as large as a pin head, there
is a development of knowledge, a repository and a continuum of
heredity which embraces the entire science of aviation, architecture.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 37

engineering, economics, offensive and defensive warfare and a
highly developed sociology.

Throughout unicellular life, too, as well as in the multicells,
we find the same remarkable evidences of capacity for adaptation
and transformation, the fresh water rhizopods, for example.

Primordially the cell-of-life appears to have nourished itself,
that is to say, obtained its food, by the absorptive, or saprophytic
method, drawing in food particles from without, through its outer
skin, or cell wall. The tissue cells of multicellular organisms —
animals and plants — still obtain their food in that way, from the
blood and the sap.

Unorganized, whan living a free, roving life, amoeboid unicells,
originally saprophitic, have developed various ways of seizing and
ingesting larger food particles, also smaller unicells, as prey. From
their substance they thrust forth a great variety of processes (pseai-
dopodia) both for locomotion and for grasping elusive food. They
spread nets, or webs, spun by impulse of will from the superficial
substance of their cell bodies, to catch and enmesh smaller unicells.

Others of this class of predatory unicells — like the light-armed
peltastae of ancient armies — have equipped themselves with jave-
lins, needle-like darts, which they eject from their substance, and
hurl to considerable distances to transfix and paralyze their prey
or their enemies. It is hardly too much to say that they overwhelm
their prey or their enemies with flights or envenomed arrows, since
often the one thus attacked is seen to sink inert, as if paralyzed.

In response to hunger and will-power there has developed in
these originally simple amoeboid cells, chemico-sentient apparatus
not only for transforming alloyed protoplasm into pointed, de-
tachable darts, but apparatus for casting these with relatively great
force; — as seen in individuals of raphidiophrys and heterophrys.

Figure 3, as sketched, gives some idea of the way in which the
pseudopodia of the simpler amoeboe have, in heterophrys, devel-
oped to long lance-like cils, projectable, and even detachable for
casting to greater distances.

Along the larger trunks of these processes flow transformed
currents of the cell cytoplasm which give rise to needle-like cils
more minute than threads of finest spun glass. Under stress of
hunger, fear, or hate, this unicell transforms sentient matter to
lances and forked darts. When we learn how this is done, we

38 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

shall be far on our way to control and guide the cells of our own
tissues.

The point to which attention is particularly called in connection
with these different forms and types of the cell-of-life, is its intrin-

sic capacity, as here displayed, to transform its own substance
(cytoplasm) and adapt It to various uses; and this as bearing on
the analogous capacity of the cells in the animal organism for
change imder stress of the will of the whole organism. In a word
it shows what the cell-of-life can do, and how facile a substance

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 39

for transformation is this marvelous living substance which we
sometimes call " protoplasm."

No longer a free, roving unicell, seizing its food in the turbid
puddle, but associated with myriads of its fellows in the animal
organism, our physiological cell-of-life takes its nourishment from
the condits of the blood stream beside the capillaries of which it
is located and does its life work. A million other cells labor con-
jointly to make this blood plasma the highly refined nutriment it
is : — the last word, under nature, in the line of cell food. It is
therefore on the circulatory apparatus of arteries, arterioles and
capillaries, with their associated veins, veinlets and lymphatics, and
on this refined blood plasma flowing swiftly through them, that we
must fix our attention as the one and only instrumentality for
reaching, modifying and renewing the living substance of the cell.
The blood stream, foul, or pure and renovating, is our sole means
and vehicle of cell nutrition. On nerve fibrils we depend for inci-
tation and stimulation by will power as directed by the brain; but
the blood plasma and circulatory apparatus are our sole means
of renewal of substance.

Figure 4 represents, in diagram, the position and relation, as
regards nutrition, of the large multipolar cells of the spinal cord
to an arteriole twig and capillaries. Through the arterioles and
capillaries flows the blood stream, bearing with it the red and white
blood corpuscles, and the plasma which alone the cells attract to
themselves and absorb. It has been held that the plasma seeps
through the walls of the capillaries, also that these walls contain
minute stomata through which the cells have the power to suck
the plasma. Certain fibrils from the cells appear to touch — per-
haps tap — the capillary walls. Take the case of a muscle cell,
the function of which is alternately to contract and elongate,
thereby producing mechanical movements. The muscle cell is
nourished not differently from those of brain or cuticle ; but at the
call and behest of the whole organism for contraction and elonga-
tion, we find the living substance responding after a manner,
sketched in Figure 5, which represents a muscle cell at two stages
of contraction, a first, or initial stage, and a maximum stage; the
relaxation, or elongation stage being the same, conversely, accom-
panied by an acid chemical reaction.

40

SALVATION BY SCIENCE

A portion of every such muscle cell, one side of it, consists of
undifferentiated, granular protoplasm (cytoplasm) containing the

nucleus; that is to say, the living matter of this part of the cell
still retains the original character of all cells not specialized by
the needs of the whole organism and devoted to particular uses

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH

41

and functions. This is the part to which self-life, growth, etc., is
now restricted.

In the other part, on the other side of it, or midway through
the cell, we find an altered specialized tract of protoplasm, where
the living substance is arranged in filaments, lying parallel to each
other. These filaments are capable of contraction, at an impulse

ov

G^JiJiAj'f cut: tfCL. Cji^fCXJC^^ .

from the other part of the cell. To this specialized part of the
cell protoplasm the name of myoplasm has been given.

After embryonic life this cell devotes its powers not to multi-
plying itself by fission and division, as is the wont of unicells,
but to the production of dynamic energy for the common good
of the confraternity of cells in the whole organism. It is a fine
and very suggestive example of what the cell-of-life has shown
itself able to do under stimulus of a certain definite sort.

In like manner a brain cell devotes itself to the process of
thought, or a gland cell to the production of saliva, or of pepsin

42 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

ferments. At the call of the common good, too, this brain cell
or this muscle cell stands steady in its place and prolongs its indi-
vidual cell life from the few days, or hours, of the original, rap-
idly-multiplying unicell, to fifty, eighty, or a hundred years. Won-
derful data for thought and hope lie in these facts of cell life.
First, we have need to study and analyze the stimuli which imped
the cell to these grand feats of adaptation, and second, to produce
and use them at will.

The muscle cell is in truth a grand example of what a cell may
come to do in response to the demand made upon it by the whole
organism of which it is a loyal subject. What we here behold
is electrons, innumerable, organized and bending their efforts, we
may even say their wills, harmoniously and in unison, to accom-
plish one great purpose. Even so the star-suns of the galaxies
of space bend their united efforts to turn the wheel of the sidereal
universe, at the call and behest of the cosmic common good. It
all moves from the sentient side, in the cell, or in the Milky Way.

It is in the differentiations of cell life, however, in special organs
and functions of animal and plant life that the capacity of the cell
for change and perfection is most strikingly displayed. The eye,
for example. Here is an intricate illustration of what each cell,
or group of cells, can do and make, when stress or incitation is
given it to modify its life and its cell products to certain uses.
Within this globe of the eye we have cells which make glass, both
transparent, colored and semi-opaque ; cells which secrete clear
liquids and also jellies, cells which make black pigment sheets, and
also the toughest of fiber, and which put forth and maintain highly
sensitized fibrils, cells which stand together cooperatively to pro-
duce a matchless mechanism of muscle fibers, cells which trans-
form their substance to cilia and to hair for protection of the more
delicate surfaces, and cells which constantly secrete soothing fluids
for laving and moistening the entire apparatus. All this has been
done by the cell of life in response to the call of the whole organ-
ism for light. And the point of interest here is the transformation
which the cell has shown itself capable of.

In short, we come to learn that the cell is in very truth the pro-
teus of our world of life. As regards longevity it may live a day,
a week, as in unicellular life; or In the muscle, or brain, of multi-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 43

cellular life, it may — if the need of the organized life of which
it is a unit demands it — live fifty years, or even for two centuries.
A cell life-time, indeed, may be long or short as the cell itself wills,
or the will of the organism of which it is a part, stimulates it. It
may be ephemeral or practically deathless.

As another marvelous instance of what the cell-of-life may be
impelled to do, at the continued behest of the whole organism,
take the case of a gland cell, lodged in trabecula at the root of
a fang in the jaw of the rattlesnake, or the cobra. Here we have
cells differing little in appearance from the cells of the parotid,
submaxillary, or other glands, and like them drawing nourishment
from the same blood plasma, yet this one manufactures and ex-
cretes through the gland duct, when suddenly pressed, a poison
so deadly that half a minim of it will destroy a million cell lives.
Yet in some manner at present unknown to us, this gland cell con-
trives to make and keep separate from its nucleus and the remain-
der of its cytoplasm this potent weapon of death.

Analogous to this are many plant cells which manufacture acids,
acrid juices and gums ; analogous, too, are the hepatic cells of th-e
animal organism which make and excrete gall.

Not only is the cell-of-life able to assume wholly diverse func-
tisons, but even in as extreme a case as that of cells removed from
the animal organism in which they have been developed during a
thousand generations of ancestral life, these cells when thus re-
moved, and if nourished in favoring media, adequately protected
from outside infection and extremes of temperature, live on for
weeks, or months, and probably would do so indefinitely. It is
solely a question of nutrition and protection.

For example, a bit of heart muscle, containing the specialized,
peculiar muscle cells of that organ, has, at present writing, been
kept alive and pulsating for three months, at the Rockefeller In-
stitute in New York.

This is exactly what experiments here had led us to infer, to
wit, thal^the cell-of-life lives by virtue of a sentient impulse and
vital processes inside itself, and will go on doing so as long as it
is nourished adequately and protected from " death " by the outside
world. Death comes to it in the animal organism, because in an

44 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

aging organism it is no longer nourished sufficiently and pro-
tected from septic attacks, i. e., microbes and poisons. In an aging,
shrunken organism, as that of man at eighty, adequate nourishment
no longer reaches the cells through the blocked and contracted
capillaries, and unremoved waste products, breeding bacteria, sub-
ject them to a constantly growing handicap to survival.

Another point of great interest and significance in these experi-
ments with heart muscle cells, above referred to, is the fact that
when removed from the organism and placed in media suitable for
nutrition, these cells proliferate, i. e., increase in number by growth
and division, thereby resuming a more primitive function of the
cell-of-life, one which they would never again have exhibited, had
they remained in situ, within the heart organ whence they were
taken for the experiment. This fact, incidentally observed, is of
an importance which will loom largely in the future.

Yet another fact or principle which ought not to be lost sight
of, is the tenacity with which these cells from the heart muscle
hold to their function of pulsation. Removed from their place in
the beating heart, and placed in fluid media inside a glass jar,
there would appear to be no longer organic stress, or reason why
they should go on pulsating, yet they do so for months, thereby
affording most reassuring evidence of cell fidelity to an assumed
function, a loyalty of allegiance to the animal organism from which
it has been transplanted.

Incidentally, however, it was observed that cells of this bit of
transplanted heart tissue, cells which lay on the outside of it and
most exposed to demoralizing influences, so to speak, changed
to, or rather in proliferating gave birth to a species of amoeboid
non-pulsating cells, as if, under stress of hard, untoward condi-
tions, the heart-muscle cell were displaying a tendency to revert
to that simple primordial cell from which all multicellular life has
in time developed.

THE NEURO - ELECTRONIC CIRCULATION

When we speak of the organic circulation, what is generally
meant is the circulation of the blood and lymph, with its arterial,
venous and lymphatic apparatus. No other circulation is recog-
nized, either in anatomy or physiology.

There is another, however, the most important of all, the one

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 45

most essential to animal life and personality, since by no other
agency can a multicellular organism be actuated and its many
millions of separate cell lives unified in the one greater self-con-
scious life. By means of this circulation alone is the multitudinous
cell psyche united, consolidated, held together, and incited as the
animal self or soul.

So little is this latter circulation known, or recognized, that it
has as yet received no name, no descriptive designation. Pro-
visionally, until a better designation is found, it may be called the
electronic circulation, or better, perhaps, the neuro-electronic cir-
culation, since electrons enter into the composition of the substance
which circulates.

This latter medium or fluid is vastly composite, consisting of
many various emanations from the cells of the vi^hole organism
and of electrons, or corpuscles, also generated in the organism.
Term it a current or a fluid, it is one of the most wonderful things
in nature, embodying the esoteric secrets of organic chemistry. A
phase of it we speak of as sensation ; — but what is sensation,
and how is sensation accomplished?

The apparatus by means of which the neuro-electronic circula-
tion is maintained, is, of course, the nervous system.

And here it would be well if the reader could glance at two
anatomical charts, one of the blood vessels, the arteries, the veins
and blood circulatory apparatus generally, the other of the nervous
system, meaning the cerebro-spinal system of afferent and efferent
nerves, and nerve filaments, as minute as shown by charts. Even
a casual glance at the two sets of bodily apparatus will convey an
idea as to the analogy of the two circulations — the one so well
known, the other of which so little is known, as yet.

But, as in the case of the blood circulatory apparatus, no illus-
tration as a whole can depict, either the capillaries, or the far more-
minute terminal nerve fibrils which reach the cells and hold cell
to cell in sentient communication; since this is below the ken of
the human eye, and a matter of microscopic demonstration.

Whereas the blood and lymph currents circulate in tubes and
tubules, the neuro-electronic circulation is maintained through in-
sulated cables which divide into smaller and smaller lines, appar-
ently solid, composed of an organic substance which it is the func-
tion of certain cells to secrete and keep in continuity. To the neuro-

46 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

electronic fluid — if fluid it may be called — the nerve trunks and
nerve fibrils are as pervious as telegraph wires to electric currents.
Instead of being of copper or iron, however, the nerve cylinders
are of complex chemical composition, of greater but slower con-
ductivity. The neuro-electronic current appears, indeed, to enter
and actuate first one group of chemical molecules in the nerve
trunk, then another, and to be accompanied by sentient as well as
physical activities of the transmitting substance, a substance which
cannot better be described than as being a kind of alloyed proto-
plasm, not so greatly alloyed, or " fixed," as not to be still semi-
sentient. Like striped muscle fiber it is an alloy of cell cytoplasm.

Two phases of the neuro-electronic circulation are incidentally
exhibited in an animal organism, namely a sensory phase, and a
motor phase, the one setting inward to the center of self-conscious-
ness, the other setting outward under incitation of will power,
to direct and incite the mechanical apparatus of the body.

For the most part, however, the neuro-electronic circulation —
like that of the blood — goes on subconsciously and constantly,
both during sleep and waking hours. It is largely a function of
the cell life, below the ken of the cerebral self-consciousness, and
is as yet an unentered field of investigation — one of grand pos-
sibilities.

So far as our present knowledge of the neuro-electronic circu-
lation goes, the substance which circulates consists of emanations
from the cells of the entire organism and passes to and fro along
the inner thread, or core of the nerves, inciting first one group
of molecules, then another. Each group, in turn, incites that next
it, and thus the impulse goes forward to the muscle, gland, or
epithelial surface, to be influenced.

Apparently, each molecule, or group of molecules, in the core
of the nerve, gives up, as the impulse travels, certain of its free
electrons, thus forming something analogous to an ordinary elec-
tric current. We know, at least, that electricity is present, and
appears to be generated as the impulse moves along the nerve.
Yet the phenomena are not a little complicated ; — somewhat as if
a line of a thousand persons, stationed half a mile apart, connected
by telephone, were passing a message from one to another for a
distance of five hundred miles, to still another person, who, on re-
ceiving it, would be incited to wield an ax or turn a lever. For

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH

47

this reason, probably, nerve messages are transmitted slowly, com-
pared with electric messages through wire. Something more than
a current of electrons is set up. An emanation from the cells
accompanies it, an emanation which has sometimes been termed
vim, virtus and, more loosely, vital energy and vital power. No
recognized term has been given it, because its nature, character and
functions have as yet been scarcely recognized. In the substance

2. SoMaMi^ ^te^cU CkJUL9.

^<:TVM^"fc;;ui Ixynr^ ^yM^ Ami-

which circulates, the electron would seem to be what the red and
white blood-corpuscles are in the plasma of the blood-stream.

Figure 6 attempts to illustrate the two circulations, conjointly,
in glandular tissue like that of the pancreas, the parotid or the
thyroid gland. An arterial twig with its capillaries bears nourish-
ment to the cells whose function it is to secrete certain " juices,"
necessary to digestion, or the organic well-being. In the arteriole,
or often so, enters a small efferent nerve trunk, branching into
nerve fibrils which ramify among the gland cells. By virtue of
the current, maintained in the nerve and its fibrils, the cells are

48 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

held in function through life and stimulated to activity as required.
Deprived of this constant neuro-electronic current — if the nerve
were cut — the cells soon relapse from their proper organic duty,
degenerate and become desuete, or even run riot in malignant
tumors. It is the neuro-electronic circulation alone which holds
all the many groups of somatic cells in function and renders animal
life possible.

No effort has been made in this pen sketch to represent either
the venous capillaries, or the afferent nerves. These latter are the
reverse phase of the neuro-electronic circulation.

Through the neuro-electronic circulation which reaches it along
the nerve fibril, there comes this mandate so masterful that the
life of the cell bends to it constantly, as the worker-bee labors in
the hive, the skilled artisan in the factory. It is the voice — the
sentient aura — of the whole organism, the whole organized civi-
lization of the nation and the race. That voice, that sentient aura,
" circulates " by means of the nerve filaments.

In yet another particular the neuro-electronic circulation differs
from the sanguineous. The substance, current, or medium, which
circulates, is an emanation from the cells, especially the cells of
the brain and nervous system ; its origin is intracellular ; and its
efferent and afferent nerve fibrils — which correspond to the arte-
rial and venous capillaries of the sanguineous circulation — are
cell processes, namely, fibrils put forth by the cells themselves.
These in the case of the brain dendrites and multipolar cells of the
spinal cord, consist of associated arborizations, and the so-called
axis-cylinder processes, which, issuing from the base of each cell,
unite with others and pass into the larger nerve trunks.

The neuro-electronic current is thus a circulation between cell
and cell, or in other words, the circulating medium of the asso-
ciated cells. While the circulation of the blood plasma may be
termed intercellular, the neuro-electronic is intracellular, and thus
connected with the sentio-chemism of life itself.

The idea to be conveyed may be assisted, perhaps, by a few
pen-strokes — Figure 7 — illustrating the relations of four pyram-
idal, or dendritic cells of the human cerebrum, and of the multipolar
cells of the brain and spinal cord, generally. The cells and cell

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH

49

processes are sketched black, somewhat as they look when stained
by Golgi's corrosive sublimate method, with no attempt to represent
the neuroglia, or the capillaries of the blood circulatory system.

The neuro-electronic circulation, as will be seen in the case of
these four dendrites, is through the cells, and from them outward,

K

'& 7.

p<xy^Xo cP_^Ct^ 6r/^:w^

by means of the axis-cylinder process, or neuraxone, to the muscles
of the mechanical apparatus of the organism.

With no little propriety, therefore, the neuro-electronic circula-
tion might be termed the sentient or subjective circulation. It
comes from the life side of matter.

50 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Permit the repetition here of the cardinal fact touching the
neuro-electronic circulation. It is through the cell-of-life, not
around it; and the motive power which causes it to circulate is
the will power of the cell : that will power which emanates directly
from the sentient life of the cell. The vehicle of it appears to be
currents of electrons. The idea now held at this laboratory is that
the essential element of it is an emanation from the life-side of
the cell, superadded to the electron, modifying, or otherwise affect-
ing, its frequency, rhythm, or even its internal character.

It is not likely that our present methods of staining and exam-
ination bring out the finer fibrils of the arborizations of the cells,
but only the relatively coarser, grosser portions. The cortex cere-
bri of man and the higher animals is a veritable maze of these
fibrils, developed apparently for association and affiliation, cell with
cell, that each may sense what goes on in the others. Whether
the fibrils of different cells touch, join and anastamose, one to an-
other, is a matter of dispute and discussion. In some situations
cells appear actually thus to coalesce with other cells, but certainly
not as a rule. Each appears to preserve and maintain its own
individuality intact. What strengthens this latter view is the pres-
ence of numerous " buds," so called, or nodules of living matter,
in the arborizations, which are conjectured to serve as tiny ac-
cumulators in the sentient circulation.

In any sketch of this kind it is quite impossible to depict the
length of the axis-cylinder processes, or neuraxones, which descend
to relatively enormous distances, through layer after layer of fusi-
form, or nuclear cells. Often they are seen to communicate with
each other by means of lateral offshoots, thus maintaining com-
plete sentient and, perhaps, electronic tension. Ultimately they
join other axones and are combined in the sheathed nerves which
extend to the most distant parts of the organism. Altogether, it
is the most wonderful mechanism in creation.

HOW THE UNICELL BECAME A MULTICELL

During the year 1883, and for three years subsequently, an
extended study of unicellular life was made at this laboratory,
comparing unicells and unicell colonies with the tissue cells of

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 5 1

animal organisms, the general result being to establish the follow-
ing facts : —

First, that there is, in reality, but one mode of life on the earth's
surface, namely, the cell mode; this is to say, that all animal life
is confined to and issues from the cell. No cells, no consciousness.

Second, that unicellular life, life as single, separate cells, was
for long ages, millions of years probably, the sole and only form
of life on the earth; protozoons, unicells and colonies of the latter.

Third, that the multicells, or metazoons, meaning animals, in-
sects, plants, trees, did not appear on the earth until later epochs,
being of the nature of later developments from the colonizing habit
of unicells; the permanent closure, so to speak, of the hitherto
loose, temporary colony, growing out of the tendency of unicellular
life to band together and live together for mutual support, greater
security and better, more easily obtained food. The unicellular
colony was therefore the first step toward that extended, vastly
varied cell organization for mutual good, which has finally given
us the animal organism.

Fourth, signal advantages, remarkable advantages, indeed, to
the unicells, resulted from colonizing and from organization.
Hence such confederations continued to survive and went on
slowly perfecting their modes of living in combination.

In 1893 this deduction was set forth in Pluricellular Man, from
which the following citation is made : —

" The true terrestrial type of life was and still is unicellular,
creatures consisting of a single protoplasmic cell from which are
displayed all the functions, in miniature, exhibited by multicellular
creatures. These are the protozoons, the first, the standard type;
nor is this type of cell essentially changed in the metazoons, or mul-
ticellular organisms, since the latter are merely well-organized asso-
ciations of cells. There is, indeed, strictly speaking, but one mode
or type of life on the surface of our globe, the cellular, and this
type is preserved in all forms of life. For in the cell alone do
we find sentience exhibiting vital phenomena. No cells, no con-
sciousness.

" Pluricellular organisms are a later development from unicellu-
lar life. At first the metazoons were small, simple aggregations
of the protozoons; and the fact of confederation appears not even
to have modified the separate, unicellular lives. Each retained

52 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

complete autonomy, performing all the functions of a separate life.
Change of the conditions led to more permanent grouping and
induced modifications and differentiation of functions, till at length
dissolution of the bond which united the several unicellular lives
became impossible; and thus the way for further differentiation
of functions and the evolution of organic life was opened.

" All the multicellular organisms of which the human body is
an eminent example are but extensive, organized unions of what
were primarily unicells in which the type of unicellular life still
distinctly persists."

Here it may be well to state definitely, that, in all that follows
we are dealing with the lives, the psychic side, of unicells and
multicells, rather than with the forms of life; and hence that we
are not entering upon discussions of natural selection, descent,
variation or adaptation, in either the Lamarckian or the Darwin-
ian sense; nor yet of the opposed theories of species formation,
like the mutationstheorie of De Vries and others. The general
theory of the evolution of life on the earth is accepted as a matter
of course; but it is rather with the psychic side of such evolution
that we are now concerned.

It was an evolution, covering millions of years, but it went
on after nature's purblind fashion, until all the varied flora and
fauna of the earth's multicellular life have come out of it.

Signal advantages, we say, resulted from such united life. By
division of labor and differentiation of function, the larger, organ-
ized colony of cells could obtain food more easily, the confederated
unicells could the better defend themselves from the attacks of
enemies. Acting together for the common good, they were able
to live more at ease, more comfortably and happily, and hence to
live longer individually. Vastly more at ease, indeed, and vastly
longer, since in the higher multicellular organisms — that of man,
for example — we now find certain cells (the remote descendants
of earth's primitive unicells) living a thousand times longer than
their unicellular ancestry. It is as if a single human being, when
joined, hereafter, in the larger life of the race, were to live thirty
thousand years instead of thirty! To unicellular life, therefore,
multicellular organization has proved a species of natural salvation.
It has been the unicell's upward way to a kind of unicellular im-
mortality, and as such is of profound practical significance to the

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 53

biologist and the student of social science as pointing the way to
deathless life for man, from communal effort.

The microscope proved that the human organism was a vast,
highly organized, consentient confederation of cells ; that it lives
only in its cell life; that it has no other life than comes from
the harmonious confluence of the cell lives ; and that the ances-
try of these component cells was the unicellular life of the ancient
earth. Yet the embryology of man shows us that all the tissue
cells of the organism issue forth and develop from a single ovum,
composed of as few, possibly, as two cells emanating from the
bodies of the parents. How and by what physiological process the
semina of millions of tissue cells in an animal organism are em-
bodied, or garnered, in these few embryonic cells is still a matter
of research.

However accomplished, it is distinctly a process, or achieve-
ment, of multicellular life, one which developed after the unicellu-
lar colony took on permanent form and perfected its organization.
The details of it remain to be demonstrated.

Does each cell of the animal organism fructify and secrete ex-
ceedingly minute semina which are attracted to and garnered in
the cells of the reproductive organs and afterwards develop in the
embryo ; or does the personal aura — the soul — of the plant,
animal or man so impress itself on the reproductive cells that by
virtue of their mnemonic faculty they remember, imitate and repro-
duce the parents in the child ?

Subsequently, many months were spent studying the lives of
plants and animals, considered as organized unions of cell 1-ife;
or in other words — to use Haeckel's terms — the phytopsyche
(plant soul) and histopsyche (tissue soul) as so many consentient
unions of the cytopsyche (cell soul). It became evident that by
means of sentient contact, cell with cell, two or more cells — a
hundred, a million — may coalesce sentiently and form one larger
communal life about a common axis of self-consciousness; in fact,
that the lives of all the multlcells are such organized unions of the
lesser lives of their component cells. This composite origin of the
human soul was, indeed, a novel discovery as in contrast with the
theological concept.

And the cytopsyche, or cell soul? Whence does that originate,

54 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

and is that, too, an organized union of the souls of even smaller
living units ?

At that time — 1870 to 1885 — biologists had much to say of
" protoplasm," the compound of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, car-
bon, sulphur and phosphorus atoms, or molecules, which was seen
to form the body or basis of the cell. Eminent authorities, like
Professor Thomas Huxley, regarded protoplasm as the physical
basis of life, the compound from which life glowed forth as the
ray from the diamond.

But the cell contained a nucleus and granules, a centrosome
and other semblances of organization ; and further observation of
cells established a number of facts indubitably; first, that the life
which they exhibit, depends on the cell organization; second, that
as long as a cell lives, a constant stream of material particles enters
it from without, becomes for a time part and parcel of it, then
departs from it; third, that these particles are particles of ordinary
matter ; and fourth, that on departing from the cell they take away
with them the same properties which they carried into it, and were,
clearly, endowed with no other properties while in it.

At that time we knew little or nothing of electrons, corpuscles
and the composite nature of atoms ; and the ether was then the
" luminiferous ether " of Tyndall and Helmholtz. Yet dealing
only with atoms and molecules, the hypothesis became a necessity
that these particles entering and leaving the cell, possessed a prop-
erty, or properties, which as organized in the cell, gave rise to the
phenomena which were termed vital phenomena.

In the end, there is no escape from this hypothesis as to matter
and life ; and in Living Matter the following convictions touching
the intimate nature of matter, universally, were set down : —

" We conceive of matter as sentient. Matter moves and returns
to itself through the great cycle of universal phenomena. Matter
possesses the elements of feeling; hence the universe has every-
where a low degree of sense to proceed toward an object. It is
that which gives semblance of design in nature.

" What seems the inertia of matter is a condition of equilibration ;
what appears to be dead matter is only matter at a deadlock, from
which it may be released to live. This sentient property is eternal
to and inseparable from the ultimate particle. Even when locked
in the apparently dead clod, the initial atoms are still living atoms.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 55

robbed of not one whit of their static ability to feel and to
live.

" Philosophy taught much concerning certain supposed prop-
erties of matter, and has portrayed its impenetrability, porosity,
extensibility, ductility, inertia, et al. These were held to be its
primary properties. As a necessity of theological tenets, matter
was depicted as the lifeless material of a manufactured universe.

" But the philosophy of to-day postulates matter, not as lifeless,
but as living, not the inert substance of a created world, but the
living substance of a self-creating and self-sustaining universe.
Matter is of itself creative of natural phenomena by virtue of that
static attribute which resides at the core of every atom.

" The sentient particles feel, and from this eternal well-spring
all phenomena, physical and vital, move forth. Rather there are
no physical phenomena actuated by insentient forces. Motion
originates from the elementary sentience. Hence, in organized
matter, we contemplate, not the miracle of an insentient force trans-
forming itself into sentience and intelligence, but simply the rais-
ing-up of this primary sentience of matter to more full expression.
The organism of any living creature is the instrument, developed
originally from the inherent sentience of its component particles.

" Here on this eternal constant, the intimate life of matter itself,
founds the hope of a possible immortality for man. No vicissitude
of earth has yet been observed to deteriorate its quality. Ever-
lasting as the stars, it shines from the core of each ultimate particle
of matter, and illumines the wide deserts of space with the glow
of Hfe."

As a physical philosopher Tyndall was drawn to a similar con-
clusion in 1870; Gassendi to a like idea, in 1640; and in the
classic era, Demokritos, Epicurus and Lucretius conceived of mat-
ter as possessing such creative properties.

That matter has within it " the potency of all life " is a con-
viction which has most venerable sanction in philosophic thought
during three thousand years, one, too, which all our researches
tend to strengthen.

No one, of course, can yet fully define matter, nor predicate its
ultimate properties. The properties which at present appear to
us as final to it are Substance, Sentience, Energy. That these are
its ultimate properties, who shall say ? Matter is still the one great

56 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Mystery, the ever Unknown God, afar from the Inner Courts of
which we rear our altars.

There are or rather there have been philosophers who believe
in the dualistic hypothesis of matter, that is to say in inert matter
and " pure " energy.

In ultimate analysis the dualistic hypothesis always becomes
untenable to minds capable of carrying through a logical ratio-
cination, and has to be set aside for the monistic hypothesis, namely,
that matter and energy are one. This latter, indeed, is now the
■well-nigh universally recognized hypothesis of scientific thought.

And so surely as the monistic hypothesis of matter is true, just
so surely life on the earth is an organized development of an initial
impulse in matter.

No foreign or extraneous ingredient enters into matter to give
birth to life, no dualistic or triune combination, no tertiam quid.
Matter as we see it everywhere has in it the potency of life. The
corpuscles and corpuscules of this block of granite will yield a
human body and a human " soul," if organized as one.

The matter in this log of wood — the corpuscles, electrons, ions
and inclosed ether — would give forth a human intellect, if organ-
ized as a human body and a human brain. The basic, initial sen-
tience is there inherent and could be raised up by organization and
formed by interaction and reaction with its environment.

That organization, as seen in the human body, however, has
been the slow development of one hundred millions of years. The
" soul " of a man is a hundred million years old. As seen in the
individual, however, it can be destroyed, that is to say, reduced to
its initial sentience by an hour of incineration.

Given the low sentient property of matter in the ether, and the
intellect, the mind, the soul, is raised up from it by organization,
reciprocal sensation and plastic forming of substance.

The lowest, the most archaic estate, or attenuation of matter,
concerning which we now have knowledge or intimations, is the
ether, so called in lack of a better term ; the omnipresent ether
which the prescient Mendelieff believed to be one of the argon
gases.

The next lowest attenuation of matter of which we have some
little knowledge at present, is the corpuscle, self-organized, it is
believed, from the ether and manifesting its sentient energy as

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 57

negative electricity, causing magnetism, also light, heat, and other
phenomena.

The corpuscles have grouped themselves, seriatim, in the atoms
of the so-called elements of matter, the gases and liquids, the
metals and other substances, with their varied combinations of
atoms in molecules.

It has all gone forward under stress of that primeval, sentient
impulse to move. There is no other rational explanation of crea-
tion or of the universe. It is a self-moving universe and the im-
pulse is from its own initial sentience. In a lowly sense the cor-
puscle is as much a living being as the cell-of-life. Atom and
molecule, too, each lives its life, some of them, indeed, possessing
a degree of immortality. The difference betwixt the life of an
atom of oxygen and that of a brain cell is one of degree only,
due to a more extended organization. It is all life.

And this universal, sentient unity, shall we call it God? Not
in the anthropomorphic sense. It does not seem proper to deify
it, or worship it. Its life is lowly, unintelligent energy, purblind,
unorganized sentience. Yet out of it omniscience and omnipotence
may issue, through self-organization, first of the corpuscle in the
atom, the atoms and molecules in the cell-of-life, cells in the human
organism, and human organisms in the larger life of the race.
God is therefore ahead of us, not at the beginning. Omnis-
cience has yet to come. Omnipotence is in the future, not In the
past.

Godlike and immortal beings may have developed in past eras
and cycles of the cosmos. If so, they would seem to have passed
to other quarters of space. Within the flight and range of light
and gravitation, we find nothing operative to-day save matter and
its sentient energy.

If there is a God behind nature, he now gives no token of his
presence save nature itself; and it is more logical, more reverent,
if reverence be exacted of us, to conclude that we are not to seek
what we have no means of finding. " God " is not on this side
of matter except as evinced by matter itself; what is on the far
side we know not. Moreover, it is as rational to think of the
universe as having existed from eternity, as to conceive of a Cre-
ator who antedates it.

The low-sentient energy which drives nature forward amain, is

58 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

plainly not regardful of animal life on the earth, nor the hopes
and fears of mankind. Indeed, it is not easy to comprehend what
this swift, intensive, radiant life of unorganized matter is, in its
relation to organized life which rises to intellect. Yet the one
comes from the other.

Everywhere above and below the earth's immediate surface, mat-
ter is seen to be largely in the atomic and corpuscular condition.
It lives vastly, voluminously, with enormous dynamic power, but
is apparently unconscious of man. Yet of its intimate nature we
have ample evidence that it is true to an end, invariant, and hence
beneficent to those who place their lives in accord with it. On the
other hand, it crushes out remorselessly those who from carelessness
or wantonness go counter to it. Remorselessly, because it recks not
of human hopes or fears, and is not conscious, on the plane of
human consciousness. To us and our intents it is largely imper-
sonal. We have to learn of it and live by it. It is the eternal
fount and well-spring of life and has immortality potential for those
who will learn how to avail themselves of its possibilities. Other-
wise not. We must learn how to live in accord with it. Immortal
life is thus our birthright, under nature ; but we must enter into
it by our own efforts. It will have to be our own achievement. We
are not saved, nor to be saved. We shall have to save our-
selves.

In this our epoch of the cosmic evolution of matter, we see the
sentient substance segregated into numberless little self-lives, mi-
crocosms within the grand macrocosm, a vast cyclic movement
toward greater, wiser individuality. The lowly sentient energy
of the world-ether whirls itself asunder and apart into unnum-
bered little personal lives, each a self, living for itself in the midst
of the environing universe; each subjective to itself, with all the
rest of the universe objective. First the corpuscle, then the atom,
each a living self and soul from out the primeval sea of sentient
energy. Thus starts personality.

On the surface of our earth the atoms unite in the so-called
" protoplasm " of the cell-of-life, with its marvelous gift of mem-
ory and mentation. And after long eras of unicellular life, lo,
the unicells combine in the multicells, the terrestrial, metazoic life
now headed by man.

So far as we know, the corpuscle is immortal, in the sense of

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 59

living as long as earth and sun and stars abide. Certain of the
atoms appear to be so, but not all. Some of them waste and die,
or pass into other atoms ; some are enduring.

It is not certainly known how the cell-of-life originated on the
earth's surface, nor yet that it may not have come to the earth,
as a cell intact, from some other planet or sphere in space. In
all probability it originated on the earth, during an early geologic
epoch. The electric tension and the chemical affinities at the earth's
surface, admit of a grouping of certain atoms and molecules —
those of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, and phos-
phorus — in an organized compound which exhibits a more com-
plex life than that of the component atoms. Moreover, this vivific
compound is so internally mobile, so structurally at an equipose,
that it is capable of receiving and retaining sensory impressions
from the external world; that is, it can be acted on by its envi-
ronment and retain traces of that action; in other words, it has
the capacity or faculty of memory. It remembers what goes on
about it.

The evolution of life on the earth founds in this internal mo-
bility and this faculty of memory. The development of intelli-
gence in the cell presupposes this faculty of memory in the pro-
toplasmic molecule.

What the physical or dynamic process of memory is, we do not
as yet know; but the later knowledge of matter leads to the hy-
pothesis that it is a change of relative position and relations among
the component atoms, and that it is accomplished by currents of
corpuscles, or of the ether, setting into the molecule from without.
By ether here we mean simply a medium or attenuation of matter,
more minute than the corpuscle. Of the existence of such more
minute attenuations there are now evidences. In fact, the present
hypothesis is, that there are many such attenuations, one within
or below another, as the corpuscle is below the atom, going down
to more ethereal states not yet possible of demonstration.

Through a long period, not less than a hundred millions of years,
the unicells were the sole inhabitants of the earth. Metazoons,
grand organizations of cells, were to appear in time ; but during
all that long period, there is no trace of them in the slowly accu-
mulating strata. We find unicells only, each living its small life,

6o SALVATION BY SCIENCE

and giving birth to offspring, usually by simple fission of the par-
ent cell into two child-cells.

As to the psychic character of that simple unicellular life, we
have abundant evidence that it was the minute prototype of animal
and human life. For the cell-of-life everywhere possesses the fac-
ulty of memory in all its component mobile molecules ; and memory
Is the one condition requisite to the growth of intelligence and
mind. Every protozoon possessed a mind, a soul, quite as much
as does an animal, or a man. The difference between the cell soul
and the human soul is one of degree and quantity, not of intrinsic
quality; and that difference of degree is due solely to the more
extended organization of the animal brain. The higher human
faculty of thought rests on the more complex organization and
greater mass of the human brain ; it is not a difference in psychic
quality. Memory and thought are carried to higher, more com-
plex reactions in the brain of an animal, or a man, than in the
nucleus of a cell, that is all.

CELL SELF AND MULTICELLULAR SELF

And how is this life of a unicell composed or developed from
the basic sentience of matter? The answer to the question is of
interest since it strikes the key-note to the origin and destiny of
the human soul.

First we have the corpuscle, living its electric life; and we
find from ten hundred to two hundred and twenty-four thousands
of these individual corpuscles pooling their lives in the life of an
atom, such as compose the various elements of matter. The life
of an atom is a consentient blend of the lives of all its component
corpuscles, where each gives up self in the larger life of the atom.
There is self-surrender in the interests of the larger life.

It is the faculty of pooling individual lives in a larger life which
has led certain scientists to conceive the hypothesis that, at bottom,
matter, when at its lowest attenuation, is a confluent unity; not
segregated, but capable of segregation, an unorganized, etheric
world-fluid, to wit, sentience, or sentient energy. The semblance
of form and substance begins with segregation.

Whether this hypothesis be true or not, the fact is well estab-
lished that the corpuscle has the faculty of pooling its life in the

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 6 1

larger life of the atom, the atom in the greater life of the unicell,
where true psychic faculties are exhibited.

The unicell lives, hopes, fears, and erelong suffers death, from
the inevitable concurrent accidents of its environment; and at
death, which is by no means the death of the component atoms
and corpuscles, these same atoms and corpuscles reassume each its
own individual life and go their ways into other cells, or other
combinations of matter. Such is the rationale of cell life, and it
offers us the key to the greater problems of human life.

Owing to accidents from the environment, the unicell of the
ancient earth lived but a short time, a few hours, a few days it
may be; but from the psychic side of its life, it was always seek-
ing to escape death; for that is the nature of all life. And at
length, after all those millions of years, we find the unicells com-
bined in cooperative unions.

As to how this was first accomplished, we have as yet no pre-
cise knowledge; whether unicells were united as a result of their
colonizing habit, as seems quite possible, or whether from some
intracellular evolution a double-, triple-, or multiple-celled creature
developed. The fact remains that multicellular creatures, meta-
zoons, appeared on the earth : animals in which we find one tract
or group of cells doing one thing, for the common good, another
tract or group doing another. One cell, or group of cells, acts as
eye for the whole union, another as ear, others as muscle, still others
as bone; others still as organs for food preparation and carriers
of the prepared food; while yet another interior group assumed
the function of intelligence for the union, the office of perceiving,
reflecting, and deciding what is best for all to do ; in a word soul-
cells, having the kingly function of brain.

As a result of the metazoic union, too, there was developed a
marvelous and still inscrutable method of reproduction of the
entire metazoon, child from parent, by a transference and con-
centration of germinal elements, or psychic patterns, from each
cell to certain special cells, devoted to this use, to the end that a
younger metazoon might be extruded from the parent and after-
wards grow to full size, thereby perpetuating the species and en-
abling it to survive on the earth. The method is a complicated
modification of unicellular reproduction by fission of the cell
nucleus.

62 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Of this wonderful process of transference and concentration
of germ elements, from the entire cell union, in the reproductive
cells, we know very little, as yet. How did it begin? In what
does it consist?

Darwin, as is well known, suggested cell " gemmules," Spencer
" physiological units," Weissmann " biophors," Haeckel " plasti-
dules." These conceptions are now seen to be inadequate, the
actual facts touching down to deeper levels of matter.

All that we can yet say definitely is that such an esoteric method
of metazoic reproduction has developed, as a result of the organ-
ized, differentiated cell life.

HOW THE BRAIN CELLS UNITE TO FORM THE HUMAN INTELLECT

It had long been a matter of observation that unicells put forth
" protoplasmic " branches and emit fibrils of the nature of " darts "
and " rays," to aid them in securing their food, or for defence
and during conjugation in colonies. Histologists, too, had already
described the forms and branchings of certain groups of the brain
cells (neurons).

Studies of these forms and characteristics of cell life, during
1891-92, led to definite conclusions touching the unification of the
cell life of the brain, and the composite nature of the human in-
tellect. The brain is comparable, sentiently, to a vast and well-
organized colony of unicellular life. In fact, that is what it is;
for even as unicells, when temporarily united in a colony, put forth
protoplasmic filaments to sense each other's presence and to pool
their hitherto separate lives in one larger life, so in like manner,
the brain cells have put forth long, branched processes which aid
in forming a union of their individual cell-lives in that larger, uni-
fied life which is the intellect, or soul of the man.

" We find that the cortex cerebri is composed largely of net-
works formed from these branching cell processes, associated with
the plexuses of blood capillaries and the adjuvant neuroglia, re-
quired for their physical support and maintenance. The superficies
of the cortex, indeed, is by far the most remarkable structure which
minute anatomy has knowledge of. The extent and intricacy of
the fibrillar threads, loops, and twigs, formed by the mutual inter-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 63

lacing and interlooping of thousands of tree-like branches which
the cells send upward into it, are quite incomparable. In this
respect the cortex of the brain is a hundred times more dense and
more involved than are the tops of trees in a dense forest. The
branches, in their amazing ramifications, not unfrequently extend
to a distance of twenty times the length of the cell body. It is as
if each tree of a thick forest sent forth vines for branches, which
cHmbed to a distance of several hundred yards, dividing as they
proceeded into a thousand vine-lets and tendrils, which enwrapped
and entwined everything in their course. Such a jungle, growing
to a height of many hundred feet, would no more than illustrate
this astonishing net-work of the protoplasmic fibrils of the cortical
cells.

" The histologist is led to inquire with wonder, why this mazy
output of living filaments has developed. Is it to facilitate cell
nutrition ? The present investigator has been inclined to think that
the brain neurons have grown up, even as many-branched trees
grow in sheltered situations, to fulfil and express each its life ;
and that originally, at least, nutrition was the object conserved,
but that ultimately con-sentience resulted. For, at present, it can-
not be wholly, or largely, for the purpose of accomplishing cell
nutrition, since these cells are nourished by the saprophytic, or
absorptive method, and not by prehension of food particles.

" It is not to accomplish locomotion, for these cells rest nearly
stationary on fluid beds, sustained by the nets of neuroglia. The
conclusion is reached, of necessity, that these far-branching proc-
esses serve a purpose of mutual perception and communication,
cell with cell. The sentient, protoplasmic fibrils touch, or so nearly
touch that what one cell feels and knows is known and felt by its
neighbor cell. It would follow that an impulse or a sensation which
comes to one cell through its efferent fiber from the outer world,
is known and felt by all its fellows throughout that entire convo-
lution or tract of cells.

" For all this mazy web is demonstrated by the reactive agents
of our staining fluids, to be purely protoplasmic matter, capable of
feeling, and able to convey sensation. When, therefore, a sensation,
received either through the eye, the ear, the organs of taste and
smell, or through the thousand sensory nerves extending to the
surfaces of the bodv, is transmitted alonQ- a sheathed nerve fiber

64 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

and reaches one or more of these large cells of the cortex, intelli-
gence of such a sensation is at once distributed by means of the
sentient net-work to a hundred neighbor cells, and from them is
diffused over the entire brain, which thus receives tidings as if it
were a single large cell, instead of an aggregation of sixty millions
of cells.

" By means therefore of this sentient bond of cell to cell, afforded
by the protoplasmic net-works, many millions of cell lives are
blended in one common life, having one common sense. By means
of this bond, too, a higher life than that of a single cell is rendered
possible. For by it thought, which is the business of comparing
what one cell knows with what another cell knows, begins, and
both cells are thereby made wiser in experience. Reason is set up ;
imagination is made possible ; and in the end the human intellect
is developed from what was at first the primary sentience of indi-
vidual cells.

" For it is not here intended to advance the doctrine that the
human intellect is no higher than the sentience of the component
brain cells individually. By means of this extended organization
of cells, something more than a cumulative result is attained. By
specialization and organization, a higher plane of intelligence is
reached ; even, as we conclude, the intelligence attained by the
cell is of a higher order than that of the intra-nuclear molecules
which are believed to form the basis of cellular organization.

" Biological synthesis would lead us to infer that by means of
organization, higher and higher planes of intelligence are suc-
cessively attained. Extended organization and the specialization
of parts to distinct uses have led to those more complicated actions
and reactions in the plastic, protoplasmic substance, the entirety
of which issue in a higher kind of intelligence, higher because vastly
more of experience is included In the brain as a whole than in the
cell.

" Briefly, we wish to convey the idea that, according to the
present biological conception, the human intellect is something
more than the combined sentience of the sixty millions or more
of cells, contained in the brain; that it is an extended development
of that sentience, rendered possible by the association and inter-
action of the cells.

" This association and this organization have, we believe, been

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 65

largely due to the wealth of protoplasmic branches and fibrils which
the brain cells have thrown out and which bring them into touch
and sentient contact with their fellows."

THE DISCOVERY OF CELL OLD AGE

In passing, it may be remarked here, that in 1890-91, these facts
were accorded little meed of recognition in America, or abroad.
It was not until two years later, when Dr. Ramon y Cajal of the
University of Barcelona published similar descriptions of the brain
cells, that the importance and great significance of these investi-
gations were recognized. Questions of priority in research are
invidious at best. It was a source of satisfaction to know that the
work done at this laboratory was fairly in advance of that of the
European savant.

The microscopical researches on which the above facts found,
were conducted in part at New York City, during the winters of
1890-91-92; and the "material" examined was the brain and
spinal cord of dogs (twenty-six dogs) large and small, old and
young, from the dog pound of that metropolis which in its treat-
ment of the canine species out-Heroded ancient Athens. At that
time a horde of dog-catchers — tolerated for political as well as
other reasons — ranged through the city by day and by night,
capturing unlicensed dogs. Closed dog-wagons came to the pound
at intervals. It was possible to obtain any size of dog, any breed
of dog, and, indeed, anybody's dog that you wanted, by paying the
price agreed on in private with the meretricious Celts in charge
of the " probation cages," and the " gas box." But this is digres-
sion.

Incidental to these studies of brain and cord cells, as regards
their consentient union in the brain, a very important and inter-
esting discovery was made. In these canine subjects the cells of
old individuals were found to differ visibly from the younger, in
that they were less delicate, the filaments less extensive and, as
a rule, the whole cell smaller; that is to say, the living portions
of the cell which could be stained, were less in quantity in the
old than in the young. Not only were the nuclei and centrosomes

66 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

smaller, but the cytoplasm was equally diminished. It was fully
apparent that these old brain and cord cells had deteriorated and
were declining by a process of involution. Yet here and there
on the slides appeared a w^ll-nourished cell which looked to be
holding its own with those of the " control."

Observation of these variations was carried through five pairs
of old and young dogs — each pair with a " control " — of about
the same breed and of the same size as nearly as could be obtained,
although the latter particular is of no especial importance; a small
dog may have as large cells as a large dog.

In passing, it may be noted here that nearly all these old New
York dogs had lesions of the spinal cord, most frequently in the
posterior columns and the column of Tiirck.

Later, the brain cells of pigs were compared in like manner with
those of old hogs, with the same general result ; though it should
be remarked that in the genus siis not a single lesion of the cord
happened to be encountered; but this may have been largely due
to chance.

Next year, as far as possible (not an easy matter without sus-
picion of a pathological vitiation of the results) the same com-
parative studies were parallelled in human subjects, with substan-
tially the same revelations as to the progressive change in the
aspects and appearances of the cells from youth to advanced age.

Still later, the cells of other tissues of the human organism —
cuticle, bone, muscle, liver, heart — were in like manner contrasted,
under high microscopic power, the general result of all these ob-
servations being to establish the fact that the cells of the mam-
malian tissues, man as well as the lower animals, shrink in size and
change their appearance as the subject ages, tending to fall into
a condition w^hich cannot be better nor otherwise described than
as " cell old age." The cells themselves grow old and become
senescent; and it is cell old age which underlies organic or bodily
old age in animals and man. In other words it is the old-aging
of the cell which has so long been that mysterious cause or agency
which induces and is associated with constitutional and functional
old age in man. There are intimate or primary causes of cell old
age, incident and peculiar to the inner, personal life of the cell
itself, and proximate or secondary causes due to the metazoic or
associated life of many cells, living in a cooperative union.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 67

The causes of cell old age are manifold; the pre-determining
bias from ancestry; faulty nutrition of the cell from impurities
in food, that is to say the general impurities of food; decline of
the body heat, in advancing years ; starvation of the cell from the
shrinkage of the capillaries, causing restricted circulation of the
blood plasma; diminution of nervous energy from the brain and
cord to the tissues, i. e. slackening of the sub-conscious life ; slow

% ,1~. SnyvtAJicux. (UJLLs ^i^urt^ £,crrcL oL. CU^ o^*^

poisoning of the cell from unremoved waste products of the whole
body; microscope " dirt; " what may be described as the gradual
" binding out " of the cell from the chemical hardening of its
environment of formed matter; the (possible) drain of germinal
elements to the reproductive cells; slow, chronic suffocation from
lessened oxygenation, due to the fouling and thickening of the
alveolar membranes in the lungs.

Sketch 8 will give some idea of the changed appearance of mul-

68 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

tipolar cells from the anterior horn of the spinal cord of dogs,
in old age as compared with adolescence, viz. eighteen months as
against fourteen years. The cells appear smaller; the nuclei are
noticeably smaller; and the arborizations now for the most part
fail to be revealed by the stains (methel blue, eosin and fuchsin).
Old tissues are, it should be remembered, less easily stained than
adolescent tissues. In the cases cited, the fibrils had either largely
disappeared or become so attenuated, that the stains failed to ren-
der them visible on the slides. The cell bodies, too, are less dis-
tinctly stained and have assumed a perceptibly shrunken appear-
ance, not unlike the cells of animals suffering from extreme fatigue,
or when long famished.

In the pituitary body or gland — exceedingly interesting on
account of its influence, when stimulated, or diseased, on the
growth of the entire organism — the contrast between adolescent
and aged cells was most remarkable. The cells examined were
from the posterior lobe, the anterior containing none of this class.
As stained by the nitrate silver process, these cells appear to be
dendrites or pyramidal cells, somewhat resembling the cerebral
pyramidals, but less regular and typical. Each has one, sometimes
two neuraxones, or axis cylinder processes, which, however, are
not as easily traceable as in the cerebrum.

The pituitaries from but two dogs were examined, one appar-
ently about eighteen months old, the other very old, certainly not
less than eleven or twelve years, probably more.

Sketch 9 gives the generalized result of what the microscope
revealed. In the young animal the cells, cell branches and arbori-
zations are displayed clearly even in feathery detail. In the old
animal the presence of the cells is shown for the most part as a
mere irregular patch of black stain, much as if the branched proc-
esses were dead and only an encysted cytoplasm and nucleus re-
mained of the cell. Even this cell body was smaller and less
distinctly stained, as if shrunken or impregnated by non-living
matter.

Curiously enough, however, on one slide, out of seven or eight
of this old tissue, there appeared a single cell in good condition,
as large or larger than any of those on the slides of young tissue,
having all the characteristic arborization, with the neuraxone
traceable to a considerable distance.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH

69

Apparently this was a cell that had continued to be well nour-
ished while its fellows had starved — how, or why, it would be
interesting to know. Perhaps because located contiguous to a
capillary channel which had remained fully open and pervious to
the blood-stream. Similar rare isolated instances of well-preserved

B

k

B

6 6 8 ^^yi^t^i^UtxA^ <^££.s <ku^>^ a, vw^ oiS (^03.

cells were observed among the cerebral dendrites, and also among
hepatic cells : rare individuals, surviving in health and strength,
in the midst of a shrunken, dying generation of their fellows.

Allowing for all errata of the staining processes, either the
nitrate method or the dyes, the facts in regard to cell old age
appear to be about as I have endeavored to sketch them.

70 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

THE CAPILLARIES IN OLD TISSUES

One of the most inveterate of these causes is the slow shrinkage
of the capillary tubes, the caliber of these diminishing until the
white and red blood-corpuscles squeeze through them with dif-
ficulty, or cease wholly to do so.

Many practical difficulties attend the preparation of the capil-
laries for examination, chiefest of which is an injection fluid that
will penetrate them. The fluid, moreover, has to be forced into
the artery at a considerable pressure, and in aged subjects, and
often in adolescents, the vessels give way before the capillaries can
be filled. Gases, too, sometimes act to make " pockets," especially
in old subjects, where many of the capillaries are plugged, or des-
uete.

So many, indeed, are these practical difficulties, and so greatly
do subjects vary, that it would be unsafe to draw deductions or
form an opinion as to the difference between old and young capil-
laries, from a single comparison. A considerable number of com-
parisons — ten at least — should be made, and all the conditions
carefully estimated, as, for example, the greater elasticity of the
young capillary.

The accompanying pen sketch — Sketch lo — was made after
a week's w^ork in such comparisons. It stands for a general result
rather than for any one instance.

Of old capillaries, compared with young, it may be said, first,
that they are shorter as a natural result of tissues thinning in aged
subjects. This is especially noticeable in the epidermis and cutis;
yet in forming an opinion it is necessary to do so guardedly, on
account of the greater pressure required to inject the old tissue.

There are pouches in old capillaries, and often they appear to
end abruptly in cul-de-sacs, although here again it is well to bear
in mind that this latter appearance may be due to failure of the
injection fluid to penetrate further. Allowance for this, indeed,
must be made constantly in all cases, old or young.

There can be no doubt whatever, that as a rule, applying to at
least ninety per cent, of two capillary systems, adolescent as com-
pared with aged, that the calibers of the old capillaries will be

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH

71

-cJtU.

found of notably less diameter. For instance, where young capil-
laries have an average caliber of 1-2500 of an inch, the correspond-
ing old capillaries will be as small as 1-3200; and in the brain,

72 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

or cord, where the young are 1-4000, the old might be less than
1-4600. It will be understood, of course, that I am not here speak-
ing of dilated capillaries, or of pathologic cases, but of what may
be termed the normal aged condition; nor yet of the sometimes
pouched, sometimes stenotic condition of a capillary.

In old capillaries scarcely a nucleus of the formative epithelial
cell can be distinguished in the walls of the tubule. Per contra,
in young capillaries, where a successful attempt is made to stain
them with silver nitrate, the nuclei are numerous.

Old capillaries as a rule dilate easily, with the tendency above
noted, to show " pouches," " pockets " and plugged loops. In the
old, too, considerable tracts are not unfrequently found obliterated,
the loops apparently plugged with unremoved waste, or stenosed
beyond the point where the blood-stream can penetrate them.

The arterial capillaries are, of course, the channels through which
the blood reaches the tissue cells and passes over into the corre-
sponding channels on the venous side of the circulation, to be
pumped back by the heart to the lungs for re-oxygenation. Not
only the blood plasma is oxygenated, but separate charges of oxy-
gen are taken up by the red blood disks and borne by them to every
part of the organism, to maintain the body heat at 98° Fah.

It is not difficult, therefore, to perceive what happens when the
arterial capillaries become so narrowed, stiffened, plugged and
generally impaired that the plasma fails to reach the cells, and
the blood disks cannot readily pass over to the venous side, but
stick by the way, or become pocketed.

This is manifestly why lean elderly persons, with shrunken tis-
sues, suffer so constantly from cold feet, cold hands and from low
temperatures generally. This is one of the large factors of old
age. Incidentally, greater stress is put on the heart muscle to
force the blood through to the veins. The accumulation of venous
blood which we often see in the veins, however, is quite another
matter, due to abnormalities of the valves in the veins and to en-
feebled heart action.

Micro-photography is of less avail here than in almost any other
situation. Allowing for the greater difficulty of injecting old tis-
sue, there yet appears in the latter, as compared with young, a
condition somewhat as sketched above.

Rarely, or never, do we succeed in so perfectly injecting the

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 73

capillaries, that the finer, ultimate channels, loops and meshwork —
where the arterial capillaries pass over and are differentiated as
the venous capillaries — can be examined ; the latter, indeed, in
most instances, remain filled, or partially filled, with blood at the
death of the subject examined.

The first capillaries, from the arteriole. In young tissue are longer
and of greater caliber as a rule. Evidently their elasticity and
dilatibility are greater. The strong heart of youth sends the blood
disks, charged with oxygen, through them rapidly, without ob-
struction, or squeezing, generating that heat so necessary to health
and vital well-being.

In age the reverse condition prevails, with lack of heat, and slug-
gishness, not only of the plasma-flow to the cells, but of the neuro-
electronic circulation through the nerve trunks and fibrils.

I have attempted to show the pouched appearance in this size
or grade of capillaries, where apparently the red disks of the blood
pause too long in their obstructed flow. Some of these pouches
look to be greater than I have drawn them; but when all the dif-
ficulties attending examination are borne in mind, that question
is a delicate one, at best.

In this connection, it may be remarked that sixteen years ago,
in 1896, a prize of $400 was offered from this laboratory for the
best exhibit of microscopic slides, comparing aged and adolescent
capillaries from human or canine subjects, with a view to increasing
our knowledge on this subject of capillary shrinkage and the re-
sulting cell starvation.

The offer and the motive for it were made as plain as possible ;
but very little came of it, many microscopists professing themselves
unable to comprehend what was wanted.

Any well-equipped observer might have made these discoveries
touching the old-aging of the physiological cell ; and any one may
verify them who will.

Cell old age, we repeat, is the deep-lying, final cause of old age
and decrepitude in man. It is in the cell that we must begin our
work of self-renewal. Hitherto " old age " has been regarded as
a " God-ordained law of life." There is nothing divine about it.
It is due to purely physical causes, each and all of which can be
removed, or alleviated, by applied science.

In this connection it is proper to refer again to Professor Elie

74 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute, at Paris, whose interesting
works on the prolongation of human life have been so widely-
read in this country, and who has of late been adjudged worthy
of one of the Nobel prizes.

For five years it has been a matter of surprise at this laboratory
to find that Professor Metchnikoff, in his voluminous publications
on the subject of old age, nowhere recognizes cell old age, i. e.
the old-aging of the individual cells in the tissues, particularly the
brain.

Is it possible that this deservedly popular foreign scientist has
not discovered that it is the " old age " of the cells which ante-
dates organic and constitutional old age in the human body and
is slowly reflected outward in the well-known aspects of human
senility? Old age in man may almost be said to be of two kinds,
primary and secondary, that is, cellular and constitutional; the old
age of the cell and the resultant old-aging of the orgai.ism.

Professor Metchnikoff, however, makes no distinction between
cell old age and organic old age, and appears not to recognize the
former condition as the intimate cause of the latter. Is it possible
that cell old age has not yet been discovered at Paris? Is it for
this reason — the failure to recognize the old-aging of the cell —
that Professor Metchnikoff gravely concedes that " old age " in
the human organism, is ultimately irremediable? That all which
can be done by science is to rid the organism of noxious bacteria,
perfect surgery, and choose food with greater wisdom? By so
doing we may, under favorable circumstances, he thinks, prolong
human life thirty or forty years, possibly sixty. No hope of any-
thing better than this ahead. Has the new knowledge of matter
no significance for this savant whose genius and industry we so
profoundly respect?

To-day w-e are working forward to discoveries which will enable
the cell-of-life to be regenerated at will. Nature is no longer fate,
for science ; science will be fate, for nature. We are soon to mas-
ter it and do with it what we please. There is deathless life for
man, ahead, without " old age," or infirmity. The Kefir bacteria
of sour milk may be advantageously introduced into the alimentary
canal, but no panacea for the aging of the human organism will be
found until the facts of cell old age are recognized and the remedy
applied there. The deep-lying cause of old age is intracellular,

THE PROMETHEAN EAITH 75

not organic, and it is there that we shall have to begin remedial
action.

SENSATION AND CELL OLD AGE

In a recent work, entitled Age, Growth and Death, Professor
Charles S. Minot of the Harvard Medical School, has gone into
this matter of the progressive senescence of the physiological cell
far more deeply and comprehensively than any of the foreign his-
tologists. He recognizes a structural change in the protoplasm
and nucleus of the tissue cell, from youth to age. Incidentally,
Professor Minot holds that the protoplasm of the cell is increased,
while the nucleus is diminished — a deduction which the present
writer's observations fail to confirm as regards the former. With
few apparent exceptions, I have found that the entire cell " ages "
and is diminished in size, " protoplasm " and nucleus alike.

As to an intimate structural change in the living matter of the
cell, from infancy to age, that is of course beyond our present
powers of observation to demonstrate, although it appears likely.

Touching the causes of this change, Professor Minot is silent,
as if regarding it as something final in the order of the universe.

But certain of the primary and the proximate causes of this
progressive structural change in the protoplasm and nucleus of
the cell from youth to age have already been suggested above.

To these causes, already enumerated, must be added another,
from the psychic side of the cell life, to wit, sensation, that is to
say, the sensory life of the cell from moment to moment and day
to day. Painful sensation undoubtedly impairs the sentient proto-
plasmic structure, impairs or deadens it; while on the other hand,
pleasant sensation vivifies it. But in organic life as we now live
it, painful sensation in time overbalances pleasurable, in the cell
life, leading to a secular deterioration in structure — the structure
requisite to maintain life. The philosophic and practical inference
from this is easy, the moral plain.

Granting a structural change in the somatic cell, evinced in a
progressive senescence from foetal life onward to old age and
djeath, we are of course constrained to seek the causes. Why does
the change occur? To leave it there, in the hands of Fate, does
not help us to grow in knowledge. At present the primary causes

76 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

seem to be errata in cell nutrition, bias from cell ancestry and a
possible fructification of the cell in a species of corpuscular germ
elements which set up a drain of depletion on it; although this
latter hypothesis is contrary to the present germ-plasm doctrines.

The cell in its self-conscious life, whatever its situation —
whether a protozoon or a metazoic tissue cell of brain, or muscle
— is subject to that continuous reaction from its environment
which we ordinarily term sensation. This reaction is iterated
from moment to moment, hour to hour, and day to day, during
the entire cell life-time.

Now we know from common observation that the repetition of
identical or similar sensations dulls, that is to say lessens, the sen-
sory capacity of brain cells.

Does sensation then cause that structural change in the nucleus
and the protoplasm of the cell, which we associate with senes-
cence, making it necessary that there shall come erelong a partial
or complete break-up of the cell organization, commingling of the
cell contents with that of another cell, fission and a new cell or-
ganization, in order to escape the results of such long-continued
sensation ?

THE INFERENCE FROM MAUPAS' OBSERVATIONS

More than forty years ago, in France, E. Maupas, and after-
wards Balbiani, demonstrated that a colony of uni<:ells, living on
by fission, from parent to child, became senescent, enfeebled and
tended to extinction, unless sexual conjugation took place at in-
tervals of forty or fifty generations. Rejuvenescence was thereby
effected; otherwise the colony died out. More recently in this
country Professor G. N. Calkins has, as I understand, verified
Maupas' conclusions from actual observations. My own work
in mammalian tissues, old and young, as mentioned above, tends
to establish the same general fact for the metazoic cell, or cycle
of cells ; since the various organized groups of tissue cells in meta-
zoons are analogous to the cell colonies of unicellular life. The
fact, too, that metazoons can only be renewed, that is to say reju-
venated, by the sexual method, goes still farther to show that the
same law of life prevails alike in the unicell colony and the orders
of tissue cells. In the one situation as in the other, the cell ages

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 77

and ultimately dies, unless re-blending and re-casting of the cell
contents are accomplished by union and fusion with some other
cell. Left to its unaided self too long, the cell dies. A fresh start
must be made. The initial elements of life are there, but they must
be re-assembled, re-constructed. When thus re-grouped and rej-
assembled, they begin to live and grow again.

What can this mean other than that the delicate sentient struc-
ture of the cell — nucleus and protoplasm — is somehow fouled
and deteriorated by its life, by the way it is nourished, by its hard,
painful sensory experience ?

The unicell eats what it can lay hold of, and can frequently be
seen to have a hard and demoralizing struggle with what it ingests.

In this respect the lot of the tissue cell of the animal body is
easier; and for this reason it lives far longer. Its food is the
highly-wrought plasma of the blood-stream; a serum which cer-
tain groups of cells devote their lives to rectifying and purifying
for easy, safe assimilation.

But even in normal mammalian blood Is this cell food perfect,
clean, fit and chemically pure? By no means. The physiological
cell dies from it, in time. Hence our contention and hence one
line of research pursued at this laboratory. Can we not by experi-
ment improve this sanguineous serum-of-life? Can we not still
further rectify and purify this Uumen vitcE, this plasma of the blood-
stream, till a clean, pure and chemically perfect cell food is at-
tained ?

That at least is one of the present ideals.

CONCLUSIONS WHICH THE FACTS NECESSITATE

Throughout nature, everywhere, we see life rising by successive
steps of cell organization and cell cooperation to higher and higher
degrees of intelligence.

This union or pooling of individual cell lives in a larger life is
accomplished not by the obliteration of the cell self, but simply by
placing each cell life in line and consonance with its associate cells,
as when many laborers place their shoulders to one wheel, or pull
at one drag-rope, or lift together, to raise a heavy timber. There
is no loss of self life, but united action with others for the ultimate
benefit of that self life. Each cell retains its individuality and>

78 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

in a sense, its personality. Each lives its life, but lives it in the
larger life of the whole animal organism. When thus banded to-
gether, there is insured to each protection from many of the acci-
dents w^hich befell the small unicell, better food and the benefits
and advantages which accrue from the greater experience and or-
ganized knowledge of all. In all these respects the analogy between
the cooperative cells of the animal body and the citizens in a repub-
lic, or nation, is very close and instructive.

But mark well the principle on which this grand development
of cell life in animal organisms rests: the principle of union,
cooperation, organization; the building up of a larger, organized
life from many smaller, less complex and hence less intelligent
lives ; first, the living corpuscle in the atom, atoms in the proto-
plasmic molecules, these molecules in the cell-of-life and cells in
the animal body: a grand evolution of a larger, more intelligent
life from millions of lesser lives.

Mark it well, for we must not ignore the sequence, nor shut
our eyes to what inevitably and logically happens when that organ-
ism of animal life is marred, dies and is dissolved. There is no
final loss, no death, no cessation of the basic life, itself, meaning
the initial sentience of matter. The instinctive faith of humanity
that life itself is intrinsically deathless, has never been wrong;
that basic life goes on otherwise and in other forms of matter. It
is the union, the larger, cooperative life of the animal which is
dissolved and ceases to exist at organic death. The atoms and
corpuscles then separate and go each their ways elsewhere, taking
each its individual, inseparable life with it.

The union is dissolved, the cooperation ceases, the organized
animal life is no more. The components of that life, the corpus-
cular and atomic lives, go on in a myriad other new forms and
aggregations of the universal life. There is no cessation of that
universal life, but a passage, a translation, into new forms.

The problem of organic self life lies in keeping up the organiza-
tion, in the words of the old axiom, in keeping soul and body
together. Otherwise, it is resolved back into the lowly, unintelli-
gent life of unorganized matter. When we die we are still a part
of the great whole, but not as an organized self, not self-con-
sciously. We are still here, but we do not know it.

Nature in her evolution of life has put forward no plan and

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 79

made no provision for the saving of the composite, organized Hfe
of a metazoon, an animal, a man, when by accident or disease the
organism is destroyed.

Yet self-conscious life everywhere shrinks from death. On this
fond, sad hope of a dying world, Supernaturalism has preyed for
thousands of years, with its thousand empty promises, in return
for tithes, rites, and tribute. That is the burden of Asia's super-
stitions.

To-day the growth of human knowledge brushes aside all these
fond, vain hopes of supernatural rescue. They were but the
mirage, projected before the eyes of a race of beings that had
begun to feel the cruel hardship of death and seek salvation from
it. Supernaturalism marks an initial phase only of the world-
wide effort of mankind to gain immortal life. An illusion, but
one which none the less had promise in it, promise of a future.
grand achievement. In place of it science now points out the facts
of nature, and shows the way to a hona-fide immortality.

And is it not the part of wisdom and of duty to choose this
more certain way? Why longer build our hopes on that idle myth?
True, a venerable creed, redolent of incense, endeared by ancestral
worship, entrenched in costly church architecture and embalmed in
sacred literature, exhorts and entreats us to trust the myth. Half
the world still tries to believe, while the other half scoffs, or turns
its face to other things. The plain truth is that the brain of the
race has outgrown the myth of "spirit" life; the facts are too
evident.

For what occurs when an animal or a man dies? The heart
ceases to beat. The blood-stream to the brain stops. Well-nigh
instantaneously the brain cells lapse from consciousness, retract
their fibrils and relax sentient contact cell with cell. The personal
self-consciousness as suddenly ceases. The organism is no longer
a living man, but a cadaver. Immediately then it is invaded by
swarming hordes of putrefactive bacteria, and the work of disso-
lution begins, nor ceases until the organized corpus is reduced to
the component atoms and corpuscles from which, by so long a
labor of ancestral life, it had been raised up to be the mechanism
of intellect.

It is the organism, the organization, alone, which has perished
and ceased to be; but that organization carries the personality,

8o SALVATION BY SCIENCE

the self, the self-consciousness of the man. Each atom and cor-
puscle lives on, and, departing from the dissolving cadaver, takes
its individual life with it. Apparently these atomic and corpus-
cular lives are deathless. We thus live on in the elemental life
of the cosmos, from eternity to eternity. We were a part of it
from the beginning, and shall be a part of it on to the end, but not
a self-conscious part.

It is thus the elements of the human soul only that are at present
immortal. We are not saved, personally, under nature, but have
opportunity to achieve salvation. There is liberty to do so. Super-
natural salvation is a myth of the world's childhood. But now in
the light of greater knowledge we are free to work out our own
salvation here ; and the new faith of science bids us do it.

DISSOLUTION OF SELF - CONSCIOUSNESS IN SLEEP

During the life-time of an animal or a man the cells (neurons
dendrites) of the brain and nervous system, each a separate life,
are sentiently pooled and sink their otherwise individual lives in
the human personality. It is seen to come about through proto-
plasmic contact, by means of a mechanism of sentient fibrils which
the cells put forth. The cells are the intimate, sole founts of life,
but they blend to form the larger personal life of an animal or
a man, during the animal life-time. Yet not uninterruptedly, even
during the life-time. For at this point of our investigation the
phenomena of sleep, catalepsy, trance and other lapses of the self-
consciousness presented themselves for consideration and found
new, clearer explanation.

The consentient union of cell-lives in the human self-conscious-
ness is not wholly continuous. In sleep the brain cells break contact
and for six, eight or ten hours consentience ceases.

With the partial shutting off of the blood supply, the elate cell
fibrils are to some extent retracted, the cells withdraw from the
consentient union, and, instantaneously, the " soul " stops. It is
a beautiful and convincing illustration of the real nature of the
human personality, and how it is maintained from moment to mo-
ment and from day to day ; it teaches what the human " soul "
really is, and how easily dissoluble it is, either temporarily, or
forever.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 8 1

PERSONAL AXIS ; THE AXIS OF SELF - CONSCIOUSNESS

When these facts as to the composite nature of the human per-
sonality became apparent, the question arose, how is this sentient
confluence of cell lives in one larger life accomplished? How do
the distinct lives of the brain cells (neurons) pool their separate
sentiences in the neuropsyche ? The interlaced processes and fibrils
we have found. Sentient contact we have demonstrated. But
what passes or flows from cell to cell to Insure the unification of
the separate cytopsyches, since they live and act together as a per-
sonal unit? It is not only an " e pluribus unum," but a confluent
union, a blend. By some means millions of minor lives form one
larger life and sink their own individuality in it, for the time being,
at least. There must be a species of ethereal " circulation " within
the currents of which the cells are embraced, like magnetic currents,
with polarity, about an axis of self-consciousness. Every personal
self has its own axis-of -being, about which the vital activity goes
on from moment to moment, hour to hour and year to year, during
the personal life-time.

Axis, indeed, appears to be the first great principle or law,
involved in the present evolution, or rather devolution, of matter;
axis with polarity. We trace our corpuscle (electron), or our
still more minute corpuscles, down to the ether, the primeval
" argon gas," if gas it be. In that contracting gas we see the
corpuscular eddy start whirling, self-centered, whirling about an
axis of its own. It has set up to live for itself in the midst of
the inchoate, primeval substance. Individual life begins with the
first self-centered axis of separate being. Human personality starts
and founds there. All that follows in the way of evolution of
life is but combination, organization, cooperation. The root of
personality is in the first corpuscule that emerged from the ether
• — and may be resolved back to that. It was a living corpuscule,
having its own personal axis, its own lowly self-consciousness; —
for to feel is to be conscious. All consciousness is self-conscious-
ness In some degree; consciousness implies self.

But what is it that whirls or circulates about this axis? For
four years the problem of what " nervous energy " is, and how
it stands related to the atomic, corpuscular, or etheric attenuations

82 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

of matter, has been the subject of laboratory study here. Mean-
time Rontgen rays, radium emanations and all the later discov-
eries touching electrons, afforded aid and abundant suggestion.

" Our experimentation has been directed to determine what
emanations, or ' rays,' a living cell gives off. It is hardly neces-
sary to say here that such tests are not easily applied. The only
fact established is that the cell-of-life gives forth energy of the
nature of both positive and negative electricity; negative elec-
tricity when the cell is in a normal condition, positive electricity
when fatigued, distressed, or poisoned by carbon dioxide.

" Nerve currents, meaning the impulses that move along nerve
trunks from the brain and cord of animals to muscles and glands,
are more easily studied by the ordinary methods. The result of
our observations has not been to identify these fully as electric
currents, but as electric currents plus other and more subtle ema-
nations. Their comparatively slow rate of motion along the nerve
trunks also indicates that a more complicated conduction is in-
volved than that of an electric current through a wire, or other
conductor. In a word, a ' nervous current ' now appears to be
a current of negative electricity — since it responds readily to the
electroscope — but one either much modified, or bearing along with
its component corpuscles a ' charge ' of something more ethereal.

" As to the nature of this charge it would be easy but unprofit-
able to theorize at present. The only point established is that the
cells of the brain and cord generate normally — among other
products — a great and well-nigh constant quantity of negative
electricity which under certain circumstances changes to positive
electricity. What corresponds to electric current proceeds from
them quite steadily and they remain as constantly ' charged ' or
surrounded, by a ' field ' or ' atmosphere ' of an electric nature.
Moreover, this ' atmosphere ' or aura, vibrates, or circulates about
an axis, comparable to that around a magnet.

" On a minor scale the same thing goes on in every cell, whether
a unicell, living its life apart from others, or a neuron of the
human brain. Each cell has its personal axis, its own corpuscular
* circulation ' around that axis. Otherwise it could not be a self,
that is, a separate life.

" When an organized assemblage of cells is pooled or united in
a multicell, as in the human brain, a larger, concrete circulation

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 83

and a new, greater personal axis takes the place of the thousands
of minor cell axes, and lo, a human, self-conscious personality, a
soul, flashes forth. This for the waking hours of the brain; but
in sleep the cells largely resume, each, its personal life, that is to
say its personal axis and circulation. It is probable, indeed, that
cell axis and cell circulation are never wholly surrendered, in the
larger life, even in sound sleep, never wholly, till death.

" If Thomson, Becquerel, and other eminent exponents of our
new knowledge were right, this electrical output from the cell-of-
hfe is nothing else than a stream of corpuscles.

" Elsewhere in nature, something analogous to brain cell phe-
nomena, is displayed in the phosphorescence of noctUiica, in the
fire-fly, and noticeably in the electric eel. The brain cell is there-
fore not the only generator of electricity and light, in nature.
The cell-of-life everywhere gives rise to similar currents of energy.

" The phrase, currents of energy, might be held to imply that
the cell-of-life acts as a battery cell, or dynamo, and undoubtedly
it does. But we believe it to do more than this, that it creates
energy in the sense of willing chemical action and instigating or
directing corpuscular motion, from the life-side of matter.

" We by no means wish to be understood here as carrying the
idea that liberation of corpuscles in the cell-of-life is the only
process going on there. The cell is, in fact, a comparatively large
organism, if we may be allowed thus to express it. Ordinary
chemical action and the formation of carbon dioxide go on in
it. In the cell we have assimilation and oxidation, and also, as
we believe, a liberation of intra-atomic energy." — Self-Conser-
vation and Self -Maintenance.

THESE ARE NOT NEW DOCTRINES

In the light of our modern knowledge of matter, it is interesting
to revert to the views of the Stoic philosophers and the Hindu
sages, of Zeno and Chrysippus, of Anaxagoras, of Epicurus and
Lucretius. These thinkers of old appear to have divined the truths
of nature, and gave voice to them as clearly as the language and
ideas of their times rendered possible. Essentially great minds,
past and present, have all believed alike ; their apparent differences
are due mainly to difference of eras and the quibbles of disciples.

84 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

The great natural philosophers of all ages have conceived of
a primeval Thing, or Noumenon, from which nature emerged, by
a long process of growth. That primeval Thing is known to mod-
ern thought as the world-ether, at once the origin and matrix
of the universe, the base and the back-ground of the cosmos,
that which embraces and holds everything together, that from
which all disjunct particles arise and to which they finally re-
turn, the ocean of being from which all individual existences
emerge.

Corpuscules within corpuscles there may be, even as there are
corpuscles (electrons) within " atoms " and " atoms " within
molecules. The way down to the basic ether may be long, even
infinitely long. But this would not affect our present thesis as
to life. Life issues from the sentient side or property of the ether;
individual life begins and is embodied in that first corpuscle which
set up an axis of its own in the world around it. The corpuscle
is a living, personal corpuscle by virtue of its axis and disjunct
state. It is the inherent, individual energy of this little mass, self-
centered and acting for itself subjectively and willfully against
the resistance of the objective universe around it, that marks it
as a separate individual life. Every such corpuscle is a living
corpuscle.

When the corpuscles group themselves in the " atoms " — a
thousand or a hundred thousand to the atom — each is seen to
yield and contribute its living energy, or a part of it, to form a
larger composite life, the life of the atom which in turn proceeds
to center itself and set up a personal axis of its own.

Each " atom " of oxygen, of carbon, or of the metals, has life
peculiar to itself. In the " atom " are united, pooled let us say,
the lives of thousands of corpuscles (electrons) which for the
time — a day or a million years — lend their lives to swell the
larger life. But that atom may be disrupted, or waste away like
the atom of radium, and all atoms in time, perhaps, in which
case each corpuscle goes forth, taking its small, inseparable life
with it. The " atom " is then no more ; it has died, that is to
say ceased to be an atom ; the lives of the corpuscles were but
lent to it for the atomic life-time.

Exactly so of the " atoms " when, in turn, their lives are united
in the complex molecule of " protoplasm," that large, loose, self-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 85

mobile molecule in which memory is possible. Exactly so, too,
of cells which go to make up the organism of the multicell.

In every case we have the lesser lives, in myriads, pooled or
contributed for the time being, to form a larger life about a greater
personal axis. In case of the cell and of the human organism this
union or pooling is but briefly maintained. Death and dissolution
soon ensue. " Atom " and corpuscle go their ways. There is no
loss of the component atomic or corpuscular lives, but a scattering
of them to the four winds, as when a seed-pod bursts and the pooled
seeds fly far asunder.

A human life is thus made up of an innumerable multitude of
lesser lives — of corpuscle, of " atom," of cell — an innumerable
company of minor lives which, at the death of the human organ-
ism, issue forth to the four quarters of the cosmos.

To be re-assembled — when ?

IN THE LARGER LIFE ; THE META - METAZOON

The present social evolution of mankind in national life is so
clearly a continuation of the metazoic development of cell life,
that students of social science will find great help in using the
animal organism as their model for study.

The metazoon is the paradigm for the sociologist. For the na-
tion is in truth a meta-metazoon. This is not a metaphor, as
many may think, but a physical fact.

From the consentient pooling of the component cell-lives in
the human organism there is set up an aura of personal life of
the nature of an electric field : the subconscious life in the grasp
of which every cell of the organism lives and is maintained, at
a certain key or tension.

Quite as true it is that the meta-metazoon — the nation — has
its physical aura, emanating from the lives of all its citizens, the
good and the bad alike. Within the field of this national aura
each citizen — like the cell — lives his life, experiencing its sus-
taining and restraining influence for good as long as the majority
in the nation are right-minded and progressive, for evil when this
larger life becomes unprogressive and delinquent.

National, civilized life has not yet gone so far relatively in
organization as metazoic life; the individual citizens of the nation

86 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

are not yet as fully organized and united for cooperative effort
as the cells in the animal body; that is the only point of difference;
the principle, the motif for uniting, is the same. Even as the uni-
cell was too small, too weak, to live long or happily on the earth's
surface alone and unaided, so with the imorganized human life.
To gain better, happier conditions, there must be organized coop-
eration in a larger, stronger life, the communal life of the nation,
or of pan-humanity, in which self is not lost, but ennobled by
consecration to the common good.

From the corpuscle upward to the cell, and from the cell upward
to the human organism, there has been no loss, no obliteration
of self, but a consonance, a banding together, to secure stronger
effort and greater advantages for all.

Even so in the perfected republic of the future, the individual
citizen, by a full, generous cooperation with his fellow-men, will
attain the domination of nature, and in the end, freedom from
those evil conditions which now uniformly cause death after a
brief life-time.

In this larger life of the nation and of all humanity we live,
per force ; and it is to the still untaught, futile struggle of the
individual man to live for self alone and make his environment
wholly subserve selfish ends, that nine-tenths of the unhappiness,
misery, and crime which we see about us is due. In this we have
great need to change our present ideals of personal life and our
conceptions of what our lives are for. In the very cradle, we now
take a wrong apprehension of what we have come into our heritage
of life to do; a wrong apprehension which comes from erroneous
beliefs concerning the nature and destiny of the human soul. At
the outset of life there is dinned into our infant brains the false-
hood that this earth is but a dreary bourne which we are soon
to leave, instead of becoming a part of its greater life.

Largely due to this initial misdirection of their lives we find
the majority of mankind living solely for self, devoting their
energies to getting the largest possible share of humanity's hard-
earned wealth, by hook or crook, often by any species of legal
trick or dishonesty. Yet even as they grasp the prize, the curse
from it falls on them and their sons. It is the logical result of
the initial untruth, told and sung to the cradle. The child's ideals
go wrong from the start. Most of all we need a system of in-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 87

struction for our children, based on natural truth, versus the pres-
ent supernaturalism, such a system as Japan is now seeking for
its unborn posterity, instruction to live in the larger life of the
nation.

Well-educated people in Christian countries to-day, in England,
in America especially, are in the anomalous position of teaching
their children for the first ten years of their lives an antiquated
supernaturalism which by the time these children are fifteen years
of age, they have infallibly to unlearn and reject !

Mind is a growth, a progressive system of molecular architec-
ture, an orderly building of the protoplasmic molecules of the
brain cells. We allow to be reared in the brain of the child, at
its most impressionable age, when the cerebral cells are most plastic,
an edifice of error which, a few years later, has to be razed from
its foundation and a new structure reared there on wholly differ-
ent lines, fronting a different aspect of the universe.

How many of us know, too, with what mental misery and with
what keen pangs of conscience this demolition proceeds. Such
potent hold and sway over the brain have first teachings when
given us by fond parents and venerated instructors !

What wonder that in so many cases morals suffer and a hard
unbelief in everything religious supervenes? It is the natural
reaction from the Falsehood told to the cradle.

The psychic and physiological damage done the brain by this
disaster to its first hopes and beliefs can be but inadequately dem-
onstrated, as yet. To start the growth of a human mind wrong
in its essentials, at the outset of self-consciousness, is the most
serious of handicaps.

With Romish and Greek Christianity (as with Mohammedan-
ism and Buddhism) the system of tenets has passed into the rigor
mortis of a dead faith, and become structurally unprogressive.
Such creeds, like old trees, may die, but can not be rejuvenated.
Much the same is true of the elder Protestant sects.

THE GREAT COMMUNAL MAN

We have ever to bear in mind, too, that church Christianity, as
we now see it, is Christian only in name. The Personage, called
Jesus, who lived nineteen hundred years ago in Palestine, con-

88 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

ceived himself to be the Hebrew Messiah, and sought to found
a kingdom of God on the earth, the denizens of which, he taught,
would be immortal through purity of heart, meekness, mercy,
unselfishness, brotherly love, righteousness, and right living gen-
erally. This is evident to all who read even the present perverted
gospel histories, with an unbiased mind. How sadly do those
belittle him who teach that he was a God. He is infinitely greater
and grander as a man — a great-hearted, pure-minded youth, in-
spired by a noble ambition to realiz-e the national hope of Israel,
the kingdom of God on earth which the Hebrew prophets had
long foretold, the coming of the son of David, the Prince of Peace.

Who will write the real biography of this great-hearted young
Jew?

Equally futile are the lucubrations of that legion of historical
critics certain of whom even deny that such a person as Jesus ever
lived! Truly, a historical critic easily becomes a madman. As
well deny that Mohammed, or Siddartha, or Confucius has lived;
or Caesar, or Hannibal, or Augustus, or even Washington, or
Lincoln! A great human personality is never obliterated from
the life of the race, and never manufactured by myth or tradition.
Jesus lived in Judea, and lives on still in the communal life of
Man.

For he was the great communal man, the founder of the true
communal race-life, the prophet of the future meta-metazoon.
Nor, despite all this present confusion of tenets and dogmas, are
his ideas difficult to understand. He attempted to embody and
realize the Hebrew Hope, the kingdom of heaven to come on the
earth. He believed that this " kingdom of heaven," and with
it immortal life for the sons of men, would come from moral
purity, brotherly love to our fellow-men, bearing one another's
burdens, mercy, meekness and faithful service in all things, pur-
ging the heart of selfishness and pride; in a word, living for our
fellow-men, merging our lives, without reserve, in the larger life
of our race.

Such was the life-scheme of young Joshua, or Jesus, of Nazareth,
such the kingdom of heaven which he dreamed of founding in
Judea, a province of Rome, nineteen centuries ago. Temporarily
it failed, or seemed to fail, but has not failed, nor can it fail,
though long in coming. It comes, none the less. What are nine-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 89

teen centuries in the evolution of an idea like that ! This necessary
purging and merging of self has gone steadily on. The full gran-
deur of the Idea has as yet scarcely dawned in the minds of men.

Supernaturalism, with its tenets of disembodied soul life, nether
worlds and upper worlds, was grafted upon Jesus' simple, beautiful
scheme of immortal life, by church synods and conferences, for
politic purposes. That simple, beautiful scheme of deathless human
life, taken by itself, stands forth as fine and true as ever; for it
is natural truth. Did Jesus perceive intuitively what it has taken
science so many centuries to learn? One might almost think so.
In no respect, in no particular, not even in spirit, is the real Mes-
sianic scheme like Romish, Greek, or Protestant Christianity.
When the church adopted Zend-Avestan supernaturalism, it lost
Jesus by the waysides of Judea. Even so modern Buddhism
has evolved itself clean away from its founder and is now prac-
tically an alien cult. Church Christianity to-day has little claim
on the believer in Jesus, and little right to the use of that name.
Humanity is now turning again to the man of Galilee, seeking
to find out what he really taught.

Who will write the real biography of this great-hearted young
Galilean? It should not be a wholly impossible task, even now.
Renan has come nearest it, yet Renan lacks reality and human
atmosphere. Not unfrequently he confounds the two Jesuses, the
actual young Judean, and the idealized, supernatural Jesus of the
Church. For two there are, the one real, the other largely ideal,
and to rightly comprehend Christianity, it is necessay to keep them
distinct.

The first is the young Nazarene of the reign of Tiberius Csesar,
of unknown paternity and uncertain, though probably, Jewish
heredity. The youth of high thought, who read the law and the
prophets, particularly Isaiah, and conceived the noble ambition to
become the long-prophesied Prince of Peace, the Messiah of the
Jews, the Redeemer of Israel, and to found " the kingdom of
God " at Jerusalem.

Whoever wishes to understand the ideas of the real Jesus, and
comprehend what he attempted to do, must read the book of Isaiah
and of Daniel and Jeremiah, but especially the first. Isaiah was
his fount of inspiration; fired by it, and conscious of unusual
powers, he assayed the supreme effort of realizing in himself the

90 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

long-delayed national Hope of the Hebrews. What the prophets
had foretold, he resolved to be.

Such efforts are not imposture, but the birth of eras. The con-
sciousness of lofty powers sanctifies the self-exaltation. All the
great cults of mankind have been initiated thus boldly, thus am-
bitiously, thus personally. It is on these lines that a Life of Jesus
might be written which would possess actual interest in America
to-day.

The other Jesus, the Jesus Christ of modern Christianity, is
largely an abstraction, an apotheosis.

Such idealization and deification of the great characters of human
history is not uncommon. Even within our own brief national
history we have an idealized Washington, and an equally glorified
Lincoln — almost laughably unlike the homely Illinoisan.

Thus Siddartha was idealized in the Buddha, Mohammed in the
Prophet of Allah ; and in the Classic era, .^sculapius, Prometheus
and the entire Pagan Pantheon, every divinity of which had prob-
ably a personal beginning, even as Jesus, which later ages first
idealized, then deified. This is the historic habit and tendency of
humanity. Thus originated all mythology. The Gods were at
first human beings, who came in time to be idealized and finally
worshipped. This strong conviction of potential godhood appears
to be an intuition of the human intellect, a vision of the future
reflected back into the past.

In like manner Jesus became the concept of an adored Son of
God incarnate, no longer human, but divine; the intercessor and
pleader for man with the stern Hebrew Jehovah; the patient bearer
of the sins of the world, bleeding, dying on the cross for sinful
man.

In the larger light, it is a portraiture of the best instincts of
the race, a high and noble conception of a human life, transformed
and transfigured to a divine one: a loving, sorrowful, great-
hearted divine man, worshipped and believed in as a potential
saviour of all. A beautiful conception, slowly worked out through
nineteen centuries of human life on the earth; a picture and por-
trait of what every human life ought to be, and of what it may
become by living, a better, holier life.

There is a moral grandeur in this slow, beauteous growth of
a divine ideal of what human life should be and may become,

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 9 1

something at once grand and sacred, the evolution of the best there
is in us.

Gradually, as the race developed, this idealized Jesus has grown
up with it, purifying itself from the older, harsher ideals of blood-
guiltiness, ordeal, revenge, and merciless retribution, evolving the
commune, sympathetic, loving Saviour of to-day, the true, heart's
brother of us all, divine only because he is first human, and what
we may all become, the evolution of Godhood within us.

And because it is a day set apart to this divine ideal in us, the
Christian Sabbath is still a holy day, and should remain such, con-
secrated to the growth of this higher altruistic ideal, this spirit
and sentiment to beafr each other's burdens and to share-and-share-
alike the hardships and vicissitudes of our hard terrestrial habitat.
For there will never be any real peace on earth and good-will
among men till we all accept this ideal, till every man of us merges
his selfishness and accepts pot luck with his fellows. Then — when
we all stand together, shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart — then
will begin that commune life of great works which will transform
earth to Heaven, transfigure and spiritualize the human organism
and win immortal life.

It is thus that the real Jesus lives on in the brain of the race,
idealized, glorified. He embodied the Messianic idea of a loving
brotherhood of pan-humanity on earth. Never will that person-
ality die, nor cease. As centuries pass it but enters on new leases
of life. One such new lease it is now about to take in America.
Already we feel the thrill of its coming. We hear it even in the
discordant outcries of the Socialist mob — that larger life of the
still living Jesus, from vi^hose cult we have now to strip away the
erroneous, often fantastic eschatology of church Christianity.

It is at this difficult phase of human progress in America, that
we now stand hesitant, loath to break with church Christianity,
yet convinced that its dogmatic teachings are erroneous. Con-
vinced, too, that when the break comes supernaturalism and every-
thing connected with it must go, in toto.

Far more, even, than our clearest minds are aware, our lives
enter into the larger, communal life of the race. All of history,
science and intellect in the higher sense, is due to the reflex action
of this larger life on us personally; all that distinguishes the edu-

92 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

cated man of our times from the bone-cave savage of the Quater-
nary drift, whose radius of activity described only a four-mile
circle around his filthy cavern, whose days were passed in ferocious
hunts for food, his nights in shivering fears of attack. Who heard
the foot-falls of evil spirits behind every bush, saw gods on every
hill, and whose religion consisted of rude rites and sacrifices to
propitiate these. Who dreaded with good reason the approach
of his fellow-men, and whose highest feats of strategy lay in am-
buscading and massacring them.

Such was primeval man as we first know him, a roving, lurking,
unorganized human protozoon, with a mind no higher than the
brute. Altruism was as yet unborn in his brain, the advantages
of cooperation undreamed of. Whatever we are better ofif than
that bloody-handed hamadr>^ad of the bone-caves, is due to our
communal life.

It is owing entirely to that life that we can travel in ease and
safety far from our primitive caves, even around the world, and
secure to ourselves the cultivation which comes from such travel.
It is due entirely to our cooperative life that commerce goes on and
the fruits and goods from every quarter of the planet are brought
to our doors ; that railways link country to country, and steamship
lines continent to continent.

It is due to our communistic life — imperfect as it still is —
that we have literature, history, science and the news published
for all from day to day; that the sea is underlaid with telegraph
cables, the land overspread with wires, which put us in thought-
touch with our fellows, thousands of miles away.

To this larger life, too, it is due that remedial, surgical and
sanitary science has developed and now adds so much of comfort
and assurance to our lives. To the larger life, that invention,
architecture and all the arts have made life comfortable.

To this larger life, also, that ideas of right and wrong, justice
and injustice, are able to find expression in public sentiment and
take the form of law for the equable protection of all.

All these, however, are but the outward and superficial aspects
of the communal life. Its preeminent influence and effect are on
the mind, the brain, of the individual. This greater life, with all
its varied interests and many businesses, holds us up to a certain
key or pitch, lifts us to a wider horizon. Isolated from it, the

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 93

individual man would relapse to an inert, sluggish creature, caring
for naught save sensory pleasure — in a word, to a savage. It
is the larger, communal life, yielding a constant influx of knowledge
from all quarters of the globe, which now develops the individual
man, raising him to higher degrees of intellect; not otherwise than
in the metazoic organism where the larger life of the man or animal
elevates, improves, and strengthens the life of every tissue cell,
raising up brain life from simple cell life.

Already the life of the individual is safe-guarded and greatly
prolonged from living in the larger, organized life of the com-
munity; even as the unicell attained longer life from uniting with
its fellows in the multicell. By perfecting this communal life of
pan-humanity, the analogy would lead us to infer that the life
of the individual man may be prolonged a thousand times. The
promise of the metazoon to the meta-metazoon of the future would
be a life-time of thirty thousand years to its individual citizens.

In the animal organism the whilom unicell has found a natural
salvation ; and even so human beings may achieve immortal life
and make earth heaven, by organized cooperation and research,
invention and the mastery of the resources and powers of the
universe. Slow and blind, indeed, is he who does not grasp the
significance of this great effort of unicellular life. Even so must
the sons of men achieve a natural salvation from disease, " sin "
and death. It is the great lesson of the ages. Humanity must
unite, organize and cooperate, in order to grow in knowledge and
gain control of nature. Such is the promise of science. Thither-
ward lie " heaven " and immortal life.

A STILL PROGRESSIVE TISSUE

Advancing from these researches, mammalian brains in the gross
were then compared with the brain of man, with a view to deter-
mine how and why the latter has so eclipsed all others in inventive-
ness, reason and the acquisition of knowledge.

These studies led to not a few interesting generalizations; but
the result of greatest significance was one wholly unforeseen at
the outset, namely, the reflex effect of the growth of human knowl-
edge on the brain itself, and the fact that modern civilized life,

94 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

education, science par excellence, are developing the brain of man
and rendering it a still progressive tissue of the organism, ana-
tomically.

Whether man as a type of terrestrial mammal is still progres-
sive, was one of those questions which naturally suggested them-
selves to biologists of the generation of Darwin. Many then held
that the human type is " fixed," that is to say, structurally un-
progressive, and would remain so, for the reason that there are
no longer geological and climatic changes, such as compel re-
adaptation of organic life. Comparison of human tissues, bone,
muscle, skin, hair, hepatic tissue, renal tissue, pulmonary tissue,
with those of the lower animal orders, went far to confirm such
opinions.

As investigation proceeded, however, it became apparent that
in forming this opinion as to the unprogressiveness of the human
type, one tissue, at least, had been overlooked, namely, the human
brain, and that it was in his brain that man can still claim to be
progressive in type and not " fixed." The brain of man is not
only growing in size, but is changing form, and has been doing
so steadily for the last ten thousand years, due to the growth of
knowledge.

Certain of the conclusions reached in 1895 are quoted here,
from a paper which will be found on subsequent pages.

" What is designed here to point out is the fact that the nervous
system of the human organism, particularly the cerebral portion of
it, or, in other words, the tissue of mind and intellect, has always
been in the past and is to-day a progressive tissue. It came into
existence, as brain, in response to a need of greater capacity for
the reception and utilization of intelligence. That need still exists
and grows constantly more urgent.

" Bone and muscle cells have developed to the extent of the
necessity which led to their differentiation ; the incentives to loco-
motion and organic support remain much the same; hence, bone
and muscle cells long ago reached the acme of their development.
The same is true, or true in a large part, of every tissue of the body
save the encephalon. The brain is still forced to develop and grow
larger in response to constantly changing conditions incident to
the world's growth in knowledge. Certain tribes, races and peo-
ples, it is true, adhere to habits and modes of life largely unpro-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 95

gressive, and as a result show little brain change from generation
to generation. It is not so, however, with the peoples of the domi-
nant races, the nations who think and invent. Science is the agent
of brain growth. To think, in the true sense of the word, signifies
brain development. New inventions stand for cerebral evolution.
The changed sensory experiences, too, which result from new in-
ventions, tend to alter the protoplasmic arrangement of the brain,
and add to its capacity for growth. In America, to-day, we see
heads of varying sizes and shapes, not only the types emigrant
from Europe, Asia and Africa, but types and sizes unknown before
in any country. There is actual brain growth among us. A new
variety of intellect is being developed.

" A comparison of the earliest human skulls, found in ancient
caves, tombs, and mounds, with those of individuals of the present
age, shows that on the whole there has been growth of brain as
well as a perceptible alteration in shape in favor of greater intel-
lectuality. Brain has grown greatly in size and improved In form
during the last eight or ten thousand years ; — a period of time
relatively brief when considered in comparison with the develop-
mental epoch of mammals.

" Prehistoric skulls are smaller and less prominently developed,
frontally, than those of our own epoch. The same general truth
is exemplified when the skulls of existent savage tribes are com-
pared with those of individuals from the highly civilized and pro-
gressive nations ; there is less of that higher frontal development
in savages, which we always find associated with the growth of
intellect, and this even in instances of large individuals, where the
skull is very massive and capacious. Acquired knowledge and the
sciences tend constantly to increase the bulk of the brain and mod-
ify its form; in a word, to render it a progressive tissue.

" This proposition is still more grandly exemplified when the
evolution of life on the earth is contemplated as a whole. In early
metazoic life, brain was scarcely more than initiated. The lower
vertebrates have small brains. But in the quadrumana the human
brain is found to be outlined in type and form. From this order
of mammals the progress of the human brain can be readily
traced.

" Nor can it be doubted, even although our microscopes fail
to show the fact, that the brain tissue is receiving a progressive,

96 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

internal development, corresponding to the intellectual growth of
humanity.

" So surely as there are new things to learn in the great uni-
verse around us, just so surely will the brain of man go on grow-
ing and developing greater capacity for the reception of knowledge.
It is in this respect and in this tissue that man has not reached
the acme of his powers, and that evolution has not ceased."

A SUMMARY OF THE FACTS

Such are some of the facts and the researches on which the new
faith of modern scientific knowledge founds — the Promethean
Faith.

1. The facts of cell life, namely, that it is the one, the only
type of life on the earth ; and that all the metazoons, including
man, are but so many long-perfected organizations of cells, in
which the cell type still persists, essentially unchanged. Associ-
ated with these facts of cell life, is the well-supported hypothesis
of the sentient constant of matter: a working hypothesis merely,
but one which the entire progress of research so far sustains at
every point.

2. The facts of the preservation or natural salvation of the
unicells by union and organization in the multicell or metazoon,
and the indicated salvation of the still progressive multicell (man)
in the organized, perfected nation of the future.

3. Demonstration of the manner in which the lives of the cells
are unified or pooled in the larger life and personality of the multi-
cell.

4. Demonstration of the fact that death and dissolution of
the cell organization in the human organism ends personal self-
consciousness and terminates individual life ; that death is, whether
from disease or dynamic shock, always of the nature of an unnat-
ural event. Death, like fire, is the antithesis of organized life, a
reduction back to the lowly, unorganized sentience of primeval
matter. Death blots out that higher intelligence; and nowhere
in nature do we find any provision, except reproduction, made for
the preservation of a personal intelligence after the destruction of
its organization. It has vanished, because each component cell

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 97

and corpuscle are now withdrawn from the union and have gone
their separate ways, taking with them each its own smaller self-
life, those lives of which the greater life, or soul, was a temporary
union.

5. Further demonstration of the unification of the multicells
(humanity) in the greater communal life of the nation where,
in an imperfect manner, as yet, mankind is uniting intelligently
and pooling its knowledge to accomplish greater works and achieve
grander results than one man can accomplish, working separately
and alone.

Here again, in the nation, there is a physical unification of cell
energy, from individual to individual, tending to set up a national
aura and a confluence of individual lives in a greater national life.
The mental picture is that of, first, the consonant organization of
the corpuscle in the cell, second, the cell in the multicell, and third
the multicell (man) in the nation; all resting on a physical basis;
a consonant organization of lower life to form a larger, higher
fife.

6. The fact that the human brain is a still progressive tissue
of the organism, steadily growing and unfolding new capacity for
the reception of knowledge.

7. Conclusive evidences that the causes of " old age " and
death are purely physical causes within the province of scientific
knowledge to alleviate and remove.

8. Proofs taken from the entire course and history of life on
earth, to show that it has made a continuous upward progress
toward better conditions from the very first; continuous progress
toward salvation from evil and error, justifying faith and high
hopes for the future.

It is, we repeat, from all these facts, touching life on the earth,
that the faith expressed in Salvation by Science is formulated;
and we assert without fear of contradiction, that when these facts
are taken together and estimated as a whole, no other deduction
can be drawn from them.

Taken together they can mean but one thing. If they do not
stand for the scientific salvation of man, then the terrestrial life
scheme is illogical, unnatural, abortive. The longer it is studied,
the more certainly the student will come to this conclusion, namely.

98 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

scientific salvation from the growth of human knowledge; it can
mean nothing else.

And this is the new creed which, after centuries of incubation,
scientific knowledge now offers the world, in place of supernat-
uralism.

So far as the work done at this laboratory is concerned with it,
the researches here were begun with no higher purpose than a
desire to understand what life is and how it goes on in the cell.
I wished to learn what could be done with that form of energy
which appears in nature as life, whether it could be mastered, har-
nessed, so to speak, and made, like other modes of energy, to do
human bidding. But one by one the above facts and truths flashed
forth, as research proceeded, facts and truths which underlie the
origin and destiny of life on the earth.

Almost unawares, the new faith emerged from the mists of
olden darkness, a loftier, grander faith, wearing the garment of
Eternal Truth.

To that faith I have attempted to give voice.

IMMORTAL LIFE THE KEY - NOTE OF ALL CREEDS

Immortal life has been the key-note of all religious creeds. The
Hebrew faith, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, all have succeeded
because each in some form held forth the hope of personal immor-
tality. It has been the hope of that life which has nerved men
to labor, to worship, to fight. The great teachers of mankind have
all realized this.

When the promise of personal immortality, made by a creed,
begins to be doubted, the creed declines and continues thereafter
only by virtue of ritual, church architecture, brain indoctrination
of the masses and social usage ; a detriment henceforth and a
drag on the intellectual progress of the race. In that plight stands
dogmatic Christianity with all its sects, to-day. Its " soul " doc-
trines are discredited, its promise of immortal life is no longer
believed. Henceforward it will go on only by virtue of the un-
eliminated ignorance and superstition of mankind, for two cen-
turies, perhaps, slowly dying out, as the one great central truth
of it, the truth taught by Jesus, comes to be really understood and

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 99

assimilated into the new faith of scientific knowledge. Already
the soul doctrines of supernaturalism are vanishing like ghosts at
dawn; and in this same rosy dawn of our increasing knowledge,
educated persons, everywhere, are waking from the sleep of old
creeds and searching for a better, more certain realization of the
hope of immortal life. Supernaturalism is dead; and the hope of
deathless life by supernatural grace, dies with it.

Yet even now as that old hope of immortal life fades out, this
new, more realistic faith comes to take its place.

The present century will be signalized in human history as the
epoch of this greater new Faith, displacing the former creeds
which have come to America with our forefathers, but which
America has outgrown.

It is one of the great, infrequent centuries of transition, which
come only secularly, once in a thousand or two thousand years ;
and it will mark an era as remarkable and as distinctive as those
from which Time is now reckoned, from Jesus, from Mohammed,
from Siddartha.

The new faith is not a modification of the old faiths. It differs
from them radically and is opposed to them fundamentally. At-
tempts to " harmonize " them, the new with the old, will be futile.
If the new prevails the old must give place, for the new contro-
verts and reverses the old. It does not renovate, it razes the old
from its foundations. It begins afresh with new, diverse concepts
of life and of man. Certain truths from the old creeds it adopts,
but gives them new guise.

The old faiths are systems of supernaturalism and treat of the
supernatural salvation of the human " soul," apart from the body.
The new faith is the antithesis of supernaturalism, and treats of
the natural salvation of the human intellect in the human body on
earth, by the physical renovation of the body. It teaches salvation
of the human personality under nature, achieved by man, him-
self.

The old faiths separate the soul from the body by death, in
order to " save " it. The new faith of science finds the soul joined
indissolubly to the organism and renews and renovates the latter.
It teaches that salvation comes from keeping soul and body to-
gether.

lOO SALVATION BY SCIENCE

The old faiths transport the " soul " to Heaven, to Paradise,
to Nirvana : undefined bournes, disjunct from Matter and Time,
illocal in Space. The coming faith of which this century is the
era, looks to the paradisation of the earth and teaches that man
makes his own " Heaven " and makes it here. It leaves all that
wide-spread architecture of churches, mosques, temples and cathe-
drals, beneath which the soil of America and Europe now groans,
leaves it desuete and desolate, indeed, so many hollow-echoing
sepulchres of past superstition, like the ruined temples on the Nile,
in Ceylon, in Cambodia, from which the gods of the past have
long since departed.

The new faith of scientific knowledge is therefore, in very truth,
a new departure of the human race, an abandonment of super-
naturalism in to to, as complete as was the abandonment of pagan-
ism for Christianity, in the days of Constantine. More so, indeed ;
the change is even more radical and subversive.

WHAT ARE THE TENETS OF SALVATION - BY - SCIENCE ?

And what are the tenets of this new faith of scientific knowl-
edge, it may be asked. What are its articles of faith?

It has no hard-and-fast tenets.

It is all comprised in the simple faith that we can perfect the
human organism, transform the earth to Heaven and achieve
deathless life.

Strictly speaking, the truly scientific mind has and can have no
" fixed " tenets, no thirty-nine articles, to be baptized into, or
subscribed to, as a credo.

For science is progress, continuous progress. The faith of sci-
ence is a progressive attitude of mind toward life and the universe,
always with the expectation of enlarging our views coincident and
corresponding to each fresh advance in knowledge. In the creed
of science we expect to grow in mind, changing and modifying
our beliefs as knowledge increases. Our creed is therefore a hope-
ful, optimistic attitude of mind tozU'ard life, zuith the purpose to
make it better.

As regards articles of faith — in the church sense — the creed
of science might have to be re-written every year so rapid is, or

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH lOI

will be, the growth of human knowledge. Science garners new
facts and makes its tenets anew daily.

Where knowledge is growing there can be no unchangeable
dogmas. Dogmatism dwarfs the mind and paralyzes the psychic
g-rowth of the brain. It is only with unprogressive, or retrogres-
sive races, that a fixed creed can be maintained; and with the
retrogressive, the creed slowly degenerates to ritual and super-
stition. The worst superstitions are but so many former religious
systems in decay : religion in the fossil state.

The attitude of mind which the growth of scientific knowledge
sets up, is emphatically one of good-will, hope and great expecta-
tion for the future. On this planet, after nature's myriad experi-
ments in living organisms, brain, the brain of man, is now making
a noble progress. That wonderful colony of living cells, organ-
ized to grow in knowledge, is now making grand strides toward
the conquest of nature and the universe. Pessimism as to this
is but ignorance of the scope and extent of that progress. It
has been persistent, continuous, irresistible, for a hundred millions
of years. Apparently, too, it is now but well inaugurated; and
field appears to be offered it by the natural life of the globe.

Barring cosmic accidents in space, the earth, like Mars, Jupiter,
and the other planets, bids fair to revolve for millions of centuries
to come. Water and air, too, show no indications of depletion.
The well-springs of solar heat, light and electricity are equally
enduring. Moreover, these tides of energy from the sun can be
conserved and their action on the earth's surface regulated. Cli-
mate can be controlled and the planet made a paradise. It is an
empire waiting human conquest.

The only element which individual man lacks to enable him
to conquer this empire and enter into possession of it is time.
Individually, his days are now too short for more than to learn
the first rudiments of life, and perceive his real situation in the
universe. There is not time for more. Before we have fairly
learned to live, we suffer from disease and infirmity, and die,
miserably die, with all this Infinite opportunity to live, unentered,
unenjoyed, unpossessed. Death keeps humanity down to a boot-
less learning and re-learning, over and over, of the mere alphabet
and accidence of life. On account of death the human generations
but little more than hold their own ; for in dying the results of

I02 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

teaching are almost wholly lost. But little of experience is really
conserved; for the tissue of intellect must mature for forty years
to become really wise. Death causes all this vast labor to be done
over and over again, on the whole a little better. Reproduction
is better than extinction, but only a degree better, and not for a
moment to be compared with the grand advantages of living on,
free from personal death.

Reproduction takes place because we would otherwise die, but
is not an ideal mode of survival. The individual with his acquired
experience and refinement is the ideal survivor. Infancy suffers
what would be needless tortures in learning to live, if the adult
could survive in health.

The world-wide demand of educated, inventive man is now for
more time. He sees the doctrine of disembodied souls to be a
myth, and asks, "Is it possible to save the soul?" The question
is one that enters with the newer conception of our freedom in
the universe. What we have we must achieve for ourselves. We
are alone here, with everything to gain from invention, research,
and discovery.

Immortality is the birthright of life and the destiny of man.
Men still die, but death is not an irremediable evil. The great ter-
restrial scheme of life, when grasped in its entirety, points to a
purified earth, inhabited by one great nationality, the descendants
of mankind, whose lives will be prolonged toward immortality.
A gens terrestrial and celestial, not overpeopling the earth, nor
yet devoid of procreative power, not an assemblage of infirm, aged
organisms, kept alive by improved medicaments, but persons fresh
in unfading maturity to whom the years will bring, not infirmity,
but stronger personality, fuller life, grander beauty and greater
wisdom. For this wonderful substance which we from eternity
inherit — and now call matter — has in it an infinite potency and
capacity, the capacity for godhood if we will develop it.

The new and greater gospel of science, as briefly outlined in
the foregoing paragraphs, is therefore this natural optimism of
the human heart, this faith in future man, this ennobling of self
in the larger life of humanity, and lastly, grandl}^ this new hope
of immortal life, achieved in righteousness, on a perfected earth
w^hich shall realize our ideal of heaven. This is that grander faith
which three centuries of science now offers mankind.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH IO3

IMMORTAL life; HOW IT CAN BE ACHIEVED

What the cell-of-life is in the animal organism the individual
citizen is in the nation, that is to say, the vital unit wherein the
national life inheres. The constructive, not the destructive, so-
cialist can find no better model for study than the position and
economic relations of the cell in the animal body, as applied to the
citizen in the nation. The analogy is close and impressive.

This analogy, too, rests on something deeper than a fanciful
resemblance, or similitude. It founds in physical law. The same
etheric aura holds and enfolds alike citizen and cell. Each cell-
of-life radiates emanations and maintains about itself an aura in
the ether. From the confluence of contiguous cell auras arises
the personal aura of the animal body, that atmosphere of " per-
sonal magnetism " which, in greater or less degree, surrounds and
enfolds every human being throughout life; and from the con-
fluence of personalities comes the national, communal life.

This is no imaginary statement, no figment of the fancy, but
a physical fact. We live, move and have our being in a medium
of such amazing tenuity, elasticity and sensitiveness, that even our
conceptions of the swiftness and subtility of electricity fail to
convey an adequate idea of its properties.

For fifty years we called it the " luminiferous ether, concerned
in the transmission of light, heat, and electricity," and thought
little more about it. From the growth of scientific knowledge on
all sides, especially bio-physics, we now know that this omnipresent
ether (or aether) transcends all former conceptions as to what
matter may be, opens a new world to thought, joins chemistry with
psychology, spirit with substance, and is probably the raw ma-
terial of life and the human soul itself. It were better called
psych, undeveloped soul; or Omorca, after that archaic divinity
of the cosmos, while it was still unformed.

From the physical side, Mendelieff believed it to be the last of
the lucid Argon gases; but to term it a gas minimizes its won-
derful properties.

Indeed, to gain any conception of what we now know that the
ether must he, we have to stretch all our previous ideas of it to
the breaking point, and then evolve new ideas.

I04 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Thought pre-supposes the existence of the ether as its medium.
The life of a cell — every individual life — sets up a continuous
disturbance in this subtly elastic medium, thrills it, so to speak,
sets it vibrating. The basis of the aura which surrounds every
individual life, every cell, or union of cells, is the contiguous ether
about it, vibrating to the beat of that cell-life. Every cell, every
plant, every animal, every human life, lives on a certain vital key,
or pitch, giving forth what we attempt to describe as rays and
emanations. It is this vital radiancy which maintains the personal
aura.

Moreover, every life appears to have a degree of tension, or
frequency of vibration, of its own, which stirs and influences the
ether to vast distances. Contemplate, then, what must follow in
terms of harmony or of discord, when a million or a hundred
million lives — whether cells of the animal organism or fellow-
citizens of a nation — attempt to live together. We live wisely
or not, or at least easily or not, according as we live in beat and
harmony with the whole life of the earth and it may be, even, of
other worlds in space. Eminent, pure and correct lives strike har-
monious chords in this great anthem of the world's music. Great
men, preeminently the founders of the religions of humanity —
Jesus, Mohammed, Siddhartha — have actually changed the etheric
harmony, the key, the pitch, at which hundreds of millions of
their disciples and followers live, have changed the harmonics and
even substitute one Life-anthem for another. None the less, even
the lowliest life goes to swell the chorus, either harmoniously, or
otherwise.

The thousands or the millions of people in a town or a nation
irradiate a composite aura which enfolds, modifies and profoundly
influences all who reside in that town or country. We shall ere-
long be able to demonstrate this emanation in physical terms,
measure it, gauge it and determine the moral tone not only of
the individuals, but of towns and nations.

A metropolitan aura may be good and helpful as a whole to
the individual citizen, or visitor, or it may be bad and depressing.
It is a question of the quality and purity of the majority of the
individual lives there. Who but has felt the depressing biophys-
ical effect of certain quarters of our largest cities? It is the aura
of depravity and death.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH I05

Organized in the nation, too, the greater composite life of all
its citizens is capable of the most gigantic feats. Compared with
the effort of one man, working alone, a nation's might is as the
strength of the elephant in contrast with the feeble movement of
a unicell in the puddle by the roadside. The newer, scientific
Faith is therefore placed in the organized cooperation of the nation
or the race, or more restrictedly, the progressive, enlightened por-
tion of the race.

Better, longer, happier life came to the unicell from organiza-
tion in the multicell. Greatly prolonged life, looking toward death-
less life, will come to the human multicell from cooperative or-
ganization in the greater, stronger life of united humanity, or
that portion of it which can be brought to recognize the truth and
act together.

The obstacles in the way of deathless life, on a globe of matter
like the earth, are too great to be overcome by the individual man,
striving for it alone. He must augment his feeble might a million-
fold by combining with his fellows. In this the unicell showed
us the way, thousands of centuries ago.

The present, incipient, social organization of man, little under-
stood, scarcely comprehended at all, has been going on, after a
slow fashion, for ten thousand years, and still goes on erratically,
by fits and starts, with vague aims and much ignorant clamor.
The point which we wish to make here is that, with a clear under-
standing of our true situation and a full knowledge of the facts
of nature, we might at once organize powerfully and, with this
grand object in view, achieve results within thirty, forty or fifty
years, such as will otherwise wait and lag for centuries. If even
a million or a hundred thousand educated Americans would work
together with hope and faith, no obstacle to research and discovery
could long withstand us. Deathless life might come speedily. The
achievement would depend on the wholeness and heartiness of the
cooperative effort. No conceivable task in research or ameliora-
tion of the human lot will prove too great for that nation or people
which consecrates itself as one man to the effort.

Even in so indifferent an enterprise as that now being made
by the American people at Panama, we see an Isthmus pierced and
five hundred million cubic yards of earth and rock cast aside. But
what is that compared with what this nation could do if we all

Io6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

set to work with faith and enthusiasm ! Verily but the touch of
an infant's hand to the hammer-stroke of Thor, or the giant-rush
of charioted Achilles, driving to battle.

Alas, that this potential giant of the greater life still sleeps,
sleeps and dreams of distant " heavens," or " hells."

For the obstacle, and the only one that holds us back from the
achievement of deathless life, is lack of faith that it can be done,
lack of that faith which nerves every great achievement; lack of
faith, and indifference to life on the part of our fellow-men; dis-
belief in the future of life on the earth ; apathy and the hundred
degrees of pessimism which prevail naturally in a population living
largely for sensory pleasures, and the born-thralls of erroneous
creeds.

Inventiveness, skill and wealth are not wanting, if one million
of people in Europe and America would unite to this end. We
could do it in fifty years. Some of us now living, even, might
grasp the grand prize, and learning the art of self-renewal and
self-maintenance, literally pass from death unto life.

But as yet we are not able to bring the truth home to the minds
and hearts of these living units of our great potential confraternity.
Their minds are still inert from doubt. Why ? One word explains
it : Supernaturalism, and its gilded promissory of another life
somewhere else.

The new Faith here presented offers the strongest motive con-
ceivable for mankind to unite and work together for one grand
common purpose — Life. Supernaturalism still blocks the Way
of Life. Virtually, it condemns us all to death.

That is ever the cruel, killing feature of it. The discoveries
which might come in a decade are to drag along for centuries,
when they might come so fast and give us life ! Perfected cell
food, regulated climate, the extirpation of disease-producing bac-
teria, regeneration of the tissue cell in situ, cumulative control and
use of cell energy : all might come in fifty years.

Instead, we must die, miserably die, because this larger poten-
tial life cannot yet be organized for work.

Will none of the millennial Christs-of-men appear and wake us
to labor for this later Kingdom of God-hood?

Generation after generation must we still stick fast in the sod-
den narcotism of antiquated creeds? Century after century, must

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH I07

we see the idle horde of lucky rich persons — who apparently do
not know nor care why they are on the earth — squander the
wealth of the world in inane pleasures^ horse-racing, gambling,
champagne, gluttony, debasing themselves, thereby entailing their
worthlessness and their diseases upon future generations ; — and
meantime rousing in the breasts of those less " lucky " these dark
auras of hate which bid fair to culminate in bloody revolutions,
destruction of hard-earned values and reversals of progress?

That greater communal life, fit and adequate to Herculean
labors, is as yet scarcely organized. In America we are still a
huge, forceful democracy, sprawling across the continent like some
enormous amoeba ; segregating in hostile classes and castes of
aggrieved, malcontent individuals. Unity or harmony there is
little enough, as yet. The potential energy of the great national
aura is largely wasted in discordant wrangles. Like the swarming
hive we buzz, madly crawl, wrangle and sting each other, from
lack as yet of the greater voice, the deeper signal-note from the
queen bee, bidding each worker drop selfishness and stand together
for that greater, grander object, the swarm-life.

That call we still wait. That greater Voice we have yet to
hear.

Weaklings may sigh for god-ridden " heavens " in some distant
quarter of the universe, or some fourth dimension of space. None
the less the outer shell of this old earth is a glorious habitat. Im-
perfections it has, but it can be transformed to a paradise.

And the grandeur of our situation here ! — our feet on these
storied strata, our faces to the illimitable fields of sun-strewn space.
And we have eyes to see the light of all these galaxies, light that
has been thousands of years on its way to us !

And must we die, miserably die, and leave this grand old home-
stead of ours, ours from ancestry and natural entail through a
million centuries of terrestrial life? Die and miss it all for the
endless future, die and lapse into the insentient void! Is not that
suffocating thought one to drive us to work for life's sake, death-
less life?

Nor is this greater communal life merely a matter of cumulative
strength. Skill is intensified, inventiveness heightened, where
many work together, united and agreed as to the object in view.
If a thousand students were directing their microscopes to an

Io8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

examination of the activities, displayed in the cell-of-life, with a
view to discovering its internal economy, what one failed to see,
another would discover. In the perfecting of the microscope, too,
to attain greater power, or invent a newer, better instrument, what
one failed to think of, another might find out.

So in chemical synthesis, carried on to discover a pure food
for the nutrition of the cell-of-life, if a thousand skilled chemists
were to set to work, what proved impossible to the wits of one
would be accomplished, or fortuitously hit on, by another. What,
indeed, might not a thousand well-trained investigators discover,
if all worked together with a common end in view, to produce a
substance which will feed the component cells of our organisms,
without that waste and those poisonous residues which now wreck
the kidneys, contaminate the alimentary canal, discolor the lungs,
clog the hepatic cells and harden the blood-disks, literally dragging
us down to death ?

This, even one thousand well-equipped students might do, if
they could be rallied, enlisted, and brought together, to labor
earnestly to this end.

What we shall do, if we do not thus unite and work together,
will be to go on generation after generation, making but a pur-
blind progress, often disheartened, often pessimistic, and in the
end, it may be, pass the point of race development where great
achievements are possible — pass into the limbo of nature's un-
progressive orders of life. There is danger of it. At present the
Aryan is on the ascending limb of his race-life; but beyond there
is ever a possible descending limb, to the dark nadir of the fossil.

With every order of terrestrial life there seems to be a hey-day
when all things are possible to it, even godhood and immortality.
The westward-moving Aryan has now circum-traversed the globe;
there are no more continents to which he may migrate. He has
come around fronting that lofty Asian plateau from which he
originally set forth. Will he now rise to a higher type of life, or
stagnate for an epoch and hide his bones in the rocks?

This problem of a perfect cell food, like that of climate control,
the world-wide extirpation of noxious bacteria and the general
paradisation of the earth, is one which passes, naturally, to the
lot of the greater, communal life — to the meta-metazoon. Hith-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH IO9

erto scientific work has been the task mainly of the single, isolated,
unaided man, the unicell so to speak ; but we have now come
to greater tasks which demand the united labors of the larger
life.

To organize this greater life, organize it for practical work,
is therefore the first duty which presents itself, the next step in
our quest for deathless life.

And here the pessimist, of course, in all his many garbs and
guises, will not fail to cry out that this is visionary and cannot be
done. We know him of old ; yet humanity has a habit of pressing
on toward better things in spite of his raven-croak.

The difficulties, however, are not to be underrated, nor over-
looked. Men have not yet sufficient knowledge, it is urged, to
comprehend the tremendous advantages of such close cooperation;
nor do they as yet really know how to cooperate. Personal selfish-
ness outweighs the larger view. The inherent immorality of a
short life, too, prompts us to snatch at personal pleasure and let
the next generation take care of itself. It is all a part of this
horrible immorality of certain death, difficult to be ameliorated
as long as human life is so perilously insecure and brief. With
death but a few years ahead at best, human beings work for those
few years and continue indifferent to larger interests.

All of which is true in a way. And yet there is always a meas-
ure of altruism in the human heart, a balance of philanthropic
goodwill and a strain of generous heroism, prompting to deeds of
self-sacrifice for the common weal.

We would all of us, as a rule, be willing to do more than we
do for the common good, and cooperate in mutual undertakings,
more than we do, but for the impracticability of such efforts, the
difficulty of initiating united action, the inertia of existent social,,
political and economic methods. It is this inertia of olden forms,,
customs, race antipathies, creeds and national prejudices among
the billion and a half of the earth's inhabitants, which so baffles
making united effort.

All of which brings us back to the practical question of what
can first be done, under the circumstances, to unite the world's
resources, combine human intelligence and render both effective
for combatting the causes of disease and death ? What is the first
practical step to this end? Can any plan be adopted by which

no SALVATION BY SCIENCE

intelligent persons of this generation can really get to work and
bring their personal efforts to bear on the problem?

At first it appeared possibk to the present writer that something
could be done on a world-wide scale, and that the best method of
beginning would be a world-league of educated people generally,
in every civilized country, irrespective of race or nation; for sci-
ence is a common nation, a common country. And since there
are many spoken languages and the Latin is the lingua franca of
science, it seemed proper to call such a league Gens Scienticc et
Vitcc, The World-Nation of Science and Life.

It seemed possible that scientific men and educated people, the
world over, might thus organize to promote research on a grand
scale, with greatly prolonged life in view. It was at once recog-
nized that membership must not be construed as inimical to existent
citizenship and allegiance to one's own country, but only as pledg-
ing members, individually, to use their best efforts to promote such
researches, and in case of impending war, to avert it, by referring
the matters in dispute to the already organized peace tribunals.
Also, in the case of nationally-selfish legislation, to defeat it in
favor of a policy more internationally just.

It appeared possible that such a world-league, having its head-
quarters in the United States and an extensive membership in
every country of the globe, might come to exercise a controlling
influence in mundane affairs.

Peace societies we already have, but the Gens Scienticc et
Vitcc would be of wider scope, uniting persons of scientific at-
tainments everywhere, and having a definite aim, namely, the
union of mankind for the application of all science and all the
world's resources in the coming great struggle to reach the acme
of Natural Salvation; to protect and rescue the human organism
with its human soul from its present hard fate.

It was not believed that the suggested league would make much
progress among the alien races, save in cases of educated indi-
viduals. The burden of progress and achievement will long rest
with the dominant race. Certain of the lower races, like the lower
animals, will of necessity be coerced for the general good and for
their own good. The " rights of man " are sacred only when
man is disposed to make good use of them, and is intelligent enough

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH III

to do SO. The right to make the world better is a divine right,
the natural prerogative and duty of superior knowledge. An igno-
rant, ill-disposed race or nation, bent on selfish and aggressive
courses, may properly be constrained to do right, even within its
own ancestral territory. Men or races have no natural right to
do wrong, even if never so sincere, never so self-holy.

With the Indo-European rests not only the responsibility to do
right for the world, but the duty of seeing to it that others do
right. This is, in very truth, " the white man's burden," the
gravest of all responsibility.

In nearly all civilized countries there are now scientific asso-
ciations, or what corresponds to them, which might, it was be-
lieved, on proper representation, be united for promoting public
enterprises of a scientific character. These societies and associa-
tions would serve as the national units of the proposed international
Gens. Science which is the main-spring of all present progress, is
thus far deficient in methods of working on a world-wide scale,
or even of acquainting, save by hearsay of the press, scientific
men of one country with those of another. In many cases, it is
not until published papers appear, that scientists in remote lands
gain an inkling of what contemporary investigators are doing.
Nothing like economic division of labor in scientific research, or
in the way of mutual aid, has yet been attempted.

Perhaps nothing less than an engrossing common motive, like
that of the achievement of greatly prolonged life, will suffice to
unite and bind together the scattered scientists of different coun-
tries. That motive, at least, will prove the greatest incentive to
united action. The sublimity of the object and the personal stake
of each and all in the success of the endeavor would quite over-
shadow the baser sentiment of jealousy between investigators. The
biological science of the twentieth century will be, indeed, work-
ing for life's sake. This interest will become universal and intense.
Each fresh discovery, each new application of remedial skill, will
be flashed from continent to continent and be hailed with an ever-
growing enthusiasm.

When once the idea has gone world-wide that science has good
hopes not only of removing the causes of death, but of so facili-
tating and perfecting nutrition by improved food, that the strug-
gle and stress of living will be lifted, then will be exhibited an

112 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

ardent desire to live, such as the world has never known. We
grow -weary of living and resign ourselves to death only because
of the pain and hopelessness of the struggle to live longer — a
struggle which will cease in vital calm and rest when research
teaches us how nutrition takes place and what chemical substances
are the proper food of the cell-of-life, without the present hard,
internal labor of preparation.

All this was hoped for when the Gens Sciential was first pro-
posed, in the earlier editions of Natural Salvation.

Nor did the idea fail to elicit response. The response, however,
revealed the practical difficulties in the way of making the Gens
operative for the end in view. Willing members were numerous;
but how to work together was the problem which soon rose.

The lives of most men, even ardent students of the sciences,
are too circumscribed, too much bound to the wheel of personal
necessities, to be able to join, effectively, in such an endeavor.

Questions of salary, travel, and domestic ties stand in the way
of active participation. Many, the most in fact, are too busy get-
ting a living, too much enslaved to family life, procreation and
its attendant duties, to cooperate in the larger effort. They would
like to do so, but their menage engrosses them and holds them
back.

Moreover, we were too far apart, in every sense. Greater wis-
dom, however, often comes from unsuccessful experiments. The
Gens Scientice was to be a world-wide league. Practically it
proved too world-wide; we could not get properly in touch.
Something less unwieldy is needed. Who will help organize it?

Why not come forward and help on, you who have inherited
a competence, or have gained one in successful business? Instead
of living for the rest of your lives in the usual slothful way (par-
don the word), why not come and help on, as best you can, this
great achievement for which the Agt waits?

There was a man (sing his example, O Epic Muse!) whose
name was Field. He made a fortune in business and instead of
retiring, to rot in it, he then, though his years were not a few,
threw his whole soul into a grand enterprise and lived long, lived
to see that enterprise a fait accompli.

Cyrus W. Field sleeps with his fathers in the brain of the race;

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH II3

but the first Atlantic Cable is at his credit there; and his far
children of the grander America to come, will want to call him
up, to live again, whenever they have a bold project in hand that
daunts their courage. They will want to hear Field's brave voice
again.

Cyrus Field had no technical skill for making or laying ocean
cable ; — but he had a soul, and he saved it, in the only possible
manner, for deathless life.

Horse-racing, private yachts, champagne and the somatic pleas-
ures — how soon all that sort of thing palls is a matter of con-
stant experience with the retired rich. Why relapse to that dry
rot of animalism? It is an ennobling motive for the rest of your
life, which you need now. Not French cookery, not Cuban to-
bacco, not race-horses, not selfish ease, but that good, clear con-
science toward Humanity which transfigures the human face.

For whether we know it or not, whether we care or not, our
personal sub-consciousness, and that of our race, hold us account-
able for the money (humanity's money) which we have gotten
hold of. That sub-conscience in us will not surcease, nor abdicate.
No man will, nor possibly can, long enjoy life who lives along
purely selfish lines. That unappeased Nemesis who presides deep
in the ancestral brain of the race, soon finds him out, and day by
day, with unseen hand, drops loathly satiety in the cup of his
pleasures.

There is no escaping that draught. 'Tis to be drunk, good
friends, and that, too, from a physiological law profound in the
intinia of your being; profound in the storied strata of that com-
mune brain-of-man which a thousand generations of your ancestors
have confided, temporarily, to your care and keeping, not for you
alone, but for generations yet unborn. You hold it only in trust.
It is confided to you only in the expectation that you will guard
it preciously and pass it on, made better by your occupancy ; —
for it is the precious heirloom of a million years of struggle, of
battle, of toil, of martyrdom. Live delinquent, at your peril. The
Court-of-the-Dead sits there over your own brow, sits to judge
you, and has its own code of exquisite retributions.

Also its beneficent rewards; but always and ever the price of
these is labor for your race.

With brows knit and rapt, sad eyes, Life-on-Earth presses for-

114 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

ward on her marvelous journey upward, to win Heaven and Im-
mortality for her far-future children. It is the one great, august
spectacle of this still mysterious Universe — that Purpose sublime
of Life-on-Earth.

But the way of that upward journey is long and hard and ardu-
ous. Naught less than devotion and our best efforts are accepted,
or tolerated. No malfeasance is permitted us. Delinquents are
weeded out, without thought of them, personally, their names
blotted from the Book.

And what in the way of research and experiment?

Everything which bears on the great subject of prolonging life
and making it happier. For example : —

Experiments in combining, or concentrating the nervous energy
of several persons in one current, for transmission to another
person, with a view to producing curative effects. Three or four
investigators might undertake this, working together.

Ignorantly and in a crude way, something like this is brought
about in the alleged " prayer cures " and " faith cures." The
" magnetic healers," et hoc genus omne, also operate and thrive
from a knack of summoning their cell energy and projecting it,
by an effort of the will, to the organism of a weaker, diseased
person.

The emanation projected, appears to be a composite current,
containing corpuscles (electrons) but made up mainly, it is be-
lieved, of more minute particles of exceeding subtility. Corpuscles
are present in the current ; that has been proven ; but more sub-
tile emanations from the cells appear to accompany them. It is
already known, too, that a certain rhythm, or consonance, is
requisite between the " healer," imparting the emanations, and the
recipient, as if a low or high voltage of the current might be in-
volved in the success of the effort, or synchronous wave-lengths,
as is requisite for interpreting wireless messages through the
ether.

What we have need to discover is a scientific method of com-
bining the cell-energy of a number — perhaps in time of a large
number — of healthy persons, or animals, in a powerful current,
tide, or aura, regulating its consonance and applying it to recipients,
for purposes of cure or regeneration. What is needed is media

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH II5

of conduction from one organism to another, also means of accu-
mulation and storage.

As a matter of fact every human being generates and wastes
a vast amount of nervous energy, which might be economized,
conserved and used for purposes of self-maintenance and even for
rejuvenation.

For it is by no means impossible for a hundred or a thousand
persons to live in such vital harmony, so bio-synchronously, by
means of media and conduction methods which may be devised,
that many forms of disease can be successfully resisted and cer-
tain steps in regeneration effected.

Bio-physical altruism, this might well be called; altruism in
actual practice, physically. Hitherto altruism has been a pleasant
theory, held in a somewhat vague, ill-defined way; but by means
of this bond of brain cell energy — still calling it nerve force —
we may set up altruism with our fellow-men in terms of physics.
In truth, we are but at the beginnings of this great subject of
controlling the currents of energy which the cell-of-life produces.
As we live at present that energy is largely squandered.

Care and control of the organism during sleep have also to be
made matters of study.

Sleep is ever "a mild form of death" — the temporary death
or cessation of the self-conscious mind, covering a period of one
third part of our lives.

The proper preparation of the organism for sleep, and caring
for it during eight hours of the twenty-four, is therefore a very
important consideration. Sleep as entered upon is often injurious,
even dangerous. In truth, we have yet to learn how to sleep prop-
erly. The field for experimentation here is a wide one, embracing
the electrification of the sleeping body and the application of elec-
trical currents to certain organs during slumber; also the use of
ozone and added oxygen in the air respired, since it is well known
that lowered respiration in sleep at times leads to various degrees
of carbonic acid poisoning and suffocation, as evinced in danger-
ous nightmares, terrifying dreams, etc.

The experimentation carried on along this line of research in-
cludes many recently suggested adjuvants and safeguards. It is
a field of great promise ; promise that the eight hours of uncon-

Il6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

sciousness may very possibly be made a period of depuration and
even of rejuvenation.

People sleep so badly at present, so foolishly, so dangerously
even, that this line of research may, without the least exaggera-
tion, be regarded as an urgently necessary one. Certain it is that
a vast alleviation of the lives of millions may be brought about
from one year's study and experiment. This investigation may
well be undertaken by five or six observers, working together at
this laboratory.

Another line of research which needs to be conducted more care-
fully than has been done heretofore, is extended observations of
unicellular life, under the microscope, in respect to nutrition.

In respect to reproduction, Maupas did this many years ago.
After the methods of Maupas, or improved methods, we need to
do this in respect to the nutrition of unicell colonies as regards
their food and the effects of various foods on the life-time of the
individual protozoon. Remembering always that a cell is a cell,
whether living alone, or organized with others in the multicell.

Parallelling the above is the subject of human nutrition, car-
ried forward from those experiments latterly instituted at Yale
University and Washington. These researches and experiments
have gone forward to the extent of furnishing an advantageous
basis for further work.

Nutrition — an improved scientific nutrition of- the physiolog-
ical cell through the blood — is one of the imminent problems in
our quest for longer life.

Food, as we at present view it, seems a simple matter. The
lower animals and plants afford it. It has but to be herded, cul-
tivated, harvested, and cooked. What more simple? But of all
future inventions and discoveries, the greatest, the most important,
will pertain to food.

At present we ingest the errata of plant and animal life. " The
dead, alas, are in us," and " death is in the pot." There is lack,
too, in the human organism as we inherit it, of energy to maintain
the complicated processes requisite to reduce and make it ready
for assimilation by the tissue cells. It is our food which renders
greatly prolonged life impossible, at present. Nor is it probable
that the human organism ever was, or ever could be, bred or

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH I17

trained to live forever on food such as human beings now eat.
The physiological processes by which food is reduced, comminuted,
corrected as to its chemical constituents, peptonized, hepatized,
oxygenated, and, in a word, carried forward to higher and higher
stages of chemical instability, fit for assimilation by the tissue
cells, set up a heavy draught on the collective life of the animal
body. There is a necessity for putting forth energy on the part
of all the cells, which causes an ever-increasing deficit of potential,
a growing debt from overwork, a chronic accumulation of the
effects of fatigue, which, under present conditions, must sooner or
later lead to a running down of the cells.

Under favorable conditions, a cell may gain potential; but the
severe, steady draught on cellular energy, necessary to maintain
organic nutrition, even on the best food at present procurable, at
length bankrupts the collective energies of the cells.

The horse, the ox and other ruminants, that have to do even
more hard grinding and furnish more energy, relatively, to main-
tain nutrition, succumb much sooner than man.

In one sense, therefore, it is our food which brings us to death's
door; that is to say, the exhausting physiological processes, neces-
sary to prepare it for cell nutrition, will in the end work the most
perfect existent animal organism to death.

It is only when the organism is young, the lungs pervious and
the tissue cells little encysted as yet, that a gain in cell potential,
for fifteen or twenty years, can be made over the draught on vital
energy, requisite for nutrition.

We may properly attach great significance to these facts, since
the general opinion is, that food, once eaten and drunk, reaches
its proper destination in the body without much expenditure of
energy. Yet sudden death not infrequently follows overfeeding,
purely and solely from organic inability to summon sufficient power
to initiate the process of food reduction.

It is along the line of improved food, as well as regeneration of
the somatic cell, that we must look for happier and longer life.

Is such food possible?

Beyond doubt. But at present we lack the data of nutrition.
We do not as yet understand how a cell nourishes itself, nor how
it might best be nourished. The cell absorbs particles from the
blood plasma, and we have a general knowledge as to what those

Il8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

particles are; but of the modes and processes of intracellular
digestion and nutrition we are ignorant. We do not know how
much of that food is actually assimilated in the cell, nor how much
is rejected. Beyond doubt the blood is a comparatively dirty,
vitiated, toxic stream. It is probable indeed that the cells suffer
constant injury from minute dirt particles which they ingest. The
intestinal tract, or passage along which the ingredients of the
blood are prepared for the villi to engorge, is a howling wilder-
ness of disgusting parasites and bacteria, many of which are hos-
tile to and destroy the life of the host when they multiply beyond
certain bounds to which the vis medicatrix of a healthy organism
keeps them down.

As a first step in the study of improved food for the future we
have need to see what the primitive cell — the protozoon — has
done in this line. For better food has been the object of long
effort, since the first micro-organism appeared on the shores of
the primeval sea. Protozoons, like rhizopods, ingested food par-
ticles which, laboriously, with an exertion of all their powers,
they contrived to reduce, digest and in part assimilate. It was
a hard life into which they put all their energies ; and to their
humble efforts we owe a debt of far-off sympathy. One can but
think softly of those first toilers in the archaic marshes — so much
depended on them.

The protozoon had his small stomach, an improvised colon,
and maybe a unicellular liver; and beyond doubt our ancestral
amoeba had his colics and his jaundices, and was often in mortal
agony from terrific peritonitises. It could hardly be otherwise,
considering what food chunks his hunger drove him to engulf.
But he struggled through by hook or by crook, and finally drifted
into metazoic cooperation, and thus took life a little easier.

For after locomotion, better food was the first problem which
multicellular creatures undertook. The animal organism, with its
blood-circulatory, blood-disks, blood plasma, cardiac apparatus for
propulsion, and lung tissue for aeration, offers a most interesting
and suggestive study of the way the protozoon, in its later role
of physiological cell, has handled the food question. It is the
object lesson given by the protozoon to the human metazoon.

To secure better assimilable food for brain and muscle, the
confraternities of metazoic cells very early in the division of labor

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH II9

impressed a certain number of cells into service to act at first hand
on food substances and make that their peculiar business, so as
to get it in more available form; these were the cells lining the
food pocket or future stomach. The labor being arduous, the
metazoic consentience soon detailed certain other groups, or tracts
of cells, to aid those of the stomach-sac; and these afterwards
developed variously as liver, pancreas, and other glands, great and
small. Still others took up the work of passing the liquefied pabu-
lum to those other tracts or groups whose business was locomotion,
and these in time developed as arteries, heart and veins.

But to be transformable to energy and carry on the physical
business of the co-partnership, oxygen was needed; the food must
be charged with it; and another cell group took up the business
of admitting external air and infiltering oxygen. From this group
has developed pulmonary tissue. But nerve, brain and muscle
cells excrete waste products of the nature of poisonous refuse,
to such deleterious extent that another cell group assumed the duty
of extracting it from the circulation and washing it away; and
from this tract of cells we have the renal organs.

Still there was complaint that the food was not good enough,
and another cell group, entering the sanguineous current, under-
took the task of still further refining and vitalizing the plasma,
now on its way to brain and muscle; and from these labors for
the common weal have come various gland cells and the white and
red blood corpuscles.

It is at the price of all this auxiliary labor and only by virtue
of it that the brain and muscle cells are nourished and are able
to live so long and do so much in the way of locomotion and
intelligence. Mind would be impossible on a poorer food for the
brain cells.

And what is the lesson from this ?

Locomotion, intellect and a life-time of a century have been
attained by the metazoic cells from a food as good as that which
now comes to them in the blood plasma. Yet that plasma still
contains noxious particles, despite the efforts of the living organs
which labor to refine and improve it. The inference is easy. Sci-
ence must come to the aid of the organic apparatus and furnish a
food clean, pure and easier of assimilation.

This brings us to the fundamental question. What Is food? —

I20 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

a question which has been variously answered. Nor can it be
answered at present. Food is that which renews the cells. The
cells absorb it from the plasma of the blood. But exactly what
portion they absorb, or how much of what they absorb is necessary
or best for them, is not known. There is doubt whether the tissue
cells are renewed as to their intimate structure, or that nutrition
adds ponderable matter to the cell, or is more than a replenishing
of corpuscles, or corpuscides. We do not know that cell food is,
or need be, anything more gross than electrons. That is to say,
the idea has begun to prevail, that nutrition as we now know it
is an immensely cumbersome and arduous process, attended by
great strain and duress of the organism, all of which science may
obviate by presenting a food w^hich will not require such hard
physiological labor. The excretion of urea has been held to prove
that there is structural waste and replenishment of cell substance.
As nutrition is at present accomplished, this appears to be true,
the result of a species of Internal combustion from oxidation in
the cell. Indeed, it is evident that the process of nutrition within
each cell of the organism is, on a small scale, strictly analogous
to what takes place in the stomach and intestinal tract of the
larger multicellular organism, namely, that there is intracellular
ingestion, excretion, and assimilation of an esoteric plasma which
renews the cell. That is what appears to occur; but our question
is, need it occur? Is it anything more or better than a laborious,
destructive process which may be obviated altogether by providing
a more ethereal cell food ?

What, then, is the actual cell food?

Keeping in mind that much of what the cells take as food from
the blood plasma is still in a gross condition, which necessitates
intracellular conflagrations before it is reduced and sublimated,
fit for the cell to take up, keeping in mind this fact, I say, what
is the real food of the cells? What is this last product of intra-
cellular digestion which goes to cell maintenance?

Beyond doubt it is something refined, " ambrosial," ethereal,
perhaps the electron itself. We know not as yet whether there is
a decomposition of the atom of carbon, or of the other elements
present in " protoplasm." Is the life of the cell dependent on
the restoration of the component atoms by an intake of fresh cor-
puscles, set free by the incoming food-stream? And if something

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 121

of this nature is found to be true, is it not quite possible that a
dynamic food which may be administered directly to the cells,
without combustion, waste and residue, is the desideratum of life
on the earth?

We are as yet, of course, at the first outer confines of this great
question of cell food. But even now it begins to be evident how
much depends on a better understanding of nutrition, and the
great desirability of directing research in this direction, backed
by the resources of the larger communal life. Immortal life is
the stake which science is playing for along this line of investi-
gation. It is a true world-problem, one of those more than Hercu-
lean labors of the coming century, which call for the united efforts
of mankind.

In the past, the great discoveries of science, have often been
accidental, or well-nigh so, discoveries which have come to light
by chance in the course of other, more sordid pursuits.

Oftener still such discoveries have been the lone exploits of
some solitary student, or inventor, starving in a garret, to whom
no one would give ear or aid. So frequently, indeed, has this
been the case, the fallacious idea prevails that this is the normal
course and source of scientific discovery and invention — some
ill-equipped inventor, working alone and in secret, in a garret or
cellar !

Not infrequently, too, in the past and at present, there is per-
sonal jealousy between those who are attempting to work out new
ideas to be " patented," leading to secrecy and even to deception
and the dissemination of false information.

What a humiliating picture does this give of the yet unorgan-
ized character of scientific progress ! In this respect we are still
so many predatory human protozoons, each striving for self, un-
regardful of the advantages of cooperative effort, and too sus-
picious or too selfish to work with our fellows.

All this must now be changed in the greater interests of the
larger life of man. Such primitive, " unicellular " methods of
discovery must now give place to organized experiment and co-
operative research, where each student and investigator has his
pre-arranged part to work out and perfect. Little is realized as
to the scientific progress which might be made from organized.

12 2 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

closely cooperative research on the part of a considerable number
of investigators, working together along co-related and supporting
lines of experiment. It is a new field, the grand triumphs from
which are all to come. As yet the world scarcely believes in it
and still puts its faith in the lone inventor, the tattered genius
of the garret and cellar. It is time for science to abandon the
unicellular method, and organize its scattered units for stronger,
more successful work.

What might not a thousand students of biology accomplish, if
they would get together, canvass the whole subject to be inves-
tigated, pool all existent knowledge of it, delegate to each his
particular item of investigation and experiment, and then keep in
close touch with each other, day by day?

Let us suppose this thousand students to possess each a com-
petence in the way of personal income, or property, so that all
could devote themselves unreservedly to the work in hand with-
out distracting personal cares ; or that the thousand were elected
to enter an endowed institute where the funds were adequate to
provide salaries for the personal support and proper recreations
of each worker. And let us now suppose that the chosen subject
for study and experiment were rectification of the blood plasma, or
this tremendously important one of a chemically perfect cell-food.

It is easy to see what issues hang here; and yet this latter is a
purely chemico-physical problem; nothing supernatural, nor super-
human about it; just a scientific problem, to be solved, like the
spectrum, or the parallax of a star.

Living matter, the " protoplasm " of a cell, will conserve and
maintain itself continuously, that is to say, live deathlessly, if
it can be nourished with a food which is chemically pure in the
sense of doing no inherent damage to the protoplasmic structure
or constitution. We have need to get this fundamental principle
of protoplasmic life on the earth fixed in our minds at the out-
set.

Picture then these prospective workers, this thousand good
heads, assembled in the amphitheater of the laboratory, or institute,
ready for the great undertaking.

The entire subject would then be canvassed at frequent meetings,
talked over, and a symposium made of the combined knowledge
and suggestions of all. Gradually then the problem presents itself.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 1 23

unfolds and takes form in the minds of the entire thousand, so
that close cooperative effort becomes possible.

Then would come organization into groups of ten or twenty
workers along distinct yet co-related lines of study and experiment,
each group having its own internal organization, with one special
executive group perhaps at the head of all ; the idea being to have
an elastic, yet closely co-related organization of the thousand, in
order that the work of every individual may be known to all, and
made to count in the general result.

More specifically, a group of twenty-five might be detailed to
gain exact knowledge of what has already been done in the way
of pure food-stuffs, and the sanitation of food-stuffs, so far as
experiments have been conducted, during the last decade.

Another group might systematically observe and study the nutri-
tion of unicell colonies, by foods similar to the plasma of mamma-
lian blood, giving wide chemical range to their experiments.

These preliminary observations would open the way for close
cooperative work with other sections, beginning analytical studies
of mammalian blood; for we must regard mammalian blood as
the long-wrought result of the metazoic, cooperative effort of the
organizing unicells, to produce a cell food. The mammal is a
vast organized union of cell life which was originally unicellular
life. In the course of that organization the combining cells have
labored together to take their formerly crude food-stuff, work
it over, refine it, purify it, oxygenate it, then pump it through
closed, air-tight pipes, tubes and tubules to each cell of the vast
cell confraternity.

To accomplish this, different orders of cells have worked, doing
each an allotted part of the labor. The alimentary, secretory and
depurative tissue cells have each their preliminary share and func-
tion to perform ; and finally, swimming in the blood-stream, the
millions of blood corpuscles affect oxygenation and bring about the
final changes in the rectified plasma.

In reality the presence and activity of the blood corpuscles con-
vert the plasma to a serum, the exact nature of which we have
still to study, and to improve in the scientific sense. That is to
say, it is in this latter stage that we find it, and it Is here that we
have to begin our new study of it in the light of experimenta-
tion.

124 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Closely connected with this subject of perfected nutrition and
a chemically accurate cell food, comes an even more important line
of experiments, through the blood circulatory (which might well
occupy the attention of one of our larger groups of student asso-
ciates), namely, to rectify, fortify and give tonicity, or stimulus,
to the tissue cells, themselves, by innoculations with the products
of certain glands of the animal organism, or by reagents artificially
produced of the nature of those gland products, or by " serums "
from the blood of animals which have been thus innoculated, forti-
fied and rectified.

For example, we now know something of the revolutionary
effects on the cells of the organism, produced by the secretion of
the adrenal glands, as also of the thyroid gland, pituitary gland,
and of the " islands of Langerhans " in the pancreas. These
agents have to be combined and attempered one to another.

We have always to keep before us the mental picture that it
is by virtue of the nicely-adjusted and nicely-balanced action and
interaction of every gland and every organ of the body, that the
present vital tonicity of the cells is preserved and their food pro-
duced for them in the blood plasma. If one or any of these glands
or organs falls out of normal function, the cell life suffers : a
condition frequent in aging organisms. We shall have to attune
the organism to the note or key of adolescence.

Add now to our mental picture of this, the fact that certain
clever surgical experiments indicate that if even a few living cells
from one of these glands can be transplanted from the body of
a healthy animal to the human organism, and made to live there,
the necessary rectification of the organic harmony and tonicity will
be produced. That is to say, the product of these gland cells ap-
pears to leaven the entire organism. Nor does it seem to make
much difference where or in what part of the organism the en-
grafted cells are introduced, anywhere that is most convenient,
the desideratum being only that the product of these cells shall
freely enter the circulation and mingle with the blood plasma.

Without entering upon details of technique, the idea and theory
of the line of experiments, above urged, cannot fail to be apparent.
It is one of bright promise in our quest for the control of life.
Where a gland of the human body has perished or become desuete,
it may probably be replaced, surgically, from lower animal life.

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 12 5

But of even brighter promise is the general idea of a progressive
scientific rectification of the organic tonicity by experiments with
gland cells and their products, by means of " grafts " and innoc-
ulations.

Organic chemistry as applied to the tonicity and rectification of
the cell life of the organism, is, indeed, a veritable new world, only
awaiting research and experiment, to yield us great discoveries.

It is not too much to say that the future of the genus homo on
the earth, whether it shall continue its higher evolution along the
paths of knowledge and power, or not, whether it shall fulfil its
loftier destiny, attain the freedom of the universe and win heaven
and immortal life, or not, rests largely on two factors, namely,
a perfected cell nutrition, and the control of brain cell energy,
meaning by the word control the art of generating it, or of deriv-
ing it from the lower animals, and applying it, at will, to the
human organism, for purposes of vital reinforcement and the cure
of disease.

Results of the greatest importance to human progress and human
happiness will immediately follow these two discoveries.

First, life with us will then be, practically, optional. We can
live as long as we please. Death will no longer be a necessary
sequence to life.

Second, " old age," infirmity and " disease " will become evils
of the ignorant past. With perfected nutrition of the cells and
the conservation of their germinal products, the tendency to invo-
lution (old-aging) of the cell, after adult life is reached, will cease
in the absence of the causes of that Involution. Disease from inva-
sions of microbic life may be promptly suppressed by re-inforce-
ment of the sufferer's vital powers by adjuvant cell energy from
without, thereby heightening the aura of life, that restorative vis
medicatrix naturco which has ever to be summoned by the physi-
cian. This modicum of restorative energy will be infused to the
human body, even as an increased amperage of electric power is
now " turned on " a flagging motor.

We now have certain expectations that this surplus, this reserve
of nervous energy, may be derived from healthy animal life,
depleting these lower organisms for the benefit and behoof of
man.

126 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

A full tide, or " head," of vital energy is nature's protection
from disease. We fall into abnormal, diseased conditions, from
lowered vital tonicity, causing lack of resisting power. Vital tonic-
ity may then be intensified, at will, by scientific appliances.

The ideal aimed at in this, is to have at command a full head
of " vim," or " nervous energy," for the fortification and protec-
tion of the organism, and also for holding it in harmonious func-
tion, and maintaining that much desiderated condition called " con-
stitution."

Given vital energy at command, to use as needed, it is not be-
lieved here that the involution, or devolution, of the cell, known as
'* old age," will go on, or be initiated. A full head of vital energy
in the organism, maintaining a strong aura of life, is the natural
antidote to old-aging. " Old age " is initiated when the vital
energy begins to decline, as it does shortly after bodily growth
ceases. The causes are many, but may be summed up briefly as
the total terrestrial resistance to life. That resistance can be over-
come by means of the two discoveries outlined above.

Third, from a chemically accurate nutrition of the cell-of-life,
will come the gradual elimination of the grossness, coarseness
and ugliness of the human organism, often so repulsively ex-
hibited as that organism ages. These unsightly conditions are
the manifest result of inaccurate, or perverted nutrition of the
cells, the gradual falling out of harmony of the co-related organs
and apparatuses, and the consequent distortion of " constitu-
tion."

With perfected nutrition, will come abiding health and a pro-
gressive spiritualization of the human body, realizing the vague
religious aspiration for a spiritual body, that is to say, a body less
" carnal," less gross. At present our bodies are a sad, strange
mixture of foulness and putrefaction in which the sweeter, purer
etheric flame of life struggles and smoulders — the clear result
of our imperfect food and the bacteria which we ingest with it.
All this may be beneficently changed by accurate nutrition, and
our bodies transfigured to realize higher ideals of protoplasmic
purity and beauty. With perfected nutrition this progressive spir-
itualization of the organism will surely come ; it can not be other-
wise. During adolescence, when nutrition of the cells is best, we
sometimes catch fleeting glimpses of what well-nigh divine beauty

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 1 27

the human face and form are capable of attaining for a brief time :
the veriest glimpses as yet of what is coming in the future and may
be rendered permanent. It is one of the prizes for labor along
this line of research.

Fourth, on the psychic and moral side, equally beneficent results
will be seen to follow naturally. Bad living, bad nutrition, disease,
brief life-times and the certainty of death are the great immoral
factors in human life, at present. No man would live immorally,
or enter on a course of crime, if he knew he could live forever,
or at will. Immorality and criminal courses would be illogical to
such a life. Immorality and crime are short cuts, weak snatches,
at happiness — which mainly fail. If we had time to attain hap-
piness otherwise, we would none of us ever turn criminals, or raise
our hands against our fellow men. The moral argument for these
lines of research, as above urged, is thus apparent. But the moral
grandeur of Salvation by Science will be set forth in a future
edition of this book, in relation to the communal life of man and
the " Kingdom of God " on earth, as first taught nineteen hundred
years ago by the Galilean lake. Twentieth century science with its
late new knowledge of matter, cell metabolism, human personality
and the ether-of-space, but iterates, realizes and makes practical the
Idea which inspired that lone, bright Genius of Palestine, in the
days of the Caesars. We are but giving form and dynamic potency
to that Idea, clothing it with physical forces for actual, material
realization. And let it be said again that this realization of the
Idea is impossible only to those who, from some mental defect,
cannot summon courage and hope to work for it.

Another needed effort of investigation, for a number of well-
equipped observers, is the subject of multicellular reproduction, to
ascertain what actually goes into the metazoic ovum ; whether
these germ elements are reduplicated or generated ab initio, as
long as the parent organism remains plastic, or whether, as many
believe, the cells of the parent organism are depleted by an irre-
placeable out-go of such elements, and that old age is the result
of the drain set upon the organic cells by the cells of the repro-
ductive apparatus of the body; a drain which goes on quite the
same whether the germs are liberated for offspring, or not.

Which of these views is correct is of immense importance as

128 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

affecting future plans for the husbandry and renewal of the cell
life of the body. These questions deeply concern marriage and
the larger communal life of the nation in the future.

Who will endeavor to go to the bottom of this long-standing
mystery, in order to bring up the facts to the light of day? Such
investigators, if successful, will be public benefactors.

In the past, for reasons necessitated by the human habitat and
environment, nature has completed the cycle of life, by the parent-
and-child method. We have now, in producing the future death-
less individual, to learn to restore the germ-elements to the fructi-
fying cells of the parent organism; — as if we returned the vast
crop of apple seeds to the parent apple tree instead of allowing
them to go broadcast over the land; as if we learned to restore
the millions of milted eggs to the parent salmon, instead of seeing
them go largely to waste in the beds of the rivers, the parent fish
meantime dying at once from the excess of the fructifying process
of its cells.

In male animals and man, where continence is practised or
enforced, a partial return of the germ-elements is accomplished
by absorption into the circulation; and the revivifying effects of
such restoration have long been a matter of observation. We
know therefore that even under nature's imperfect process, what
is equivalent to a partial rejuvenation is effected, in some degree.
We have to perfect this restorative process and substitute economy
and thrift for waste and squander of life. Psychic factors also
enter here.

But first we have to learn as to the nature of these germ-elements
(semina cellulae), whether they exist at all, what they are and also
the nature of the drain which they set upon the parent cell. The
theory of Weissmann is well known, as also the gemmule theory
of Darwin. Both now bid fair to be found correct in part; the
germ-plasm undoubtedly sets up a drain on the somatic cell. Con-
fessedly, my own researches along this line have not yet determined
anything definitely. We are evidently dealing with something
exceedingly minute and subtile. It still eludes the microscope and
will have to be approached along other lines.

Another question of great and timely importance in our quest
will be to determine as far as possible how deeply and how rad-

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 1 29

ically, the life of the brain and nervous system controls and main-
tains the life of the other tissues of the organism.

To put the question in another light: if it were possible to
remove the brain and nervous system from the organism of a man
sixty years old, and replace it with that from a youth of twenty,
what would be the efifect on the life of the older organism? Al-
though purely hypothetical, such a case can be supposed, and gives
an idea of the scope and bearing of the proposed inquiry on the
psychic old-aging of the brain.

The problem of normally prolonged life involves not only nutri-
tion and protection of the brain cells, but the protection of their
immediate outlying adjuncts from the wear and tear of terrestrial
life, meaning that delicate peripheral apparatus which stands be-
tween the central nervous system and the external world, and puts
us in touch with our environment. Truth to say, it is an adjunct
often neglected, so far as proper recognition goes of the part it
plays in animal life and the necessity of guarding it from injury.
Owing to its exposed situation, it suffers first of all as the organism
ages. In attributing the self-conscious life solely to the brain, too,
a partial error has been made. This often neglected portion of the
nervous system carries in it a measure of the personality and has
a degree of autonomy. It outlies the brain and cord, like a distant
state of the nation, and is connected with it by long sheathed
threads, lines and channels of modified nervous substance, which
are little more than conductors of nervous energy.

We are referring, of course, to the very elaborate and interesting
apparatus by means of which the central nervous system termi-
nates in the human skin, and is thereby put in communication with
the external world; that living mechanism which disassociates the
ego from the non-ego ; the chemico-mechanical medium wherein
we end, subjectively, and establish our personal relations with the
objective universe.

This portion or adjunct of the nervous system also includes the
highly-specialized, terminal cells of the organs of sight, hearing,
taste, and smell, as well as the nerve plexuses of the lungs, heart,
liver, kidneys, and alimentary tract, within the thoracic and abdom-
inal cavities of the body. But we are now alluding more partic-
ularly to the skin and the nerve terminal apparatus lodged in it.

130 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

This latter consists of what has been variously termed papillae,
" tactile corpuscles," " end bulbs," " Corpuscles of Gandry," " Pa-
cinian corpuscles," " Corpuscles of Merkel," et at., where sensory
nerve fibres from the brain terminate and receive sensations from
the external world. Here, too, motor-nerve fibres actuate the sweat
glands, sebaceous glands, hair follicles and muscular fibres.

Altogether it forms an apparatus so necessary to sense, to excre-
tion and the general depuration of the blood, that cessation of its
functions is soon followed by death. Yet owing to its exposed
situation, damage, shrinkage and deterioration begin even during
adolescence, and as time passes become grave factors of old aging.
Daily accidents, heat, cold, the action of the air, water and mordant
substances, tend constantly to impair and destroy the skin as an
organ of life.

What can be done to save and keep it good, becomes, therefore,
a proper subject of study.

Bearing on all these questions, there is already a great deal in
the way of useful data, scattered about the world, at distant lab-
oratories, or embodied in scientific papers and books, often in
foreign languages, which would be of service in our quest, if only
it could be looked up, collected and conveniently tabulated for ref-
erence. This of itself would properly afford a line of work for
many who are acquainted with one or more of the foreign lan-
guages.

Connected with this proposed collection of data, too, is the plan
for organizing a more or less permanent party of students, for
travel during the winter months, in Southern countries. By this
we mean annual winter tours of the party, working together, with
a view to enlarge our knowledge and add to our resources for
experimentation.

Beyond doubt we can at present best examplify the truths of
the Promethean Faith, by living long, healthily and happily, as
we work out the greater problems; and one enthusiastic corre-
spondent has proposed that ten, a score, or a hundred associates
might unite in building an ideal Vivarium, a veritable little
" heaven," equipped and provided with every agency of advanced

THE PROMETHEAN FAITH 13I

scientific knowledge, including our own discoveries, for conserving
and prolonging life. We have to make our own "heaven;" we
shall never have any other save what we make for ourselves.

Whether in the matter of the " canals " and " oases " of Mars
Professor Percival Lowell and others are right or wrong, whether
that planet is the home and seat of a highly civilized life or not,
even the broaching of so grand an idea is worth much to us as an
intimation of what may be done on the outer surface of a globe
like the earth, plunging onward through unknown eons of time,
into unknown regions of space. The grandeur, the awe, the terror
even, of our cosmic situation, when actually realized, passes all
conception of poet or philosopher. Yet this bleak outer skin of
a peregrine planet may be transformed to a Paradise by future
humanity working together; and this our tentative Promethean
Vivarium, even in this first early childhood age of scientific man,
might prove an example and a pioneer effort in the future para-
disation of the earth.

In fancy, at least, we can picture these Martian planet-neighbors
of ours as having already achieved immortal life. Perhaps they
but wait to " reveal " the secret of it to us, if we can but learn
to communicate with them. " Revelation " may come to us from
the far off heavens, after all, when interplanetary signals can be
seen and interpreted.

Finally, to every reader whose attention is drawn to this effort,
the author respectfully addresses the following appeal : —

From your studies, observations, or reflections, can you not send
to this laboratory at least one fact, one thought, or one pertinent
suggestion which in your judgment bears on the problems which
we have to solve ?

Any one such fact, or contributed thought, may serve in aid,
and is earnestly solicited. We desire to call together, summarize
and utilize all the knowledge that exists at present in the minds
of educated individuals (even as the neurons pool their sentiences
in the human brain) and, from the united volume of this knowl-
edge, develop a larger, stronger consentience with which to work
out the solution of these problems of deathless life.

This plan is strictly in line with the metazoic development of
mmd from the days of the unicells to present times, namely, a

132 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

consensus of knowledge and the evolution from it of greater
intelligence. Not a metaphor, but a law of bio-physics. Not a
mere desultory collection of facts, ideas and notions, but the mate-
rial from which a larger, organized knowledge may be evolved.
Experience shows that greatest aid comes from brief pithy sug-
gestion, or citation of pertinent facts or circumstances.

The appeal is made in the name of the great Achievement to
be won. No gainful motive attaches to it, nor can personal profit
be promised. It is surely a question of that later, grander, prac-
tical Altruism which bids us ennoble our self-lives by pooling them
in the larger life and endless future of our race. For along that
white path of self-ennoblement from self-surrender, of personal
apotheosis from self-consecration, lies the only real, abiding hap-
piness for the individual man of to-day. Personal, self-conscious
immortality is still denied to us of the present generation. We
have not yet risen to it ; but by this hearty devotion of self to
the common weal, we are able to project our dying lives forward
in time and space, and blend them with the deathless future life
of humanity throughout the happier eons which are to come.

Whatever your own faith, reader, whatever your mental reser-
vations as to Salvation by Science may be, will you not join in
this cooperative endeavor? In and of itself it cannot from the
very nature of things be wrong, since it is a practical effort for
the growth of human knowledge.

The effort to set forth this new view of immortal life is, as the
writer is painfully aware, but a crude one, burdened by all those
imperfections which usually attend the first utterance of new
thought. For that crudeness I humbly apologize.

END OF PART I.

PART II
THE CELL -OF -LIFE; SALVATION UNDER

NATURE

(1898)

It is a part of the unwritten code of science that the investigator
shall avoid a priori conclusions, look coldly upon theory, and
be wary of hypothesis. In a word, that he shall devote himself
patiently to the acquisition of data, be content to collect facts,
and live abstinent of the ever-present human weakness to play
the role of prophet.

Nothing, indeed, so surely distinguishes the man of science
from the charlatan as his attitude toward theory and his caution
in presenting conclusions. A single page, often a single para-
graph, of the article, or the book of a writer on scientific subjects,
enables us to judge all too accurately of the value, or lack of
value, of his entire effort; and, generally speaking, the verdict
turns on the care with which he draws conclusions from data.

Science has endured so much of premature vaticination that
its best friends and exponents have come to regard all that sort
of thing with marked hostility, as detrimental to true progress.
There is a disposition to put injudicious enthusiasts outside the
pale. A certain regimen has come to prevail; immature publi-
cation is held to be bad form as well as futile. Humility and an
educated conservatism characterize the truly scientific mind:
the attitude of Newton at the end of his grand discoveries.

With all that biology has of late demonstrated, we know too
little still to say much of first causes ; yet the time has come
when the creed of science can be outlined and forecast.

It is in the nature and constitution of the human mind to
believe something. The history of mankind shows that those
tribes, nations, and races which have gone forward with the
greatest energy, have been actuated and incited by confident
beliefs as to the origin and destiny of human beings.

In like manner the scientist has often foxmd hypothesis an

I

2 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

adjuvant ; for an hypothesis is of the nature of a belief. Some
of the most signal discoveries in astronomy, chemistry and
biology have been elicited under guidance of provisional theories.
There is a use as well as abuse of hypothesis; and, moreover, the
theories of science are often bona fide glimpses of truth.

So at present, when the old faiths are fading out, like ghosts
at dawn, when venerable soul doctrines are falling into desuetude
and discredit, glimpses of the truth come and will serve to light
us forward in the great outer darkness of the universe.

As such and such only are the present outlines of a greater
gospel put forward: gHmpses of the truth, seen through the
murk of our ignorance, and better than the existent babel of
superstitions.

As regards Christianity, biological science now goes far to
substantiate and confirm the original scheme of life and salvation,
as conceived and taught by the Foimder, but will purge it and
separate it from those adventitious doctrines which Church
Fathers, Bishops and Synods engrafted upon the new religion
during the first three centuries of its existence. These doctrines
were never essentially Christian, but of the nature of ingrowths
from Persian, Greek, and Egyptian systems of philosophy.

Christianity, however, can hardly be said to be more than one
of the religious beliefs of America. Allah, Brahma, Joss, and
Mormon, as well as the Hebrew Jehovah, are now worshipped
among us. Asia and Africa, as well as Europe, have contributed
to the amazing melange of tenets which stand for religion in the
United States. Never in the world's history has such diversity
of belief been exhibited in one country ; yet each of these hundred
and ten different cults is endeared to thousands of immigrant
devotees by ancestral ties and traditions.

If by some megaphonic device we were able to hear, at one
time and in one place, the amazing outcry of doctrines which
goes up in thousands of churches, temples, and other places of
religious worship, the confusion would out-jargon that on the
Plain of Shinar.

Such multiples of contradictory doctrines mutually discredit
each other. It has followed naturally that the younger genera-
tion, born in America and educated in the public schools where
general scientific knowledge is imparted, is quite without a faith,

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 3

in the old-time meaning of that word, and looks to science for
its real tenets.

Nor looks in vain. Even now, already, science is able to
outHne a new and greater faith ; and no prophetic gift is required
to assure us that this new faith will be the religion of future
America.

For a new hope has come to the htmian heart, the hope of
salvation from "sin" and death by natural means: Natural
salvation, contra-distinguished from supernatural salvation.
Supernaturalism has been the burden of all previous religious
systems. In all the past, human hopes have founded on rite,
sacrifice, and supernatural rescue. But the keynote and initia-
tive of the message of science is natural salvation: salvation
under nature, accomplished by the growth and conservation
of himian knowledge.

In all the past, man has turned to the skies and prayed to
powers beyond the earth for salvation; but now, at the dawn
of the twentieth century, he turns to himself and gravely, hope-
fully estimates the problem of self -salvation.

Moreover, self-salvation, when regarded in the light of our
present greater knowledge, is seen not to be new at all, but to
have been in progress ever since life first found foothold on the
earth's surface! Apparently it has been in the natural order
of things from the beginning.

We shall be able to show that natural salvation has been the
tendency and trend of the entire evolution of life on the earth;
that from the Silurian ages upward, life has put forth and de-
veloped toward a naturally attained freedom from evil conditions,
" sin " and death; and moreover that the prospect for this is
good. There is so much doubt, disheartenment and pessimism
in the world that a plain statement of the human situation from
the biological point of view cannot be otherwise than morally
healthy. The progress of this great life movement on the surface
of the globe constitutes a drama of surpassing interest, the
grandest spectacle in nature.

As to the origin of life on the earth, we have no certain knowl-
edge as yet, whether it came here from some other world in
space, or originated here from a capacity to live inherent in
matter. The former supposition puts the question of origin

4 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

one step farther away; the latter is the one to which all inter-
mediary theories must ultimately lead; for life is the subjective
side of matter, its personal attribute : that property which renders
the corpuscle a " psychon."

It is not difficult to believe that there are other planetary
globes where life develops more easily and with less travail and
diiress than on our earth. It is not incredible that the first cell,
spore, or perhaps still more rudimentary germ of life, arrived
here from some other world. It has been held that the " mole-
cule of protoplasm," so called, could not have originated on the
earth. Cell life, it is maintained, does not now come into existence
spontaneously; and the inference is therefore easy that the first
unicellular life of the globe was from an implantation.

This conjecture once admitted, the next surmise might be that
the earth was life-seeded by design, or from personal motives,
on the part of intelligent beings inhabiting a more life-fertile
globe in space. And it is more reassuring to think that such vital
implantation was from beneficent design and to conceive of it
as Divine. It is a moral contradiction that beings more intelli-
gent than man should be malevolent. On this earth, at least,
intellectual development does not tend to, or eventuate in,
malevolence and cruelty, but rather in a desire to give happiness.
By human standards, an omniscient mind could not be a "Satan" ;
yet we do not know what exists afar. To the normal mind there
is not much in the present life struggle on the earth that indi-
cates mercy, kindness, or beneficence.

There is no biological evidence, pro or con. The attitude of
the universe toward life on the earth seems to be impersonal
and neutral. Animal and vegetable life grows, bears seed and
dies, un watered, un cherished, imharvested. And while at first,
owing to long indoctrination, this thought of im cherished neglect
pains many minds, it must on reflection come to be regarded as a
glorious heritage of liberty — the liberty of the imiverse.

As nearly as can be estimated there is on the surface of the
earth, at present, " protoplasm " (meaning matter temporarily
in that condition of reciprocal activity which we term " living
matter ") to the amoimt of 5,500,460,500,000 tons.

Temporarily in the living condition, we say. For a significant

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 5

almost startling phase of it is, that this vast quantity of matter
is constantly passing out of the living into the non-living condi-
tion. As often as once in six hours, probably, once in twelve
certainly on an average, the entire five or six trillions of tons
of protoplasmic matter falls out of the living into the non-living
condition; and pari passu an equally vast weight of non-living
matter is raised up to the living condition. It is believed that all,
or the most part, of the matter which makes up the outer strata
of the earth to the depth of many miles, has at some time or
other been in the living state, and not once or twice only, but
many times.

We may, indeed, go much farther and not exceed what is
probable in supposing that in the great past history of the uni-
verse — a history of successive series of solar and planetary
formations — matter has lived in an infinite number of forms
and types of life from eternity, intermittently and alternately.

For here it is significant to note the reversion of scientific
opinion from the extremes of the dynamic hypothesis of pure
force, toward the Newtonian idea. Light and also heat and
electricity are not only dynamic, but material. Force, so far
as we know it, is always associated with an efflux of matter.

The method by which this continuous passage of non-living
into living matter is effected, is association and contact with
previously existing Ijving matter. The non-living must be in-
fused into the living matter ere the non-living can be re-vitalized.

The intimate impulse which accomplishes this vast trans-
figuration seems to be a subjective one, resident in the " proto-
plasm " itself, or, in other words, in the matter which is, for the
passing hour, in the living condition, and which sinks down from
that living condition, while in the act of raising up non-living
matter to its own level. The impulse, or working energy, is
apparently a transgression of subjective sentience into matter-
moving power or motion, effected at a great depth of atomicity,
on that low plane where particles are able to move in response
to a primarily sentient property which they universally possess.

It is from this low plane, or condition of tenuity, that " pro-
toplasm " is built up, and sets forth in its wonderful career.
On the earth as we now inhabit it, life struggles upward from
this deep-lying, sentient plane of matter in the teeth of a gigantic

6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

resistance. The energy in protoplasm is largely expended in
overcoming this resistance; the bulk of our living substance
has necessarily been impressed into mechanical service, — bone,
teeth, hair, cuticle, muscle, tendon, in order to make way and
obtain food. This, in fact, is life on earth, as man has thus far
led it; but it is possible to improve the earth as a theater of
life, and by the control and regulation of its " natural forces " to
lessen the resistance.

Growth is a law of living matter; and on the earth's surface
protoplasm is capable, under ordinarily favorable circumstances,
of increasing its bulk much more rapidly than it wastes, or dies.

It is able to conserve energy. A cell is capable of raising up
a greater amount of non-living matter into the living condition
than it loses by the act of so doing.

The only limit to such growth is the capacity of the earth as
a field for life ; it constantly sustains as much matter in the living
condition as it has room for. The various genera and species of
living things, moreover, mutually limit and restrict each other.
But for animals, plants would probably overrun the earth to the
full extent of its standing room ; but for some species of animals,
others would increase inordinately. Bacteria, in a favorable
medium, propagate at a rate of which no conception can be given
in figures.

The point of interest concerning this is that, given favorable
conditions, with no checks to its growth, the tiniest dot of pro-
toplasm might convert all the available matter of the universe
into protoplasm! or, in other words, when once a modicum of
matter, ever so small, has entered the living condition, it has the
power to draw an infinite quantity of contiguous matter into the
same life-expressing combination, and continue the process in-
definitely. It is as if the universe of matter were combustible
and the dot of protoplasm, introduced into it, were a spark of
fire, — with this important difference, however, that growth
of living matter implies the raising up of matter to higher degrees
of complexity, or the storing up of potential energy in matter,
the reverse of igneous combustion. While we cannot affirm that
growth of protoplasm is creative of energy, it is certainly con-
servative of energy in a manner elsewhere and otherwise un-
known.

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 7

In protoplasm, a higher or more primary attribute of matter,
to wit, sentience, appears to make heat, light, and kindred modes
of energy its servants and to successfully stem the ordinary
effects of katabolism.

In past ages of the world, noticeably the carboniferous, a far
greater quantity of matter has been in the living condition at
one and the same time than at present ; the indications are that
there have been periods when the continents sustained twenty
times more vegetable protoplasm, year by year, than during
the present era. From age to age the quantity has varied in
accord with the terrestrial conditions.

As yet we know no method of transmuting non-living into
living matter apart from the agency of previously existent
living matter. But no more can we at present make feldspar, or
mica, or gold, or silver, or lead. It is as likely that we shall discover
a method of producing living matter, as that we shall learn to
produce any of these substances. The task waits a deeper knowl-
edge of matter, but is impossible only for the present.

One reason for believing that new protoplasm and new pro-
tozoa no longer come into existence spontaneously is that many
or all of the micro-organisms which we study under the micro-
scope are new only in the sense of being newly discovered by us.
Many of the disease-bacteria were at least operative and pro-
duced the same poisons three thousand years ago. The dia-
tomaceae of to-day exhibit the same characteristics and the same
silicious envelope as those taken from fossiliferous strata laid
down in the seas of the tertiary epoch. In fact, many of the
genera of micro-organisms are the most venerable and changeless
of anything upon the earth. Nor can we wholly agree with those
who regard these minute creatures as the most rudimentary of
living forms. It by no means follows that because a living
creature is small, that it is therefore exceedingly simple and recent
in the sense of ancestry and heredity.

Another feature of this vast body of terrestrial living matter,
the most remarkable, characteristic, and important feature
indeed, is the singular mode in which it exists or lives, from mo-
ment to moment. Although of such vast bulk and weight when
considered in the aggregate, it is never found in continuous
bulk, but always exists as minute modica, or little measures,

8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

isolated one from another. On an average, these minute modica
of living matter or protoplasm are not much more than the
three-thousandth of an inch in diameter, but occasionally reach
the one two-hundredth and larger; and their true or typical
form is manifestly spherical. From the center of these small
spherules life is exhibited. In consistency, the living substance
is semi-fluid; it is so nearly transparent as to be deemed color-
less; and it does not give off odorous particles. As above
remarked, it is ordinary matter, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,
carbon, etc., and the cause of its peculiar behavior, in the living
condition, is in all probability the manner in which the particles
are combined, and their arrangement and relations one with
another.

More profoundly, when we seek to know why living matter
always assumes the form of and exists always in the small
spherical integers, termed " cells," we are brought to contem-
plate a new law of matter which apparently acts counter to
gravitation, or, as is more likely, prevails upon an interior plane
of matter within that on which gravitation acts. It is the sway
and prevalence of gravitation over ordinary matter which
causes the world of matter, as we see it, to appear lifeless and
inert. But in protoplasm, pure and unalloyed, we behold a law
of matter, find expression, subversive of gravity, prevalent
over it and transfiguring ordinary matter to living matter in
spite of gravity, so to speak. This may seem a bold statement.
Life, indeed, has been held by many biologists to be a co-relative
of gravitation, a cognate and derivative mode of the universal
energy of matter. Cognate, indeed, it no doubt is; derivative
also in the loose sense of being aided and facilitated by it in all
the larger forms of terrestrial life; for it is assuredly not the
intention here to convey the idea that the ordinary functions of
animals are carried on contrary to gravity or chemism. The
writer ventures, however, to set forth the conception that within
a normal " cell " of living matter there is an expression of
energy not derived from gravitation, but superior to it; as if
emanating from an inner seat of energy, as if acting upon matter
at a different angle or point d'appui. Such an opinion by no
means conflicts with the monistic conception of energy. It is
meant merely to set forth that life is not the immediate derivative

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 9

of gravitation, or chemism, which many physical philosophers
have been inclined to consider it, but rather a static property
of matter which antedates gravity, and, in the intimate com-
position of matter, outranks it.

Indeed, the truer view of this great question is probably that
life finds but an irregular, erratic expression in the superficies
of the terrestrial globe, where gravity and the grosser modes of
universal energy prevail as a rule. Yet the conception will be
foimd to grow in the mind of the student of living matter, that
this wonderful static property is a very universal property ; in a
word, that all matter is sentient at bottom ; and that its apparent
insentience, or lifelessness and inertia, as seen on the earth, is
less a natural than an unnatural and fortuitous condition into
which it has fallen from the peculiar recoils incident to planetary
formation.

This view need not incline the student to entertain pantheistic
conceptions of matter, or drift away to extreme opinions as to
a universal mind inherent in nature : an ocean of omniscient
intellect, from which our " souls " are stray driblets. On the
contrary, the entire trend and drift of biological science are to
the effect that the primary static property of matter is sentience
only in the sense that the raw flax is damask, that the crude ore
is a steel warship, and that in the great tracts of universal matter
there is nothing more intelligent than the elements of intelligence;
even as in " protoplasm " of lowly grade there is little save the
capacity to feel. Be it remembered, too, that there is now,
probably, no " protoplasm " existent on the earth's surface of
such lowly grade, such archaic simplicity upon the scale of
intelligence, as that which first stirred on the early shores of the
azoic oceans.

As the student examines those wonderful little integers, the
" cells," day by day, the inquiry constantly presents itself, Why
does the living matter adopt this form? Why does it live in
these little globules of uniform size.? — for although the size
of cells differs considerably relatively to each other in different
tissues and situations, the difference is mainly within certain
definite limits; and the general type and form are unmistakable
and apparently unchangeable.

Why does protoplasm exist in such small measures of sub-

lO SALVATION BY SCIENCE

stance, each scarcely more than a pin's point? Why do its
" cells " fail, since they are constantly growing, to attain larger
size, an inch or more in diameter? Why do they not coalesce
in the tissues into one sentient working mass? And why, on
the contrary, do they constantly divide, when these small dimen-
sions are reached, and become dormant, die even, rather than
transgress them? These are inquiries which the student will
find often recurring as he observes cell life. The idea conveyed
from the totality of such questionings is one of a certain ever-
present barrier to protoplasmic life, or a constantly restricting
law which makes life on the earth possible only in this small form,
or type. Some stress of terrestrial matter appears to confine
life to this minute expression. This little cell is the only way
in which life up-wells from the profound depths of matter. For it
is apparent that the cell is but the form, the tiny thread-like
channel from a deep-lying stratum, through which some very
esoteric or final property of matter flickers up.

So great confusion of thought has often been exhibited on
this subject of cell consentience that it is important to set the
matter in a clear light. In the cell-of-life we have presented the
spectacle of a thousandth of a grain of matter — oxygen, hydro-
gen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus — which has set itself to live,
set up for itself as against the rest of the universe, stepped out
from its former relationship and allegiance to other matter, and
started a new little world of its own. For that is what a living
cell really is: a minute portion of universal matter which has
withdrawn from the rest and set up autonomy. The laws of
matter no longer control this thousandth of a grain of matter as
formerly.

In every animal and in every cell there is always matter,
a large per cent, of its bulk, which is not living, and hence inert ;
but the really living portion of the cell carries itself in defiance
of gravitation. True, it is borne on by the earth on its orbit and
revolves with it ; none the less it is able to direct chemical action
for its own behoof and combine forces to overcome gravity when
it wishes to climb hills or trees. In a word, it fights gravitation
to do as it pleases, and succeeds. So long as it lives and is not
crushed out, it is to a degree independent and self-direc-
tive.

THE CELL-OF-LIFE II

The present development of life on the earth began in the
age which geologists term the Silurian; but the presence of
graphite in the Laurentian, or " azoic " rocks renders it not
incredible that there was a previous life development which termi-
nated, or was followed by a period of high temperature.

But to return to what is known, keeping it separate from con-
jecture, we find that low forms of unicellular life were existing
on the earth many millions of years ago. Geology affords the
evidence of this, though the exact number of millions of years
is still debatable. That is not material to our purpose, however ;
it was a very long time ago. Fire, w^ater, and unicellular life
have wrought together to make the earth's surface what we
find it to-day. But geologists are agreed that there was an azoic,
or lifeless, age, followed by an epoch when protozoons — vege-
table and animal cells of life, the monera, protamoebidag, diatoms,
algse, myxopods, rhizopods, ciliata, flagellata, et al. — had
appeared; unicellular creatures from one ten-thousandth to a
hundredth of an inch in diameter.

For millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, certain
of these protozoons were the sole inhabitants of the earth which
was fit for no higher form of life; or, if fit, no higher form had
developed. Nothing more graphically illustrates the wealth of
time at Nattire's disposal, or the fact that the course of nature
cannot be judged by human standards. Metazoons, creatures
of higher, more complex organization, were to appear on the
earth ; yet through all these millions of years no sign or semblance
of them was visible. Were these millions of years of unicellular
life necessary to prepare the earth's surface for metazoons?
The question is idle. Every measure of our estimation of nature
breaks down on extended application. We have no code of
morals for nature and can have none, for nature is eternal, and
man a being of yesterdays and to-morrows.

The point to make here pertains merely to the fact that for
ages and epochs, to which all subsequent time is but as an hour
to a day, a lowly imicellular life was all that the earth bore.

Observers from afar, if such there were, might well have con-
cluded that there would be no further development; thus other
planets appear to our terrestrial astronomers ; the epoch of life,
or of the higher life-forms, has not yet arrived, or has passed.

12 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Then occurred a new departure in terrestrial life, an innova-
tion, but when, how early, or how late in that first long epoch
of unicellular life we do not know. Some time during those
millions of the earth's unhistoric revolutions an innovation on
unicellular life began. From accident of the environment, or
even perchance from a malformation, two or more cells began to
live united together, and to act in unison — the earliest meta-
zoon! Or, as some biologists conjecture, an unusually tough
cell wall, or membrane, may have restricted the ordinary course
of multiplication by fission. The offspring or increase of a certain
protozoon may have been unable to separate from the parent cell,
to lead an individual life apart, as formerly, and thus two or
more protozoons may have come to live together, in sentient,
protoplasmic contact as one life, and to act for a common in-
terest.

It is not essential to our argument to show how metazoons
began. The point made is, that they came into existence and,
beyond doubt, originated from the unicellular life which ante-
dated them. In some way two or more cells contrived to merge
their hitherto separate lives in one. Their separate sentiences
were pooled, so to speak, in one consentient life.

This was accomplished by means of close protoplasmic con-
tact, when the two hitherto separate cell lives coalesced, like
two drops of water on a window-pane. For it is possible for
two cells to live as one and form a single life or self-conscious
existence, if there is close protoplasmic connection between the
two, that is to say, if they touch each other, or are joined to-
gether by one or more threads of the sentient living matter.
When this occurs, the two cells may have one common life, or
soul, in place of the two lives previous to the union. One com-
mon life may take the place of two; and yet the two cell sub-
stances do not become confluent or coalesce ; they merely touch
and remain separate seats, or fountains of sentience; it is the
two sentiences only which unite; as when two springs which
issue at points near together, combine their waters in one rill.
The two cell lives combine in one stream, but the cells themselves
remain distinct, separate founts of life. The tremendous signifi-
cance of this fact is little recognized or understood as yet. It
subverts the present theological doctrine of the human soul.

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 1 3

It demonstrates that the intellect of man, the human personality,
is composite and dissoluble.

At the outset, however, certain hasty conclusions which have
sometimes misled investigators should be avoided. The bodies
of the higher animals are something more than confederations
of unicellular life; that is to say, they have not come directly
from a banding together of cells that once lived separately. The
animal organism develops from a single cell in the egg. All the
millions of cells in the various tissues issue forth, seriatim, from
this one reproductive cell, which seems to contain representa-
tive particles, reproductive molecules, or "biophors," and
" determinants," corresponding to every tissue cell of the parent
organism. We have by no means sounded the depths of this
latter problem, as yet. One conjecture is, that the entire animal
organism, in co-relation with its generative tissue, fructifies in
a species of sub --unicellular life; a germ life as far below the
tissue cell life in size and bulk as the cell is smaller than the
whole animal organism. The cell would thus appear to extrude
a. species of minute offspring which are assembled, as a colony,
m the ovum.

Animals are grand communities of cells and something more,
the result of long organization and new methods of cell life.
But this distinction does not essentially detract from the im-
portance which attaches to the phenomenon, disclosed to us
when two cells combine to live one life. I have termed this a new
departure, yet must not be understood to assert that it took
place suddenly, as being the beginning or end of an epoch, or
as indicating a " creative act," that mental lapse to which
certain venerable savants are so prone.

Here, too, it will be well to enlarge the common conception
of a cell. We are apt to think of imicellular Hfe as being very
low and simple, far down toward the primary molecules and
" atoms " of matter. Whereas the truth appears to be that the
" cell " is a relatively huge and vastly complex organism; and
that the unicellular life of the globe is an evolution of a most
hoary antiquity ; herewith also this other fact should be associ-
ated and kept in mind, namely, that in the bodies of metazoons,
in plants and trees, the unicellular type of life, this ancient Hfe
of the Silurian ages, still persists. In fact, it will hardly be too

14 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

much to say that the unicellular is the only real, distinct type
of life which exists, or has ever existed on the earth's surface.
Since all the metazoons are but more or less well-organized and
well-perfected confraternities of cell life, where the individual
lives of millions of cells are unified in a single, larger personality.

Many of the polyzoa are suggestive of the manner in which
multicellular organisms started. In paludicella we find cells
joined together, as joints or sections of the branches of a minute
tree-like growth, attached to stones in streams. It is a tree
in miniature; the cells grow forth, one beyond another, off-
spring above parent cell, but otherwise have little connection
one with another. It is simply an arboriform colony, or zoarium.
Other polyzoa, like mucronella, form mat-like disks on stones
in water, the cells lying in contact merely.

In certain of the zoaria of polyzoa, however, a considerable
degree of individualization is exhibited with division of labor
among the cells. In bristatella mucedo the cells not only adhere,
but the whole colony crawls with considerable facility from one
water weed to another. Kinetoskias is another zoarium where
the colony has arrived at the point of differentiation of fimction.
Adeona presents an equally interesting example of a simple
colony of unicells.

Among the hydrozoa, siphonophora affords an example where
a floating colony of unicells has taken definite form and organized
its individual cells to work for the common good. In siphono-
phora, as, indeed, in hundreds of other instances, the beginnings
of multicellular mind are apparent. That is to say, there is
present not only the ceU intelligence — that which pertains to all
cells — but that larger intelligence which comes into existence
from the consentience of the entire colony — the pooling of the
separate cell sentiences in one larger intelligence.

This habit among protozoons of colonizing — however it
originated — opened the way to metazoons. Often the colony
grows up around one mother cell, whose offspring instead of
dispersing remain loosely attached together. Of such agglom-
erations anthrophysa vegetans is a good instance.

In other instances the envelope, or cuticle, of the mother cell
expands and enlarges, forming a sac which contains the entire
colony for a considerable time, till the reproductive power of

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 1 5

the parent cell is exhausted. Eventually the sac bursts and the
group disperses. Many of the flagellates exhibit this phenom-
enon, the parent organism continuing to move about after
becoming a colony instead of a single cell.

In gonium pectorale, a volvocine of stagnant fresh waters, a
colony of sixteen offspring cells adhere laterally to each other,
in the form of a minute, rectangular plaque of a light green color.
Pandorina, on the other hand, gives birth to either sixteen or
thirty-two offspring, which live for a time in a species of globular
colony, inside a thin envelope, through which each cell thrusts
out two fiagella. While living as a colony, these sixteen or
thirty-two cells act together, as if actuated by a common impulse,
moving their flagella in unison to propel the colony. It changes
direction, tacks suddenly, and otherwise affords evidence that
all the cells are acting together as one. Either there is a sentient
contact which serves to enable the sixteen separate cells to act
as one, or else a temporary species of nervous system, consisting
of filamentous processes thrust forth from cell to cell.

In the oft-cited instance of volvox globator, the colony is of
more complicated structure and forms a large green ball, to the
surface of which the individual cells adhere in great numbers, as
many as twelve thousands to a ball having been counted. In
this case they appear to touch each other and are each provided
with two flagella which project though the membrane. Here
each cell appears to be a free agent within its own envelope,
but projects protoplasmic threads or filaments, like telephonic
wires, into its neighbors, by means of which a network of con-
sentient communication is established. At an internal signal
all the thousands of flagella swing in harmony like oars, and
the ball moves from point to point. It is clear that something
analogous to a nervous system is here present, even though of an
ephemeral nature, consisting of filaments which can be thrust
out and withdrawn at will.

In the dioecian volvox the male colony remains apart from
the female cellules, except at time of fecimdation, when both
colonies break up, scatter, and presently conjugate in pairs and
groups.

Colonies of protozoons which come from a single parent cell
present some analogy with a multicellular animal organism.

1 6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

which also develops from a single egg-cell. The way, however,
from a colony of protista to the organism of a vertebrate animal
is long and, in its aetiology, but little understood.

The first metazoons were clearly temporary makeshifts, owing
to stress of accidental conditions. It is likely, indeed, that they
had often occurred for millions of years, occurred thousands of
times, but had died out, or progressed no further than the polyzoa
we see at present time, owing to unvarying conditions, flood and
drought, heat and cold. But at some time one or more of these
unions of cells chanced to survive longer and took more perma-
nent form, sufficient permanence to carry it on and set up a new
mode of life by organization — that organization and differentia-
tion of cell function which was to play so grand a part in the
future.

Space and a desire to make the argument continuous prevent
more extended enumeration of such primitive unions of unicellu-
lar life. But one has only to look abroad on the face of nature
to see conclusive proof of the position here taken. In every
tree, shrub, and plant, in every animal that walks, every bird
and insect that flies, we behold an agglomerated organized mass,
or congeries, of cells, each filling its place and doing its appro-
priate part in a cell commonwealth. There may be thousands of
cells in the plant or insect, or there may be millions in the tree
or the animal. The proof, we say, is on all sides. Tree, animal,
insect, alike, are examples of this principle of e pluribus unum,
for the common good of all.

We wish here merely to show the manner in which ths
metazoons started, and the significance of the act when two
or more protozoons unite to live one life and become one larger
self.

No claim is set up here, that we know at present, from what
colonies or unions of primitive unicells the vertebrata were
developed. Nature, indeed, appears to have performed many
strange experiments in multicellular organisms, long-extended
and horrible experiments, which go far to convince us that we
must not deify or even personify nature. For nature is elemental
and impersonal. The unicells first organized in uncouth and
savage forms,

«' Dragons of the prime that tare each other in their shme."

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 1 7

Dinosaur, megatherium, and mastodon roared and battled
through ages that to man are incomprehensible.

«« A monstrous eft was at one time lord and master of earth,
For him the bright sun shone and his river billowing ran."

Man's hundred thousand years are but as a span to the era of
vertebrate monsters and monstrosities, while earth's young uni-
cells were making their first tremendous efforts at organization.

But when two or more cells unite to live together as one,
each has first to surrender, temporarily at least and in part, its
own self-conscious personality ; and then as a merger of all these
surrendered personalities there ensues a larger, grander self
about a new axis of self-consciousness.

The most perfect example of this self -surrender and resultant,
grand consentience is exhibited in the brain of man. Here
temporarily during the day some sixty millions of " cells "
extend filamentous processes and, all taking hold of hands, so
to speak, surrender each its self-consciousness and autonomy to
form the human intellect. From this grand surrender, and at the
instant it is made, there flashes forth the consentient human
personality, the " soul of man." It is done as if by electric
contact. This intellect or " soul " is the union of these sixty
millions of brain cell lives ; they surrender self to live as one.

But in the brain this is but a temporary self -surrender. Owing
probably to the severe vital draught which the consentience
makes on the individual cell the human intellect cannot remain
constant or continuous. There must be respite and recuperation
for the constituent cells. Accordingly we find that after ten or
fifteen hours the consentient strain is relieved; the union is
disrupted. Sleep ensues. Suddenly, as suddenly as it began, the
brain cells let go hands. The filaments are retracted. Contact
is broken. Each cell resumes its individual life, becomes itself
again, self-conscious, and attends to its own personal affairs —
nutrition, ehmination of waste products, rest, growth.

But the instant the cells resume self-hfe, the human intellect
has ceased, as when electric contact is broken, unconsciousness
supervenes.

jl8 salvation by science

^Tiy, it may be asked, why and how did the first two or more
protozoons come to unite their self-lives in one larger self?
From w^hat seems accident of the environment, on the objective
side; and for greater comfort, ease, and safety, on the subjective
side; or rather when accident, or "the law of chance," had
initiated the innovation, the subjective comfort which resulted
from it led to a voluntary and wilful continuance of the new
mode of living.

For by thus uniting, a division of the hard labor of living was
possible; the single cell was no longer compelled to face the
world alone and perform all the various kinds of labor which the
act of living necessitated. After combining, one cell could do one
kind of work and confine itself to that, and another, another
kind. One cell, or group of cells, could attend to locomotion,
as in volvox, another to securing food, and still another to diges-
tion and assimilation of the food.

Soon, indeed, one cell, or group of cells, in the union, took
upon itself the office of spying out food, or sighting danger and
notifying the motive group to move forward swiftly, or to beat a
hasty retreat. This spy cell, or group of cells, soon assumed
the leadership. In time, complete differentiation of labor-
function was effected. The locomotive or muscle group not
only performed no other kind of labor, but became unable to
perform other. Its internal organization conformed to this want
of the union. So of the group which seized, or digested food,
and preeminently so of the spy cell group which erelong devoted
itself exclusively to discernment, intelligent decisions and a
general directorate and protectorate of the other groups.

This apparent development of metazoons from protozoons,
of so great significance in the terrestrial scheme of life, was set
forth by this author some years since a little more in detail.

" Very soon after creatures composed of many cells (meta-
zoons) were developed from groups of unicellular life, the neces-
sities of locomotion in the struggle for food led to the differentia-
tion of certain tracts of cells as bone and muscle, and finally to
the development of the entire apparatus for mechanical move-
ments.

" Simultaneously, too, another peculiar species of differentia-
tion began to be necessary, namely, a special tissue, whose office

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 1 9

should be that of intercommunication between the different
associated cells and tracts of cells which were thus assuming
more and more diverse offices, and becoming somewhat different
in character, one from another. It was thus and for this reason
that a nervous system began to be needed and hence to develop ;
for the plastic, living substance has always shown a faculty of
adapting itself to widely variant functions and modes of living.

" Certain cells began to take up the business of receiving
sensory influences from outlying cells which were hard pressed
or in want of food, and of transmitting such sensory influences
to contiguous cells. In short, certain lines of internal cells began
to take upon themselves the task of conveying the sensations
of others from one tract of the cellular mass to another tract, and
of interpreting the sensation received from one tract to the com-
prehension of the sentience of another tract, so that action,
within its sphere of action, would ensue in the second tract. In
addition to their own sentient economy, these lines of cells in
the incipient nervous system took up the function of common
carriers of sense, and also the offfce of interpreters of the sensory
language of one order of cells — if I may borrow the figure — to
the different language of another order.

" Thus, humbly, as we conclude from observation of low forms
of life, did the nervous system, or tissue of intelligence, begin
to develop. Primarily there was but one or two simple thread-
like lines of cells attempting the office of transmitting feeling,
and succeeding indifferently at first; but as animals increased
in size, the business of telegraphing sensation grew, and a net-
work of lines was developed. Sensation was going both ways,
and soon the necessity of a common center to which sensory
influences could be brought, and thence distributed to their
proper destination, was forced upon the nascent, sense-conveying
cells, and a ganglion, or little brain, came into existence. The
confusion, too, resulting from counter-currents of feeling soon
led to the formation of double lines, one for transmitting sensa-
tion inward, the other for transmission outward; and thus the
divisions of sensory and motor nerves were inaugurated to and
from the little brain center, which presently assumed the function
of deciding upon the merits of transmitted sensations, and re-
sponding to them by a message from its own sensibility.

20 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

" Nerve ganglia multiplied as animals increased in bulk and
attempted larger movements; and in time, to avoid confusion
and get the organic business done, one ganglion was obliged to
take the lead and keep order among the other ganglia, to decide
between them when they got at variance, and generally to take
the office of head ganglion.

" Thus, in time, a larger and capitally important ganglion was
raised up into prominence to perform the function of oyer and
terminer, a cerebellum, and finally a cerebrum, — a mass of
highly organized cells which have from long use and inherited
development the capacity for intelligent perception and thought."

Without any attempt to present a consecutive line of examples
to illustrate the progressive development of the cerebro-spinal
system, the above outline indicates the principle upon which
this group of cells has come forward to occupy its present grand
prominence as exponents of intelligence.

In treating of the cells of the brain as individual, living crea-
tures, it may be well to set forth more explicitly what their status
of intelligence probably is, and explain how far they may be
regarded as sentient. It is not claimed for any unicellular
creature that it possesses rational powers to such extent as is
evinced by an organized tract of cells like that of the human
brain. For in the human brain we find a great number of cells
of four or more varieties, devoted some to memory, some to
reason or the comparison of experiences, some to vision, some to
hearing, and some to the estimation of the odors and flavors;
and it is the sentience and experience of them all which are com-
bined in the human intellect. Yet from observations of uni-
cellular life we find, as in the case of ciliates, that it is quite
possible for a single cell, no larger than many of the brain cells,
to possess not only sentience, but to acquire the data of mem-
ory, and to act from its previous experience. Many forms of
unicellular life, indeed, behave rationally; nor is there reason to
suppose that the cells of the brain are less capable of perception
and of memory. In the brain, however, cells of different tracts
are concerned with experiences of particular kinds, some record-
ing the data of vision, others the data of hearing, and still others
collating and comparing such data. It is probable that a cell
of the tract or group in the area of vision, for example, is largely

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 21

occupied with depiction of visual imagery, and becomes a kind
of living, sentient specialist, or expert in colors and scenery.

None the less it is a sentient creature, with its own internal
economy of nutrition and growth. In a word, it is a sentient
self. It perceives, lives and acts from its own personal point of
view, for its own behoof and welfare. This much is quite certain.
It is a sentient creature and within its limited sphere has acquired
a kind of wisdom of its own. More we cannot predicate of the
individual cell. It is a pygmy of a limited degree of intelligence.

Nor does our argument claim that the protozoons first banded
together from intelligent foresight as to the results of union. The
beginnings of metazoic life were probably accidental per se.
But the results of union and division of labor followed quite the
same, and it is from these actual results that our conclusions
are drawn. By union of their hitherto separate sentiences the
cells evolved a higher kind of sentience, a nous, a soul, developed
to a higher degree of intelligence, from the exercise of which
each cell of the organic union was grandly benefited in the matter
of food and protection, and is enabled to become a participator
and beneficiary of mind.

It may be added that the later physiology portrays the con-
nection and intercommunication of cells in metazoons as based
on and maintained by currents of " corpuscles," liberated and set
in motion by the cell metabolism and depicts life itself as aris-
ing from the reciprocal action of these biogenetic units of matter.

The passage from the unicellular to organized miulticellular
forms of life, from protozoons to metazoons, was primarily effected
by simple combinations of cells and varying of their functions.
It was thus that the animal organism originated. The question
of importance next to be asked is. What was gained by it? Of
what use was it? What advantage accrued from it to the cells
themselves which, from the strict biological point of view, are
not only the first, but the only type of life that has ever appeared
on the earth? since all life, organic as well as unicellular, goes
on by virtue and instrumentality of the cell mode.

What advantage therefore has accrued to the cell, and how
far has it by this means advanced toward that natural salvation
which is the goal of all life?

22 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

A survey of the whole field shows clearly that the single cell
made a great personal gain by uniting its life with its fellows.
This is apparent even in the primitive colony of ciliates, more
evident still in volvox, and grandly demonstrated in the animal
organism. The cell in the colony lived longer and more com-
fortably than when struggling for life, alone; and at the acme
of organization, in the vertebrate organism, we find cells which
have attained to what is, for a cell, immortality. In unorganized
unicellular life, the average life-time of a cell may have been less
than two days, not much longer. In organized metazoic life,
we find the neurons of the cerebral cortex of an elephant, or
a whale, for example, living two centuries. By combining with
their fellows, these cells, or their descendants, have increased
their span of life thirty thousand times !

In man these brain cells often survive for a century. Human
beings, with life-times correspondingly prolonged, would live
to the age of eighteen thousand years.

It is apparent, moreover, that these groups of brain cells would
live longer (for they give little evidence of having exhausted
their capacity for living on) but for the fact that they are dragged
down to death by the fate of the organism, i. e., the failure of
coordination among the other tissue groups of cells.

This is profoundly interesting as showing what cell life, under
favorable conditions, may accomplish in the way of a vast lon-
gevity, from successful combinations, and organization generally.
There appear to be cells of the brain which would live on for
many centuries were it not for accidents to other parts of the or-
ganism.

Generally speaking, longevity is the proof of correct living.
That cell, or union of cells, lives long that is well nourished and
well protected. No animal organism is as yet perfect, even
approximately so. All the groups of tissue cells have not been
equally advantaged by organic union, but taken together a great
gain has resulted, chiefly in the matter of food and protection.
The brain and muscle cells of the animal organism, for example,
have their food specially prepared for them along the intestinal
tract and brought to them in the arterial conduits, and they are
housed and shielded from the mordant action of oxygen and the
attacks of hostile bacteria by the integument and bony walls.

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 23

All the physiological cells are alike benefited in that prime
requisite, food; and this fact must be kept in view when the
higher social organization of the metazoons is considered. Food
specially prepared and refined by groups of cells which have made
this office their business, has largely conduced to the longevity
of the physiological cell and made brain possible. Without a
specially prepared food the organic cell could not survive for a
day. Improved food, protection from enemies and, subjectively,
that greater guiding intelligence that comes from organic life,
are the factors which have so improved the cell (the protozoon
developed to a neuron) that it lives for a century in man, and
in the whale, the carp and the elephant for two centuries.

In plant life as we now view it, banding together has not been
as advantageous for the saprophytic cell. We have trees two
thousand years old; but so far as we at present understand the
arboreal economy, the vegetable cellules are not long-lived.
This would follow, a priori, from the far less perfect organization
of plants, the more crude food supplied to the cells, imperfect
protection and the apparently inferior sentience of the cells them-
selves. The contrast but emphasizes the deduction made for the
physiological cell, namely, that it has attained its preeminence
by perfecting the organic union of which it is a unit. And the
inference has sometimes been drawn that could the metazoon as
seen in the animal organism, be given a more perfect development,
the component cells would reach that acme of natural salvation for
which they have striven for two millions of centuries and would
become, in very truth, deathless cells-of-life.

There is no more wonderful and grandly instructive spectacle
in nature than this widespread and long-extended effort of the
globe's unicellular life to save and preserve itself from hard-
ship, accident, disease and death. Nor has the effort been
" instinctive " in any other sense than all sentience is instinctive.
From the subjective side of life, the primitive unicells of the
ancient earth began to live together for mutual comfort, aid, and
protection, and continued these unions till by division of labor
and differentiation of function the simple colony developed into
the vertebrate animal organism, with its thirty specialized genera
of cells, all acting together for the common weal.

Man must still turn to the unicells for grand examples of social

24

SALVATION BY SCIENCE

organization and progress by means of organization. Vastly
and grandly more than is yet exhibited in human civilizations
have the protozoons united and combined for mutual better-
ment. In this maple, towering in leafy beauty, we may find two
billions of arboreal cells, organized, apportioned for diverse
labors, trained to special work, devoted and artisaned to the
production of fiber, bark, sugar, and chlorophyl, and all in an
orderly sequence of effects and a consecration of each cell self
to its appointed task, with an apparent content and faith in
the outcome, when each does his share, such as the human world
has never yet seen nor understood.

In that horse dashing along the track we behold several billions
of cells, each a living creature, an individual life, banded, united,
and organized in such multicellular complexity that it is the glory
of anatomy and histology even to have demonstrated and de-
scribed it. And in the matter of locomotion — since speed is
the criterion in the horse — we may behold this entire body of
cells moving at a speed a million times greater than that at which
it would be possible for these cells to move if living isolated
and solitary, as did the ancestral protozoon on the beach of the
Cambrian Ocean.

We should not here be understood as denying or leaving out of
the account the influence which the metazoic mind exerts for
longevity. It is by reason of this superior intelligence, obtained
by banding the small wits of the cells together, that those better
conditions were gained which make cell longevity possible. Nor
yet would we appear to assert that the animal organism lives for
the benefit, or at the behoof of the component cells. In the animal
brain the cells live to themselves only during the eight or ten
hours of sleep daily. During waking hours the lives of all these
cells are consentient, banded and blended together to form the
self-conscious mind of the animal, which devotes its energies
to supplying the animal wants. Without this consentient
vinion for mentation, locomotion, and general muscular activ-
ity, the animal could not have developed. The component
cells improved, each its individual condition, by forming a con-
sentient partnership.

This point might readily be given fuller illustration, and a
thousand examples of metazoic life cited in evidence of the prin-

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 25

ciple, rationale, and intent of the passage from unicellular to
multicellular life; but the idea has been conveyed; and this is
enough for our present purpose. The genuineness of the deduc-
tion can hardly be controverted. By banding together and by
organization, with division of labor for the common good of the
union, the cell-of-life, as first seen in the protozoon, has come to
live two centuries, instead of two days, with a legitimate inference
that it is practically deathless under improved organic conditions.
That is to say, there is nothing in the constitution of the cell, no
biogenetic law, that prevents it from living indefinitely. Revo-
lutionary as this deduction may appear to those who teach and
believe that death is a final law of nature, the reverse of that
doctrine can now be confidently maintained. It need scarcely
be added that this conclusion is of the greatest significance, as
affecting our beliefs concerning human life and the future of life
on the earth.

And after metazoons, what? After cell unions and cell organ-
ization in the animal organism, what next? After an organized
development which has resulted in the advancement of the cell,
the brain cell, to a high degree of intelligence and a grand lon-
gevity, what next in the line of its progress ?

Bearing in mind that the cell is the original and, strictly speak-
ing, the only type or mode of life which has thus far appeared on
the earth, what means will be adopted to still further improve
and better its lot? Will it of its own initiative inaugurate any-
thing better or greater than the animal organism as we see it
about the cerebro-spinal axis in vertebrates?

The answer would seem to be no, as regards the individual
cell, and yes, as regards the consentient union of cells as dis-
played in the brain and mind of animals and man. And if yes,
what has already been accomplished in this larger corporate
capacity? Union and organization are manifestly the order and
method of all life on the earth. Since the cell banded in the
metazoons and made a grand gain for itself in so doing, we might
naturally look for unions of metazoons for mutual benefit and prog-
ress. But here, as against such actual unions by contact, the physi-
cal laws of the globe of matter on which we live interpose obstacles.

26 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

We cannot have sixty millions of men, or monkeys, or elephants
living in a ball, like volvox. Contact-union for mutual aid, defense,
protection, comfort, and improved food is limited. If we at-
tempted to unite or blend a nation of people as a metazoon, or
even make it resemble one in the matter of consentience, as, for
example, the eighty or more millions in the United States, or the
forty millions of Great Britain, every person, or citizen, would
need to be represented as almost wholly deprived of locomotion,
and seated, as if at a desk or table, in one place, where food and
the material for his work were brought to him in ducts and tubes.
Still further, it would be necessary to conceive of them all as
built in and encased by the substances which they manufacture.
Further still, and most essential of all to the truth and pertinence
of the simile, we should need to depict every citizen as connected
with his neighbors and through them with every other citizen,
by cables, bands, or cords of sentient living matter continuous
with his own living substance. We must picture, too, the more
prominent class of citizens as having thrust forth immensely
long tentacles, forming nets of this same sentient matter, extend-
ing long distances from their bodies, and lying in close contact
with similar tentacles belonging to hundreds of their fellows,
in order that they may feel and literally sense all that these others
do or think.

If this condition of things existed throughout the nation, we
would imdoubtedly find the individual citizens living as one
enormous National Person, In place of eighty millions of indi-
vidual men and women, we would see them unified in a self-
conscious national life. Such a nation would act and conduct
itself among other nations as a Personal Being.

Upon a lower plane of inorganic relationship of particle to
particle, in the atomic sense, it is possible that such a unified
personality possesses the universe, answering to the indefinite
conception of deity. Gravitation has been held to be the lowly
organized personality of cosmos, expressing itself in natural
phenomena. Von Hartmann, in his " Philosophy of the Un-
conscious," appears to have grasped some such conception, which,
however, he immediately perverted to the exigencies of an
immoral philosophy.

Since meta-metazoons, as of vertebrates, are physical impossi-

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 27

bilities, the advantages which come from union and organization
have to be secured in a different way, by other methods of
obtaining the necessary consentience.

In hymenoptera (insect metazoons) the bees and ants offer
suggestive examples of social and economic imions. In the
swarm and apiary we find that differentiation of fimction and
division of labor have proceeded far, and taken their place in
heredity ; and in the case of the queen bee the social organization
has operated to greatly prolong her life. Swarm life also serves
to afford general protection from enemies, equalize the food
supply, and defend the union against the rigors of climate.

In the termite ants we find not only all these advantages
gained from swarm organization, but others that come from the
war-like operations which organized imion renders possible.

In bird life, crows, pigeons, geese, penguins, and many other
species have attained advantages from rude organization; and
in mammalian life there are many humble examples of flocking,
herding and banding together for mutual benefit, to gain pro-
tection from enemies and to secure food. The wild horse, bison
and caribou herd for protection ; wolves pack, to pull down larger
animals for food; baboons, monkeys and savage humans band,
tribe and horde for protection, better food and companionship.

The lower vertebrate orders and primitive man have thus
set us examples, so to speak, pioneered the way and initiated
that larger organization by virtue of which " civilization " has
arisen. The early and wild mutations of men furnish complicated
yet fairly clear studies of the development of the nation from
the tribe and the clan. No different principle is involved than
that seen to be operative in the flock and herd, and also in the
ant-hill and hive. It is the " instinctive," sentient effort and
push of the cell-of-life to obtain better conditions.

It is not the intention here to enter upon the political history
of mankind, the rise of nations and empires, or the causes of
their decline. Nor yet to trace the beginnings of commerce, or
the rise of the arts and sciences; or recount the history of war
and the constant world-wide struggle for freedom from oppression.
It is all a part of that process of union and organization of hu-
manity, to secure higher advantages. Something analogous to
it has taken place among the tissue cells in the development of

28 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

the animal organism: the natural clash of conflicting interests,
the fight of self against self-surrender for the common good,
that self-surrender which comes so hard, yet always redounds
subsequently to the individual good and ennoblement.

For fifty thousand years the effort at human organization
has ebbed and flowed, operating blindly, misled by a thousand
false ideals and " revelations." Religion has fought against
religion, cult against cult, and " god " against " god." For
the true law of human progress was not yet perceived. The
ideal of htunan confraternity was not yet recognized ; that ideal
which the convexed surface of the globe so strongly suggests,
and which the greater history of cell life so convincingly teaches.
For it is the inestimable privilege of our science to narrate the
rise of the cell-of-life and demonstrate the method and law of its
progress; to found natural salvation and uphold a new ideal;
to confirm the doctrine of human brotherhood as taught by
the Founder of the Christian religion and, incidentally, to show
why that sublime doctrine has for nineteen centuries appealed
so strongly to the hiunan heart ; because it is a law of terrestrial
life and a necessity to further human progress.

The advisability of peace and good-will among men had been
taught before the Christian era, and the advantages of harmoni-
ous action set forth by others; but the Personage who appears
in history as Joshua, or Jesus, was the first who profoundly
felt and lived it, and gave his life for it. In his mind glowed that
divine ideal of a " kingdom of God " arising from brotherly
love and that mutual cooperation and union of all humanity
which alone can insure salvation imder nature. Biology endorses
with a cordial reverence the tremendous efficacy of that ideal
and shows it to be in line with the whole progress of life on the
earth. Science now labors for the realization of that ideal.
Every other doctrine of the present Christian faith will fall, its
eschatology fade away. That alone will remain ; for it is, indeed,
millions of years old; it has been operative for two millions of
centuries. Thousands of years before our era, unhistoric Christs
had announced it in horde and conclave and died for it; but
Jesus put it in the form of a world-faith for this latter epoch;
and his service of love must ever command our reverent affec-
tion. He identified himself with that universal law of life by

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 29

virtue of which corpuscle and primeval psychon surrender their
self-lives to form the cell life, the cell the human intellect, and
by virtue of which still the human life will hereafter live in the
grander life of a deathless humanity.

For the psychon is not self-lost in the cell, nor the cell in the
organism, but from its self -surrender lives a better and longer
life; and in the future grand sodality of human life the indivi-
duals will become immortal, even as the cell has prolonged its
life in the brain. The vital unit is not lost in the union. What
it gives of self to the organization returns to it again with com-
pensations ; and he who casts his life into the consentient human
effort, takes it again, ennobled by self-sacrifice; it returns to
him, christened and imbued by the larger life of which for a time
it has formed a part. The brain cell could never have attained
its present estate but for the greater personal life of the organism
in which, for a part of the time, it blends itself.

For the point to be kept steadily in view is, that cell life,
perfect enough not to die, but live on continuously, is a question
and merely a question of excellent food, protection from injury,
loftier joys and germinal renewal, and not that death is a final
" law of natiu"e," as a false eschatology has hitherto taught
mankind.

If the science of biology teaches anything, it teaches this
truth of the possible deathlessness of cell life on the earth ; and
this truth is to the last degree important and revolutionary.
The doctrine that death is a final " law of nature " has been
made the corner-stone of that other cardinal doctrine, namely,
the " disembodied spirit " myth. With the refutation of the
doctrine that death is a " law of nature " will fall this latter
doctrine of disembodied souls. For it will no longer have a
raison d'etre. In its place will come that grander gospel that
life is the " law of nature," not death, and the demonstration,
long overshadowed by errors of theology, that the " kingdom
of God " is a natural development of life on the earth.

Two millions of centuries have struggled forward in pain and
travail to make the human brain capable of the human intellect.
It is a priceless heritage, the great ancestral estate of humanity.
It is not destined forever, nor much longer, to be lost in death;
we shall carry it through to a greater destiny. The true scope

30 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

and intent of life is now just dawning in the minds of men. We
are waking, — after idle dreams, — waking to what we can do
and be, waking to the great possibilities of science, waking to
live, instead of resigning ourselves to death and mythical promises
of ghost life.

But how ? How will this be accomplished ? Granted that the
cells of the human brain may live for a centtiry, the entire human
organism still dies and the cells perish with it. How will this
fate be altered or averted?

The answer is plain. It is already outlined and indicated in
the manner and the means by which the cell has prolonged its
lifetime from a few days to a century. We have but to study
the rise and progress of the physiological cell. Its life history
is set before our eyes in the animal organism. By union, organ-
ization, differentiation of function and division of labor for the
common weal, this long-perfected animal organism has been
developed. But now, to carry its development forward and im-
mortalize the component cells, an onward step in organization
is necessary. The human individual must be made the unit of a
greater system, even as the cell has been the unit of the animal
body.

And this greater system of union, organization and division
of labor has already been initiated, unconsciously, it may be
said, on the part of mankind. For thousands of years human
beings have been banding together to this very end, unconscious
of the real purport of their effort! The personal ends which,
individually, men have had in view, as the motive of their labor,
eventuate in a greater achievement than they wot of. For it
does not follow that the human intellect, composed of cell sen-
tiences, can always comprehend the outcome of its acts. The
intellect is not yet sufficiently consentient to perceive and under-
stand the deeper instinct of the component cells. Instinct, of
which we have heard so much, is the dimly perceived motive
and will of the cells.

But, as has been said, an organization by consentient or
" protoplasmic " contact, human being to human being, is im-
practicable under the laws of terrestrial matter and undesirable
for ideal and economic reasons. We therefore resort to a better

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 3 1

kind of union and organization — better because it affords
greater individual liberty, based on intercommunication by the
use of abstract signs and symbols, and also impress the more
ethereal states or modes of matter into our service to accomplish
intercourse; so that personal feeling and thought (which is the
feeling of the brain-cells) can be freely communicated from
individual to individual, as freely and intelligibly as if by contact
of protoplasmic filaments. Protozoons, indeed, might never
have united to form metazoons had they possessed anything
like human facilities for intercommunication. They were de-
pendent wholly on touch and feeling, and on this sentient basis
the animal organism, which we inherit, grew up.

The extent to which this humanly developed system of inter-
communication has progressed need not here be described.
Language, commerce, education, the industries, arts, sciences,
law, religion, medicine and the entire social order have come forth
and grown up from it. Mails, transportation, telegraphy and
telephones are adaptations and inventions to effect a larger
intercourse. In fact, the means and facilities for communication
are now ample. It is not lack of these which delays the progress
of humanity. A most rapid advance is possible. The obstacle
to progress is the lack of the spirit of cooperation, lack of confidence
and good-will, lack of understanding of the real situation. Instead
of this essential good-will there is suspicion, envy and hatred,
which pave the way to violent acts, war and destruction of the
hard-earned fruits of labor.

It is the same ancient dislike of self-sacrifice seen in the proto-
zoon, which so long delayed metazoic life; the same unbelief
that the merging of self in the community will redound to the
benefit of the individual; the same reluctance to work for the
common weal; the same self-love that makes so many millions
of our fellows unwilling to share and share alike with others,
blinded to the fact that their greater happiness lies in just that
act of self-surrender! Blind, too, to that other greater fact,
that along this line of self-sacrifice and cooperation alone lies salva-
tion from disease and death. This is the Way.

Just as the cells unite their lives and work together for the
common good, so must the citizens of a nation or country devise
methods and form habits of imited effort, to accomplish great

2,2 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

ends. The first step to this is good-fellowship, good-will one to
another, mutual confidence, and a determination to cooperate.
There is no other way. Selfishness is retrogression. The way
to enduring life is through consecration of self to the common
good. This is the lesson from the cells. This is the method of
nature. By following this method, for example, multicellular
man may live eighteen thousand years. He may live forever.

In imicellular life, no separate single cell, by any device, or
husbandry of its life, could have lived a century, or a year. It
is only by union and self-consecration that the long-lived organ-
ism has been developed and the neuron become a partaker in its
longer life. And even so in organized, perfected humanity the
component individuals will become macro-biotic.

By united effort all are raised up to a higher plane of life.
Faulty and imperfect as it is, human civilization has doubled
the years of man. Twelve centiiries ago the average length of a
human life in Europe was evidently less than eighteen years. But
compared with what science could do with its present resources
of knowledge, existent civilization is but the most rudimentary of
organizations. The effort at an advanced civilization is barely
inaugurated, as yet. All the great results are to come.

The only obstacle is ignorance; ignorant distrust, ignorant
hatreds for creed's sake, or for race's sake; fatuous ideals of
patriotism, forgetting that all men are brothers; insensate
ambitions to build up one nation in wealth and political power
at the expense of the rest of the world, reckless of the refluent
wave that will sweep it away in blood and loss.

The priests and preachers of Christianity have made but a
feeble progress in convincing the world of the truth and utility
of this great doctrine of Jesus, because they have not compre-
hended it themselves. They have understood neither its scope
nor significance. The great doctrine of brotherly love and human
equality has been preached rather as a sentimental tenet, a
species of Sabbath-day duty, a symbol of allegiance to the
church, a kind of holy discipline for the soul, to prepare it for
" another world." They have missed, lost and sacrificed the
power of the golden rule as an agent for controlling and elevating
mankind, because they have made it a shibboleth of church
membership rather than a prime requisite of human progress.

THE CELL-OF-LIFE ^^

The real significance of this doctrine has yet to be made plain
to human eyes; its real strength has yet to be manifested.
Then, not till then, will the hiiman race accept it and act on it.
This deeper-lying truth of life has yet to be instilled in the mind
of humanity. Church Christianity has never evinced an im-
derstanding of it, never can have an adequate comprehension
of it, as long as the " kingdom of God " is believed to be an
immaterial realm of disembodied spirits in some unknown
quarter of the universe. The Son of David distinctly and re-
peatedly claimed to be the Hebrew Messiah, the realization of
the prophet-promise of Jehovah to the patriarchs. He is a rash
commentator who asserts that the Beni-Israel ever believed this
promised Messiah to be other than a terrestrial one, the foimder
of a kingdom of God and of Israel on the earth. There has been
a fatal break in the facts of Scripture here, an insincere com-
promise with Zend-Avestan spirit myths, which has always
weakened Christianity as a world faith, and from which science
will now shortly compel it to piu'ge itself or fall.

The golden rule is no sentimental phantasy of an exalted
dreamer, but a matter of human utility and necessity. This is
the Way, and until it is adopted, nationally and internationally,
mankind will stick and pause in its onward career. It is a prime
requisite to the farther progress of human life, and as such must
be recognized by civilized man everywhere. It is that greater
Christianity which is yet to come.

The difficulty of initiating an era of good-will and mutual
cooperation lies not so much in the perversity of men, individu-
ally, or their inherent imwillingness to make those needful
sacrifices, as in our present inability to bring about a world-
wide imderstanding and to secure common consent of all parties
and peoples. Thousands, yes, millions of the dominant race,
are convinced that the highest good of all lies in an unselfish
federation and organization of all terrestrial interests. But
there are the alien races, speaking other tongues and intensely
jealous of the dominant race; and even worse, there are the
oppugnant religious systems, each claiming to hold all the truth
in the universe, possessing each a supreme deity and sacred
ritual of its own, and denouncing the votaries of all other systems
as enemies of Good and emissaries of Evil.

34 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Strangely enough — where the converse should hold — it
is religion which will longest bar the coming of " the kingdom
of God! " Sadly enough, too, it is not those tenets that pertain
to life on the earth which have set sectaries so inveterately apart,
but doctrines concerning future paradises and gehennas.

The saddest spectacle which the earth presents is that of
the zealot millions ready to carry war and devastation, from
continent to continent, in the name of Allah or Jehovah. If
the biologist ever utters a prayer it is for human deliverance
from religion in the fossil state. If one world-task looks harder
than another, it is to redeem the human brain from the incubus
of religious indoctrination, and set it natural again, capable
once more of a normal perception of truth. Herakles of old
might have blanched at that labor.

For the brain is " formed "and the courses of thought molded
to doctrinal ideas, taught by church authority. When these
doctrines have been inculcated for centuries, and then found to
be wrong, the task of rectification is a most disheartening one.
Considered in the gross, the entire brain of humanity, at present, is
imder the spell of erroneous creeds, and does its thinking along
perverted channels of mentation. The belief that this earth is
merely a place of probation for heaven after the death of the
body is the worst possible initiative for the achievement of that
natural salvation which is, and has ever been, the real goal of
life. Mankind cannot rise in opposition to its own faith, nor
will the effort to attain a natural salvation begin in earnest
until the truth and the facts concerning the soul of man are
imderstood and accepted.

The inference and argument for natural salvation have brought
us, step by step, from the protozoon to that wonderful congeries
and federation of cells, grouped about the cerebro-spinal axis
of man; in other words, to man in his present imperfect social
organization; his blindly selfish attitude to his fellow-beings;
his weapons and engines of destruction ; his standing armies and
navies; his wars and his antagonistic creeds. That confident
cooperation and good-will to his fellows, necessary to organize
humanity for its crowning achievement — the achievement of
immortal life — have yet to be inspired in the hearts of men ;

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 35

and the point to be kept in view is, that this is the inspiration
imperatively necessary to future progress, the sine qua non of
the human situation.

No gift of prophecy, no skill of divination, is required to
forecast what might be done on our planet in half a century of
good-will and cordial cooperation among men. When the billions
of hard-earned wealth, now wasted in war and warlike equip-
ment, are applied to research, discovery, invention and the
general application of knowledge to the amelioration of human
life, then will begin an era of human advancement to which all
previous progress is as a fitful starbeam to the glory of the rising
sun! Dull is the mental vision of him who cannot discern this
promise of our incipient sciences. It will surely come; but it
might come speedily, before the year 2000. It will come from
the combining of all human knowledge, the joining of brain to
brain by mutual incentive, like cells of an electric battery, joined
to raise strength of current, to secure that consentient elevation
of intelligence which will carry achievement to an ecstasy of
enthusiasm and great hope.

There is inventive talent enough in the general brain of man-
kind, now lying inactive, unemployed, or perverted, to obviate
most of human ills, could this talent and genius be given oppor-
tunity and incentive, and be organized for work.

Fifty years of such organized effort would usher in achieve-
ments even to predict which would now be thought visionary.
Fifty years of confraternal endeavor would so perfect locomo-
tion and transportation that journeying to any portion of the
globe could be accomplished in from three to five days, accom-
plished in ease and comfort, and with a fair degree of safety.

This of itself would be the first and best step to effacing the
ancient antipathies of race and religion. The formula for intro-
ducing the Golden Rule among men is intercommunication
versus ancient isolation.

Within fifty years, perhaps much less, we might come to
understand the internal economy of the cell-of-life, and might
master the problems of its reproduction These problems are
already outlined; but we are still ignorant why the somatic
cells wax and wane, from youth to age; or more explicitly, what
charge of corpuscles, "biophors," or " gemmules " is concen-

36 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

trated in the cells of the germ-plasm; how this marvelous re-
charging of life from generation to generation is accomplished;
why the commingling of cells from the two sexes is advantageous,
or requisite; and, in general, the nature, chemical composition
and mode of production of these minute germ elements of the
organic tissues.

These are studies and discoveries which urgently wait the
scrutiny of earnest, well-equipped students of our science. That
they are beyond human discovery might have been believed
once, but will hardly obtain credit in our times. In fact, we
are on the brink of such discoveries.

We need to know the composition of the animal ovum, of
what the germinal matter consists, how and whence it arrives
there, and how it may be produced artificially. We have to
discover of what selected components — electrons, psychons, or
biophors — this animal ovum is composed, to the end that the
various tracts of somatic cells issue from it and coordinate in
the tissues of the organism. We have to learn on what actual
physical basis old-aging proceeds: whether as animal life goes
on the tissue cell is slowly depleted of its initial complement of
germinal matter; whether the original " charge " of ancestral
life-germs is gradually exhausted in numbers or potency; or
whether the contents of this body cell are homogeneous, and old-
aging ensues from imperfect foods and the ravages and deleteri-
ous products of bacteria.

In short, we have to learn whether the somatic cell rims down,
from expenditure of its concentrated biophors, or whether it is
simply smothered, poisoned, slowly encysted and suffocated by
the weathering, infiltration, and induration of the tissues in
which it lies embedded; whether old-aging is a slow form of
starvation from the contraction and hardening of the capillary
walls and the thickening of the limg membranes. Or yet, whether
all these causes operate together, namely, slow starvation and
suffocation, combined with depletion of the inherited germinal
matter.

For exhaustion or expenditure of the vivific imits of the
somatic cells, some process of inoculation, kataphoresis, or
inward radiation may be devised ; for the progressive suffocation,
poisoning-out and starvation of the cells, an amelioration of all

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 37

the conditions of life as we now live it, must be accomplished,
viz., the extermination of bacteria, purification of the atmosphere
and the use of foods adapted to protoplasmic renewal; all
purely physical problems and properly the subjects of scientific
research; and all in line and continuation of that natural salva-
tion of the cell-of-life from accident, disease and death, which
has been in progress since life began on the earth.

Parent and child, through a htmdred generations, constitute
but one human personality, pressing forward, in time, to become
something better, wiser, more powerful and happier. The parent
dies and the child succeeds, but at a vast loss of knowledge and
of time, not because death and birth are the ideal or ultimate
laws of life, but merely because we have not yet acquired suffi-
cient knowledge and power to escape death. The human per-
sonality, incarnate, living on from century to century, conserving
science, able to renew itself and resist all the vulgar agencies
of decay and death, is the ideal human being, not a chain of
parents and children.

But life, as we now live, is one long contention with accidents,
bacteria, improper food, duress of climate and hostile fellow-
creatures. First the cell was driven to a mode of reproduction,
to escape extinction; multicellular creatures developed from
cells and may be said to have inherited the reproductive mode
of life. Humanity has arisen from its lower ancestry to its
present estate, by virtue of the reproductive, alternate mode of
life. Hence, to die appears to many persons to be as natural a
fate as to be born; yet when more closely examined, death is
seen to be an unnatural event, a result of hardship and distress,
a fate repugnant to life everywhere and a catastrophe to be
escaped.

The Weismann hypothesis of life, death and heredity is so
well known and so generally accepted, in part, among English
and American biologists, that an extended statement of it is
imnecessary here. It has taken its place in our science ; and the
two important modifications to which it must be subjected are
now fairly well outlined. Professor Weismann has been termed
the Darwin of cell development ; to the present writer it seems

38 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

that he might better be called the Lamarck, and that the
Darwin of the animal cell has yet to appear,

Weismann's positions are (i) that death is not an inherent
necessity of unicellular life. The imicells do not die, but divide,
giving rise to offspring by fission. " No amoeba has ever lost
an ancestor by death." Weismann defines death as " a definite ar-
rest of life." " The proof of death is that the organized substance
which previously gave rise to the phenomena of life forever ceases
to originate such phenomena." Death implies the presence of
something dead. An amoeba, for example, produces offspring
by dividing into two amoebae. By this act of fission the parent
disappears in the two children, but has not died. Hence arises
Weismann's conception of the natural immortality of the proto-
zoons. The protozoons die only from accidents of heat, cold,
or violence. This view, however, has now of necessity to be
modified.

(2) These deductions apply not only to protozoons, but essen-
tially to all living creatures which produce offspring by fission;
and it is on this basis that Weismann has built up his theory
of the origin of death, briefly this: since amoebcc and other
imicells which reproduce by fission are naturally immortal,
death must be regarded as peculiar to multicellular organisms
(metazoa) . In the metazoons where the cells are organized with
differentiation of fimction, there are two distinct classes or
groups, those which develop to form the animal body (soma),
and the reproductive cells, confined to the generative tract.
The former (somatic cells) grow till the organic limits are reached,
live for a time and fall into senescence ; the latter (the reproduc-
tive cells) are the tmits from which the next generation will be
developed. The somatic cells are concerned only with the life
and welfare of the individual, the reproductive cells with the
continuance of the species. Of the two classes of cells the repro-
ductive live on from generation to generation, never die in fact;
the somatic cells alone are subject to death. The reproductive
cells are immortal, as the amoeba is immortal ; they die only by
the — to them — accident of the death of the body.

(3) It is an error to regard the animal or human organism
(soma) as the essential or important part. The reproductive
tissue (germ-plasm) alone is of importance. The soma is sub-

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 39

ordinate and exists for the purpose of carrying forward the germ-
plasm. It is its vehicle of life, exists for no other object, and
has no other raison d'etre. In the opinion of Professor Weismann,
the human brain exists solely for the purpose of nourishing,
protecting, and bearing forward the group of cells lodged in
the organs of generation.

(4) He further holds that the origin of death is found in the
consideration, that it is advantageous to the species that the
individual animals, or humans, shall die. " If for a moment we
imagine that one of the higher animals were to become immortal,
it is perfectly obvious that it would cease to be of value to the
species to which it belongs. On one hand, there is the necessity
of reproduction, on the other, the utility of death." He argues
that the duration of individual life is, in all cases, that which is
best for the species. For example, the May-fly lives but a few
hours, because no more time is needed for depositing her eggs.
With mammals, on the other hand, years are required for the
rearing of offspring sufficient to make good their places in nature.

(5) With regard to the proximate causes of death, Weismann
holds it to be due to the somatic cells losing the power of growth
and multiplication after a certain length of time, or a certain
number of cell generations. " Length of life in the individual
is dependent upon the niimber of generations of somatic cells,
which are able to succeed each other from the original endow-
ment in the ovum."

(6) As regards heredity and inheritance, Professor Weismann
discredits the common opinion that the personal lives, habits
and efforts of parents affect the character of their offspring. His
theory of a distinct germ-plasm controverts the concept of
Darwin that " gemmules " from all the somatic cells are garnered
up in the reproductive cells, and thus reduplicate the parents in
their offspring. Nothing of this, from the soma, is conveyed
to the germ-plasm, or affects, save in extreme contingencies,
the reproductive cells.

Like Herbert Spencer, Weismann conceives that life on its
lowest plane, unmodified by environment and unorganized,
exists through or by virtue of " physiological units," which he,
however, terms biophors (life-bearers), a conception not unlike
that of the plasomes of Brncke, or the plastidules of Haeckel.

40 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

In the lowest forms of life, the biophors are little organized ; but,
under the influence of the environment, as evolution proceeded,
the biophors assumed certain persistent relationships to each
other and formed themselves in fixed groups. Such groups
determined the character of the cell, and to these Professor
Weismann has given the name of cell- determinants.

Numbers of determinants are associated in larger groups,
termed ids, and ids again as idants: relationships of biophors
which form parts of the centrosome and chromosome of the cell.

(7) It is Professor Weismann 's conception that death —
touching its origin — is intimately connected with sexual repro-
duction.

That the protozoons are naturally immortal and that death
is confined to the metazoons has been refuted since Professor
Weismann put forth his hypothesis in 1881. Maupas had shown
that certain protozoons exhibit the phenomena of senescence
and die out, from intracellular causes; also that protozoons
conjugate sexually and are thereby restored. The hardship
of the terrestrial habitat affects even the lowest, simplest forms
of life, perhaps even the " biophors " themselves. The latest
advances in physics indicate that " atoms " tend to waste
away, and future researches may prove that the electrons are
not stable imits. Avoiding death is less a question of ultimate,
incorruptible atoms than of making scientific repair excel natural
waste.

That many groups of the somatic cells tend to senescence and
exhaustion, in time, is apparently true, but this tendency should
not be looked upon from the standpoint of the fatalist. Beyond
doubt it is a tendency and a condition which can be remedied.
The science which discovers the condition, will erelong discover
the remedy. The brain group of cells tends least to sen-
escence.

It is but natiu-al that having brought forward his hypothesis
of the germ-plasm. Professor Weismann should attribute a
leading role to this group of cells and give it marked prominence.
This is seen in his unqualified assertion that the individual exists
solely for the purpose of bearing forward the germ-plasm from
generation to generation. This deduction is true in a sense, but
hardly in that sense of finality which Professor Weismann is in-

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 4I

clined to ascribe. Beyond doubt it is difficult to say why life
exists at all. The purposes and intents of creation are not as
clear to the biologist as to the theologian. Professor Weismann
holds that the individual animal, or human, lives as long as is
necessary to bring forth and foster offspring, no longer, then dies
because its death is necessary for the good of the species, or,
strictly speaking, the good of the germ-plasm. If this assertion,
with its incident fatalism, were restricted to evolution in the past
and cast no black shadow on the future of evolution, it would be
more rational, less repugnant to the bond individual, who is
made to play the role of a hopeless serf of death. We cannot
resist the conviction that ultimately, at least, the germ-plasm
exists or will exist for the good of the individual, not the
individual for the germ-plasm; that the brain group of cells
is of greater consequence than the generative group. But
again we admit that it is rash to say that anything exists for
any purpose whatever. Purpose, conscious purpose, does not
come in until there is brain. There is apparently no purpose
in lower nature, or if a purpose, it appears to be an unconscious
one.

According to the Weismann hypothesis, the reproductive
cells give rise to offspring by virtue of the permutations and com-
binations of their own constituent biophors; the somatic cells
do not contribute to the germ-plasm either from their substance,,
or otherwise. The soma, indeed, grows from germinal matter
in the reproductive cells, but exerts little or no influence upon
that tract. The germ-plasm lives apart and to itself, and is
sufficient in itself for all which we know as heredity, unaffected
by the life or culture of the soma.

But when we consider the intimate relation in which the repro-
ductive organs stand to the whole organism, when we contemplate
the close nervous connection and sentient sympathy betw^een this,
group of cells and the brain, when we consider the constant streams
of electrons which are poured to these cells from the brain and
other organs of the soma, when we picture the steady circulation
or corpuscles from the brain cells through these cells — it seems
well-nigh marvelous that this group (the germ-plasm) should be
so little affected, so little modified, as Professor Weismann would
have us believe.

42 SALVATION BY SCIENCE'

Later researches afford indications that the intimate causes
of old-aging are resident, primarily, in the cell nucleus. It has
even been held by one observer that the cell nucleus lives, indi-
vidual and apart from its cell host, originally intrusive and
parasitic. But if so, it has become so well domesticated as to
participate naturally in the life of the cell.

The nucleus is found to be made up of a series of net-works,
composed of a granulated substance chemically rich in phospho-
rus, to which the name of nuclein is given. These net-works
take aniline stains very readily, and are thus seen to be connected
one to another by the substance linin, which is not coloured
by the same dyes. Thus examined in old and yoimg cells, the
quantity of nuclein in the latter is found to be so imiformly
greater in many instances that the deduction is made that there
is a progressive diminution of nuclein granules from youth to
age, as the nucleus divides, giving birth to new generations. As
the nuclear granules diminish, the somatic cell falls into
senescence, sinking to a condition where fission ceases. For a
long time it rallies and divides again, but produces an enfeebled
offspring, till finally it encysts itself and forever ceases to be
parturient. The present theory is that no new nuclear granules
are engendered in the somatic cell. Like the worker-bee in the
apiary, it is differentiated and specialized beyond the power to
produce offspring. In like manner isolated ciliates lose the
power of reproduction, unless opportimity is given them for
conjugation with other individuals.

Brown-Sequard conceived the idea of reaching and restoring
the somatic cell by injecting triturations of reproductive glands,
as medicines; and beyond doubt methods of restoration by
inoculation, or vivific foods, will be discovered.

The rapidity with which the remotest tracts of cells in the
organism are influenced and permanently affected by the intro-
duction of minute quantities of remedial substances into the
blood-circulatory is now well known to the medical profession.
Such inoculation affords more direct access to the cellular seats
of life than the alimentary tract with its modifiying acids. The
blood is in immediate relations and actual close contact with the
cells which, in all cases, must be reached before remedial effects
are produced. Nothing acts in the animal organism until the

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 43

cell is reached and its sentient economy affected. Many eminent
physicians are, therefore, of the opinion that injection into the
circulation offers the best method of administering certain
medicines.

Inoculation to produce immimity from diphtheria, small-pox,
hydrophobia, et al., has been successfully practised for many years,
as also by veterinaries as tests for tuberculosis. The procedure
is in its infancy, as yet, but is one of great promise, since it is
the cell which must be acted upon, and the rapidly propelled
blood, reaching it almost instantly, comes in touch with its
sentient surfaces. As soon, therefore, as we can discover and
compose regenerating substances, or those which will stimulate
regeneration, the blood-circulatory affords an efficient route to
every cell in the body.

What these substances are, we do not yet know, whether arti-
ficially propagated nuclein, or reagents which stimulate its
growth in situ. But if anatomy and histology offer us one hint
more significantly than another, it is that the blood may be made
a breeding-ground for the regeneration of the somatic cell. A
thousand well-equipped investigators, starting off with enthusiasm
and rivalry to study this problem, would hardly fail in twenty
years to set us far on the way to the control of all life. What owe
rich men spend yearly in their vacuous craze for horse-racing
alone would more than equip and maintain these researches.
Such inane squander and misdirection of the world's hard-
earned money cries down Heaven's condemnation. But they
know not what they do! Misled and bewildered by erroneous
creeds and futile ideals, they know not how otherwise to spend
the millions which they even believe belong to them.

A hopeless phase of thought has come to many biologists from
regarding the ordinary course of nature as final for the human
race. Whereas, nothing is more probable than that we shall come
to direct and control the processes of nature in the cell. What
takes place in the nucleus and the causes of nuclear exhaustion
will yet be foimd a simple chemical problem. The control of
life in matter is unquestionably before us; the entire progress
and trend of research look to such achievements. But for this
outlook of hope, we might well accept the dictum of Bichat, that
" from infancy we die, day by day." The cells of the soma

44 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

develop in a certain way and to a certain end ; nor is there the
least likelihood that the human organism, of its present physio-
logical bent, would ever reach great length of life.

We mean that the somatic cells, imaided by the human intellect,
would continue to produce an organism, subject to growth and
decline. The ancestry and nuclear endowment of the cell carry
it to a termination of its activities. This is more apparent in
the dark-skinned races of mankind than in the dominant race,
and still more evident in the lower animal orders.

Lower, imassisted nature would live and die in alternate genera-
tions as long as the earth offered a foothold for life. The chemical
affinities and electric tension of terrestrial matter foster this
method of vital expression. There would be little hope of any-
thing much better or longer-lived. The earth is not, in its
present condition, a habitat for deathless life. Its inclemency, its
extremes of heat and cold, furious winds, hours of darkness,
variant electrical condition and, more inimical still, its hordes of
hostile bacteria, — all are against enduring life-forms. We see,
therefore, that in a manner the primary instinct of the early
races of man is right; this earth, unregenerate, is not the place
for immortal life. Some improved condition is to be sought for
that, some promised land, some realm of godhood. Not till
this century has the vision of all these human ages begun to be
interpreted. Alchemists had dreamed of a sporadic immortality
by magic potations ; but not till now have men come to see that
vastly prolonged life is to be the outcome of brain evolution
and the growth of knowledge.

We look up to the disk of the earth's older sister planet and
see its surface spangled with a strangely familiar geometry:
parallel " canals," or belts of vegetation, and at the intersection
of these canals " oases " which may be the Martian realization of
" heaven," from which the germs of disease have been excluded.
What interplanetary rivalry in good works do those " oases "
suggest! Will our earth ever tiurn its face to the gaze of the
universe, seamed by such giant engineering?

When we ask the question broadly. Why does the human
body grow old and at length cease from function? putting
the inquiry in the bio-physical sense, the answer seems to be
that the personal life embodied in the organism is at length

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 45

overcome and overmatched by the totality of the resistance
to Hfe which it encounters, from the embryonic stage onward;
more specifically, to the general telluric resistance, physical,
chemical, molar, molecular, which the protoplasmic molecules
of the organism meet with, as long as they maintain the personal
life. After adult age is reached, they lose groimd in the struggle
and at last succumb. The downward curve of the somatic cell
has begun. But there is a period, during adolescence, when the
cells gain ground, when they make head against the terrestrial
resistance to life and prevail joyously, with a sense of victory;
when the inherent energy of the personal life is more than suffi-
cient to breast the opposition.

We have, therefore, to picture this personal life of the cell
as an impvilse which for a time rises superior to the resistance,
then slackens and falls away to cessation.

Yet its source in matter is apparently a constant in nature,
inseparable from the material corpuscle and persistent in matter
at a uniform tension. Why then, in the human organism, is it
exhibited thus intermittently, in adolescence and senescence, in
youth and old age?

The answer is that human life, even as waves on the ocean,
or sound waves in the air, has fallen into the rhythmic, wave mode
of life, as a general result of the terrestrial resistance to life;
and that the cessation of vital energy, seen in aging organisms,
is apparent rather than real, marking a transfer of life from one
generation to another.

The transfer of life by means of the reproductive elements,
and the subsequent death of the parent organism, is a mode
of life into which all animal orders fell far back among the earliest
metazoons, if not in unicellular life itself.

It is manifest, too, that this tendency or life habit of humanity
is very deeply rooted in the cellular elements of our being. The
cell determinants are cast for growth and decline. Sterilization
of the reproductive tissue in the individual, removal of these
tissues, or the most rigidly enforced continence, has little or no
effect as regards the aging and death of the organism. The
tendency of the body to follow its inherited cycle of growth and
decline is inveterate, and not to be changed by the exercise of
the will. Something, indeed, this will-power of the personal

46 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

life may effect, but not that radical transformation of being which
the perpetuation of the individual implies. It is to our science
that we must look for prolonged life.

Procreative desire rapidly slackens in individuals to whom
life offers sufficient attractions to live on for life's higher, more
refined pleasures; and in this circumstance we have a certain
earnest of evidence that the higher intellectual life of the future
will physiologically redound to a prolongation of individual life.
Decline of the procreative instinct follows naturally when the
individual has hopes of surviving; and such decline and self-
continence react to prolong life; yet centuries would scarcely
suffice to alter the deep-seated trend and course of our ancestry.
It is to our sciences — the superior intelligence of brain — that
we look for aid in prolonging our lives. Man has already passed
the point where he relies for his progress on the tedious course of
terrestrial nature, unassisted. He reaches forth a Promethean
arm and, in the light of his stores of knowledge, bends lower
nature to his wishes. We expect to bring our sciences to act upon
the cellular basis of our lives and accomplish its regeneration.

Under low nature, man would never surpass the purely animal
cycle of organic growth and decline, of adolescence, matiu^ity,
and old age. It is only by rising superior to the lower course of
nature that man has become something more than an animal
order of life, recording experience in written language, kindling
fire, smelting the metals, impressing the lower animal orders into
his service, and even dominating the forces of nature, in order
to travel by steam and speak around the globe by electricity.
He has put lower nature in harness and now directs natural
law.

In view of these grand victories, why should he despair of
altering the lower course of nature in his organism and of direct-
ing the life of the cells of which his tissues are composed? The
question is a novel one, in this sense. Hitherto, biologists have
assured us that we must be content to be what our inheritance
would make us. That is the old cell doctrine in a nutshell.
Weismann and, in general, the German, Enghsh and many
American histologists base their theories of life on this assump-
tion, namely, that the ordinary course of nature must be final
as to man's future. Nature is fate.

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 47

But brain is higher nature, the acme, at present, of natural
development. Everything which makes man a civilized and
enlightened being has been obtained by brain mastery of lower
nature and the diversion of her ordinary courses to his advantage.
Why should we not expect to thus arbitrarily change and facilitate
the nutrition and life of the cell? In point of fact, that is what
has been done and is being done constantly in a himdred ways
already. The position of not a few biologists on this question
to-day is much as those who would argue that since a man can
walk but fifty miles in a day, afoot, by his natural means of
locomotion, or swim but twenty miles, he can never go to San
Francisco in less than sixty days, or reach Liverpool in less than
five months. Three himdred miles per day are as natural to
brain as twenty miles to muscle.

It is to science that we look for the control of cell life. Biologi-
cal science, it is true, is stiU in its infancy, but it is a very hopeful
infancy ; and it is the opinion of many of its best exponents that
within another quarter of a century we shall have penetrated
the secret of cell nutrition and growth, and opened the way to a
scientific renovation of the tissues.

But faith has to be engendered as well as discoveries made.
Enlightened man, indeed, is but just awakening to the idea that
he may possibly escape death by setting his wits to work to this
end ; and, as ever, there is the olden outcry of impiety raised
against the conception, as if it were wrong to try to live! As if
it were not natural to live on !

But greatly prolonged life implies an amelioration of all the
conditions of the terrestrial habitat, and within fifty years well-
nigh complete control of the aerial currents and rainfall might
be attained if only a modicum of the intellect of the race could
be concentrated upon these problems. This achievement would
go far to bring about that physical paradisation of the earth,
needful to redeem it from the imputation which it has so long
endured, of being " a dreary bourne " and a place of exile to
homesick souls who long to fiee away to some better land. The
earth will yet be made one of " the garden spots " of the tmiverse.
It is a purely physical problem, and not a little of the data for
its solution is already in our hands. Foretelling the weather is
the first step to controlling the weather. It is a question of the

48 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

electrical distribution and regulation of the solar heat which
falls on the earth's surface, and the direction of the " trade,"
or retro-rotary winds due to rarefaction and the earth's axial
motion.

The electrical distribution of the earth's share of the sun's
radiation will make it possible, not only to regulate the rainfall,
but gauge vaporization from the ocean and lakes. Droughts and
freshets, tornadoes and frosts, might soon become disasters of
a past age, if the resources of control which are already coming
within our grasp can be applied. What is expended in national
preparation for war, in a single year, would suffice to initiate
the preliminary plants and stations for experimentation in heat
distribution.

Climate is as much a terrestrial condition to be controlled
as a city's water-supply. A bad climate will be quite unneces-
sary in the year 2000. The problem of irrigation is properly one
of a regulated rainfall as well as of dams, canals, or artesian
wells. Vaporization and rainfall are the factors to be controlled.
An equable distribution of solar heat and a regulated electrical
tension are the agencies to be used to this end. The whole prob-
lem of climate-control is already outlined in physics, as to its
methods. We need but the wasted war appropriations and the
labor of idle soldiers to put it in operation.

Such a half century of rational cooperation would see even
more revolutionary advances in our methods of commtmication,
now effected by mails, telegraphs, and telephones. Not only
will messages and general news be transmitted, electrically,
but be accompanied by photographic and phonographic represen-
tation of passing events. But of far greater significance to life,
its prolongation and improvement, will be the conquest and
extirpation of those teeming hordes of bacteria which infest the
animal organism and render all organic life abnormal and pre-
carious. Human life in the future is to be liberated not only
from known " germs of disease," but those swarms of less deadly,
but yet deleterious micro-organisms of which the human body is
the host and which, by their presence and products, enfeeble
life and maintain diseased conditions. The human body must
be regarded not only as living amidst and externally exposed to
microscopic life of a hostile and noxious character, but as being

THE CELL-OF-LIFE 49

infested by such life which entering the blood-circulatory either
with food, water, or air, penetrate to every tissue and organ.

Ninety per cent of all human casualties are due either directly
to the presence of micro-organisms, or are induced by the more
or less remote effects of their activity. The extirpation of
bacteria will be a long step toward the achievement of vastly
prolonged life. Like all the others, it is a purely physical problem
and only waits combined action on a great scale on the part of
mankind. The habitat of man has to be purged and cleansed
from these now well-known causes of death. The task is too
great to be undertaken by individuals, and remains over for the
organized effort of nations and races.

To summarize Natural Salvation as outlined on the previous
pages, we have first of all to record and emphasize the later,
better conception of matter. That protean mystery of the
visible universe is not the dead, passive clay of a Supernatural
Potter, wrought, moulded, and formed only beneath his hand,
but is itself the Potter, both potter and clay : the basic substance
of a self -moving cosmos, an infinite and eternal entity.

This sublime conception alone comports and corresponds with
the evolution of mind, its desire of infinite opportunity, its
tendency to unlimited growth and its hopes of immortal life.
The universe is endless, the field which it offers life boimdless.
On the infinite breadth of Void lies outspread this inscrutable
mystery which the physicist now terms matter, but whose real
name mortal lips have never yet spoken, perhaps never will,
never can ; since to define it is to rob it of its most sublime attri-
bute.

Whence it came, or whitherward it moves, none can answer.
It is the unknown. We feel, see and study certain of its phases,
but of its origin, or destiny, we know nothing as yet.

Even our present scanty knowledge of matter enables us to
perceive that such are its attributes; and ever as the horizon
of our science broadens and the clouds of our ignorance lift, we
are led to regard matter with new awe and greater reverence.
Fresh from the mutations and catastrophes of a thousand world-
deaths, it emerges ever new, with the same omnipotent power to

50 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

create afresh. Yesterday, to-day, forever, it is the same ex-
haustless well-spring of motion, beauty, feeling and life.

One of the attributes of matter as observed in nature — its
primal attribute, probably — is a sentient property by virtue
of which it displays the phenomena which we term life. Matter
lives.

The first manifestation of life of which we have knowledge is
in the cell, as observed in unicellular life. Beyond doubt chemism
everywhere is attended and, indeed, initiated by a low degree of
elemental feeling, yet this property is at a great depth below what
we designate as life in the cell. Cell life is the result and product
of an extended organization of the lowly-sentient atoms, electrons,
or psychons, if these terms may be used as names for the most
minute particles of matter of which we have knowledge. In the
cell we have many billions of corpuscles — each from its be-
havior a sentient particle — extensively organized to accomplish
nutrition and reproduction.

Incident to the sentient property of matter there is a lowly
degree of selfhood, or incipient personality; and when the
corpuscles are organized in the cell, we find, pari passu with the
cell organization, a corresponding bund of selfhood, evinced in
the cell personality.

It is from studies of the cell organization that we have come
at length to grasp the principle and raison d'etre of all natural
organization, namely, to accomplish elevation of the lowly
sentience of unorganized matter to higher degrees of sentience,
having apparently as its ultimate object and end, animal intelli-
gence and those still higher degrees of intellect displayed in the
human brain.

Nowhere do we find intelligence without organization of the
basic substance. The small mind of the cell exists only by
virtue of an orderly arrangement of its protoplasmic contents.
This small, self-conscious life presupposes organization. Only
by means of organization is the low basic sentience of uncon-
ditioned matter, the untrained instinct-force of chaos, raised
up to intelligence.

Here is our master key to Nature: organization and intelli-
gence, rising hand in hand from elemental matter, each depend-
ent on the other, neither able to exist without the other. Mind

THE CELL-OF-LIFE $1

no more able to exist without its organized body and brain,
than body and brain can go on existing in the absence of the
conscious and subconscious mind. The one is the co-relative
and component to the other. They can no more be separated,
nor exist apart from each other, than the elemental corpuscle
can be sundered from its primary sentient property. Sundered,
were that possible, matter would no longer be matter ; the imi-
verse would vanish on the breadth of Void.

This, then, is the principle which the future psychologist and
theologian must grasp and incorporate, or find their doctrines as
a house built upon the sands.

On the earth thus far there has appeared only the cell type
of life, supplemented by more or less well-perfected combina-
tions of this type. From this vast substratum of unicellular
life has developed a complexity of cell unions, organized as plants
and animals.

By virtue of this extended organization, the estate and con-
dition of all the cooperative cells have been greatly improved,
their tenure on life enormously lengthened, their psychic power
as enormously enhanced.

From the Silurian ages there has been a continuous progress,
extending upward through plant and animal life to human life
in civilized communities, until as a result of the whole grand
scheme of organization, we have in the brain of man the highest
type of united cell life and unified cell intelligence, where the
cell (neuron) now lives a hundred years, and by further progress
may become immortal.

And it is to this entire cooperative effort of life-on-earth to
improve its condition and preserve itself, that we have given the
high yet humble designation of Natural Salvation.

HUMAN PERSONALITY

ITS COMPOSITE AND DISSOLUBLE NATURE

(1893)

Biological science places the long-debated problem of hu-
man personality iinder new lights. We are now able to demon-
strate how one particular group of cells in the human organism —
ceUs such as were originally, in the earlier ages of the earth,
separate unicells — combined, became modified and finally
united to form one larger, organized life, in conformity with the
law of vital progress, through organization, pointed out in the
first paper of this volume. The human brain, indeed, is the
grandest terrestrial instance of this symbiotic progress.

It wiU not be necessary here to enter upon an exposition of
the " cell doctrine," or point out that the human body is an
organized union of physiological cells, nor iterate the evidences
of the evolution of life. We begin, therefore, with the general
statement, that the human organism as we inherit it from our
ancestors, is an association of cell life, each cell a small organism
by itself and a descendant, far back, of a protozoon that once
lived apart from its fellows and was capable of making its way
alone in the world, having matter-moving powers and guided
by a lowly intelligence which stood to it as mind.

The present functions of the tissue cell of the animal body,
of muscle, bone, cartilage, gland, as we observe them, do not
imply a notable individual exercise or display of cell intelligence ;
such exercise of intelligence, however, is potential in every cell,
was once displayed by the ancestry of that cell, and might again
be called into use, if the conditions of its environment were altered
and demanded it.

In brief, the tissue cell is like an artisan who has so learned
his trade and has worked so long in the same factory, making

52

HUMAN PERSONALITY 53

the same kind of goods, that he now works with Httle mental
effort, because it is not required ; yet the capacity for other hnes
of work and thought still survives in him in some degree, although
he would very likely starve, or perish, if cast suddenly forth
into the wilderness. If the transition from his factory and his
habitual food and labor were made gradual, he would adapt
himself to the changed conditions. The capacity to so do is
latent in him still ; — and that is much the status of the tissue
cell of the human body as compared with its ancestral unicell
of the ancient earth.

We are speaking now of muscle, bone, or gland cells, in short,
of any and all of the thirty orders of tissue cells, save one. The
intelligence of that one has not been as much restricted by its
appointed task. We refer, of course, to that order, or genus of
cells which appear as brain and spinal cord, or the nervous
system as a whole. While the remote ancestry of the neurons
was the same as the muscle, bone, or gland cell, its differentiation
and training has been distinct; for the neuron has been the cell
whose task compelled it to extend its primary quotum of intelli-
gence and develop its lowly wits.

It is with this wonderful group of cells, the neurons, that we
have to deal in the vexed question of human personality (per-
sonal identity, self-consciousness, " soul "), and incidentally
to inquire whether this human personality is detachable from
the organism or not. Whether the human intellect can exist
and does exist apart from the human body, after the latter is
dead, or not.

We are not here understood as affirming that the cells of the
nervous system are the only cells of the organism concerned in
human personality, not even when this group is extended to
include the sympathetic system. Every group of cells in the
animal body is faintly and in some minor degree apparent in
the sub-conscious human intelligence. All enter into and con-
tribute to that great sea of feeling which we term the sub-
conscious mind.

Physiologists have even described a sixth sense which they
term the muscular sense — the indistinct sensory representation
of the vast group of muscle cells in the personality. A glance
at the organic mechanism is sufficient to show that these cells

54 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

and groups of cells can have but a secondary, or reflex representa-
tion; a faint twice-reflected sense, like earth-shine on the un-
lighted segment of the moon. For muscle and gland cells form
groups by themselves, not interlaced with the neurons and
having no interlacing processes, being only reported, if we may
use that word in this sense, to the neuron group by means of
immensely long filaments which the latter have sent forth. In
fact, all those vast groups of cells in muscle, bone, and gland are,
as far as the human personality is concerned, but so many out-
lying, alien provinces of an empire, controlled and stimulated
to action from the central capital, but only reflexly and faintly
symbiotic with it.

The manner in which personality — intellect and mind —
fell to the lot and became the task of the neuron group, is now
apparent and can be demonstrated. A trace of it appears even
in the zoaria of polyzoa. Something like an incipient nervous
system exists in bristatella mucedo and in kinetoskias where a
colony of unicells is seen to act as an individual, by transmission
of impulses from cell to cell to insure simultaneous action to a
certain end on the part of all the cells. The same is observed in
the volvocine colonies. This is the first step to a nervous system
— the transmission of a directive impulse from cell to cell.

At this early stage of differentiation of function, any cell of the
colony may act as a brain or nerve cell. The capacity is inherent
in all cells at the outset of multicellular life. The protozoan unicell
exhibits functions of muscle, brain, and gland. One cell, living
alone, may do all that any multicellular organism can do, on
a small scale. But in a colony of unicells — from which multi-
cellular creatures originated — and particularly in a large colony,
certain cells, on account of their outer or inner location in the
colony, come habitually to do certain things and assume certain
functions. Those on the outside unite to propel the colony
onward toward food; those on the inside deal with the food
after it is seized and ingested ; and there come to be those which
take it upon themselves to spy food, or to scent it at a distance,
in a word, to act as eyes, ears, and nose for the colony.

But to convey what these cells saw, or scented, for the benefit
of the colony, to other cells, those for example which propel the
colony, it was necessary that certain intermediate cells, or lines

HUMAN PERSONALITY 55

of cells, should act as carriers of this intelligence and pass it on
from cell to cell, and here we have the origin of a nerve — a line
of cells passing intelligence to the other cells, those which propel
the colony. In this necessity of the many-celled colony we find
the beginning of the function of nerve and, ultimately, of brain.
For very soon the need of a common center to which the con-
veyed intelligence from without could be brought, would make
itself felt. Certain cells would be impelled by the common want
to take up the ftmction of estimating these conveyed impulses,
whether faint or intense and imperative, of estimating and
responding to them. Thus somewhere along the incipient nerve
line a nerve ganglion would be developed from cells which, under
other circumstances of the colony's needs, might have become
locomotive cells or gland cells. For it is the many common
wants of the cell union which have forced the assumption of
different functions upon different tracts of cells.

There seems to be nothing very wonderful in the process by
which the virgin sensibility of the unicell has been raised to the
condition of intellect. We observe, first, a condition in which a
cell is compelled to feel the feeling of another cell. The medium or
agency of transmitting feeling in this case is probably an actual
current of corpuscles, let us say, for the sake of a familiar
word. Excited to action by this received sensation, the inter-
mediate cell transmits the sensation to another contiguous cell;
this latter in turn transmits it to a third, and so on. But sensa-
tion thus conveyed onward, from cell to cell, requires referendiim
somewhere. Moreover, different lines of cells thus acting as
incipient nerves would cross each other, as such lines multiplied,
and cause distraction and confusion.

A new necessity arose, the necessity that certain cells along
an embryo nerve line, or at the crossings of such lines, should
assume a higher ftmction of intelligence, the function of deter-
mining the relative strength and value of the conveyed impulses
which pass through them, and of acting for the common good
by judging of them, neutralizing some of the least important, or
intensifying others, and, in general, regulating and administering
for all. And in these cells at the crossings, or midway the incipient
nerve, we find a nerve ganglion developed, that is to say, a little
brain for that tract of cells and nerve lines. These cells of ganglia

56 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

have the magisterial office thrust upon them by the importunity
of their fellow cells in the multicellular union. They find them-
selves the recipients of confided feeling from the others, on all
sides ; they are stimulated by it and led to respond as judges of
such feeling. From their situation and the necessity incident
to it, the faculty of discrimination and of judgment as to the
nature, character and motive of these incoming currents of
sensation is in time developed.

The neurons of the brain have thus been made the repositories
and agents for the estimation of a thousand simultaneous currents
of these partly-interpreted sensations, transmitted to them from
all portions of the organism, and particularly from the organs
of special sense, the eye, the ear, the olfactory and the gustatory
tracts.

Thus impressed into the service of the organism, the neurons
have developed in numbers adequate to that service. Instead
of a tiny ganglion for the receipt of simple sensation, we have
in the human brain a grand mass of cells capable of receiving
and estimating the perceptions of a hundred inferior ganglia, of
comparing these perceptions with other previously recorded
perceptions from the same organs of the body and with those
from other organs; of deciding as to the relative importance of
all these and of responding through the motor system of nerves,
in accordance with conclusions which are arrived at after a final
estimate of the grand total of perception, reflex perception, and
the thousandfold perception of perceptions which make up the
complicated process which we commonly call thinking.

It is of interest to examine the minute anatomy of the neurons,
and study the physiological mechanism by means of which they
join themselves together and unite their lives to form the human
intellect. Of interest, because this mechanism is the most
wonderful thing in the world. Throughout the length and breadth
of our earth there is nothing to compare with this sentient com-
bine of brain cells and the marvelous networks of living matter
which they put forth to sustain human self -consciousness.

Under the microscope, as we are now able to use it, the entire
scheme of the soul's origin and maintenance is displayed. We
see and are able to map out the mode of its growth and discern
how its manifold virtues, aspirations, instincts, traits, and beliefs

HUMAN PERSONALITY 57

have come into existence and stand linked together in a composite
whole. Here is revealed as on a chart the physical basis of
psychology — the new scientific psychology of the 20th century;
— and it were better if the old, erratic, creed-attainted treatises
were burned, and the site cleared for the truth.

For when free of the taint and bias of religious indoctrination,
the new science of the soul can be made so clear, so simple to the
understanding, that the average boy or girl of ten will learn it
in a few easy lessons.

The means by which the neurons are united in the brain has
long been known to minute anatomists; and during the last
fifteen years numerous investigators have described the amazing
networks which they form in the cortex of the cerebrum. Whether
or not the microscopic fibrils coalesce end by end and become
continuous from cell to cell, has been a subject of controversy,
backed by what has seemed evidence on both sides. The con-
tention that the neurons are directly united by their filaments,
has not been demonstrated beyond question, the facts going to
show that these extended, delicate processes of the cells very
closely approach each other and, during the elate, erectile con-
dition of diurnal wakefulness, actually touch; and that in sleep
this contact is broken, a condition of non-contiguity, brought
about in part by the shrinking away of the blood capillary system
in the cortex during somnolence.

Until very recently, however, no observer appears to have
fully comprehended the profoimd psychic significance of this
extraordinary web of living fibrils.

Gehuchten, Obersteiner and His called attention to the ex-
traordinary length of the protoplasmic branches of brain cells,
and to the extended and intricate networks which they form.
Conjecture was attracted to them ; but it was not until the growth
of our knowledge had embraced other discoveries that these mar-
velous networks of sentient, protoplasmic threads were identified
not only as a means of association of cell with cell, but as the
consentient web of living matter by means of which self-con-
sciousness and personal identity exist and are possible. In a
word, that it is by means of this vast network of interactive
fibers, fibrils and filaments that the many millions of cells of the

58 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

brain are able to live as one self-conscious entity and give rise
to a personal intellect.

Histologically, as the abode of the genus of intellectual cells,
the human brain must be conceived of as a vast skein or con-
geries of nerve fibres, on the outer surface of which, carefully
roofed over by the cranium and tough membranes, lie the most
important groups of cells.

It is of these cell groups of the convoluted, outer surface or
cortex of the brain that we shall here speak almost exclusively,
scarcely more than referring to the great nether group or groups,
commonly described as the nuclear and fusiform cells; for it is
in the cortex that the ramifications of the cell processes which
we are now to study, are best exemplified.

These cell groups of the cortex, of the cerebrum, and of the
superficial gray matter of the cerebellum, are wonderfully well
situated for nutrition, supported at ease, so to speak, by the
fibrils of servant cells of inferior grade (neuroglia), lodged in
fluid beds, and guarded by protective or repair cells. Great
advantages are theirs, and great things in the line of intelligence
are accomplished by them. Not even our best methods of prepa-
ration and staining have yet enabled us to trace all the delicate
branches, fibrils and processes which they thrust forth and
maintain extended, in order to touch and to lie in sentient con-
tact with those of other cells, thus enabling himdreds of them
to live in close apperception and sentient communion one with
another.

The cells of this class, or species, from the human cerebellum,
or lesser brain, differ considerably in size and general appearance
from those of the cerebrum, and also from those of the spinal
cord; but from their position and connections, their psychic
r61e is believed to be similar, since they are held to preside over
and inaugurate the passage of subjective sentience into molecular
motion.

The protoplasmic processes of the large Purkinje cells from
the folia of the htiman cerebellum interlace somewhat as sketched
with a pen in the accompanying drawing. But neither in this
sketch, nor the merely diagrammatic one of pyramidal cells from
the cortex cerebri, which follows it, can the amazing networks
which the branches and filaments form, be fully depicted, since

HUMAN PERSONALITY

59

as seen on " slides," after microtome section, the filaments are
often broken, or cut asunder.

The Purkinje cells, so called, are from .03 to .04 of a millimeter
in length ; but the branched processes and fibres which emanate
from them are of far greater extent.

These cells are collocated in a layer at a depth of less than a

A A BODIES OP LARGE CEREBELLAR CELLS.

BB PROTOPLASMIC BRANCHES AND FILAMENTS.

CC AXIS CYLINDER PROCESSES.

millimeter in the outer strattmi of the foliated cerebellar surface,
and are nourished from a rich capillary plexus. They are sup-
ported, that is to say, held up otherwise than by their own
consistency and firmness, by a system of adjuvant cells called
neuroglia and formerly known as "spider cells," or "basket
cells," which some observers have been inclined to classify as
semi-nerve cells. In some tracts of the brain these spider or
basket cells have been discerned as forming a net of supporting
fibers about the body of the larger nerve cell.

From what may be designated as the base of the nerve cell,

6o SALVATION BY SCIENCE

there emerges a process, or protoplasmic branch, termed the
" axis-cylinder process," which dips downward into a layer of
smaller nuclear cells and enters the great skein of nerve fibers
which forms the central parts of the brain. How far this axis-
cylinder process or fiber proceeds has never yet been fully
demonstrated, but it is believed to proceed to, or become con-
tinuous with a fiber which does proceed to, other tracts of the
opposite hemisphere of the brain, and even to pass down the
spinal cord and extend to distant tissues of the body.

Reverting again to the body of the cell, we find issuing from
the other side, the side opposite the base and hence the part
directed toward the outer surface, one and frequently two large
branching processes, which often extend a relatively great dis-
tance toward the extreme outer surface of the cortex and branch,
like a tree top, into smaller and smaller processes and fibrils, till
the best methods of preparation fail to trace them farther.

In this outer layer of the cortex of the cerebellum (which has
been inappropriately termed the molecular layer) the extended,
constantly branching processes of many cells lie side by side,
contiguous and in contact; and as these processes and fibrils
are protoplasmic and sentient, we can scarcely doubt that they
perceive each other from such contact, and communicate one
with another. In a word, there is the strongest probability,
short of certainty, that the business of willing movement out-
ward to the muscles is dependent upon the concerted action of
these cells.

Besides the fibrils of the large Purkinje cells there are also
in this outer " molecular " layer, minute fibrillar processes from
great numbers of smaller cells which lie embedded in it; also
nervous fibrils which, so far as discovered, are not processes of
cells, but seem to be of the nature of separate growths, analogous
in some degree to the fibers of muscular tissue, which are not
pure protoplasm but of the nature of protoplasmic alloys.

These latter minute fibers also lie in contact with the diffused
fibrils of the Purkinje cells, and apparently bear sentient impulses
from them downward into the vast hank of central fibers.

Beneath this layer of large-branched cells, there is another
class or variety of smaller nuclear cells, the bodies of which
have scarcety one-fourth the diameter of their superior neighbors.

HUMAN PERSONALITY 6 1

Many of these have small fibrillar processes, one of which is
sometimes seen to rise toward the " molecular " layer while the
other dips downward amidst the white fasces of fibers. The
function of these smaller nuclear cells is not easily divined.

In the medulla oblongata and in the gray columns of the
spinal cord are also found large cells with branched protoplasmic
processes, somewhat resembling those of the cerebellum, with
small nuclear cells and fusiform or spindle-shaped cells, in con-
nection with the same mazy hanks and bundles of communica-
ting fibers. And in the great hemispheres of the cerebrum, or
grander brain, is found an arrangement of superior cells and
inferior cells, with enormous hanks of fibers similar to that
observed in the cerebellum, but on a vaster scale.

The superior and larger cells of the cerebral cortex differ in
form from the Purkinje cells, and from their triangular outline
have received the name of pyramidal cells. They are found in
great numbers and at varying depths in the " molecular " gray
cortex of the cerebrum. The body of a large pyramidal cell
averages about .04 mm. in length by .02 mm. in width. It
occupies a free space, is surrounded by blood capillaries which
supply it with nutriment, and rests easily in lymph fluid, with
a number of protective cells and repair cells in close attendance
upon it. It is further supported by the nets of " basket " cells
(neuroglia), and altogether is placed in a position of ease, as if
for intellectual labor. The large cell body contains granular
protoplasm ; and within it are to be seen the essential cell nucleus,
occasional vacuoles, and very frequently a few grains of pigment.
The base of a pyramidal cell is directed toward the axis of the
brain convolution, i. e., toward the mass of white medulated
nerve fibers of the interior. At the base, the protoplasmic cell-
substance is prolonged downward in a number of branched fila-
mentous processes; and ordinarily, about midway, one of these
assumes the character of an axis-cylinder process, which, entering
the mass of sheathed fibers, becomes one of them, extending
eventually to some distant quarter of the brain or of the body.
The other processes from the base, especially those from the outer
corners, branch out in finer fibrils, which intermingle with those
of other cells and with the minute fibers which certain cells
appear to produce and cast forth from their cell bodies.

62

SALVATION BY SCIENCE

A still more remarkable process, however, rises from the apex
or top of the cell. This apical process is directed upward or
outward into the cortex, branching at intervals and extending
to a comparatively great height into the " molecular " or outer
layer of the cortex, where its fibrils lie in contact with those of
numerous other cells.

In certain situations, noticeably at the summit of the con-

A AA LARGE PYRAMIDAL CELLS OF THE CORTEX CEREBRI.

C C C SMALL PYRAMIDAL CELLS.

BBB AXIS CYLINDER PROCESSES.

DDD APICAL PROCESSES AND PROTOPLASMIC BRANCHINGS.

volutions, some of the pyramidal cells attain great size, com-
paratively, and are found to have bodies .12 mm. in length by
.05 mm. in width; but, in far greater numbers, there is associated
with them a class of small pyramidal cells, much like those
described above as regards form and processes, but smaller,
having bodies no more than .01 mm. in length by .005 mm. in
width. It is not impossible that these small pyramidal cells are
a reserve in slow process of development to the larger class, or
would so develop under stimulus.

HUMAN PERSONALITY 63

Beneath the layer of pyramidal cells there is also found in the
cerebral cortex a " nuclear " layer of small rounded cells, some
of which have protoplasmic processes as seen in the cerebellum;
and there is also a fusiform group.

We find that the entire surface of the cortex cerebri is com-
posed mainly of these marvelous networks, associated with the
plexuses of blood capillaries and the adjuvant neuroglia required
for their physical support and maintenance. The superficies
of the cortex, indeed, is by far the most remarkable structure
of which minute anatomy has knowledge. The extent and in-
tricacy of the fibrillar threads, loops and twigs, formed by the
mutual interlacing and interlooping of the thousands of tree-
like branches which the cells send upward into it, are quite
incomparable. In this respect the cortex of the brain is a himdred
times more dense and more involved than are the tops of the
trees in a dense forest. The branches, in their amazing ramifica-
tions, not unfrequently extend to a distance of twenty times the
length of the cell body. It is as if each tree of a thick forest
sent forth vines for branches, which climbed to a distance of
several hundred yards, dividing as they proceeded into a thou-
sand vinelets and tendrils, which enwrapped and entwined every-
thing in their course. Such a jungle, growing to a height of
several hundred feet, would no more than illustrate this astonish-
ing lacework of the protoplasmic fibrils of the cortical cells.

Histologists were early led to inquire with wonder as to the
significance and use of this mazy output of Hving filaments.

It cannot be wholly or largely for the purpose of accomplishing
cell nutrition, for these cells are nourished by the saprophytic
or absorptive method, and not by the prehension of food parti-
cles.

It is not to accomplish locomotion, for these cells rest nearly
stationary in fluid beds, sustained by the nets of neuroglia.

The conclusion is reached, of necessity, that these far-branch-
ing processes are thrust forth for the purpose of mutual perception
and communication, cell with cell. The sentient, protoplasmic
fibrils touch, or so nearly touch that what one cell feels and
knows is known and felt by its neighbor cell. It would follow
that an impulse or a sensation which comes to one through its
afferent fiber from the outer world is felt and known by all its

64 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

mates throughout that entire convolution or tract of cells, and
not only in that one convolution, but — so complete is the
protoplasmic connection — throughout the whole brain, which
is thus made to take cognizance of sensation as a unit, as a per-
sonal, self-conscious individual.

For all this mazy web is demonstrated by the reactive agents
of our staining fluids to be pure protoplasm; sentient, living
matter, capable of feeling, and able to convey sensation. When,
therefore, a sensation, received either through the eye, the ear,
the organs of taste and smell, or through the thousand sensory
nerves extending to the surfaces of the body, is transmitted along
a sheathed nerve fiber and reaches one or more of these large
cells of the cortex, intelligence of such a sensation is at once
distributed by means of the sentient network to a hundred
neighbor cells, and from them is diffused over the entire brain,
which thus receives tidings as if it were a single huge cell, instead
of an aggregation of two hundred millions of cells, each a distinct
living creattire.

By means of this sentient bond of cell to cell, afforded by the
protoplasmic networks, many millions of cell lives are blended
in one common life, having one common sense. By means of
this bond, too, a higher life of greater compass than that of the
single cell is rendered possible. For by it thought, which is the
business of comparing what one cell or tract of cells knows with
what another cell knows, begins, and both cells are thereby made
wiser in experience. Reason is set up; imagination is made
possible; and, in the end, the human intellect is developed from
what was at first the primary sentience of individual cells.

For it is not here intended to advance the doctrine that the
human intellect is of no higher character than the sentience of
a brain cell. By means of this extended organization of cells,
too, something more than a quantitative and cumulative result
is attained. Human intelligence differs, not only in quantity
but in degree, from cell intelligence. By specialization and
organization, a higher plane of intelligence is reached. Biologi-
cal synthesis would lead us to infer that by means of organi-
zation, higher and higher planes of sentience and intelligence
have been successively attained — a long series of such ascend-
ing steps — since first the simple elements of life began to seek

HUMAN PERSONALITY 65

expression in terrestrial matter. Extended organization and the
specialization of parts to distinct uses have led to those more
complicated actions and reactions in the plastic, protoplasmic
substance, the entirety of which issues in a higher kind of intelli-
gence; higher because vastly more of form and of experience
is included in the brain as a whole than in the cell.

Briefly, we wish to convey the idea that, according to the pres-
ent biological conception, the human intellect is something more
than the associated sentiences of the two hundred millions, or
more, of cells contained in the brain; that it is an extended
development of those sentiences to a higher grade of intelli-
gence, rendered possible by the interaction and intercommuni-
cation of the cells.

This association and this organization have been largely due
to the wealth of protoplasmic branches and fibrils which the
brain cells have thrown out, in order to come into touch and
sentient contact with each other. Once touching, by whatever
agency contact is brought about, something of the nature of
" current " from cell to cell throughout the whole brain appears
to be set up and maintained at a considerable tension during
self -consciousness, i. e., during wakefulness. To generate current
for maintaining the consentience of the brain as a whole, an
increased blood supply is requisite; work is done and energy
absorbed. The condition, moreover, gives rise to waste products
and leads to exhaustion of the cell, rendering a period of re-
cuperation and rest necessary. The consentient circuit must
needs be broken. In sleep, the brain cell ceases to live in its
corporate or social capacity and reverts to its old-time, unicellu-
lar mode of life. Independent again, it nourishes itself and gains
strength and substance afresh.

Wonderful as are the protoplasmic processes which the neurons
put forth, to secure consentience throughout the brain, they are
not without their analogue in unicellular life. Amoeba radiosa
projects long linear rays, as it floats, to enable it to perceive and
draw in food particles. Gromia terricola projects a net of filament-
ous rays and snares. Raphidiophrys elegans emits long, lance-
like rays, or darts, of exceeding tenuity, more minute than the
finest fiber of silk. In the case of unicells these filaments are
temporary, befitting the wants and necessities of single cell life.

66 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

In the case of the neurons the necessity is for filaments continu-
ously extended.

Revert for a moment and grasp the underlying principle of
this vast development of the human personality by the neurons.
Ab initio, it founds on that esoteric property, or primal ingredient,
of living matter by virtue of which the sentient corpuscles
combine in the " atom," the atoms in the self -mobile molecules
of protoplasm. For that great mystery, matter, is not a dead
fabric, but an ever-living, sentient, self-moving substance.
Out of this ever-living substance the physiological cell, as we
find it in the htmian organism, has developed by a complexity
of evolution which, if we could see it microscopically unfolded,
would rival even that congeries of interlacing neurons in the
human cerebrum. Yet we now make this neuron the unit of
brain architecture. The infinitesimally minute fibrils by which
corpuscle established sentient relationship with corpuscle, to form
protoplasmic molecules and set up the personality of a cell, are
invisible, as yet, merely a matter of conjecture. But the wonder-
ful mechanism of filaments by means of which the brain cells
establish sentient contact to form the human personality, is now
visible.

By means of this elate, retractile mechanism, this vast net-
work of feelers, each cell of the brain is able to pool its self-life
in the grand merger of brain life, but resimies that self -life again
when, by shrinkage or retraction of the network of filaments,
sentient contact with other cells is broken. From such sentient
contact, thus induced and brought about, the larger personality
ensues. Yet we merely see here on a large scale with millions
of cells, what occurs when two, or three, or a hundred unicells
join and set up a communal life. By sentient contact with
each other a new, larger personality comes into existence, as
if around a new axis of consciousness. Several cell lives are
thrown into one. The cell relationship, or reciprocity, suddenly,
instantaneously changes. A new sentient polarity is struck; as
if earth and moon came in contact and a new center of gravity
were set up in the contiguous masses.

Personality is not resident in any one prominent neuron, or
monarch cell, but in all the cells, consentient together. There
is no " king cell " ruling the others, in which personal identity

HUMAN PERSONALITY 67

centers, no sovereign " monad." This view had its day anl has
been wholly discredited. No more is the human intellect located
at any one portion or particular tract of the brain, as for example,
the corpus striatum; this notion, too, had its day and passed to the
limbo of similar contentions, made before the consentience of the
neurons was imderstood. Personality is a coherent blend of
the lives of all the neurons, dissoluble and terminable in sleep,
or from shock, or at death of the organism.

This faculty or ability of the cell to unite its life with other
cells, surrendering that life to become, for the time, part of a
life greater than its own, has never received much recognition,
as yet. None the less, it is the keynote of human personality;
and no adequate conception of that personality, or soul, can be
formed until it is comprehended.

In truth, it is time to cease speaking of the human intellect
as a psychic integer, an indissoluble unit of intelligence. Never
was there a doctrine more at variance with the facts, or foimding
in greater ignorance of the human brain.

A Society for Psychical Research which bases its investiga-
tions on the assumption of a detachable psyche, goes wrong at
the outset, and from the very nature of things will wander in
darkness and meet with little success in its quest.

Human personality can now be resolved into its separate
cell sentiences, each a cell personality. We are able to show
how the cells (neurons) unite, by what means the greater per-
sonality (soul) is brought into being and maintained from moment
to moment and from year to year, and also what physical steps
and events are associated with either the temporary, or the
eternal cessation of that personality. There is no longer excuse
for ignoring these facts, or for teaching or assuming that self-
consciousness is an infrangible unit, that lives " unscathed
amidst the crash of worlds, untouched by the death of matter
itself." Such " long bow " may do for sermons to hopelessly
indoctrined sectaries, but has no place in modern physiology.
Not " the crash of worlds," merely the impact of a cobble on the
human cranium will cause the sentient neurons to retract their
interlaced filaments, for a few moments it may be, or for hours,
or forever. Self -consciousness ceases until they resume contact.
If the blow was heavy, it is never resimied.

68 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

So ephemeral a thing is this self-conscious personality, this
soul of man. And at best it is intermittent, with the alternate
lighting and darkening of the terrestrial hemispheres. Once
in twelve hours it must stop in order that the neurons may rest
from the stress caused by their unification as mind. The self-
conscious personality is as much lost in sound sleep, as in organic
death, only in the one case sentient contact is resumed, in the
other not.

Moreover, this personality varies in degree according as the
brain cells come fully into sentient relationship, or but partially.
In certain degrees of somnolence, a part of the brain cells appear
to join contact, giving rise to dreams. A dream implies a minor
degree of self-consciousness ; a part of the neurons are in contact ;
but the more complete personality of waking hours is not estab-
lished. To be fully self-conscious, all the lobes, convolutions,
and tracts of cells must be involved. This is best accomplished
after the cells have rested, after sleep, when each cell has for
a time been withdrawn from the consentient bund and has had
time to attend to its personal wants, nutrition and the expulsion
of waste products which accumulate while the cells are con-
secrating their energies and merging their self-lives in the greater
life of the organism. The sentient contact is less perfect toward
the end of the day, when the neurons are fatigued. The per-
sonality is then much affected. We grow heedless and do work
badly ; the morale runs down to lower degrees ; we are less hope-
ful, less ambitious, and yield more readily to temptation to evil
courses ; and this because the personality is weakened from less
perfect sentient contact of the cells.

If the brain of the criminal classes could be inspected and
examined with this end in view, it would be found below normal
in these particulars of the formation and maintenance of the
personality.

When one hemisphere of the brain is damaged, or paralyzed
by pressure of clots from ruptured blood vessels, so that cerebra-
tion is limited mainly to the other hemisphere, we have the
phenomena of a diminished personality, an intellect abated in
volume and power. The axis of self-consciousness appears to
have shifted. Personal identity continues; yet the patient
remarks that he is a little strange to himself, and has the feeling

HUMAN PERSONALITY 69

that he is not quite the same. To his friends it is evident that
he is not what he was before the seizure.

In extreme old age, when the progressive enfeeblement of the
neurons has become marked, at ninety or a hundred years, the
personahty dwindles to so feeble a flicker as scarcely to enable the
person to be self-recognizant, or perform the most habitual
acts. It can hardly be termed personality, since there are con-
stantly recurrent lapses to self -forget fulness. Pari passu with
the cell exhaustion, personality slackens and deliquesces to the
vanishing point, giving that surest of physiological evidence that
intellect has its source in the cells, shines forth from them, and
disappears as these founts of life grow dry.

From out the well-nigh infinite atomicity of matter, swift tides
of corpuscles, or electrons flash and flow through the combined
mass of the neurons; and it is conjectured that this etheric
medium forms the base of mentation. This is not yet science,
but surmise, not yet demonstrable. There is reason to theorize,
however, as to such a " spiritual body " within the " natural
body " of the himian organism; a subliminal emanation or
etheric eddy in which the neurons and other cells lie saturated or
surcharged. There are many evidences, physical, electro-
magnetic, actinic, that go to render the surmise a probable one.
It falls in line with what we know otherwise of the marvelous
attenuation of matter, its fluidity and almost inconceivably
rapid motions. Something of this sort must exist, just what it
is biological science does not yet undertake to prove; whether
the residual corpuscles of the universe form the " luminiferous
ether" of the older physicists; or whether, as is most prob-
able, there are particles of lesser mass, having far more
subtle and approximately instantaneous motions; a descending
series of such particles dropping into profound depths of ato-
micity which the human plummet has not yet sounded, and
where science, perhaps, never will find bottom. For matter is
the one great mystery of the universe.

It is in the amazing flux of these tides of etheric matter, that
all " spirit " phenomena, past and present, found and hold
their place in popular credulity. The point always lost sight
of by priest and devotee, charlatan and dupe, alike, is that it is
only by virtue of long-perfected organization that a "soul"

70 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

is raised up to self-consciousness; that the human personality
requires and presupposes an organized brain which only the
entire evolution of the human race has brought into existence;
that intellect and mind result from organized tmion of the mil-
lions of neurons which form the brain and nervous system ; that
personal identity exists only by virtue of the coalition of these
cells, and no longer than they coalesce; that self-consciousness
depends on that perfected mechanism of sentient filaments by
means of which the neurons pool their self-lives to become con-
sentient; and that when this mechanism of union is impaired
or destroyed, personality ceases, being resolved first to the
inferior intelligences of the cells and ultimately to the lowly
sentience of elementary matter — when the cells themselves
die and are reduced to their component molecules and
atoms.

It is this point of the long-descended organization of living
matter, which the biologist has ever to keep in mind ; for if our
science teaches one truth more conclusively than another it is
that intellect and mind are never seen to exist in the absence
of a delicately organized union of cells.

At the present stage of popular credulity concerning dis-
embodied spirit-life, the ground is taken by many, many even
who lay pretension to scientific attainments, that as ion and
electron appear to possess a psychic property, they may be
aggregated in a " spiritual body " which is liberated at the death
of the organism, to fly, or float away, still continent, with per-
sonal faculties intact; that this subliminal self coheres and re-
mains individual; that it still sees without eyes, hears without
ears, smells without olfactory tract, and tastes without gustatory
follicles; that it still reasons without the interlaced pyramidals
and moves without sensory ganglia and motor nerve fibers.

According to this loose conception, indeed, the physical appara-
tus is really not at all necessary, being a kind of superimposed
clog on " soul life " which sojourns in the animal organism
rather than forms an essential inseparable component of it,
the point being that at death, it somehow frees itself, gets away,
and preserves the much desiderated self -consciousness.

The argument is never very clear as to ways and means, but
takes such jumps as are necessary to gain the object sought.

HUMAN PERSONALITY 7 1

And grave professors of psychology announce with dignified
aplomb, that they " see nothing inconsistent in this view."

What volumes do such naive admissions speak for the present
dense ignorance of this same self-exalted psychology! What
utter lack of comprehension of the first principles on which
nature acts for the production of the human personality !

The human soul is not a nebula of confluent ions, not an
tindeveloped gas of sentient atoms, not the raw diffused base
of sentience, but a fabric long-developed from this sentient
base. Ion has combined with ion, " atom " with " atom,"
and molecule with molecule in long-perfected, orderly tmion to
give utterance to the lowly intelligence of the cell — the proto-
zoon. That lowly intelligence is the cell's soul. It exists in
such degree and at such a height of intelligence only by virtue
of an intricate arrangement of its component molecules and
reciprocal action between them. To give utterance to the cell
soul the sentient particles of which cell and nucleus are com-
posed have to bear certain relations to each other, occupy certain
positions one to another, and exert on each other a series of
impulses, to and fro, direct and reflex. Moreover, they have to
preserve these relations and keep these positions one to another,
in order that the personal identity of the cell may be preserved
from hour to hour and day to day. The cell soul depends on the
stability of this form — to use the word in a German sense. There
is a progressive development of the sentient substance to some-
thing which is reciprocally very mazy and complex, before we get
the ceU soul; and while that cell soul continues to exist, the
form must be preserved intact.

Crush the cell, scatter those sentient ions, atoms, and molecules,
and you have indubitably lost your cell soul; it has sunk back
to the basic sentience of universal matter. That the ghost of it
goes floating about the universe is contrary to everything we
know of nature; for nature produces degrees of intelligence
only by complex combinations.

The human organism differs from the cell only in being larger
and more varied; since it is composed of cells, organized, co-
operative, and consentient. In a general way, the human organ-
ism is to the cell what the city or the nation is to the individual
citizen. In the organism we have a more voluminous life than

72 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

that of the cell, but life of the same character and quality. The
cell is an epitome of the human body, the body an organized
multiple of the cell ; the cell sentience is the essential unit of the
human life, and, indeed, of all terrestrial life. A human life is,
therefore, the consentient product of the cell lives of which the
organism is made up.

In the course of these long organizations of cell life, sense
organs and apparatuses have developed which put the con-
sentient colony or mass of brain cells in wide, extended com-
munication with the external world, in touch largely with the
universe, with the result that this personalized mass of living
matter becomes the recipient and repository of sensations and
impressions of all sorts from all quarters. In a word, it is made
the repository of knowledge, and while thus receiving and record-
ing, becomes what we term educated, cultivated, refined, by a
continuous process from infancy to old age.

The cells of the brain not only interlace, but act reciprocally
one to another and reflexly, setting up a well-nigh inconceivably
delicate form which remains in situ during the individual life,
or is but slowly modified by fresh accessions of knowledge from
without. Each cell neuron of the colony -blend is thus enabled
to profit by the experience of the whole and is formed, moulded,
modified by the greater life and attainments of the whole organ-
ism.

High degrees of intelligence are thus reached, the intellects
of great thinkers, our Darwins, Weissmanns, Thompsons, Glad-
stones, Spencers. In each we have an inherited mass or colony
of neurons of exceptionally good quality and then, personally,
a continuous development which, could it be displayed microscop-
ically, would exhibit organization of such delicacy and complex
arrangement, and yet such permanence through life, as would go
far to set psychology on a new basis, and prove nothing less
than a revelation of Nature's method of producing a human soul!

Upon this whole delicate organization and upon nothing less,
personality depends from moment to moment, and from year
to year. It is only by virtue of this mazy organization of living
matter that intellect exists or can go on existing.

What happens at death?

First, the interlacing neurons let go their hold on each other —

HUMAN PERSONALITY 73

and self-consciousness of the person vanishes. It goes out, as
flame vanishes when atoms of carbon and oxygen no longer
combine.

What next?

The heart no longer propels the life tide of refined food in the
blood to the brain — as in sleep — and after a few minutes the
neurons themselves die from suffocation and starvation. All
those thousands of little individual lives vanish, as did the larger
self-consciousness of the person; for in each the consentient
bond of living molecules, atoms, and corpuscles is disrupted.

What next?

The dissipation of the brain as cadaver is a somewhat slower,
more heterogeneous process, involving invasions of bacteria,
disintegration, and reduction to more stable compounds, but
tending ultimately to a return from the highly complex living
substance, with all its maze of organization, to the abysmal base
of the primeval ether and its lowly endowment of life-potential.

What was once the soul has been resolved back to this ele-
mental life-potential of unorganized, unconditioned matter.
To think of it or represent it as self-conscious is to deny the first
principles of Nature. Human self-consciousness is the long-
derived result of evolution by organization of cell life. Intellect
is the outcome of a million years of brain. The human soul is
the flower of terrestrial life, and at present, alas, almost as evan-
escent as a flower. What the scientific world has most need to
apprehend is the principle by which Nature works to form a soul.

The theological penchant for conceiving of the soul as an
irrefrangible imit or entity, leads constantly to erroneous con-
clusions concerning it and concerning its fate after the death of
the organism. Even introspection shows us that self -conscious-
ness is but a play of the primary sentience of matter over an
organized fabric of brain; that we are intelligent as far as the
experience of life has impressed itself on that brain fabric and
no farther; that obliterate this recorded experience of life, an-
cestral and personally acquired, and naught remains to us of
personality; naught save impersonal feeling. Individuality,
personality, soul, comes only after an axis of self-consciousness
has been set up in living matter; it grows up about such a life-
axis by virtue of organization of the living substance. Under

74 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

certain favorable conditions the low-sentient property of un-
organized matter appears able to inaugurate unicellular life.

The conception of an unorganized " spirit " personality afloat
in space, coming and going, formed and unformed from time to
time, is an anomaly which presents itself with growing absurdity
as one's knowledge of Nature increases.

In the case of a colony of unicells, combining for a common
life, the resultant consensus of cell lives is a simple one, differing
little save in volume, from that of any one of the component cells.
In the human personality — not differing in principle — we
have the consensus of cell lives extensively developed. The
cells of the optical tract, for example, are stored with scenic
impressions that come to them through the apparatus of the
eye ; yet do these stand connected sentient and perceptive, with
every other cell of the brain, and flash to each their pictures of
the external world. In like manner the cells of the auditory,
olfactory, and gustatory tracts transmit to the entire aggregate
of cells with which they are in touch, sensations of sounds, flavors,
and odors of which they are the recipients. From the sympathetic
system, from the heart, the lungs, and the other organic appara-
tuses, as also from the peripheral nerve cells, come constant
tides of sensation which impress every cell in the brain. So
extended and perfect is the mechanism of contact that each
distinct impression from the external world, or from the different
organs of the body, is flashed to, and pervades the whole imified
group of neurons. In greater or less degree they all take part,
although the organized division of labor has delegated to the
motor neurons the function of response.

To trace the education of brain and describe the development
of intellect from the interaction between the sentient fabric of
cells within the cranium, and the external world, would exceed
the purpose of this paper. The picture presented is one of mani-
fold sensation, impression, record and adaptive growth, from
birth to adult life. The coherent mass of neurons stands all-
cognizant about a common axis of self-consciousness; for sen-
tience, like the other attributes of imiversal matter, displays
polarity. A more detailed account of how personality develops,
grows to its zenith prime, and wanes in " old age " toward
a nadir of extinction, is reserved for the future.

HUMAN PERSONALITY 75

In extreme " old age " there is in truth little left of the " soul "
to save, either by divine intervention, or human achievement.
Personality, has, indeed, become but a " shade " of its former self,
a feeble, lambent corpse-light, flickering to its cessation. It is
the cell-neurons which need a reincarnation; personality would
then up-brighten as when oil is renewed in a burned-out lamp.

The cell-neurons of the great, highly-developed brain-colony
will continue to shrink in senescence and lose the power to main-
tain personality, until such time as we discover how to regenerate
them in situ. Such is the present human situation. Is it not
better to face this situation bravely, and start afresh in our
quest for immortal life on the firm ground of natural salvation?

And are we really worthy of immortal life, would it be best
for us, until we can achieve it for ourselves?

BRAIN

A STILL PROGRESSIVE TISSUE OF THE HUMAN

ORGANISM

(1895)

Whether a higher type of life will eventually develop
from humanity, whether, indeed, the human organism is capable
of being greatly improved, was one of those questions which
early suggested themselves to biologists of the Darwin era.

The argument and the inference from evolution was, in a
word, that man as found on the earth is the long-descended heir
of the developmental effort, — the effort of living matter in the
cell mode of existence to improve its condition and rise to the
highest possible degree of intelligence and happiness. On a
priori grounds, there would seem to be no good reason to infer
that a struggle extending through millions of years, and in-
volving so much of individual sacrifice, may not eventuate in a
correspondingly grand future achievement. Evolution, in fact,
naturally ushers in a moral and a creed concerning man's past
and his future.

As to the further progress of the human organism, however,
there are many indications which appear to controvert the
affirmative view. Not a few of those whom we know to be best
equipped for forming an opinion on this subject, appear to hold
negative views, to wit, that the human organism has long ago
reached its type limits, limits which under the most favorable
conditions it could not escape; in short, that the human type,
anatomically and physiologically, is now " fixed; " that improved
conditions will but cause it to vary within certain unsurpassable
bounds; that man will remain a man henceforward, under
whatever stress of evolution, continued even for many thousands
of years, or forever.

76

BRAIN 77

When we examine the subject historically, there is much to
confirm the above view. Apparently the human organism was as
perfect four thousand years ago as at present, and differed in no
typical features or essentials. There seems to have been no
change to indicate physical evolution within the historic period.

From a histological point of view, too, there is little to indicate
even the most slowly-progressive development in most of the
tissues of the body; for example, the osseous, muscular, con-
nective, cartilagenous, and epithelial tissues. The cells of these
tissues pass through a well-defined cycle of growth, and give rise
to a series of growth products which vary, indeed, from youth to
age, but show no secular change from generation to generation.

Moreover, the bone, muscle, cartilage, and other tissue cells
of man resemble very closely those of the lower grade mammals,
the types of which are even more clearly seen to be permanent
and unprogressive.

Cataclysmic changes of the earth's surface, giving rise to new
geodetic, climatic, and atmospheric conditions, might, indeed,
if not too suddenly destructive, compel certain skeletal altera-
tions and changes of form, both in man and other mammals,
although there is the greater probability that such catastrophism
would prove fatal to all well-established types of life; in brief,
that the genus homo, or the genus bos, would perish off the earth
sooner than develop into anything else.

There is little likelihood, however, that further evolution will
be fostered by such means, the earth itself having reached an
age and a permanence of planetary type, so to speak, when surface
mutations of such revolutionary character are not to be looked
for. The very permanence of his terrestrial habitat, in fact, is
against the further evolution of the human organism, or the
development of anything superior in the way of organic apparatus
from such causes.

The widest view of this subject of organism and evolution
which we can take is so conclusive to this effect that the theory
of a higher type of being than man, hereafter to come from terres-
trial evolution, has been practically abandoned, even although it
is apparent and can be shown on good evidence that man in his
mind, his intellect, is still progressive and manifestly capable of
much future progress.

7 8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

The general conclusion has obtained that evolution in the
ordinary sense has terminated in man, and that he is not only
the latest but in all probability the last of the mammalia. A great
deal in himian creed, mythic, classic, and Christian, has originated
here, namely, on the hopelessness of doing much better on the
earth; and hence the prayerful appeal for a more favorable
theatre for life elsewhere.

The apparent cessation of evolution on the earth has long
been felt to be disheartening; literature is burdened with it and
aspiration concerning some other better state of existence has
grown out of it.

But has evolution ceased? The question, which the anatomist
and biologist have been not a little inclined to answer in the
affirmative, is exceedingly important to the morals of humanity.
Has the anatomist, the biologist or the physiologist overlooked
any point, any particular, or any capacity by virtue of which man
may still demonstrate himself progressive and take heart for
himself and his race?

It is the purpose of this brief paper to call attention to one
important tissue of the human organism which can be shown to
have been steadily progressive, and which gives no evidence
of reaching, or of tending to reach, type limits.

I shall show furthermore that it is by virtue of the steady
growth and development of this part of the body that man has
so prodigiously surpassed all other species of mammals, made
them subject to him, and overrun and dominated the whole earth.
In the physical sense, the evolution of this tissue has been strangely
overlooked by many, in fact by most, biologists, or, if touched upon,
has not been held to determine the question of man's true position
as a progressive mammal, compared with other species which are
either unprogressive or retrogressive. For while all have abun-
dantly recognized man's mental superiority to the lower animals,
and connected it vaguely with his larger brain, this superiority
of intellect has been attributed to a certain adventitious endow-
ment of the nature of " soul," not a natural part of the organism,
but an implantation from an extraneous source. Nor have
biologists clearly pointed out as yet the relative truth of the
matter in connection with man's rise from brute life to the estate
of a world-dominant being.

BRAIN 79

The human organism, from the latest standpoint of science,
is a compact, federal union of thirty or more differentiations of
cell life. Every one of these thousands and millions of cells of
which each tissue is composed, is a more or less independent
creature, possessing to some considerable extent individuality
and self-direction. They are banded together, however, in-
dissolubly, and in certain situations are in protoplasmic contact
by means of living filaments, so sentiently that all live and feel
as one.

These orders of cell life thus confederated have, in the progress
of organic development in the past, become mutually dependent
and inter-dependent one upon another until one order cannot
live without the presence and function of the others. Such are
the bone cells, the muscle cells, the connective tissue cells, the
hepatic, pulmonic, splenic, intestinal, spermatic, epithelial,
capillary and glandular cells; an extensive congeries of diverse
tissues, each containing millions of individuals and all mutually
dependent on the general well-being and safety of the organism.

So far as can be judged by a comparison of man to-day with
man in earliest historic times and man with the lower improgress-
ive mammals, all these above-mentioned cells, or differentiations
of cells, are no longer progressive. Even their abnormalities are
improgressive. For the good reason that there is nothing in the
terrestrial environment which now calls for a re-adaptation ; nor
has there been for thousands of years. The type of cell has as-
sumed permanence.

There is, however, a tissue of the organism, an order, or
differentiation of cells, which we have not yet mentioned, namely,
the nerve and brain order. In brain and nerve we contemplate
a colony, or order of cells, incorporated within the organism,
living at the expense of the other orders, devoted to the acquisi-
tion of knowledge : a function diverse from all others, nobler than
all others. In a sense, it is as if this brain order were a superior
parasite which had entered the multicellular organism and lived
on it, but repaid for its protected situation and its refined food
by doing the thinking, planning, and caring for its host. So
greatly has the ftinction of acquiring knowledge ennobled the
brain group of cells, raising it to such divine eminence over all
others, that in man it has come to stand for the personality

8o SALVATION BY SCIENCE

of the organism, the self, the ego, the soul of the human
body.

Nerve and brain are not foimd in unicellular life; at least,
not in the organic sense of these terms.

From as close a study as can be made of certain simple forms
of multicellular creatures, which are doubtless quite similar to
those from which the higher multicellular forms were originally
developed, the first rudimentary attempt to establish a nervous
system consisted of a living protoplasmic thread, thrust out from
one cell to another. At first this would appear to have been a
mere " feeler," but in time it came to remain constantly ex-
tended, no longer as a transient feeler, but as a permanent means
of sensory intercommimication between cell and cell.

But, as multicellular creatures waxed larger, and differentia-
tion of the component cell orders began, simple filaments of
protoplasm, modified pseudopodia, were no longer sufficient for
transmitting sensation from tract to tract; whole rows or lines
of cells were involved in the strong currents of sensation that
passed to and fro, and, in time, these cells became devoted wholly
to the business of receiving, interpreting, and transmitting the
aggregated sensations of all the millions of individual cells of
which an animal organism is composed.

I need not here review the evidences and the argument by
which it is now shown that sensory ganglia for perception and
reflex perception, grew up at the intersection of the primary
nerve filaments; how the special sense organs took form; how
at length the cerebellum came to be lodged in the forward end
of the pluricellular animal, and how the ever-increasing need of
greater capacity for the sensory business of a world-roaming
organism led to that enormous super-addition to the cerebellum,
known as the cerebrum.

What is designed here to point out is the fact that the nervous
system of the human organism, particularly the cerebral portion
of it, or, in other words, the tissue of mind and intellect, has
always been in the past and is to-day a progressive tissue. It
came into existence, as brain, in response to a necessity on the
part of the organism for greater protoplasmic capacity, for the
reception and utilization of intelligence. That necessity and that
stimulus still exist and grow constantly more urgent.

BRAIN 8l

Bone and muscle cells have developed to the extent of the
necessity which led to their differentiation; the incentives to
locomotion and organic support remain the same, unchanged in
character; hence, bone and muscle cells long ago reached the
acme of their development. The same is true, or true in large
part, of every other tissue of the body, save the encephalon.
The brain is still forced to develop and grow larger in response to
constantly changing conditions incident to the world's growth
in knowledge. Certain tribes, races and peoples, it is true, adhere
to habits and modes of life largely improgressive, and, as a
result, show little brain change from generation to generation.
It is not so, however, with the westward-moving peoples of the
dominant races, — the nations who think and invent. Science
is the agent of brain growth. To think, in the true sense of the
word, signifies brain development. New inventions stand for
cerebral evolution. The changed sensory experiences, too,
which result from new inventions, tend to alter the protoplasmic
arrangement of the brain, and add to its capacity for growth.
In America, to-day, we see heads of varying sizes and shapes, not
only the types emigrant from Europe, Asia, and Africa, but types
and sizes imknown before in any country. There is actual brain
growth among us. A new variety of intellect is being developed.

A comparison of the earliest human skulls, found in ancient
caves, tombs, and moimds, with those of individuals of the
present age, shows that on the whole there has been growth of
brain as well as a perceptible alteration in shape in favor of
greater intellectuality. Brain has grown greatly in size and
improved in form during the last eight or ten thousand years, —
a period of time relatively brief when considered in comparison
with the developmental epoch of mammals.

Prehistoric skulls are smaller and less prominently developed,
frontally, than those of our own people. The same general
truth is exemplified when the skulls of existent savage tribes are
compared with those of individuals from the highly civilized and
progressive nations ; there is less of that higher frontal develop-
ment in savages, which we always find associated with the growth
of intellect, and this even in instances of large individuals, where
the skull is very massive and capacious. Acquired knowledge
and the sciences tend constantly to increase the bulk of the

82 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

brain and modify its form ; in a word, to render it a progressive
tissue.

This proposition is still more grandly exemplified when the
evolution of life on the earth is contemplated as a whole. In
early metazoic life, brain was scarcely more than initiated. The
lower vertebrates have small brains. But in the quadrumana
the human brain is foimd to be outlined in type and form. From
this order of mammals the progress of the human brain can be
readily traced.

Nor can it be doubted, even although our microscopes fail
to show the fact, that the brain tissue is receiving a progressive
internal development, corresponding to the intellectual growth
of humanity.

For the human brain to-day is the protoplasmic co-relative,
the material counterpart of the entirety of human knowledge;
and in future as science increases its range and its acquisitions,
there cannot fail to be greater and greater stimulus to brain
growth and increased cerebral capacity.

It may not be wholly irrelevant here to allude to certain recent
attempts in the province of surgery to open the sutures of the
skull for the purpose of giving the brain greater room therein.
These first rude efforts may be prophetic of measures which will
be resorted to as time goes on to facilitate cerebral development,
since it is already known to many specialists in brain disorders
that congenital lack of room for the brain inside the skull is a
serious incident in the lives of many persons, particularly where
for several generations there has been a tendency to intellectual
pursuits.

So surely as there are new things to learn in the great imiverse
aroimd us, just so surely will the brain of man go on growing and
developing greater capacity for the reception of knowledge.
It is in this respect and in this tissue that man has not reached
the acme of his powers, and that evolution has not ceased.

And this aspect of his future brings us more clearly to a con-
templation of his anomalous position on the earth to-day. From
some reason — either a hint dropped in his earlier ear by beings
from some outer orb of space, or in the natural order of his
terrestrial development — man left the rank of his brutal mam-
malian congeners and began to use his brain. As a result, his

BRAIN 83

brain grew and has entered upon an era of development the
Hmits of which no one can foresee. In consequence we find this
tissue to be still progressive, but associated in the organism with
a score of other unprogressive tissues which tend but to pass
through a fixed cycle of growth and decline. It is this condition
which affords the key-note and the explanation to his strange
creeds, aspirations, superstitions, hopes, and fears ; his optimisms
and his pessimisms ; his gods, his christs, and his satans.

And this is that riddle of the Sphinx, that fateful interrogation
of the Ages which he has to answer: Will the progressive, still
developing brain acquire such knowledge and obtain such mastery
and such control over the forces of nature as to " redeem,"
regenerate, and renew at will the other improgressive tissues with
which brain is yoked in the organism, and which at present
condemn it to a brief lifetime with them? Can the progressive
tissue redeem and save the unprogressive tissues? We have now
good hopes that it can.

THE ETHER OF SPACE; ITS RELATION
TO HUMAN PERSONALITY

A PROBABLE SOLUTION OF SPIRITISM
(1908)

In the course of efforts to analyze the currents of nervous energy
which emanate from the cells of the brain, the writer has found
it interesting to observe the effect of these currents, or emanations,
on free-roving micro-organisms (under the microscope). As a
criterion, or means of comparison, a " control " current of elec-
tricity from a small static machine has been employed, of high
frequency and similar intensity, as indicated by the electroscope,
the working hypothesis being that the emanant current is a cur-
rent of electricity (corpuscles) plus x, that is to say, plus something
issuing from the brain cell, this latter being of course, the unknown
quantity concerning which knowledge was sought.

The sensitivity of these minute organisms is exceedingly deli-
cate, so much so that it may yet be found advantageous to use
them as instruments of nice determination of values, particularly
where the ether is in question as environment and medium of the
cell-of-life. Their behavior, when subjected to emanant influence
from other cell life, is very interesting and suggestive. They are
truly psychic.

In fact, these observations, in toto, have led me to lay down, as
a law of cell life, that every cell, whether a free unicell or a tissue
cell organized in multicellular organisms, is a " psychic," import-
ing the word, as quoted, from the vocabulary of our friends of
the Psychical Research Societies, when applied to automatists, or
" mediums ; " persons who appear to lapse voluntarily into an
abnormal condition where self-consciousness is in abeyance, and
thereby have certain latent powers of the brain heightened.

84

THE ETHER OF SPACE 85

In dealing with this word " psychic," too, and in attempting to
adapt it to the results of my observations of the behavior of micro-
organisms under the conditions above mentioned, I have found
myself obliged to define the word more fully and definitely than
I have before seen it defined, in fact to re-define it. I think, how-
ever, that psychologists generally will commend this later definition.

I therefore define a " psychic " as a person who is able, tempo-
rarily, to drop ordinary perception by the five senses, discontinue
life in accord with such perception, and pass into a state of per-
ceiving through and by means of the ether, instead of by the air
and the combined methods of air, ether, gravity, touch and chem-
ical action, as seen in ordinary perception by the five senses of
daily life.

A little more succinctly, every cell-of-life is naturally a psychic.
But in the brain, which is an organized assemblage of cells, the
necessities of the terrestrial life in air, water, etc., have led the
united assemblage to depend on five organized senses : ear, eye,
smell, taste, touch. Ordinarily it does thus depend. None the
less, under certain conditions which we term abnormal, it is able
to revert suddenly to the vastly swifter, more far-reaching per-
ception through the ether, where neither ear, eye, nor touch are
requisite.

The cell of a simple micro-organism is all eye, all ear, because
it is in practically instantaneous etheric communication with the
whole universe. The marvellously delicate protoplasmic web of
the cell organization vibrates to the ether thrill. For even as each
corpuscle carries its electric charge, so every last particle or vortex
of the ether carries its sentient, monistic charge of life.

A psychic or " trance medium " then is a person who from some
not yet fixed habit or metier of sensory perception — either from
disease or defective inheritance — is able to revert, like Sweden-
borg, to perception through and by means of the ether, the five
senses of ordinary daily life passing for the time being, either
wholly or partially, into a state of abeyance, so far as in some
instances to be wholly inoperative, the psychic becoming insensible
to sound, heat, cold, etc.

To see, hear and feel by means of the ether is what it is to
be clairvoyant, clairaudient and " telepathic." A human brain
communicating by means of the ether with the brain of another

86 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

person is naturally and from purely physical causes a " mind
reader." It is a question of the delicacy, density and instanta-
neously-acting properties of the connecting medium. The ether
puts every brain en rapport with every other the world over.
Every brain, animal or human, probably possesses this faculty of
etheric perception, potential, in greater or lesser degree. But it
fades out as the brain ages and grows rigidly organized, that
is to say habituated to perception only by means of the five or-
ganized senses. Animals appear to possess etheric perception;
cats and young pigs, for example; and it is often apparent in
young children before the axis of self -consciousness locates its
poles permanently and determines rigidly the personality of the
existent life.

Instinct has always been a dark, inscrutable word, both in biol-
ogy and theology. Biology has affected to scorn it of late years,
but has never been able fully to cope with it, as in the case of
homing cats, and of little pigs finding their way back to the parental
sty, after being carried off in closed baskets for many miles, by
roundabout roads.

I wish here to call attention to the clear manner in which etheric
perception by the brain solves the whilom mystery, and to the light
it sheds on much of the phenomena formerly termed " instinctive."
The explanation it offers is explicit. Instinct is etheric or psychic
perception, nothing more nor less ; and these isolated, infrequent
cases of it, as instanced above, are what is left in the multicellular
animal of the original, unicellular endowment.

On account of its small size, relatively, and the nature of its
protoplasmic activities, the cell-of-life lives largely in relations
with the ether. By this we mean that protoplasm — the delicately
organized living matter of a cell — acts and reacts by means
of the ether as its vehicle, and has little to do with gravity and
the earth's aerial envelope as a means of communication, cell with
cell. It is a creature of the ether.

Every cell-of-life, therefore, whether a protozoon, living alone,
or a cell of organized, multicellular life, is from environment and
constitution clairvoyant and clairaudient, that is to say it possesses
this far-perceptive faculty through the ether, in the clear-perceptive
sense. Although organized life, like that of the human body, has

THE ETHER OF SPACE 87

come to depend on the five " senses," that was not the method of
the ancestral unicell; and even in the human organism the tissue
cell has never wholly surrendered nor relinquished its natural clair-
voyant and tdepathic powers. It still retains a latent faculty of
perception through the ether.

In the human brain, which is a well united (by protoplasmic
filaments) association of millions of cells, there occurs, in the case
of " psychics " and " mediums," a sudden reversion to perception
by the brain en masse through the ether. The whole organized
assemblage of brain cells drops into what is termed the trance
state, seeing and hearing through the ether instead of the air. It
reverts to etheric percq^tion. A sudden, wide enhancement of the
perceptive powers of the brain ensues instantly, such as all the
celebrated " mediums " profess to experience. It is a different,
more exhaustive metier of perception. The whole brain smokes
with emanations, that is to say the emanation becomes visible,
sometimes phosphorescent. It is an effort of the entire brain as
if it were one cell in unicellular life. We then have clairvoyance,
clairaudience, telepathy and clear perception of the whole commune
life of the earth; cognition also of the past and even of the future;
— for clear cognition of the past is in last analysis the equivalent
of precognition, premonition, or divination of the future.

WHAT IS THE ETHER?

But what is this ether of cosmic space wherein perception by
the cell-of-life is so far-reaching, and to which the perceptions
(clairvoyance, telepathy) of a person in the " psychic " or trance
state revert as a vehicle of communication ?

What do we know of it? What and where is it?

It is everywhere. It is the basis and matrix of the universe.
It is that primeval element, " without form and void," from which
the cosmos has emerged. It pervades the interstices of all matter.
It is the fundamental thing, the back-ground on which the uni-
verse is built up and from which it has been evolved.

We know of matter as attenuate as the corpuscle (electron) ;
and we may define the ether as everything below, or smaller than
the corpuscle. That is the best we can do at present In the way
of a definition. It is the low-sentient residuum of the cosmos.

88 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Certain physicists and chemists believe this world-ether to be
a homogeneous substance, or element, not particulate; a condition
which they attempt to describe as " jelly-like." This view, how-
ever, would appear rather like a limitation of the human mind than
what the analogy of the universe teaches. I deem it safer, more
likely, in the light of that analogy, to define the ether as being
all matter that is below the corpuscle, that is to say, all particles
smaller and finer than the corpuscle, or electron.

Below the corpuscle, for aught we know to the contrary, there
stretches away, abysmally downward, a realm of matter as yet
unentered by the researches of man. That, indeed, is what now
appears most probable. How far downward it goes, to what pro-
found depths of things parvicular, we know not, to infinity, perhaps.

None the less it is with that realm of fine, yet very likely dis-
crete, particles within particles — each with its titanic endowment
of energy — that life, the life of the unicell and of the organized
multicell, is involved and has its intimate environment; the real
environment through which it acts and interacts with all other
life. It is a realm exceedingly sensitive to the action of cell life
and in its reactions with that life displays subtle properties. By
estimate of Mendelief the atomic weight of ether particles is one-
millionth that of the atom of hydrogen, or one-thousandth that
of the electron.

Mathematical calculations of the ether, made by the late Lord
Kelvin, Sir Oliver Lodge and others, give well-nigh incredible
figures as to the density of the ether, its weight and content of
energy : for example, weight, if it were iron or stone, of a thousand
tons per cubic millimeter, with a content of energy of lo^^ ergs,
or 3x10^^ kilowatt centuries; otherwise equivalent to the out-
put of a power-house of a million horse-powers, working contin-
uously for forty millions of years. Figures wholly fantastic, con-
veying little meaning as to the real nature of the ether which other
sources of information teach us is a medium more elastic and easily
vibrant, more sensitive to impressions and more continent of such
impressions than anything of which we have thus far gained knowl-
edge. We know that light-waves from the fixed stars, or suns
of space, press steadily forward in it for six thousand years from
the date of their emission ; that it is the vehicle not only of the
marvelously delicate thrill, transformed in the telephone and in

THE ETHER OF SPACE 89

" wireless " messages, but also of the enormous weights of gravi-
tation, seen in the revolution of the planets. Not only is the ether
the vehicle and medium of light, heat and magneto-electric phe-
nomena, but of still more subtile effects, rays and emanations of
cell life, which unceasingly pervade it, modify it and hold it in a
certain attitude, phase or rhythm; vibrating or echoing all life on
a certain note, a certain component chord, vibrating to the totality
of all life. So far from being fancies, as many might think, these
are but deductions which the accumulation of facts already neces-
sitates. In brief, the ether is now the great new world of dis-
covery.

CELL METABOLISM IN RELATION TO THE ETHER

As illustrative of the effect of cell life on a medium so elastic,
so sensitive as the ether, we have to realize that there is on the
surface of the earth, approximately, six trillions of tons of matter,
organized as living matter (''protoplasm") in the cell-of-life ;
or approximately, if spread out, more than ten thousand cells to
every square yard of surface over land and sea.

We have still further to realize that every cell-of-life is a small,
but powerful electro-chemical engine, associated with the passage
of sentience into kinetic energy — matter-moving energy — by the
intermediate step, or steps, of will-power. What we see in the
cell is a complicated, delicate organization of the molecules and
atoms of more elementary matter, having for its object the rais-
ing-up of the inherent sentient property of these molecules and
atoms to a higher estate of intelligence ; — for that is the evident
object of cell life in all its organizations. It is a complicated, con-
joint process, sentient in origin, attended by radiant activity, lib-
eration of energy and emanations of corpuscular matter and even
of atoms. Every cell as a result of its metabolism — its life —
surrounds itself with an aura, or atmosphere of emanation, com-
parable to that about a magnet. The same in greater volume is
true of the multicell. Nor is this aura of emanation and radiation
confined to the immediate vicinity of the cell. It goes forth to
great distances.

We have presented then the picture of this all-pervading, sen-
sitive ether and thousands of cells, if averaged, to every square

90 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

yard of the earth's surface, each giving forth radiant energy and
emanations. It could hardly be but that a medium so sensitive
to impression would be impregnated and profoundly impressed by
so potent an agency, and as a matter of evidence, otherwise, we
find it so.

The question then arises, what form or mode does this influ-
ence of cell life on the ether take? And here comes in for esti-
mation all that great class of phenomena, facts, traditions and
recorded marvels, which from time immemorial has been classed
as mysterious and which science has usually ignored, wisely, per-
haps, since the data for explanation were not yet in hand. But
now, in our growing knowledge of the ether and of matter, we
see the cause. That cause is life. A vast composite thrill, or
sphere of influence, throughout the ether is set up, which appears
never to cease, at least not for thousands of years. It is this which
we are now attempting to examine and study: the voice of all
terrestrial life, speaking into the ether from every cell, uniting in
one great mandate of direction and guidance.

This strange echoing of life and the forms of life by the ether
is what has long baffled us to understand and to explain. I use
the word, echoing, because at present it partially defines what is
meant, not that it adequately or comprehensively defines it. For
it is more than an echo; it is an echo, a mirror-reflection and a
memory combined, an echo-memory, continuously repeated, carry-
ing, too, formative influences.

THE PROBABLE EXPLANATION OF MIRAGE, FROST - FLOWERS AND

GHOSTS

Often when matter, like water vapor, is in the nascent, forma-
tive or transition state, this echo-memory in the ether appears to
take form and become " fixed," as in the frost-flower on the win-
dow pane in winter ; those wonderful fronds and fern leaves which
form with such startling suddenness, even as one watches them.

In quest of symbols of comparison, this ether " echo " resembles
photography rather than echoes ; there issue into the ether, con-
tinuously, what is equivalent to pictures of the forms of life and
— what is far more difficult of comprehension — impressions of

THE ETHER OF SPACE 9 1

traits and qualities as well as of form, shape and pattern. The
evidences of this are many. An etheric " echo " of character as
well as a picture of form and lineaments is cast and reverberates
unceasingly. These echoes, or pictures, " psychics " often appear
to perceive, and vaguely, ignorantly, attempt to interpret to us.

By what mode of radiation, or emanation, this is accomplished,
we do not yet know, whether by rays purely dynamic, or a pro-
jection of corpuscular matter from the cell katabolism. Certain
facts indicate that both modes occur in combination. Thus far it
can only be said that the sum total of all the phenomena shows
that something of the nature of this echoing of imagery exists
in the ether, and redacts on the cell-of-life.

The existence of the ether and of its transcendent properties is
now as well established as the existence of the electron; nor can
the phenomena, above alluded to, be traced to any other source
or medium. The negative evidence that it is etheric grows con-
clusive as we investigate it further. The ether is the repository
of the " soul " of Life-on-the-Earth, the garner and the continuum
of that soul.

The difficulty of conceiving these phenomena lies in forming
concepts of the wonderfully tenuous and elastic nature of the
medium in which they occur. Thus far science has dealt with
no substance like it. Anomalous and absurd it appears to think
of a substance which will mirror the morals of a living creature,
a cell or a man! Yet science is face to face with this anomaly;
our most recent studies of living matter and the ether virtually
compel this or a very similar hypothesis.

In truth we are but beginning faintly to realize the transcendent
tenuity and sensitiveness of this all-embracing " argon gas " of
unknown vacuum; there are no symbols with which to compare
many of its intimate properties. Moreover, it appears to be a
composite thing, field within field of greater and greater degrees
of tenuity, medium within medium. And in the midst of it we
live our lives, each life a center of self-hood and feeling and also
an engine of kinetic activity; — an activity that stirs the enveloping
medium far into the depths of space, no thrill of which is ever lost,
but comes reflected back from the infinite in the eternities of the
future. With all its mighty potentialities of mass, of density, of
boundless elasticity and of titanic energy, this ether is yet the

92 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

repository and reservoir of an imagery, physical, psychic, moral,
no trace or other impression in which is ever lost, but goes, pic-
tured, mirrored, and " echoing " on forever : a vast, vibrant, mixed
imagery which often takes what seems to us fantastic forms, as
revealed in the mirage over desert lands, where for a moment or
an hour, owing to a nascent state of the aerial vapor as the day
advances, it is " fixed " visibly in the atmosphere, as groves, streams
and fountains ; or as seen recently in Alaska, in the vast semblance
of populous cities, with structures like those of the great World's
Fairs, perhaps the ether echo-memory of them.

The strange truth appears to be, that every life, every person-
ality, which has ever lived, whether unicell, animal or man, is thus
" echoed," and be-pictured. Its imago, form, traits and morals
even are " echoed," preserved and carried on into the future. In
this ethereous realm it joins and blends with " the innumerable
caravan " of those who have lived self-consciously in protoplasmic
life. It is not the self-conscious personality; that self-conscious-
ness pertains to the living matter of the cell-of-life, but the image
of that personality, the shade, the ghost.

From this it follows that when a " psychic " passes into the
condition of etheric perception, in place of ordinary perception,
these images, shades, or " spirits " of the dead, or even of the liv-
ing, throng upon her suddenly heightened sense ; a semblance of
" control," " personation," or of " possession " occurs, and then her
physical tongue, or pencil, gives utterance to the etheric echo, pic-
ture or vision. We who are normal, or think we are, who live
according to the evidence of our five senses, perceive nothing of
all this etheric imagery. To attain it, direct protoplasmic contact
must be established with the ether.

Knowing what we now know of the ether, it is by no means
incredible that what the " psychic " perceives, is but the " shade,"
the etheric image, of the personality that was once embodied and
hence self-conscious; the etheric " echo " of what that personality
once was.

" Psychics," too, are of all degrees of excellence, as such, and
alas, of all degrees of rectitude. Some possess etheric perception
much clearer than others. None perceive perfectly; and all inter-
pret what they perceive vaguely and erratically, tinged and col-
ored by their own ideas and beliefs.

THE ETHER OF SPACE 93

THE ETHER IN RELATION TO NATURAL SELECTION AND ANCESTRY

In the protoplasmic as in the nascent state matter appears to
be remarkably sensitive to the formative, guiding influence of this
wealth of imagery in the surrounding ether. Nowhere perhaps
is this sensitivity and the effects which ensue from it seen so im-
pressively as during the very earliest stages of embryonic life
in utero. Every mother, animal or human, is at this time a " psy-
chic " in some degree. The formative influence of the mirroring
ether at this period remains a subject for future study. We have
to inquire, too, as to this constant, omnipresent influence in the
organism as the germs of a new life are prepared and matured —
the ovum and the spermatozoon — in connection with the transla-
tion of ancestral personality from one generation to another, or
as it is more commonly termed, the transmission of inherited traits
and characteristics ; heredity generally.

Protoplasmic matter is sensitive to mnemonic impression from
without to a degree simply marvelous. The ether, as vehicle, car-
ries the impression, but in the protoplasm of the cell the impression
is " fixed " and remains there as a memory. This faculty of the
cell to remember is apparently limitless, its capacity to retain such
impressions unbounded.

Personally, from imperfection of the larger, functional appa-
ratus, we forget our experiences ; that is one thing ; but in the
protoplasm of the cell, itself, no impression or experience seems
ever to be forgotten, and probably is not as long as the protoplasmic
structure Is preserved. We shall ultimately come to the deduction,
that all consciousness, self-hood and all of human personality are
here contained, abide here and here only.

From the standpoint of biological progress, the deductions which
these later studies of the ether and its content necessitate are im-
portant and interesting in their bearing on the much debated prob-
lems of natural selection, sexual selection, etc., where the earlier,
cruder " Darwinism " and " Weissmannism " fall short and fail
to explain many of the present enigmas of life.

Whitman, Wilson, Kellogg and a full score others of our promi-
nent American biologists (to say little of the German revolt against
Darwin) have for a long time, as Is well known, tacitly acknowl-

94 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

edged the insufficiency of natural selection and all other, older
theories of the evolution of life. An unknown, formative, guiding
power, deeper-lying and more constantly operative, came to be
recognized by Whitman and many of his pupils and contempora-
ries, recognized not in the sense of a weak reversion to abandoned
theistic beliefs, but a tacit recognition of a great natural cause,
thus far unexplained.

In the omnipresent ether, with its content of coercive imagery,
everywhere reflected and compelling imitation in the protoplasmic
web of cell life, we deem it possible that this hitherto unknown
cause will be found; the formative hand which underlies alike
natural selection and every other special hypothesis of vital evolu-
tion. Rather these older theories are but the superficial glimpses
of this deep-lying cause, this semblance of design in nature. It is
a cause that has been cumulative, one which has gained strength,
since the first unicell by earth's early seas thrilled its feeble life
into the void etheric medium. Before turning spiritists in haste
let us go on, therefore, learning more of the ether.

PSYCHICAL research; a harsh criticism

A former member of the American Branch of the Society for
Psychical Research (while the branch society existed as such) in
a very harsh criticism of Salvation by Science remarks, " This
book would never have been put forth if the author had been
conversant with the scholarly work of Frederick W. H. Myers,
entitled Human Personality, and the Reports and Proceedings of
the English and American Societies of Psychical Research. His
ignorance is his only excuse, if excuse it can be called."

This is frankness of the gauntest, tempered by charity the cold-
est; and unfortunately I have not even the poor excuse which
my critic concedes. I have read Myers' Human Personality very
carefully, also the later papers and works on the same subject by
Professor Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Mr. Stead, Dr. Hyslop,
Rider, Podmore, Carrington, Camille Flammarion, the late Dr.
Lombroso, Professor William James and others.

Nor am I unfamiliar with the " psychic " phenomena, induced
by many " mediums." My sin therefore is one against much

THE ETHER OF SPACE 95

"light" (as my critic sees it), all the light there is, indeed; —
and I certainly wish there were more. I desire earnestly the privi-
lege of saying that my attitude toward all and everything in the
line of bona fide psychical research is that of a pupil and learner.
I believe that the Psychical Research Societies and the authors
cited above are doing good work to advance the truth, even when
— like Sir Oliver Lodge — they manifestly fail to discern it.

" The dead have never really died at all ! " exclaims the vener-
able Alfred Russell Wallace, triumphantly.

" Our records prove the persistence of the discarnate spirit's
life," wrote Frederick Myers, and died strong in that belief.

Is it all so certainly proved then ?

The writer is not a partisan pro or con. A new view, what I
believe to be a solution of spiritism, is presented here wholly from
the standpoint of my own researches; a view associated with a
new definition of human personality and of psychic phenomena
generally. It is presented for what it is worth, in the hope that
it will be tested experimentally by others.

It is a view and a solution which have come incidentally to
other researches and studies in quest of chemically perfect cell
nutrition, a scientific rectification of the blood plasma, and the
analysis and control of brain cell energy. And from being inci-
dental, I have to confess that it is presented here in a somewhat
fragmentary manner; yet the reader will probably be able to put
together whatever of it is properly essential and pertinent to the
subject.

The Records and Proceedings of the Psychical Research Soci-
eties jumble together instances of clairvoyance, clairaudience, telep-
athy, hypnotism, '' double personality," levitatlon of tables and
" materializations," with alleged communications from " discar-
nate " spirits : a bizarre accumulation of phenomena, often having
no proper relativity to the matter in question. All so mixed, so
confounded one thing with another, that it is difficult to isolate
or locate the facts that go properly together for a logical explana-
tion of anything connected with it. One turns wearily from the
perusal of it, with the strong conviction that the key to it all is
missing, and that the right route has not been followed.

So much so that the present writer has found it better to revert
largely to the inductive method of investigation, in the light of

96 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

our new knowledge of matter. For example, these alleged levita-
tions of tables and flower pots, clairvoyance and telepathy, when
not tricks, may very possibly be connected with etheric phenomena.
But what are these " materialized spirits," " spirit hands," ghosts
and apparitions? Much of it is imposture, but possibly not all.
It would be by no means surprising if the ether were a factor or
agency here. " Materializations " may take place in it, naturally.
But how?

For answer to this let us return to the analysis of those currents
and emanations which constantly issue from the human brain and
the human organism as a whole. Of these currents we can now
say positively that they are like and probably identical with elec-
trical currents, plus a flux of minute particles, corpuscular, or
molecular, it may be. There is such an outward flux from the
brain, although we cannot yet say just what kind of matter it is,
nor yet that it is always the same. Very likely it varies and
changes, with the mood, temper, or physiological condition of the
brain from which it issues.

Experimentally, the evidence of the existence of this emanation
is as good as any evidence can be. It exists and forms an aura,
or atmosphere, pervading and surrounding the organism, over-
flowing it, too, on all sides. The evidence from a great number
of observations is also to the effect that in case of a " psychic "
in trance, passing into the state of etheric perception, the quantity
or volume of emanation from the brain cells is increased, or inten-
sified. Either from a secret, conscious effort of the will, or from
subconscious will-power on the part of the " psychic," this volume
of emanant matter is then greater and not very unfrequently takes
visible form. In the case of Dr. Lombroso's observations of
Eusapia Paladino, a " cool wind " was felt to issue from her head.
By night this emanation is phosphorescent.

The emanation or radiation from her organism may have been
of sufficient volume, as Dr. Lombroso believed, to enable her mus-
cular strength to be transferred by it.

As analogous phenomena, from a wholly different source, the
writer once saw large dim globes of luminous matter roll slowly
along the rails of a railroad, on a hot summer night, hopping from
rail to rail where the rail ends joined and finally exploding with
a considerable report and dissolving from view, as they reached

THE ETHER OF SPACE 97

the wheels of a locomotive standing on the track; — a case of
natural " materialization," not associated with life, or living or-
ganisms. These luminous bodies — a foot in diameter, perhaps —
were probably electrons, englobed and associated with other mat-
ter, either fluid or gaseous.

The emanation from the brain of a " psychic " is apparently
composite and quite complex. It would be interesting and instruct-
ive if Dr. Lombroso, or Dr. Foa, could have devised some method
of testing it, electrically and chemically. If these worthy scientists
had withdrawn their minds from " discarnate spirits " sufficiently
to do this, the results might have proved of real service in our
quest for truth.

In this brain cell emanation and the power of the " psychic "
to project it, either consciously or subconsciously, resides undoubt-
edly the explanation of table-turning, table-lifting, spirit-rappings,
spirit-hands, spirit-faces and " materializations " generally. (I am
speaking here, of course, of that small per cent of all these " mani-
festations " which is not fraudulent.)

The fire-fly and gymnote originate and cast forth emanations
from the cell metabolism of their bodies. In unicellular life we
even see the emanation take the form of tiny improvised javelins.
Unicells also levitate objects, hypnotize their victims, and paralyze
their foes — all by will-power.

These emanations are mysterious only in the sense of being
not yet fully understood; they are "spiritual" only in the sense
of being physically very tenuous and fluidic. The " mediums "
themselves are commonly ignorant persons, some honest, some
tricky. Often they are as credulous concerning " spirits " as the
venerable Alfred Russell Wallace himself. Yet not a few of the
" best mediums " frankly declare themselves skeptical ; two whom
I know personally are unbelievers as to the existence of disem-
bodied intelligences. " Somehow, yet how I don't know, I do all
these things, myself," one of them said to me.

I record here a very interesting observation by Dr. Lombroso,
namely that when Eusapia Paladino is seen to " levitate " a table,
her own weight, when sitting on a scale, is found to be increased
exactly by the weight of the table lifted. To the physicist this
fact of itself is very significant; and altogether the physical prob-
lem thus presented, is a very pretty one. That it has any connection

98 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

whatever with disembodied intelligences is so highly improbable,
that to find such phenomena included among the " evidences " of
the existence of such intelligences is a curious illustration of the
hold certain old superstitions still retain even on the minds of
savants !

It is an interesting question how far, to what distance, the
material part of the emanation can be projected by the " psychic "
— one of those problems which will ere long become a matter of
experiment, to wit, the raising of ghosts and visible apparitions.

The writer, however, is far from holding that all apparitions
are thus subjectively projected. Ghosts, phantoms and phantasms
are apparently of many kinds. There is a well-evidenced phantom
which seems to be purely etheric, akin to the mirage, the appear-
ance of which is freakish and dependent on properties of the ether
not yet understood. These, like Fata Morgana, have apparently
no direct connection with the human brain and might appear any-
where, far from the haunts of men : what our Theosophist friends
would probably term " elementals " or " nature spirits." There
is also the poltergeist, the crime-ghost, the haunted-house ghost,
and finally the venerable graveyard ghost, of the existence of all
of which there is fairly good evidence, but by no means evidence
that they are disembodied personalities still intelligently alive. The
plea made here and made very earnestly is that science shall not
weakly falsify itself by turning " spiritist," until we have investi-
gated the properties of the ether-of -space a little farther.

The ability of certain psychics, when in trance, to externalize
or project what De Rochas calls a " fluidic double," or " astral
double," to a considerable distance outward from their bodies, also
rests on good evidence. Beyond reasonable doubt it is to this
projectable "fluidic double" (in conjunction with an emanation
from the brain cells of the medium) that the celebrated " Katie
King " phenomena might be attributed.

It is safe to predict that these phenomena, in toto, will be demon-
strated to be etheric in connection with cell emanation.

The " control spirit " of the medium in many of these cases is,
I believe, one of the many latent personalities of which the human
brain is the habitat, or repository, and which in trance rise into
temporary possession of the medium's faculties. But of this more
will be said in connection with the subject of human personality.

THE ETHER OF SPACE 99

For this has brought us to the crux of the matter — human
personality.

AN ERRONEOUS DEFINITION

It is easy to see that a false definition of human personality is
the rock on which Psychical Research has thus far split. Here,
too, the truth-seeking Myers went astray at the outset of his pains-
taking quest. He assumed — they all assume — that the human
psyche, the personality, is an infrangible unit, detachable at death
from the human organism, with self-consciousness intact; they
assume this, or at least make use of it as their working hypothe-
sis. That was the definition of Butler, of Hamilton and of all
the mental philosophers of the past century whose works were
formerly used as our college text books. Myers was a follower
of Reid and these former lights of Mental Philosophy. He at-
tempted, however, to expand the conception of a detachable psyche
in accord with certain facts of scientific research and his copious
records of " spiritist " phenomena. From these latter, largely, he
deduced the idea of a subliminal, or subconscious personality, and
also of a supra-liminal, or self-conscious personality, but held that
these sometimes interact. It is, he believed, some essential part
or principle of the subliminal personality, or of the two combined,
which causes apparitions and spirit phenomena generally. This
esoteric principle, he held, was the part of human personality which
survives, self-consciously, the death of the body.

The idea of a subliminal, or subconscious mind was purely
hypothetical with Myers. He had little conception of the part the
ether plays in psychic phenomena and knew nothing, experiment-
ally, of those emanations from the brain which cause all, or nearly
all the " evidences " on which spiritists rest their contention. It
must therefore be reckoned as a good guess on his part, or would
have been, if he had classed it as physical and natural, instead of
" spiritual." From lack of this later knowledge and from his
erroneous theory of human personality, Myers went astray and
groped in darkness. The now well-indicated facts of biology and
histology prove beyond question or peradventure that the human
personality is no such indivisible integer or entity, but an organized
union of cell lives, separable and dissoluble; that even during the

lOO SALVATION BY SCIENCE

organic lifetime it can be increased or diminished. It is not an
infrangible integer which cannot be dissolved, but an aggregation
of lesser lives which can separate, as when a thousand people
gather in one assembly, and afterwards depart.

NO CELLS, NO CONSCIOUSNESS

The " cell doctrine " of life is as old as Schleiden. Schwann and
Virchow; yet it seems never to be fully understood, never com-
prehended as to its real significance. Every living organism is
composed of either a single cell or an assemblage of cells. The
cell is the only source and seat of life on the earth, the only means
of sensation, consciousness and self-consciousness ; for conscious-
ness enters only by the door of sensation.

The evidence is overwhelming that nowhere on the earth's sur-
face is there anything resembling consciousness except in and by
means of this same cell-of-life. The cell, as we find it everywhere,
is a little self, a small, yet delicate organism in which the elements
of sentience, elements existing in all matter, are raised up by the
steps of organization to self-hood and self-direction, that cell self-
hood which in the multicell rises by further organization to self-
consciousness and personality. Each and every cell of the multicell
— the human body, for example — is a self and a life by itself,
living about its own separate axis of sensation and consciousness.
In the tissues and organs of the human body, preeminently in the
brain, the cells are organized in a communal life for mutual benefit.
Yet each retains its self-hood and lives its separate cell life. It
has its own distinct metabolism, its own emanation and aura, and
its own personal axis of self-consciousness. It pools its cell-life
with others, for a part of the time, in order to join in a larger
effort for the common good, yet never, night or day, ceases to be
an individual life.

In the human brain we have tract on tract of cells, specialized
and differentiated for varied functions of memory, comparison,
imagination, reason ; all grouped, united and organized about the
axis of a larger life; in short, a complicated, extended organiza-
tion of the smaller, simpler cell lives; a structured organization
and a form. None the less all sensation there, all consciousness.

THE ETHER OF SPACE lOI

is in the cell, nowhere else. No cells, no consciousness. The con-
cept of a self-conscious fluidic or etherous body without cell met-
abolism is an illusion — the fond pet illusion of all spiritists.

How then shall we define human personality? What can it
be, but the sensation and consciousness of the cells, filling, flood-
ing, playing through this form, this structured organization of
brain? It is the confluent tide of cell lives which fills the organized
form, charges it with emanation and sets up the axis of the greater
self-consciousness.

THE BIOLOGICAL DEFINITION OF HUMAN PERSONALITY

Instead of being an indissoluble entity then, a living human
personality, a self-conscious intellect as we know it, has to be
described as consisting of two factors, first, a structured organi-
zation of brain and of the cell protoplasm, and second, a confluent
tide of cell life, filling the structure with sensation and conscious-
ness. Devoid of the confluent cell life and apart from it, there
remains but an unconscious structure. When the cells die and
their metabolism stops, sensation ceases and the factor for self-
consciousness is no longer supplied. Both factors are essential
to personality — the structured organization of brain and of brain
cell protoplasm, which has come down to us through a thousand
generations, and the confluent tide of cell life and sensation which
fills and animates the structure. Without the cell factor we have
no sensation, no sense of self, without the structured form, no
intelligence and experience, in a word, no human intellect. Yet,
what constitutes intellect and personality in any sense worth pre-
serving, may lie empty of self-sensation, void of self-consciousness,
as in sound sleep, or insensibility from a sudden blow on the head.
The structured form is there in the brain, but the tide of cell life
no longer fills it in the manner requisite to self-consciousness.

In reality, however, this structured form is the most important
part of human personality. Simple sensation to animate it might
come from any cell-of-life; but that structured organization which
comes from ancestry, is another matter. The veriest brute pos-
sesses sensation and self-consciousness; but the virtues of a Lin-
coln or a Washington come only through a vast past life of the

102 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

race. That form of brain, that structured protoplasm, is what
lives on from generation to generation. Not even the worst freaks
of atavism obliterate it. Even after dark ages of abeyance, it re-
appears. Probably no virtue, no fine trait of character is ever
wholly lost from the brain of the race. The animal brain, partic-
ularly the human brain, is wonderfully continent of these old an-
cestral forms, or patterns of personality. From parent to child
they are transmitted in ovo, sometimes well-nigh unchanged. We
know as yet all too few facts relative to multicellular reproduction,
that esoteric process of involution by which an adult animal fruc-
tifies in the regenerative tissues and — rather than die — projects
itself forward from the aging organism per angustias vias, to
re-develop later as a new life. There have been many theories of
gemmules, plastidules and the germplasm, theories still sub judice,
or in controversy. A part of the process only is visible. But we
know that it occurs. What is of interest about it here, the new
life, thus projected forward to develop a new organism, takes with
it from the old one apparently all the traits and characteristics of
the latter, even when they do not reappear or figure largely in this
next new life. We have learned that they are there quite the same
and may rise into prominence in the second, third, fourth, or far-
future generation. It is like a composite photograph of a numerous
class, or family group, which adds a new individual to the group
with every fresh generation. Another face enters to join the pic-
tured company and with each new face comes a new personality
in the brain. They blend in one picture, yet none the less they
can be resolved into those separate faces again. So of the long
series of ancestral human personalities ; they, too, are all there in
the brain strata, and under certain circumstances can be segregated
individually.

But it seems to be a law of human personality that but one at
a time can rise to be the ego of the organism, and take control of
it. In other words there can be but one ego in the animal organ-
ism at a time. When one of the older, dormant personalities of
the past rises from its racial sleep in the brain to assume control,
the present incumbent must temporarily abdicate. This appears
to be what happens in the case of " mediums," passing into the
trance state. Some one of the dormant personalities " rises from
the dead " and assumes control. In hypnosis it is a living per-

THE ETHER OF SPACE IO3

sonality that steps in from without; for this, too, may happen;
and it is in this that hypnotism differs from " spirit " control. A
dormant personaHty of the brain may wake to the control, or a
living personality may enter to do so from without; or as is not
impossible, some freakish, composite guise or " echo " of person-
ality from out the mirrored ether.

When this wonderfully structured brain which our ancestors
have transmitted to us — the labor of a thousand centuries — is
studied in the light of the accumulated facts of heredity and pro-
toplasmic inheritance, the true dawn breaks on this hitherto dark
subject of human personality and human life, past and future. Of
the vast sub-conscious life of the brain we know almost nothing
as yet; for we who are now quick, but live on the surface of it.

It is this ancestral brain, co-related, lobed and convoluted, with
its deep strata of nuclear cells, granule cells, spindle cells and poly-
morphous cells, which contains " the innumerable caravan " of
human personalities from the past, meaning always this essential
second part and factor of our definition. Like those other deep
strata of the geologic earth, long eras of life have laid them down,
and the fossils of that life are still there. The more we cleave it
apart, and delve into it with the microscope, the more it suggests
an olden past life of which these cell strata are the repository, the
book-stacks and the storehouse.

It is like some vast old crypt, but not of dry bones or decay;
the ancestral life, stored away here, is still sweet and clean and
unresolved. It is only sleeping, quietly sleeping there, and merely
a hard physical jolt will sometimes wake up one of these former
personalities, to rise, resume cell sensation and cell consciousness,
take command of the present multicellular organism with its warm
metabolism, and re-enter the realm of light ; — and then we have
a case of " double consciousness." For they are all down there
in those nuclear strata, asleep with their fathers before them.

EXEGI MONUMENTUM

Horace's ''' Exegi monumentum (Ere percnniiis " embalms the
sentiment, desire and hope of the individual man in all historic
time, and the better the man, the stronger his desire to leave behind
him some deathless, rustless monument of his personal life. Often-

I04 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

est, marble, hard granite and perennial bronze have been impressed
to this service to perpetuate the passing, personal life and carry it
forward to future time.

In vain. The marble moulds, the granite crumbles, the bronze
rusts away. Chronos' iron tooth prevails. In all the world, in all
this seething welter of restless electrons, no combination of them
preserves its stasis. No monumental substance stands the wear and
tear of this oft-smelted universe's vast life.

None, even approximately, none save one. One substance there
is which for a hundred millions of years, at least, has endured,
while the metals fade and rust, archaic rocks wither and vanish,
leaving neither sign nor trace behind.

That one unique and wonderful substance is the living matter
in the brain cells of our race, transmitted to us from out those far
depths of antiquity, when the protozoon — whence-ever he came
— first stirred on the shores of the primeval sea. Back to him,
to that far, sentient dot, we trace our ancestral tree. That little
life began moulding, forming, putting the rudiments of our present
characters — our " souls " — into that speck of self-sentient jelly.
Nay more, it is that selfsame, self-reduplicating dot of living jelly
which survives, with all its acquired impress — the record of all
its hundred millions of years — in the brain of man, to-day.

The one marvelous substance, found on this globe of matter,
the substance which has endured and will no doubt endure through
the equally long epochs and aeons of future time : the substance
which grows, not wastes, nor rusts, as centuries pass, grows and
incorporates in itself the name and fame of all the past.

Surely, this were that grand, enduring " brass " of which to
fashion and chisel the longed-for, rustless tombstone of man, the
(£s perennius of the ages, compared with which Cheops' name on
his pyramidal syenite is as Keats' despairing " writ on water."
Here is the desiderated monument stuff, fit to meet and satisfy the
aspirations of our race. It is here and herein — on these six billion
ounces of human brain — that we may labor to set up each his
mausoleum which shall live to all human time, though the world
stand to remotest ages. If latest researches in psychometry teach
anything whatever, it is that no impress of a human life is ever
lost here. It goes on in the great formed and formative aura
of the race life; it survives in each individual life; it helps shape

THE ETHER OF SPACE I05

and mould, for better or worse, each new life that is born of us,
every future generation that succeeds us.

What awful yet divine glimpses of our personal responsibility
shine forth through these slowly-opening portals of our later knowl-
edge of living matter. We make our monument here — have
always made it — whether we realize it or not. Every day we
are rearing that monument for all time. Why summon the granite
block? Why supplicate the bronze tablet? Infinitely more endur-
ing, more commemorative, is this daily work of our lives in form-
ing the future brain of the race and sustaining the aura of its
mind. A realization of this is indeed the " one thing needful " to
our future ideals and ambitions. Not a stone in a graveyard, to
lean and fall, but an inscription in deathless living text on the
Brain of the Race. There we each live on, whether we wish It,
in our blindness, or not. There we daily graven the merit or
demerit of our personal lives.

WHERE IS SPIRIT -LAND?

Ever since man first pondered the question, he has believed
vaguely that the dead, though dead, are not wholly dead, but
somewhere, somehow, are resurrectable and returnable to life.
They are gone from conscious life, he knows, yet he has always
felt that they are but deeply asleep somewhere and may sometime
wake, or be waked.

And that is the true instinct, the etheric sense of the truth.
Somewhere they sleep. But where? Where is their place of
rest? Where is spirit-land?

The Jews said in sheol, the Greeks in the subterranean caverns
of the nether world, the Egyptians in dim Amenthe, the Hindus
in Nirvana, the Christians in Heaven — or Hell, the Mohamme-
dans in Paradise — or Gehenna. Many modern spiritists, with
glimpses of the truth, have held that the spirits of the dead are
everywhere present about us. When they have learned a little
more of the ether, they will people it with spirits which they will
fondly and erroneously believe to be still self-conscious lives.

There have been philosophers who have theorized of a fourth
and even a fifth dimension of space, and even of a second dimen-

Io6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

sion of time, where dwell the spirits of the dead; astronomers,
too, who have quite as fondly located spirit-land on other planets
of the solar system.

The whole world, indeed, has constantly asked the question.
Where is spirit-land ? The search for it has been long. They have
looked the universe over for it — and never found it.

And yet it was so near them all the time !

They were carrying it around with them, inside their own skulls !

For this strata-ed, structured human brain-of-man is our sheol.
Here is that spirit-land to which we shall be gathered, garnered
we may say, where erelong we shall all sleep with our fathers.

Nor is it so very small a nirvana. Collectively, as a race, we
are carrying around two millions tons weight of it on our shoul-
ders;— and Dr. William Hanna Thompson has lately assured us
that a dot of protoplasmic matter, no larger than a pin-head, will
embody for all time the destinies, past and future, of a whole genus
of earth's fauna.

We who live in what we term self-conscious life, are but tem-
porary denizens of the outer, dendritic cell layer of the brain. We
perceive little, remember little, of the great past life of that brain.
It is mostly subconscious to us. None the less it is all there, the
whole past history of the genus homo. There are good evidences
that no experience, nor memory of it all, is ever lost. It has been
laid down in successive schemes, experience-schemes, memory-
schemes, each representing a generation, that is to say, one per-
sonality. Each is like some web of lace-work, once woven and
now laid away in the delicate cell protoplasm of those granular
and nuclear layers.

Yet given the requisite cue, and the whole fabric of that per-
sonal life, with all its traits and memories, may be brought forth
again and find expression. It is not a little like those song-records,
used in the graphophones and pianolas. The song may be heard
again, if sound is admitted to it. So of these dormant personal-
ities of the brain; they may live and speak again, if the brain
cell-life can again be made to play through them, restoring sensa-
tion, self-hood and self-consciousness. Apparently it needs some-
times but a slight shift of the axis of personal self-consciousness,
to bring about a re-admission to the dormant scheme of the warm
tide of existent cell-life. A former personality of the ancestral

THE ETHER OF SPACE I07

brain is thus revived, waked up and connected with the metabolic
apparatus of cell-life. It is here that a " psychic " in trance " con-
nects " with " control spirits." Every human brain is a reservoir
of such latent personalities; and a good psychic, an honest "me-
dium," is one of those very rare, interesting instances, abnormal
though it may be, where one or more of these long " dead " per-
sonalities rise into habitual control of the existent organism, take
possession of it for the time being, and talk or write much as this
same olden personality might have done in the past, perhaps a
thousand years in the past. For this ancient brain of ours carries
in it, potential and recoverable, the lore of all the ages of man,
the forgotten tongues of the Aryan, the astronomical figures of
the Chaldee. We but live on the outer surface of it. To most of
us the doors to its deep archives are closed. " Psychics " some-
times descend to them, ignorantly, a little way, but are usually
obsessed and misled by erroneous beliefs which render their reve-
lations well-nigh valueless.

TO W^HAT EXTENT CAN A PAST PERSONALITY BE RAISED FROM THE

DEAD?

An interesting speculation is ushered in by this revivification of
long dead personalities, dormant in the brain of their descendants,
in connection with the Hebraic doctrine of the resurrection. Could
the personality of an Abraham be waked from this his traditional
" sleep of the dead " in the brain of a lineal son of the Patriarch,
and re-animated to self-consciousness by the conscious cell-life of
that living descendant, be made to speak, to feel and to behave
generally as Abraham once spoke and felt?

And if so, would it be actually the Abraham who once lived on
the Plain of Shinar? Is the doctrine of the resurrection of the
dead to be thus verified in the growth of human knowledge ? How
is the Pythagorean faith in the transmigration of souls affected
by such scientific possibilities of re-incarnation ? The dormant per-
sonality is re-clothed by cell sensation and brought back to self-
consciousness. Practically this is re-incarnation.

It is a strangely realistic interpretation of the Hebrew woman's
prayer, " Give me children, or I die," and a biological truth which

Io8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

the daughters of the white race in America have great need to
take to heart.

What a solemn sense of personal responsibility to one's fam-
ily and one's race is thus unfolded to the conscience ! To us
who live in conscious, cellular life, each generation in turn, is
intrusted the custody, the welfare, the very life of our ancestors,
equally with that of our children and our race for the far future.
No moral doctrine of the century equals it. If such recall from the
dead be possible, it carries a power for good, unequalled in the
tenets of religious creeds. Its appeal is irresistible even with the
most hardened, the most depraved. It embodies the quintessence
of conscience. He who comprehends it and debases himself, thus
betraying his great trust, must indeed, like Orestes of old, fear
pursuit by the Furies.

SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS AS REGARDS HUMAN PERSONALITY
AND THE ETHER OF SPACE

These conclusions concerning the ether, etheric perception and
human personality were reached incidental to other researches.
They have been sketched in so desultory a manner that it may be
well to restate them briefly :

In the light of our growing knowledge of the ether, the words
" psychic " and " spiritual " as employed by spiritists, must be
re-defined, or replaced altogether, by the word etheric, since the
phenomena with which these words have hitherto been associated
in a spiritist sense, pertain wholly to the ether in its intimate rela-
tions with the cell-of-life. The same is largely true of the word
instinct; it stands for a partial reversion to etheric perception,
in place of perception by the specialized sense-organs of multi-
cellular life.

The cell-of-life is naturally and primarily " psychic," that is
etheric, in its mode of perception. The multicell has developed
specialized sense-organs on which it comes ordinarily to depend,
but under abnormal conditions it may revert to that more instan-
taneous, far-seeing mode of perception by means of the ether.
This reversion of the brain of a psychic to ether-perception is
what is seen in clairvoyance, clairaudience, mind-reading, premo-

THE ETHER OF SPACE I09

nition, etc., etc. An ancient and purely physical mode of per-
ception, reverted to under abnormal conditions. The lower
animals, indeed, are more frequently " psychic " than human
beings.

In the light of this our increasing knowledge of the ether, too,
we learn that it is constantly and profoundly affected by the cell-
of-life which is not only the organized mechanism through which
sentience and consciousness are raised up from " the elements of
feeling " that exist in unorganized matter, but also a chemical
engine with a considerable output of kinetic energy. We have
come to believe that the ether is the agency by means of which
memory and mnemonic impressions generally are transmitted to
the sentient protoplasm of the cell. We find, too, that memory
is not confined to cell protoplasm, but that a kind of memory,
" echo," or mirror-picture of all phenomena is constantly present
in the ether everywhere, and that it may be caught and imitated
by matter when in the nascent, or receptive state, caught and
" fixed " there, as seen in the frost flowers on the window pane
in winter, in crystallization, in Fata-morgana apparitions and in
the mirages that play over desert lands.

We have learned also that protoplasmic matter, especially em-
bryonic protoplasm, is ever in the nascent state, and we have been
led to form the working hypothesis that it is the ether " echo "
or ether " memory," in connection with the inherited plan in ovo,
which constitutes that formative, guiding power that underlies
natural selection.

Further studies of the cell-of-life have shown that it gives forth
an emanation, forming an aura, or atmosphere, about itself; and
that when cells are organized in great numbers in the brain of
man, this cell emanation, collectively, can be estimated, measured
and to some extent analyzed. We have evidence that it consists in
part at least of electrons, that the ether is involved with it as a
vehicle, and that there is carried along with it molecular matter
from the metabolism of the cell, matter which is sometimes visible
and phosphorescent.

We have learned also that under certain abnormal conditions
of the brain, as seen in " mediums " when in trance, this emana-
tion is enormously increased in volume and may become an agency
for the transmission of kinetic energy to accomplish levitation of

no SALVATION BY SCIENCE

tables and other objects; also that it may be projected outside
the brain of the medium by will power and made to assume the
form of human hands, human faces, etc., in a word, " materiali-
zations." It is probable, indeed, that this entire class of " spirit-
ist " phenomena can be thus interpreted; and it Is wholly im-
probable that self-conscious, disembodied intelligences have any
connection whatever with such manifestations.

This conclusion is more certainly established from the fact that
our increasing knowledge of the cell-of-life in the brain has com-
pelled a new definition of human personality, one that controverts
in toto the former conception of spiritists, namely, that such per-
sonality is an infrangible entity, detachable from the animal organ-
ism at death, with self-consciousness intact.

The definition of human personality which our present knowl-
edge of the brain necessitates is, in effect, that instead of being
a permanent entity, it consists of two factors, first, a confluent tide
of conscious cell-life from the cell metabolism, and second, an or-
ganized plan, form, or structure of the brain and of the proto-
plasm of the brain cells. It is the former which furnishes the
factor of sensation, self-hood and self-consciousness. But it is
the organized structure, descending from ancestry, that furnishes
the factor of mind, intellect and all which makes personality intel-
ligent, worth possessing, or preserving.

Sensation and consciousness pertain to the cell and cell metab-
olism. Without the confluent tide of cell-life in the brain, there
could be no self-consciousness; without the structured plan, no
extended thought, no human mind. The two factors go hand in
hand. Both are requisite to an adequate definition of human per-
sonality.

At the death and dissolution of the animal body, this organized
structure which comes through ancestry, is obliterated, and the
sensation, raised up to self-consciousness In the cell, sinks back to
the lowly " elements of feeling " which inhere in the ether and in
unorganized matter generally.

What remains then of that personality?

First, the offspring, the child, to which the ancestral personality
has gone forward through those angustias vias of multicellular
reproduction. Not only is the child, in and of itself, a partial
reduplication of the parents, but it has latent in its brain apparently

THE ETHER OF SPACE III

all the traits and tastes, virtues and vices, of those parents; so
many dormant, potential personalities which under certain condi-
tions may be displayed ; or if not displayed in this first generation,
they yet give evidence that they are really preserved and trans-
mitted by not un frequently appearing many generations in the
future. Indeed, they appear never to be lost from this amazingly
receptive web of the brain cell protoplasm. The child Is thus, for
a generation, the possessor and custodian of the now unconscious
personalities of the parents.

Second, the past personality remains and continues objectively,
that is to say unconsciously, in an " ether echo," or mirrored as
an " ether memory " which inheres and continues indefinitely. We
know not how long. These strange " memories " appear to
" loom " in the ether and sometimes to stand in a species of stasis,
caught occasionally and " fixed " in the air, as apparitions and
phantasms.

Our knowledge of the ether is not yet sufficient, to exhibit these
phenomena experimentally, much less trace out what secondary
effects result from them. Such phenomena, however, are what
we would be led to predict from even our present scanty knowledge
of a medium possessing properties so bewildering. At present the
ether with its possibilities is one of the most fascinating objects
of study. The writer is led to believe that all phenomena now
deemed occult (including spiritism) will here find a purely phys-
ical and rational explanation. Everywhere the memory of past
life appears to inhere and be reflected back. We cannot yet say
how; etheric phenomena transcend the known laws of corpuscular
and atomic matter, as light transcends sound.

We have to realize, too, that the ether permeates and flows
freely through all solid matter, and that these strange " memo-
ries " are there, too, inhering and probably operative in the very
warp and woof of all substance, in air, In water. In iron, in stone.
Hence etheric images pass freely through house walls and all ma-
terial obstructions.

Not only is personality transferred to offspring. Every human
life, as it lives, imparts its Image, as etheric memories, to all those
of its own generation who live about it. It is pictured in the
brain of all its contemporaries, and lives on there, objectively,
influencing their lives for good or evil ; and thence. In effect. It Is

112 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

flung far forward to future generations. It also lives on by means
of the symbols of speech and written language, as tradition, as
books, and in literature generally.

But it is with the effects of the cell-of-life on the ether, its
" echo " there, and with the transfer of the structured protoplas-
mic form of personality from parent to child, from brain to brain,
down the generations of the race, that we are here most directly
interested. For it is largely and mainly in the germ-plasm of the
race that we survive personal death, enter into the life of future
generations and thus enjoy a species of dormant immortality —
as if asleep in the house of our children.

It is here that we are gathered to our fathers and here that we
shall dwell with our children of the far future. Here is our spirit-
land, our nirvana of rest. We are not banished to the nether cav-
erns of the earth, nor to far realms of cosmic space. We live on
in the house with our family and our race, and may even perhaps,
on momentous occasions, be recalled to life to give them advice
or counsel, as She of Endor recalled Samuel. We are still with
them and of them, and if we have done well when in life and
accomplished much for our race, we shall be exalted. Though
dead and now personally unconscious, we shall be still helping on.
We are not put away, nor left eternally behind in the tomb. We
go forward with our kind, bearing our share in the greater life
of kin and country.

Better than this we who die, cannot hope. In this still imper-
fect life of ours we grow tired in time and sleep with our fathers,
yet we sleep not in the grave, but in the brain of the race, and as
science grows, may possibly know a species of resurrection, if our
descendants shall desire to call us up, or can tolerate our old-time
speech.

More than this we cannot yet hope. Perhaps it is enough for
us who are still so imperfect. Enough, till the grander day comes
when our children, transfigured and perfected in their organ-
isms by the growth of knowledge, shall cease to die. Bu-t even
in that grander day we shall be with them. We shall be
there. And if we have worked for that grand day, they will
love us.

Morituri.

But that thought is our compensation, our solace in death.

THE ETHER OF SPACE II3

CONCLUSIONS WHICH HAVE COME AS A RELIEF

This definition of human personality and these intimations as
to its fate and destiny in the universe will not, as I know, prove
pleasing- to many spiritists. The whole world, indeed, sighs for
a blissful personal immortality, still, alas, unearned, unachieved.
The hope of a beatified future life, when disembodied from the
organism by death, has been long fostered, cruelly fostered in view
of the inevitable awakening in the light of greater knowledge.
Perhaps it was necessary thus to tide the race over a long, hard
era of human evolution, otherwise too hopeless. None the less
cruel when we wake from the dream.

The sacerdotal promise that the " good " who pay tithes, will
be gloriously beatified when they die, goes not far beyond church
doors. The student of life, nature and the greater world has
ever seen little enough to reassure him in the thought that his
personality may possibly survive death and live on, conscious or
semi-conscious, adrift and a wanderer " upon this hurrying, heav-
ing sea of matter illimitable," with its vast catastrophes of cosmic
heat and cold. Little enough for hope or faith in the magnificent
yet awful fires of far-blazing suns, or in the rigor mortis of those
dark, invisible, dead orbs which, eon after eon, swing ponderously
on their joyless orbits through the outer reaches of space. The
earth, we are told, will one day join this dark procession of dead
orbs. One could picture it, still wheeling onward, bearing on its
lifeless bosom the wretched, self-conscious " souls " of the race
that once lived here in the flesh.

" From dawn to dawn we drifted on and on,
Not knowing whither, nor to what dark end."

— Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

To the present writer therefore the above conclusions, touching
human personality and its fate in the universe, have come as a
relief from many apprehensions, earlier in life.

" Survival is a hypothesis which people who do not stop to
reflect accept complacently. But the philosopher is a little more
reserved.

" Life is painful enough not to give us any brilliant idea of what

114 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

is to follow, and it is with something akin to terror that I figure
the possibilities that I, my ego, my consciousness, can have no
end and will live eternally. Who knows in that case what is
reserved for me? We are all. all such deplorable cowards, so
ridiculously feeble in the face of the immensity of the universe,
that we have everything to fear from the colossal forces, perhaps
unjust, perhaps absurd, which will have the power, perhaps eter-
nally, to submit us to tortures and to misery.

" Happily this survival is improbable." — Charles Richet.

It is easy to say that " God is merciful," and " God is love."

But is he ?

We mean, is nature and this boundless, eddying cosmos benev-
olent, or regardful, or even cognizant of man?

There is absolutely nothing thus to reassure us. The trapped
animal makes the long nights doleful with its anguished cries —
in vain. There is no pity. The entombed miner prays and sobs
to "God," to "Heaven!" There is no pity. Sorrowfully we
have come to learn that such faith in " God " is immoral, and but
leads to confusion. We have felt " the cosmic chill " to which
John Burroughs so fitly alludes. We have waked to the vast,
mute impersonality of the cosmos. It neither lets nor hinders man.
He may do what he can. There is liberty only. If he falls be-
neath its titan stride he is trodden on and crushed. His luckless
" soul " might even be held down for ages under glacial ice, or
tortured in pent, hot caverns of slowly-wrinkling strata, smelting
to lava, and no heed be taken. We are ever face to face with this
mute, blank impersonality of the cosmos. It carries the " elements
of feeling " only. It neither lets nor hinders; and the great lesson
taught from it all is that we must push on, grow in knowledge,
get control of it and save ourselves. It is controllable by those
who can learn how. That is our lesson. That is the religion to
come. That is the Faith to which the five creeds of old Asia are
now giving place in America. It adopts the best from all of them,
but unfolds a new plan of salvation : salvation by science.

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF
LUCRETIUS

Prefatory Note

The degree of enlightenment, one may say civilization, which
a nation, or race, has attained, may be quite correctly gauged by
the ideas concerning matter that underlie its ethics and literature.

Of the truth of this Greece in classic days furnished a concrete
illustration. Parallel with Hellenic civilization ran, or rather under-
ran, those ideas concerning matter put forth by Anaxagoras, Zeno
and Demokritos.

The military Romans never advanced much farther in their con-
ceptions of matter than a fashionable adoption of the Greek phi-
losophies, much as Vergil followed Homer in poesy, and Cicero
Demosthenes in oratory.

One great exception there was — Lucretius.

Avowedly, Lucretius recapitulated Epikuros, but did so in vivid
epic numbers, and, like Tyndall of our own era, he originated one
grand phrase which has come echoing down the centuries : semina
rerum.

More than a millennium later an analogous growth of ideas as
to the intimate nature of matter appeared in the more fanciful phi-
losophy of the Arabians. As Arabian literature and science grew,
under Islam, its philosophers engaged in quite similar studies of
the great problem of substance and being.

As Buddhism, too, passed to the estate of an established re-
ligion, we find its more scholarly votaries displaying the same
reverent curiosity, and indulging in similar deep ponderings as
to the nature and origin of matter.

Even on that lofty plateau of the Peruvian Andes, where Manco
Copac once taught, there were crude efforts to portray the parts
and properties of the one great universal substance.

The same is probably true of all the how forgotten cults of

"5

Il6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

prehistoric man. As knowledge grew, matter became more and
more a subject of speculation and discourse.

After Lucretius, and after the long lapse of mediaeval times,
Gassendi appears to the present writer to have contributed, albeit
blunderingly, the next most important idea concerning matter,
when he broached the concept of " vital heat " in matter; — mean-
ing an intrinsic component, something esoteric to matter which
gives rise to life.

To this Tyndall added the phrase, " living matter: " two words
which carried us farther than hundreds of volumes from his con-
temporaries. Those two words will live when everything else
discovered and taught in the nineteenth century is largely obsolete
and forgotten, since they guarantee, in advance, the sentient hy-
pothesis of matter, the origin of species and the descent of man.

Out of them all has come the present scientific concept which
portrays matter as the one great mystery of the universe, alike
subjective and objective, sentience and substance, from which issue
the ether, the electron, the " atom " and the molecule.

Lucretius epitomized pre-existent ideas as to matter, bridged
the three centuries from Greece to Rome, and added his one glow-
ing conception : semina rerum, the seeds of things, the first glim-
mer of the future cell doctrine.

So great indeed is the debt of modern biological science, and of
all science, to Lucretius, that neglect to venerate his memory is
of the nature of impiety. For centuries Supernaturalism heaped
obloquy upon his grave, and strove in a thousand foolish tomes
to make his " materialism " a term of reproach. None the less,
the grand renaissance of science, during the last two centuries,
is a re-incarnation of his doctrines of nature.

For crude and meager as was the Epicurian and Lucretian mate-
rialism, embracing as it did only the lifeless side of Matter, it was
nevertheless, the first intelligent step toward the study and com-
prehension of natural phenomena. The " atom " of Demokritos
was the corner-stone of modern chemistry. The semina rerum of
Lucretius were the seeds of modern biology.

Mindful of this boon from the mighty dead, a humble student
of this long-silent master ventures like a school-boy, to translate
his three hundred lines.

Warned by the failures of versifiers, no attempt has been made

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS II7

here to render classic verse into English rhyme. My effort has
been to translate the words of Lucretius into plain English, ar-
dently desiring, but as often failing, to embody his earnest, poetic
spirit.

T. LUCRETII CARI, DE RERUM NATURA

Book I., 1-14

^neadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas
Alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
Quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
Concelebras, per te quonium genus omne animantum
Concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis
Te, Dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila cceli
Adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
Summittit flores, tibi rident sequora ponti
Placatumque nitet diffuso lumine coelum.
Nam simul ac species patefactast verna diei
Et reserata viget genetabilis aura favoni
^riae primum volucres te, diva, tuumque
Significant initum perculsse corda tua vi.

Translation

Fostering Venus, Mother of Rome, Delight alike of men and of
the gods ! Thou who, beneath the ever-moving signs of the zodiac,
givest Life to the fruitful earth and the navigable sea !

For verily through thee every species of living creature is con-
ceived and, borne forth, beholds the light of the sun.

At thy approach, Goddess, rude winds and clouds flee away.

For thee the varied earth puts forth flowers.

For thee the broad expanses of ocean shine and the calmed skies
beam with light effulgent.

For as soon as the vernal influence of day unfolds and genial
breezes stir abroad, the birds first of all signalize thee in song,
their hearts pervaded by thy power.

Book I., 14-27

Indeferas pecudes persultant pabula lasta
Et rapidos tranant amnis ; ita capta lepore

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Te sequitur cupide quo quamque inducere pergis.
Denique per maria ac montis fluviosque rapacis
Frondiferasque domos avium camposque virentis
Omnibus incutiens blandum per pectora amorem
Efficis ut cupide generatim ssecla propagent.
Quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas
Nee sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras
Exoritur neque fit Isetum neque amabile quicquam,
Te sociam studeo scribendis versibus esse
Ouos ego de rerum natura pangere conor
Memmiadse nostro, quem tu, Dea, tempore in omni
Omnibus ornatum voluisti excellere rebus.

Translation

Then the wild herds gambol in their pastures and swim the rapid
streams.

All living things, in fine, captivated by desire of thee, follow
whithersoever thou leadest the way.

Over seas and mountains and rushing rivers, in the leafy homes
of birds and amidst green fields, thou, infusing love in the breasts
of all alike, incitest them eagerly to propagate their kind.

Since thou alone art queen of nature, and neither without thy
favor can any living creature issue to the pleasing coasts of light,
nor become joyous and gladsome, I earnestly desire thee to be the
companion of my song and of my verse, which I aspire to compose
concerning the nature of things for my friend Memmius, whom
thou, O Goddess, hast willed ever to excel others, accomplished in
all respects.

Book I., 54-61

Nam tibi de summa cceli ratlone deumque
Disserere incipiam et rerum primordia pandam
Unde omnis natura creet res auctet alatque
Quove eadem rursum natura perempta resolvat
Quse nos materiem et genitalia corpora rebus
Redunda in ratione vocare et semina rerum
Appellare suemus et hsec eadem usurpare
Corpora prima, quod ex illis sunt omnia primis.

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS II9

Translation

For now I shall begin to set forth much pertaining to the gods,
and take into estimation the origin of the universe and the manner
in which nature creates, nourishes, and sustains all things which
have life, as also the mode of their dissolution ; such elements as,
in the elucidation of our theme, we are accustomed to term Matter
and the germs of things, assuming them to be primary bodies from
which all objects in nature are derived.

Book I., 62-79

Humana ante oculos fcede cum vita jaceret
In terris oppressa gravi sub Religione
Quae caput a coeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,
Primum Grains homo mortalis tollere contra
Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra
Quem neque fama deum nee fulmina nee minitanti
Murmure compressit caelum, sed eo magis acrem
Inritat animi virtutem effringere ut arta
Naturae primus portarum claustra cupiret.
Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque,
Unde refert nobis victor quid possit oriri,
Quid nequeat, finita potestas denique cuique
Quanam sit ratione atque alte terminus haerens.
Quare Religio pedibus subjecta vicissim
Opteritur, nos exaequat victoria caelo.

Translation

When Human Life lay foully torn and exposed, crushed to the
earth beneath the heel of Religion that reared her head in the
heavens, impending over mortals with malign aspect, a Man of
Greece was the first to raise his eyes resolutely against her and
stand at bay.

I20 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Him neither fear of the gods nor thunderbolts intimidated, nor
portents in the skies, but rather roused the innate courage of his
soul that he should be the first to break down the jealously guarded
portals of knowledge.

Therefore the vivid force of his mind has prevailed and, entering
within these barriers, he has proceeded far beyond the flaming
walls of the world, and in thought and conception has journeyed
through the immensity of space.

Thence he now returns to us as a conqueror, able to teach us what
can take place and what cannot be; in short, how and why the
powers of nature have their limits and are held within deep-set
boundaries.

By his victory, therefore. Religion is cast down from her place
of pride ; and we, in turn, are made the peers of heaven.

Book I., 80-101

Illud in his rebus vereor, ne forte rearis
Impia te rationis inire elementa viamque
Indugredi sceleris. Quod contra saepius ilia
Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.
Aulide quo pacto Trivias virginis aram
Iphianassae turparent sanguine fcede
Ductores Danaum delecti, prima virorum.
Cui simul infula virgineos circumdata comptus
Ex utraque pari malarum parte profusast,
Et maestum simul ante aras adstare parentem
Sensit et hunc propter ferrum celare ministros
Aspectuque suo lacrimas effundere civis,
Muta metu terram genibus submissa petebat
Nee miserge prodesse in tali tempore quibat
Quod patrio princeps donarat nomine regem ;
Nam sublata virum manibus tremibundaque ad aras
Deductast, non ut solemni more sacrorum
Perfecto posset claro comitari Hymenaeo,
Sed casta inceste nubendi tempore in ipso
Hostia consideret mactatu massta parentis
Exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur.
Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum.

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS 121

Translation

In these themes I fear lest perchance thou mayest think, O
Memmius, that we are entering on prohibited topics, as if begin-
ning a course of crime.

But on the other hand, this same Religion has frequently incited
men to wicked deeds, as when at Aulis the chiefs of the Greeks
reddened the altar of virgin Trivia with the blood of Iphigenla.

Her maiden tresses, released from the fillet, dropped to equal
length beside each cheek, and at once she beheld her grief-stricken
sire standing before the altars, the expectant priests, concealing the
sacrificial knife, and her fellow-countrymen in tears.

Speechless from fear, she dropped on her knees to the earth;
nor did it avail the unfortunate maiden in a crisis so evil, that she
had been the first to bless the king with the sacred name of father.

Lifted by the hands of zealots, she was dragged trembling to
the altar, not that, a solemn rite being performed, she should hear
the joyous hymeneal hymn, but that chaste in her virgin prime,
she should be foully immolated by that father's hand, in order that
a prosperous voyage might attend the fleet.

To such enormities has Religion prompted men !

Book L, 102-119

Tutemet a nobis jam quovis tempore vatum

Terriloquis victus dictis desciscere quaeres.

Quippe etenim quam multa tibi jam fingere possunt

Somnia quae vitae rationes vertere possint

Fortunasque tuas omnis turbare timore !

Et merito ; nam si certam finem esse viderent

^rumnarum homines, aliqua ratione valerent,

Religionibus atque minis obsistere vatum.

Nunc ratio nulla est restandi, nulla facultas,

^ternas quoniam pcenas in morte timendumst.

Ignoratur enim quae sit natura animae,

Nata sit an contra nascentibus insinuetur,

Et simul intereat nobiscum morte dirempta

An tenebras Orci visat vastasque lacunas

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An pecudes alias divinitus insinuet se,
Ennius ut noster cecinit qui primus amoeno
Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam
Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret.

Translation

And wilt thou, too, Memmius, terrified by the frightful stories
of poets and priests, seek to escape me ?

How easily, indeed, such visionary tales can be invented to dis-
turb the course of your life and mar your pleasures with idle fore-
bodings !

Nor is it wholly strange that this should be so. Yet if only men
knew that there was a fixed boundary to the ills which can befall
them, they would be able to withstand these threatening fictions
of religious superstition.

But since now they fear eternal punishment after death, they
can summon no faculty, no courage to resist.

For especially they are ignorant what the nature of the soul is;
whether it is produced in our bodies and engendered with them,
or whether, on the contrary, it is implanted in us at birth ; whether
it perishes with the body, dissolved at death, or glides away to
haunt the vast and gloomy lakes of Orcus; or yet, undying, insin-
uates itself into the bodies of other animals. Even as our Ennius
has sung of it, who first brought from immortal Helicon a crown
of perennial leaf, celebrated throughout Italy.

Book I., 146-158

Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque.
Principium cuius hinc nobis exordia sumet,
Nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus umquam.
Quippe ita formido mortalis continet omnis,
Quod multa in.terris fieri cseloque tuentur
Quorum operum causas nulla ratione videre
Possunt ac fieri divino numine rentur
Ouas ob res ubi viderimus nil posse creari

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS 1 23

De nilo, turn quod sequimur jam rectius inde
Perspiciemus, et unde queat res quaeque creari
Et quo quaeque modo fiant opera sine divum.

Translation

This fear, this darkness of the mind, therefore, is not to be dis-
pelled by sunshine and the bright darts of day, but by reason and
a knowledge of nature.

Of this knowledge the first principle set forth in our discourse
shall be that no visible object, or thing, is ever produced from
nothing, even by the gods.

But now everywhere mortals are restrained and held fast by fear,
because they behold phenomena on earth, and in the sky, the causes
of which they are unable to perceive, and hence fancy that divine
intervention is present.

But when we shall have clearly perceived that nothing is ever di-
rectly created from nothing, we shall follow our theme more clearly
and shall comprehend in what manner every natural object comes
into existence and how all things are done without the intervention
of the gods.

Book I., 215-217

Hue accedit uti quicque in sua corpora rursum
Dissoluat natura neque ad nilum interemat res.

Translation

It happens, too, that nature resolves everything into its own orig-
inal elements and never reduces anything to nothingness.

Book I., 322-329

Postremo quascumque dies naturaque rebus
Paulatim tribuit, moderatim crescere cogens,
Nulla potest oculorum acies contenta tueri ;
Nee porro quascumque sevo macieque senescunt.
Nee mare quae impendent, vesco sale saxa peresa

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Quid quoque amittant in tempore cernere possis,
Corporibus csecis igitur natura gerit res.

Translation

Moreover, whatever time and nature add to objects, little by
little, compelling them to gradually increase in bulk, no power of
vision, never so carefully directed, enables us to perceive.

Nor indeed is what wastes away perceptible in old age. No
more can one discern what the cliffs which overhang the sea, eaten
by mordant salts, lose as the days go by.

Nature therefore carries on her labors by the use of invisible
particles.

Book I., 329-340

Nee tamen undique corporea stipata tenentur

Omnia natura; namque est in rebus inane.

Quod tibi cognosse in multis erit utile rebus

Nee sinet errantem dubitare et quserere semper

De summa rerum et nostris difhdere dictis.

(Qua propter locus est intactus inane vacansque.)

Quod si non esset, nulla ratione moveri

Res possent; namque officium quod corporis exstat,

Officere atque obstare, id in omni tempore adesset

Omnibus; haud igitur quicquam procedere posset,

Principium quoniam cedendi nulla daret res.

Translation

Nor yet are all bodies held fast, bound by natural substance on
all sides, since there is void, or empty space, between all such bodies.

This indeed is a truth which it will be especially useful for you
to recognize, for it will preserve you from wavering in mind and
constantly inquiring as to the constitution of nature, as also from
distrust of my teachings.

Therefore let It be set down as a fact, that there is void in nature,
intangible, empty, vacant.

If this were not the case, by no possibility could bodies be moved

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS 1 25

to and fro; for it is the nature and property of a body to oppose
and obstruct movement ; and this property is present in all bodies.
Hence nothing would be able to move, since nothing could begin
to yield, or make way.

Book I., 346-358

Praeterea quamvis solidae res esse putentur,
Hinc tamen esse licet raro cum corpore cernas.
In saxis ac speluncis permanat aquaram
Liquidus humor et uberibus flent omnia guttis.
Dissipat in corpus sese cibus omne animantum.
Crescunt arbusta et fetus in tempore fundunt.
Quod cibus in totas usque ab radicibus imis
Per truncos ac per ramos diffunditur omnis.
Inter ssepta meant voces et clausa domorum
Transvolitant, rigidum permanat f rigus ad ossa,
Quod nisi inania sint, qua possint corpora quseque
Transire, baud ulla fieri ratione videres.

Translation

For although some things may be thought to be solid, it is still
possible to discern that they have pores within their substance.

In rocks and caves the moisture of water permeates the stone
which everywhere weeps abundant tears.

In living creatures, too, food insinuates itself throughout every
portion of the body.

Forests grow and yield fruit in their season, because nutrient
particles are diffused through the trunks and all the branches, from
the smallest twigs and deepest roots.

Voices penetrate the walls and fly through the closed doors of
houses.

Stiffening cold enters even to the bones of our bodies.

All of which you would never observe to happen, if there were
no void spaces to which certain minute particles find entrance.

Book I., 358-370

Denique cur alias aliis prsestare videmus
Pondere res rebus nilo maiore figura?

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Nam si tantumdemst in lanae glomere quantum
Corperis in plumbo est, tantundem pendere par est,
Corporis officiumst quoniam premere omnia deorsum,
Contra autem natura manet sine pondere inanis.
Ergo quod magnumst asque leviusque videtur,
Nimirum plus esse sibi declarat inanis ;
Ac contra gravius plus in se corporis esse
Dedicat et multo vacui minus intus habere.
Est igitur nimirum id quod ratione sagaci.
Quaarimus admixtum rebus, quod inane vocamus.

Translation

Finally, why do we see some objects surpassing others in weight,
although no greater in bulk ?

For if there is as much substance in a given bulk of wool as in
an equal bulk of lead, they should weigh the same, since it is the
property and function of matter everywhere to press downward.

But void, on the contrary, remains everywhere without weight.

Hence that body which is equally as large as another, but lighter,
gives evidence that it holds within itself more of void.

But on the other hand, the heavier body shows that it contains
more substance and has in it much less empty space.

It is apparent, therefore, that what we call void and seek by a
searching investigation to demonstrate as such, is admixed with
all material things.

Book I., 418-429

Sed nunc ut repetam coeptum pertexere dictis
Omnis, ut est, igitur per se natura duabus
Constitit in rebus ; nam corpora sunt et inane,
Hsec in quo sita sunt et qua diversa moventur.
Corpus enim per se communis dedicat esse
Sensus ; cui nisi prima fides fundata valebit,
Haut erit occultis de rebus, quo referentes
Confirmare animi quicquam ratione queamus.
Tum porro locus ac spatium, quod inane vocamus
Si nullum foret, haut usquam sita corpora possent

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS 12 7

Esse neque omnino quoquam diversa meare;
Id quod jam supera tibi paulo ostendimus ante.

Translation

But now that I may repeat and finish the argument already
begun, the universe may be stated to consist of two parts, since
there are material bodies, and void or empty space in which they
are located and moved to and fro.

For the common sense, or perception, proves that there is such
a thing as substance or matter.

Of the existence of the latter, indeed, unless the primary assump-
tion of it is well grounded, there will be no premises by reference
to which we may proceed, or in abstruse thought be able to steady
and confirm the mind.

And to continue, if there be no space which we may term vacant,
objects could not be located anywhere, nor any movement of them
take place, even as we have pointed out a little above.

Book I., 459-464

Tempus item per se non est, sed rebus ab ipsis
Consequitur sensus, transactum quid sit in sevo,
Tum quae res instet, quid porro deinde sequatur.
Nee per se quemquam tempus sentire fatendumst
Semotum ab rerum motu placidaque quiete.

Translation

Time, too, in and of itself does not exist as an entity. But the
perception of it follows on from the sequence of events taking
place in the past, also in the present and what may ensue in the
future. Nor yet has any one been able to conceive of Time as
separate and distinct from the progress of events and the quiet
rest of objects.

Book L, 483-503

Corpora sunt porro partim primordia rerum,
Partim concllio quae constant principiorum.
Sed quae sunt rerum primordia, nulla potest vis

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Stingnere; nam solido vincunt ea corpora demum.
Et si difficile esse videtur credere quicquam
In rebus solido reperiri corpore posse.
Transit enim fulmen cseli per ssepta domorum
Clamor ut ac voces ; f errum candescit in igni
Dissiliuntque fero f erventia saxa vapore ;
Tum labefactatus rigor auri solvitur sestu ;
Turn glacies aeris flamma devicta liquescit
Permanat calor argentum penetraleque frigus,
Quando utrumque manu retinentes pocula rite
Sensimus infuso lympharum rore superne.
Usque adeo in rebus solidi nil esse videtur.
Sed quia vera tamen ratio naturaque rerum
Cogit, ades, paucis dum versibus expediamus
Esse ea quae solido atque aeterno corpore constent,
Semina quae rerum primordiaque esse docemus,
Unde omnis rerum nunc constet summa creata.

Translation

Bodies, moreover, are composed in part of the primordial ele-
ments of things, and in part of those substances which result from
combinations of such elements.

The primordial elements proper no force nor violence is able to
break up, since they maintain themselves prevalently by virtue of
their solidity.

It may seem difficult to believe, perhaps, that anything in nature
can be found so surpassingly solid. For verily the thunderbolts
of heaven pass through the walls of houses, as do also noise and
voices; iron glows in the furnace; rocks, grown fervid, burst
asunder from the fierce energy of pent-up vapors; the firmness
of gold, yielding to heat, is loosed; the frosty cold of brass, con-
quered by flame, is liquified ; penetrant heat and cold enter silver,
since we have felt each when, according to custom, holding cups
in our hands, hot or cold liquids have been poured into them at
feasts.

Whence it would appear that there might be nothing wholly
solid in the world.

Nevertheless, since by good reason I hold the opposite opinion,

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS 1 29

give me your attention, I pray, while I make it plain in my verse
that there exist elemental bodies (or atoms) of inveterate and
eternal solidity : elemental particles which constitute the germs of
things and from which, as we teach, the world has been generated.

Book L, 503-511

Principio quoniam duplex natura duarum
Dissimilis rerum longe constare repertast.
Corporis atque loci, res in quo quseque geruntur.
Esse utramque sibi per se puramque necessest.
Nam quacumque vacat spatium, quod inane vocamus,
Corpus ea non est ; qua porro cumque tenet se
Corpus, ea vacuum nequaquam constat inane.
Sunt igitur solida ac sine inani corpora prima.

Translation

Primarily, since the nature of things is found to consist of two
dissimilar components, namely, matter and void space in which all
the operations of nature are carried on, it follows of necessity that
each exists of and for itself, distinct from the other.

For wheresoever space stands empty, which we call void, there
is no matter.

Likewise, where matter exhibits itself, empty space by no manner
of means is present.

Primarily, therefore, matter is solid and without void.

Book I., 511-519

Prseterea quoniam genitis in rebus inanest,
Materiem circum solldam constare necessest,
Nee res ulla potest vera ratione probari
Corpore inane suo celare et que intus habere,
Si non, quod cohibet, solidum constare relinquas.
Id porro nil esse potest nisi materise
Concilium, quod inane queat rerum cohibere.
Materies igitur, solido quae corpore constat.
Esse aeterna potest, cum cetera dissoluantur.

130 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Translation

Furthermore, since there are empty spaces, or pores, in objects,
solid matter must inclose them. Nor can anything be demon-
strated, by strict argument, to have or to conceal void within its
own body proper, unless you yield the point that this which in-
closes and contains it is solid.

But that which has the power of thus inclosing void in objects
can be nothing less than an aggregation of matter.

Matter, moreover, which consists of solid substance, may be
indestructible, while its derivative compounds are subject to disso-
lution.

Book I., 520-531

Tum porro si nil esset quod inane vocaret,
Omne foret solidum ; nisi contra corpora certa
Essent quae loca complerent quaecumque tenerent,
Omne quod est, spatium vacuum constaret inane.
Alternis igitur nimirum corpus inani
Distinctumst quoniam nee plenum naviter extat
Nee porro vacuum. Sunt ergo corpora certa
Quae spatium pleno possint distinguere inane.
Haec neque dissolui plagis extrinsecus icta,
Possunt nee porro penitus penetrata retexi
Nee ratione queunt alia temptata labare;

Translation

Still further, if there were nothing which we call void, the whole
world would be solid.

On the other hand, unless there were substance to fill space and
maintain all things which exist, empty void would prevail every-
where.

Matter therefore presents itself as distinct from void by antith-
esis and contrast; since the latter neither exists as wholly filled
nor entirely empty.

There are present therefore certain primary bodies which are

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS I3I

able to give demarcation to space and distinguish it as empty or
full.

These bodies can neither be fractured by blows given them
externally, nor dissolved by decomposition from within. Nor yet
can their integrity be made to yield by any manner of assault upon
them.

Book I., 540-551

Prseterea nisi materies seterna fuisset,
Antehac ad nilum penitus res quseque redissent
De niloque renata forent qusecumque videmus.
At quoniam supra docui nil posse creari
De nilo neque quod genitum est ad nil revocari,
Esse immortali primordia corpore debent,
Dissolui quo quseque supremo tempore possint,
Materies ut subpeditet rebus reparandls.
Sunt igitur solida primordia simplicitate
Nee ratione queunt alia servata per asvom
Ex infinite jam tempore res reparare.

Translation

Unless, indeed, matter were thus indestructible, all things, before
this, would have been reduced to nothingness; and we should
behold whatever comes into existence created out of nothing.

But as I have demonstrated previously, nothing which is created
ever arises from nothing; nor is any created thing ever resolved
into nothing.

Hence the primordial bodies or germs of things must be of an
indestructible character, in order that material may be supplied
from the wasting away of objects, for the repair and renewal of
the world.

It is argued, therefore, that the primordial particles (or atoms)
are of intrinsic, pure solidity; since under no other supposition
could they have served for the constant use and repair of the world
through the infinite ages of the past.

Book I., 551-565

Denique si nullam finem natura parasset
Frangendis rebus, jam corpora materiaa

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Usque redacta ferent sevo frangente priore,

Ut nil ex illis acerto tempore posset

Conceptum summum aetatis pervadere ad auctum.

Nam quid vis citius dissolvi posse videmus

Quam rursus refici ; qua propter longa diu

Infinita setas anteacti temporis omnis

Quod fregisset adhuc disturbans dissoluensque,

Numquam relicuo reparari tempore posset.

At nunc nimirum frangendi reddita finis

Certa manet, quoniam refici rem quamque videmus

Et finita simul generatim tempora rebus

Stare, quibus possint sevi contingere florem.

Translation

Otherwise, if nature had set no bound to the destruction of
things, the primary particles of matter must long ere this have
become so wasted, worn and broken from long use that no new
thing could be produced from them in the allotted time of growth
and increase, or attain its appointed size and dimensions.

For it is apparent that anything can be much more speedily
demolished than constructed ; and therefore, that which the vast
ages of time past had broken and worn out, marring and wasting
it away, would never be able to be restored in time for future use.

But it is evident that there have been set bounds and fixed limits
to what may be destroyed, since we behold everything renewed
with regularity, and at regularly appointed times in which every-;
thing, after its kind, reaches the full perfection of maturity.

Book I., 565-577

Hue accedit uti, solidissima materise
Corpora cum constant, possit tamen, omnia, reddi,
Mollia quae fiunt, aer aqua terra vapores,
Quo pacto fiant et qua vi quaeque gerantur,
Admixtum quoniam semel est in rebus inane.
Ac contra si mollia sint primordia rerum,
Unde queant validi silices ferrumque creari
Non poterit ratio reddi ; nam funditus omnis

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS 1 33

Principio fundamenti natura carebit.
Sunt igitur solida pollentia simplicitate
Quorum condense magis omnia consiliatu
Artari possunt validasque ostendere viris.

Translation

It follows therefore, although the primary particles of matter
are quite solid, yet in order that objects composed from them may
be soft, air, water, earth, vapors, for example, by whatever com-
pact they exist, or by whatever power they may be maintained,
void must be admixed in them.

But on the other hand, if the primordial particles are soft instead
of solid, no reason can be rendered why flints and iron have been
created as hard as we find them.

Nature, in fact, would be unable to have made a beginning or
a foundation for her structures. The primary elements of things
are therefore of a perfect solidity; and by the close combination
of these elements objects are able to exhibit both strength and
obduracy.

Book I., 615-635

Praeterea nisi erit minimum, parvissima quaeque
Corpora constabunt ex partibus infinitis,
Quippe ubi dimidiae partis pars semper habebit
Dimidiam partem nee res praefiniet ulla.
Ergo rerum inter summam minimamque quid escit?
Nil erit ut distet ; nam quamvis funditus omnis
Summa sit infinita, tamen, parvissima quae sunt.
Ex infinitis constabunt partibus aeque.
Quod quoniam ratio reclamat vera negatque
Credere posse animum, victus fateare necessest
Esse ea quae nullis jam praedita partibus extent
Et minima constent natura. Quae quoniam sunt,
Ilia quoque esse tibi solida atque aeterna fatendum.
Denique si minimas in partis cuncta resolvi
Cogere consuesset rerum natura creatrix.
Jam nil ex illis eadem reparare valeret

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Propterea quia, quae nullls sunt partibus aucta,
Non possunt ea quae debet genitatis habere
Materies, varios conexus pondera plagas
Concursus motus, per quae res quaeque geruntur.

Translation

Moreover, unless there shall be some least limit or nether bound-
ary, where the primordial particles of matter cease to be divided
infinitely, these particles would each consist of infinite parts, since
the half of a body would always have its half ; nor would anything
ever be limited or reach an end.

What therefore could be distinguished between the greatest and
the smallest, between much and little?

There would be no difference. For although the universe as a
whole may be of infinite extent, yet the least objects will equally
consist of infinite parts.

Since strict reason precludes this and denies that the mind can
admit it, the position must be taken that there are primary bodies,
or particles of matter, which have no parts, but exist as the least
possible in size and substance.

And since there are such indivisible bodies, you can but acknowl-
edge, O Memmius, that they must be both solid and indestructible.

Furthermore, if Nature, the creator of all things, had not been
in the habit of resolving objects into these minutest parts, she
would never be able to renew the world from them ; because those
objects which are renewed by the addition of no such parts cannot
be claimed to have those properties which generated bodies are
known to possess, to wit, adhesion, weight, motion, and the power
of giving and resisting blows ; in a word, those properties which
mark the behavior of matter under nature wherever observed.

Book I., 951-968

Sed quoniam docui solidissima materias
Corpora perpetuo volitare invicta per sevum,
Nunc age, summse quaedam sit finis eorum
Necne sit, evolamus; item quod inane repertumst
Seu locus ac spatium, res in quo quaeque gerantur
Pervideamus utrum finitum funditus omne

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS I35

Constet an immensum pateat vaste que profundum.
Omne quod est igitur nulla reglone viarum
Finitumst; namque extremum debebat habere.
Extremum porro nulllus posse videtur
Esse, nisi ultra sit quod finiat; ut videatur
Quo non longius haec sensus natura sequatur.
Nunc extra summam quoniam nil esse fatendum,
Non habet extremum, caret ergo fine modoque.
Nee refert quibus adsistas regionibus eius;
Usque adeo, quem quisque locum possedit, in omnis
Tantundem partis infinitum omne relinquit.

Translation

But since I have taught that the primordial particles of matter
are quite solid and fly hither and thither perpetually, unconquered
and unworn by the ages, attend now, O Memmius, that we may
demonstrate whether there is any end to their numbers or not.

Likewise, let us peer into that which has been found to be empty
space, or void, in which Nature carries on her operations, and
learn whether the foundations of it are limited by set bounds, or
extend in vast, illimitable profundity.

It is evident, as I hold, that there exists no limit, no boundary,
on any side, or in any direction; for if bounded, it must have some
extreme point.

But it is apparent that there can be no extreme point of anything
unless there be something conceived of beyond it, which thus sets
limits to it.

In short, it would appear that the universe extends farther than
any sense which we possess, enables us to follow.

Now since it must be conceded that nothing exists and extends
beyond the entire universe, the latter can have no end; therefore
it is beyond limit, or measure.

Nor does it matter in what region or tract of it one may stand,
since in whatever place he takes his station, the whole remains
equally boundless on every side.

Book I., 968-984

Prseterea si jam finitum constituatur

Omne quod est spatium, siquis procurrat ad oras

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Ultimus extremas jaciatque volatile telum,
Id validis utrum contortum viribus ire
Quo fuerit missum mavis longeque volare,
An prohibere aliquid censes obstareque posse?
Alterutrum fatearis enim sumasque necessest.
Quorum utrumque tibi effugium prascludit et omne
Coget ut exempta concedas fine patere.
Nam sive est aliquit quod probeat officiatque
Quominu' quo missum est veniat finique locet se,
Sive foras fertur, non est a fine profectum.
Hoc pacto sequar atque, oras ubicumque locaris
Extremas, quseram quid telo denique fiat.
Fiet uti nusquam possit consistere finis
Efifugiumque fug^ prolatet copia semper.

Translation

Moreover, if all space be conceived of as having a boundary, and
one were to run forward to the extreme confines of it, and were
then to throw a swift dart, would you picture to yourself that dart,
propelled with great force, as flying far forward in the direction
it was cast?

Or would you rather be inclined to suppose that something would
finally stop it?

For one or the other alternative you must of necessity adopt ;
but either one precludes escape to you from the conclusion that
the universe stretches away without a bound.

For whether there is anything which may act to stay it in its
flight that it may come to an end of it and become stationary, or
whether it is borne onward continuously, it has not proceeded for-
ward from a boundary.

And thence, on this supposition, I shall go on, and whenever
you locate the farthest shores of space, I shall ask you what may
happen in the case of the dart.

The outcome will be that an end of its flight can never be estab-
lished, and that its escape will still find space in which to glide
away.

Book I., 988-996

Praeterea spatium summse totius omne
Undique si inclusum certis consistere ovis

THREE HUNDRED LINES OF LUCRETIUS I37

Finitumque foret, jam copia materiae
Undique ponderibus solidis confluxet ad imum
Nee res ulla geri sub Cceli tegmine posset
Nee foret omnino cselum neque lumina solis,
Quippe ubi materies omnis cumulata jaceret
Ex infinito jam tempore subsidendo.

Translation

Besides, were the space of the entire universe included within
fixed boundaries, the stores of matter would before this time have
flowed together at the bottom of it, on account of its weight and
solidity; nor could the operations of nature be carried on beneath
the dome of heaven.

Indeed, there would be neither heaven nor light of day, since
all matter, sinking down through infinite time, would be cast in
one accumulated mass in the nether sphere.

Book I., 1 008- 1 01 2

Ipsa modum porro sibi rerum summa parare
Ne possit, natura tenet, quae corpus inani
Et quod inane autem est finiri corpore cogit,
Ut sie alternis infinita omnia reddat.

Translation

Nature also takes care of her own accord, that the totality of
things shall not be thus amassed upon itself, but sees to it that void
shall invest matter and matter divide void, in order that by such
alternations the universe may be rendered infinite in extent and
variety.

Book I., 1021-1028

Nam certe neque eonsilio primordia rerum
Ordine se suo quseque sagaci mente locarunt
Nee quos quseque darent motus pepigere profecto,
Sed quia multa modis multis mutata per omne

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Ex infinito vexantur percita plagis
Omne genus motus ex coetus experiundo.

Translation

For assuredly the primordial elements or atoms neither arranged
themselves in their places by virtue of any plan or mental sagac-
ity of their own, nor yet moved forth from a previously concerted
agreement.

But because they are changed in their courses and acted on in
many ways throughout the extent of cosmos, agitated and vexed
by blows from eternity, they have, after experiencing every possible
vicissitude, obtained such aspects and conditions as we now see
that nature presents.

THE INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD
AGE AND ORGANIC DEATH

(1905)

Classic fable records the catastrophe of the Earth-bom who,
rashly importunate, strove to scale Heaven; and Hindu sages
have taught that the Lords of Life and Death have jealously
defined their realms and shut the doors, lest mortals pass the for-
bidden thresholds; that in the present orbited order of matter
and the cosmos, death must follow fast on life, till the order ends ;
till orbital motion unlooses its swift arcs and the bright, huge-
grown orbs rarify in the fire-dust of another universal nebula.
Not till then may the Lords of Life and Death loose our mortal
bonds.

Yet even in most ancient days there lived a Prometheus, an
^sculapius, an Epicurus.

" Him neither fear of the Gods, nor thimder-bolts, intimidated,
nor portents in the skies, but rather roused the innate courage
of his soul, that he should be the first to break down the jealously
guarded portals."

What man has dared, man will dare again and more. " The
bold breed of lapetus presses on, imabashed, with face set to the
dangers of an unknown future." Across the gulf of more than
two millenniums, the hardy courage, the bold initiative, of these
great-hearted ones of old, lends inspiration. The breed survives,
the breed that brought down fire from the skies, that raised the
dead.

That is ever the scientific spirit, the spirit that came from
partaking of the Tree of Knowledge, the spirit that will accept
nothing less than an imtrammeled liberty to seek knowledge and
use it.

To-day, in these opening years of the 20th century, we face
the greatest, the gravest problem which has ever engaged the

139

140 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

attention of men, the problem of controlling life and prolong-
ing our lives at will.

Medicine, all medical practice, is an effort to prolong life,
or postpone the immediate dissolution of the human body. From
the 13th to the i8th centuries, too, while chemistry was still
nascent, there were mystic alchemists and alleged Rosicrucians
who sought to grasp a sporadic immortality by elixirs and strange
decoctions. But not until this last quarter of a century has the
grander idea been grasped, that prolonged life, looking toward
immortal life, will be the natural outcome of the evolution of
life on the earth.

It was an idea that could hardly have found place until the
Origin of Species and the Descent of Man were written, since it
is the logical complement and sequence of these doctrines of
nature. It could hardly have come before, save, perhaps, as
visional in the brain of a philosopher. But following the epoch
of Darwin, Huxley and Tyndall in England; of Humboldt,
Goethe, Helmholtz, Haeckel, Weissmann in Germany, and their
biological contemporaries in France, America and other lands,
the achievement of immortal life follows as the keystone of the
arch, the climax, the perfected fruit and flower of the evolution
of life on the earth. Follows from the natural growth of knowl-
edge in the human brain, presenting itself in the light of a great
achievement. For, with the dawn of this new century, we have
wakened to the hard fact that whatever we have here on the
earth we must achieve for ourselves.

More life, longer, happier, personal life, idealized as immortal
life, has been the dream of all the human ages. It is the voice
of nature — nature that everywhere makes oath that to live
is better than to die ; and that life even tmder hard conditions is
worth preserving. This is the " instinct " of the cell-of-life,
both as a protozoon and when imited and organized in the meta-
zoon; it is the voice of the cell, heard crying up from its lowly
depths in the tissues of the organism. It is the faith of the sub-
conscious life in us.

Ever since neolithic days there are evidences that human
beings have regarded death with repugnance and fear, and have
made rude efforts, looking to salvation. The primitive religious
cults all breathed this grief at death, this desire for more life.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE I41

But for the last ten thousand years human beings generally
have despaired of escape from death by self-effort, and made
their appeal for salvation to supernatural powers. In their
ignorance of nature and the causes of natural phenomena, a
vagrant belief in disembodied spirit life took form : the " shadow,"
the shade, the psyche, the umbra, the manes, the wraith, the ghost.

Full of doubt and of fear as the belief was, it yet proved a
species of solace, solace for the hard fate of individual life. The
hope of more life has never been given up, never can be given
up, since otherwise life would not be life ; but as death appeared
inevitable, our far human ancestors comforted themselves with
this quasi belief in " soul " life after death. The comfort was
always hazy; the hope had always to struggle against common
sense, and faith was ever infirm; yet, after a manner, the sick
and dying found a nebulous solace in it; death was a little
easier,

Sacerdos entered, put on his robe and took charge of the
vagrant belief in ghost life. What had been merely a fitful
belief was exploited in a creed, with doctrines. Rite and ritual
were prescribed, sacrifices enjoined, and tithes collected. Reason
and conscience were borne down by the voice of sacerdotal
authority, nether worlds for torture were invented, and blind
faith exacted imder ban and penalty. Fane, shrine, temple,
mosque, and cathedral were reared, and vast guilds of insolent
priesthood organized. " Religion reared her proud head in the
skies; human life groveled foully in the dust."

That was the price, the penalty, which humanity paid for
longing after more life, for believing that somehow there would
be immortal life somewhere. We should fix our attention, not
on the errata of creed and religion, but on the nature of this
great Hope of the human heart, the Hope that inspired it all.

For, if himian beings had all along been persuaded with cer-
tainty that this earthly life of three score and ten years was all
to which they could attain, there would have been no religion,
no priest. It was the longing for more life which made religion
possible in human history.

Sacerdos proved the greatest of hypnotists. Htmianity passed
into the sleep of the creeds, the long-night incubus of faith in
the supernatural, with its phantasmagoria of gods and devils.

142 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

nether-worlds and upper-worlds, limboes, purgatories, torture-
hells, and gaudy -golden heavens !

A long, wild, troubled night of the human brain.

Ten thousand years of supernatural religion.

It is from this nightmare of indoctrination, this trance of
dogmatism, this long-woven spell of sacerdotal authority, that
we are now waking, waking in the clearer light of our growing
knowledge of nature.

Passing over the old-time theories and beliefs as to old age
and death — beliefs connected with the religions — it will be
worth w^hile first to make a r6sum6 of existent knowledge and
views on the subject.

So few persons actually die of "old age," it has often been
denied that such cause of death really exists. More than seventy
per cent, of all deaths is from acute or chronic invasions of the
disease-producing bacteria, either sudden, sharp attacks, or
prolonged sieges. From birth to advanced age, the human
organism is continuously invaded, assaulted and preyed upon
by noxious unicellular life.

In time, these multiplied assaults, and the damage resultant
from them, inaugurate very complex, far-reaching complications,
difficult to trace and estimate. For an organ, or tissue, enfeebled
by microbic attacks, gives forth an altered, inferior product
which in turn embarrasses and lowers the vital tone of other
organs and tissues. Thus the entire organism is progressively
impaired and depressed from normal function. In this condi-
tion it is less resistant to the never-ceasing attack from without ;
for a high vital tonicity is the organism's natural defence. As
years pass it becomes impossible to calculate from cause to effect
the damage done by bacteria. We are able only to draw a general
conclusion that the vital coefficient of the organic life, which in
theory should be biostatic, is thus slowly diminished to a point
where the personal life succumbs to almost any fresh attack
from without, or new insurrection within. For certain disease
germs become intrenched in the tissues, so to speak, and there
bide their time to deliver further assaults, and go on forays up
and down the blood circulatory. Moreover, the roaming white
cells or corpuscles of the blood sometimes assume the role of

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 43

intra-organic assailants ; — and this brings us to consider one of
the latest theories of old-aging, that of Prof. Eli^ Metchnikoff,
of the French Institute, namely, that after middle age, these
leucocytes, now known as phagocytes, begin to prey on the more
highly differentiated cells of the stable tissues, bone, muscle,
skin, etc., and even on the neurons of the brain and cord, to the
extent that a gradual wasting away ensues, with the consequent
phenomena of old age.

Professor Metchnikoff distinguishes two classes of phagocytes,
the macrophages and microphages, the latter smaller than the
former, having extensible nuclei which permit them to pass freely
through all the tissues. It is to the more voracious macrophages,
however, which are essentially minute animals, that the damage
to the organic tissues in advanced life is chiefly due: they turn
cannibals, so to speak, and devour the cells of the associated
tissues; and the cause of this unnatural perversion of appetite,
or morale, is attributed to poisons of the nature of ptomaines,
produced by several orders of putrefactive bacteria which, as
life advances, find lodgment all along the alimentary tract, be-
coming " naturalized " there in immense numbers.

Professor Metchnikoff sees reason to hope that these invasions
of putrefactive bacteria may be combatted by ingestion of the
kefir microbe, found in specially soured milk, and himself makes
use of it. He also believes that the cells of all the tissues may be
reinforced by substances of the nature of serums, obtained by
the now familiar methods of inoculation of the horse and other
animals.

As a result of all his studies and discoveries. Professor Metch-
nikoff announces his belief that the present span of human life
may be prolonged by from sixty to eighty years ; that the healthy
working period of middle age may extend considerably past a
century, thus placing himself in harmony with Buff on, who
believed that the natural lifetime of man was not less than one
htmdred and twenty years. Professor Metchnikoff 's idea of
human longevity is similar, his view being that although diseases
and improper modes of living now hold human life down to
seventy or eighty years, these evils and bad conditions may be
so far ameliorated, that old age will come three score years later.

We do not understand Professor Metchnikoff to teach that

144 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

greatly prolonged life, looking to immortal life, can be attained
by applied science. His position is, that " old age " may be
deferred, not remedied; that it is in the end an unavoidable
sequence to all organic life. The conception that sentience in
matter is a constant, a deathless property or attribute of the
ultimate corpuscle, or ether, and hence that, foimding on this
constant, immortal life is potentially attainable and logically
possible in organisms, perfected by applied science, is an essen-
tially New World idea, a concept of the American brain, which
is not as yet much recognized in Europe. It is one of those great
dominant ideas of the human brain which has unfolded as the
westward-moving Aryan passed to a new hemisphere.

" This sentient property of matter is a constant like its co-rel-
ative, gravitation, and indestructible as matter itself. It is
the eternal well-spring of Nature.

" Here, on this eternal constant, the intimate life of matter,
itself, foimds the hope of a possible immortality for man. No
vicissitude of earth has yet been observed to deteriorate its
quality. Everlasting as the stars, it shines from the core of each
ultimate particle of matter.

" Death comes to us, then, not from a law of nature. The
law of nature is life, not death. Universal matter lives from
eternity. It never dies, not even the least particle of it, but
lives immortally. Life is the grand law of the universe from
eternity to eternity.

" Our problem is to make a certain definite mass and form of
living matter — an organism — live on this earth as long as
the organism shall will so to do.

" Each and every one of the causes of old age and death is of
the nature of an ordinary physical cause, fairly within human power
to avoid or remedy, and many of which in fact we are every day
avoiding and remedying. It is the sum total of these causes which
has rendered death a seemingly inevitable sequence to life.
Yet not one of them but can singly be warded off by human
science and foresight, and if one, why not all? It is a question
of greater knowledge with us, not that we die from any immu-
table law of nature as heretofore held and taught.

" At length, after centuries of dogma, erratic faith, and equally
erratic doubt, we are in possession of facts from which a creed

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 45

may be rationally forecast. Those facts demonstrate the con-
tinuous evolution of life, imder nature, from lowliest forms to
man: a long, weary, and unaided struggle upward through
organization, from the elemental sentience of matter to the
human intellect. But is all this grand effort to terminate in the
semi-brutal, half-developed creature, man, with his ideals un-
realized? Has evolution ceased? On the contrary, it is our
faith that we have as yet seen but the nether limb of evolution.
Its grand complement has still to be disclosed in the perfecting
of the human organism and the removal of the causes of disease,
old-aging, and death ; in a word, the achievement of immortality.
Immortal life will be won by applied science. Man will save
his own soul. Earth is to be made heaven. * Salvation ' is to
come from knowledge and the apotheosis of the race. This is
what evolution means. This is what life on the earth is struggling
upward to win: Immortality, Happiness, Heaven; ideals to be
realized by human effort. The tenets of all the great religious
systems foreshadow it. It is time to understand this. It is time
to realize our true situation on the earth, and cease from chasing
mirage. We have now sufficient knowledge to begin to save our
own souls. As well face the facts of our mortal condition to-day
as spend another thousand years doting on fond illusions. If
we would live, we must save ourselves. This is the religion of
life; the religion of self -salvation. It is not 'atheism'; not
'materialism,' in the old crass sense. Not 'infidelity'; rather
fidelity to the best and the essential doctrines of all religions.
Not ' skepticism,' but Hope and Faith in Life. Not the ' idle,
new dream ' of ' Scientific Materialism,' but the Dream of all
the Ages, the grand scheme of Nature, maturing and going into
effect since first our earth became the theater of life." *

So far as we are aware, too, cell old age, the primary cause of
organic old age in man and animals, has not been discovered in
Europe.

But aside from these alleged ravages of phagocytes, there are
functional causes of organic decline which come from lack of
coordination and cooperation in the ensemble of organs and
apparatuses of the body.

* Living Matter, 1888.

146 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

To make this quite plain we must conceive of the organism
as made up of thirty or more groups or differentiations of cells:
bone cells, muscle cells, liver cells, limg cells, renal cells, epithelial
cells, blood cells, nerve and brain cells ; in a word, all the diversely
specialized tracts and groups of tissue cells which together form
the animal body and are necessary to that grand cooperative
effort exhibited in a human life.

There must be a stomach, a liver, a pancreas, etc., for digestion;
lungs for oxygenation; kidneys for elimination; and blood for
the further transformation and transportation of the food to all
the various groups of cells. All must be fed every second. Each
organ and apparatus produces a different product; and all must
labor together in a kind of organic rhythm, balance, and counter-
balance. And this rhythm and counterbalance are very nicely
and delicately adjusted, so much so, that the least aberration
or dereliction from duty and function disorders the entire organ-
ism. So much so, that it is the highest art of physiology to watch
over the organic entity and preserve the balance of organic
interaction.

But as years pass, one organ, or another, or many, tend from
the wear and tear of life as we lead it, to become impaired and
disabled. There are deposits of " formed matter," diminution
of the numbers of cells from inflammations and poisonous in-
gestions. One organ or another thus fails to do its part, the
balance is lost, vicarious action begins; what we term " consti-
tution " is broken up and discordant action ensues. Most persons
die of this organic discord.

A number of years ago, the startling statement was put for-
ward, that organic decline, ending in death, comes from a pro-
gressive asphyxiation of the tissue cells; that after adult life,
we slowly suffocate, from a thickening and hardening of the
membranes of the alveolar sacs of the lungs, oxygen no longer
passing freely in, nor carbon dioxide out. The hardening of the
alveolar membrane is aggravated from impregnation by minute
dirt particles in respired air; it being a well-established fact
that the lungs are progressively discolored from infancy to old
age ; and that the lungs of certain craftsmen, stone-workers, dry
grinders, and others, are very palpably thus impregnated.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 47

As a proximate cause of organic decline, there must be some-
thing in this hypothesis, which will have to be reckoned with in
any future effort to alleviate the causes of old age. But it can
scarcely be said to go to the root of the matter, and we are still
left to inquire why otherwise than by impregnation with visible
particles of dirt, the alveoli become hardened, lifeless sacs, im-
pervious to gases, instead of the living, pervious membrane of
childhood. And this leads to casual mention of a theory of old-
aging, suggested from this laboratory in 1896, namely, the
theory that the cells of all the tissues are slowly impregnated,
embarrassed, and killed out by invisible dirt particles which are
ingested with our food, enter the blood plasma, and finally reach
the cell by absorption.

Dirt, which has been well defined as " matter in the wrong
place," is commonly supposed to be a molar condition of terres-
trial matter which does not prevail nor exist in the molecular
realm. Hence, by virtue of this molecular exclusion and the
elective power of living matter to choose and select such particles
as it pleases for its nutrition, the protoplasmic cell has been
presumed to be in the " chemically pure " state. There is reason
to fear, however, that such an assimiption is gratuitous and far
from accurate.

Only a microscopist knows the ftill bitterness of the life struggle
with dirt. It is doubtful whether even a gas can be, or at least
has been, generated chemically pure, so omnipresent is dirt.
Dirt is Nature's heterodoxy.

The animal organism is a great destroyer of dirt; that is to
say, the various ferments and " juices," which it is the life work
of many groups of the somatic cells to secrete, act chemically
on dirt as well as on true food, on innutritious as well as nutritious
substances, to break them down to the elemental condition.
Having passed the digestive tract, too, and entered the blood
plasma, still further reduction and elimination take place, before
the highly rectified particles go to the cells of the nobler tissues
and organs.

In an adolescent organism, normal, healthy, and strong, this
eliminative process is practically adequate. Adventitious sub-
stances are expelled or broken down and resolved chemically.

But in older organisms, during periods of weakened action,

148 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

the process of resolution is less complete; microscopic dirt may
accumulate in enfeebled cells. If not dirt, what is that darker-
tinted residuum in old protoplasm?

Is there dirt in the blood? Or rather, to how great an extent
is the blood a dirty liquid? In other words, is dirt taken up,
associated with nutritious particles, by the absorbents and
lacteals?

We know that the fine particles of inorganic substances, ad-
ministered as medicines and poisons, pass readily into the blood,
and speedily enter the protoplasm of brain and muscle cells.
In the examination of old amoebce, which are nourished in dirty
water, we see a great deal of this. Under high power the same
is discernible in a culture of bacteria which can be killed out by
an admixture of dirt in the fluid.

It is not of the chemical action of inorganic particles in the
protoplasm of the cells that we are here treating, however, but
of their merely negative behavior, or presence as dirt. A particle
of arsenic, antimony, or iron may excite protoplasmic action
which may speedily result in its expulsion, resolution, or encyst-
ment, where a merely reactionless particle of silica, or lime,
might remain as an obstruction. Is the somewhat discolored,
more rigid, less elate condition of the fibrils of a brain cell, in an
aged organism, due to infiltered, accumulated dirt?

The question here raised, as regards dirt, is whether minute
particles of inorganic matter, or obdurate organic matter, enter-
ing the plasma of the blood, find ultimate lodgment in the cells,
and remaining there undissolved, chemically tmassimilated, or
vmexpelled, give rise to those aspects which distinguish aged from
yotmg ceUs. Are acciunulations of microscopic dirt in the cells
one characteristic of cell old age? Is all organic life from infancy
to old age and death a hopeless struggle with dirt?

But while the dirt hypothesis of old age contains scintilla
of truth, it must, like the foregoing, be ranked with proximate
rather than with primary causes of old aging.

Dr. De Lacy Evans also believed that old-aging resulted from
accumulations of " earthy salts," largely phosphate of calciimi
and silica, in the tissues, and also the unregulated wasting of the
cell protoplasm by oxygen. This opinion has gone the rounds of

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 49

both medical and popular joiimals, with variations. We now
know that such earthy salts, to some extent and in some tissues,
at certain stages of life, do accumulate in a way to embarrass
the cell life and to weaken the tissue. But this condition is far
from being constant, or continuous, or secularly progressive. It
is incidental and often associated with microbic invasions. As to
the imdue wasting of the cellular protoplasm by oxygen, that
is largely a myth; a far greater difficulty in old organisms is to
get oxygen to the cells at all; they smother for want of it.

An hypothesis of the old-aging of the nervous system and cere-
bral tissue of man has also been advanced from the progressive
effects of continuous or oft-repeated mnemonic and sensory
impressions in the protoplasmic substance of the brain and minor
nerve centers.

Memory, experience, and the growth of the intellect depend
on impressions from the external world which come to the brain
through the organs of special sense and the general sensibility,
and remain there as pictures. Such impressions, or pictures, are
believed to be physically inwrought in the sentient substance by
something akin to dynamic action, and, as is well known, will
remain there, mentally recognizable, for many decades. From
such portraiture of the external world, physically impressed in
the material substance of the brain, we have what is commonly
termed, experience. This experience, however, is something
more than an accumulation of impressions or pictures; for it is
accompanied by the formation of opinions and intellectual growth.
There is assimilation of the collected data as well as mere accu-
mulation ; growth of the garner itself into an organic sentient
whole, its substance being arranged, molded, or impressed in
such a degree, that a recent writer has not hesitated to define
the " soul " as " the form of the organism."

It is a well-known fact, moreover, that the frequent repetition
of the same impressions, as of sensory experiences, scenes, and
soimds, has a marked tendency to dull our sensibility to them.
Equally well observed, too, is the loss and confusion of memory in
advancing life.

Hence, the inference that the constant repetition of impressions
and the continuous bepicturing of the brain substance with
mnemonic imagery has its natural, physical limits which cannot

150 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

be long outrun without utter confusion and blurring of the
material medium, as when one pictiire is printed upon and over
another. And the conclusion derived, touching long Hfe, has
been that a lifetime greatly exceeding seventy-five years must, of
necessity, result in mental dullness and confusion of thought,

Thomas Parr, however, at the age of one hundred and fifty-
two, is alleged to have been " bright " and normal as to " all
his faculties." Henry Jenkins, of Yorkshire, England, " dis-
tinctly remembered " the battle of Flodden Field, fought one
hundred and fifty-seven years previously. Robert Evans, of
Spitalfields, " clearly recollected " the execution of Charles I.,
one hundred and thirty-two years before.

What is known as to this subject goes to show that if the data
of experience are normally assimilated with one's existent
knowledge and incorporated as such knowledge in the mind, no
confusion will result from their progressive accumulation.

In the aged, too, recollections of youthful years often appear
to be revived and to grow vivid, although it is a matter of com-
mon experience that our memory of past events fades with the
lapse of time.

Closely associated with the above theory of old-aging is the
psychic theory, namely, that we age and die because after the
purely animal or sensory cycle of brain development is accom-
plished in mating and procreation, there follows a period or con-
dition of non-development. A new, higher cycle of mind growth
is not initiated, and does not begin, with its new interests, new
ambitions and fresh incentives to live and act. The brain neu-
rons do not take a fresh start to live, and hence the stasis of
advanced age ensues, with its common conviction that life has
been lived, and that naught remains but to exist for a few. years
more and die.

According to this view, if it were the fixed belief of human
beings, the current faith, that after the age of forty-five, a new
cycle of life was to begin, a new, later course of study and prep-
aration for another life effort would be inaugurated; and if
the world and the social system offered a field for this (as in
future it will do), then the stasis of advanced life would not set
in; himian beings at fifty would be seen brightening up for a
higher, stronger life, with better, loftier ideals.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 151

The chief obstacle to this at present is not that these new
cycles of brain development cannot be initiated, but that the
world and society offer no field for it ; the hostile presence of the
younger generation pushes the adult generation off the stage of
life. What is needed for prolonged life of the individual is field
for him to live and develop ; in a word, incentive to and oppor-
timity for a greater life.

We have abtmdant evidence in numerous observed instances,
that at the age of fifty, sixty, or eighty, the human brain may
enter on a new curriculum of study, growth and achievement;
and that, pari passu with this new effort, the cell life of the whole
organism has been notably quickened and strengthened. For it
is ever the brain life which quickens, sustains and maintains the
life of the other organs and apparatuses of the animal organism.

A provisional importance must therefore be attributed to the
argument for the psychic cause of old age. To the writer it is
at least apparent that the first step toward the achievement of
deathless life will be from the psychic side.

The assumption that the brain, progressively, is dulled by
mtiltiplex mnemonic impressions, founds on the idea that the brain
is like a photographic plate or film. Whereas, what we know of
the brain neurons leads us to conclude that there is little or no
analogy of this kind ; that the building up of a personal intellect
bears no resemblance to photography. A human intellect, with
memory, implies a co-related, cooperative effort on the part of
many millions of cells, acting together, pooling their cell lives
about a personal axis. Each cell is thus stimulated to live in a
certain way, rather than stamped by a photographic picture from
without. The cell contents, or sentient substance of each cell,
is in a state of constant flux and mutation, replaced every second
by fresh particles, not " fixed " as in a photograph. An intellect
is, therefore, a certain manner or mode of cell life relatively to the
other cells of the entire brain, not a series of photographic plates,
packed away in the brain. The instances of double personality,
double consciousness, and recurrent personality, indicate that
when, from any cause, the first or former personality ceases, a
second personality may begin, as if about a new personal axis,
and go on to develop another intellect of the brain cells, quite as
if the first had never existed.

152 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

It is, therefore, fair to infer that if, at the age of fifty or sixty,
it was the custom of human beings to enter on a new cycle of
brain Hfe, and there were opportunity and social field for it, a
new axis of personality would slowly take the place of the old,
and that the cell life of the brain would arrange itself about it,
quite as readily as if no former development had taken place.
The problem of such prolonged brain life would lie in giving the
brain cells a pure, normal food, through an uninjured blood
circulatory, and preserving them from the ills that come from
association with other impaired cell groups of the organism.

The brain appears to be a colony of cells destined to live
forever and capable of doing so, but for the weakness, diseases,
and frailties of the organism in which it has developed. On the
one hand, it is the organism by means of which it has come for-
ward and arisen to its present high estate of intellectual puissance ;
and, on the other hand, it is this same organism which now drags
it down to death.

The " Cometh up like a flower " theory of old age has long been
a popular one.

When we regard the growth, blooming, and death of a summer
flower, the shooting upward of the flower stalk of a poppy, for
example, with its blossom, its seeding, and its suddenly ensuing
juicelessness and dead rigidity, we contemplate phenomena not
wholly unlike what takes place in the hmnan organism, when
regarded in the large, passing from infancy to maturity and old
age.

What has taken place in the poppy stalk?

One class of plant cells has developed, multiplied, and from the
products which have issued from them, has produced the stalk
proper and leaves. Immediately another class has, in like man-
ner, given rise first to the bud, then to the gorgeous blossom with
its stamens and pistils. Fertilization follows in its timed order;
and later another class of cells matures as seed.

It has been held that these latter cells in some manner sap and
eviscerate, so to speak, the cells of every other tissue of the plant,
and thus sapping them of their Hfe elements, or germs, condense
these latter in the seed, where it may long lie dormant, yet is
capable of producing another plant; and that the parent plant.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 53

thus sapped and eviscerated, dies naturally, its life being
virtually taken away and carried forward to the seed for another
year.

The observed fact that the stalk and lower leaves of the poppy
remain green until late in the season, if the flower stalk is nipped,
has been regarded as evidence of this view, namely, that the
phenomena of its growth, maturity, and dry death stand for a
development, successively, of one class of cells after another,
from the seed aroimd to the seed again ; that the plant dies when
the germs of life have left the stalk and leaf and passed upward
to their final lodgment in the seed.

It is an easy theory, easily derived, easily argued, and falls in
superficially well with certain aspects of the cell doctrine and
with current theology.

But it carries a great and vicious untruth; vicious in that it
woiild indicate that the primary and ultimate object of all plant
life is to bear seed ; of all animal life, to bring forth offspring.

Per contra, we believe that the object of all life, vegetable
and animal, is to live and feel the joys of living; and that seed
and offspring are produced because, under the hard conditions
of the earthly habitat, we are unable to live on continuously.
That is to say, if the earth had always been an easy habitat for
life, there would have been no seed, no offspring, no death. Offspring
and seed result originally from hardships and prospective death
to the parent cell, and are not the object of living, but rather an
evasion of death.

It seems to me very desirable to have these premises right at
the outset as contrasted with the contrary view, and to set off
free from a radically wrong theory of life.

To return now to our observation of the poppy stalk, whatever
of fate, of final tendency to go to seed, there is in it, will be found
due to heredity, established by long conformity to climate and
other conditions; a habit of living which leads the different
classes of cells to develop and produce tissue at a certain time,
relatively to each other; and in the manner in which these dif-
ferent tissue growths of the stalk and flower limit and restrict
each other.

It is now more than doubtful, and is discredited, whether any-
thing of the nature of a migratory germ, or " biophor," ascends

154 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

from the tissue cells to the seed, and is thus transferred from plant
to plant and year to year.

Why does the poppy live? It lives to express its life, its per-
sonal life, and to take its personal satisfaction from living. It
is an organized effort at fruition on the part of sentient matter.
Seed is its mode of escaping death.

But granting the general truth of the doctrine that seed and
death result primarily from the hard conditions of terrestrial
life, which make it impossible for metazoons to live on continu-
ously and deathlessly, it has been argued that all existent forms
of life have fallen irretrievably into this mode of living and dying.
Not only do the same conditions of hardship and limitation still
prevail which first induced seed and death, but ever3^ plant and
animal lives by virtue of, and in accord with, a plan or an arrange-
ment of the germinal matter in the seed, which compels it to
unfold as did the parent, and inevitably produce seed and die.

That is to say, the arrangement of the protoplasmic molecules
in the germ, seed, or ovum, is such that the successive growths
of tissue must, if the plant or animal is to live at all, succeed each
other according to the order of their arrangement or garnering
in the germ.

In the main, this view must be conceded to be upheld by the
facts. Heredity does thus hold all forms of life within its iron
clutch. Plants and the lower orders of animal life tend not to
change, and for the most part would perish if suddenly altered
conditions compelled great changes; and it is but to a single
tissue, even in the human organism — the cerebral tissue — that
we can look with any confidence for a successful contest with the
restrictive dominion of heredity. That one tissue is still pro-
gressive and capable of self- direction and self-elcvation.

There is also what may be termed the hypnotic hypothesis of
old age, the idea that old age ensues from a fixed belief, or mental
expectation, that it will occur at a certain age. That from earliest
ages this expectation has taken the form of creed or an instinct
and acts, after middle life, as a species of inveterate hypnosis,
compelling the person to behave after a senescent fashion, and
feel the sensations and even experience the pains of senility.

In a word, that we grow " old " because we believe that we

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 55

shall grow old. It is, therefore, an attitude of mind that causes
old age; and the inference is, that if a fixed belief that man is
deathless and will never grow old, could be substituted for this,
his present belief, greatly prolonged life would follow.

In support of this theory, the well-known physiological effects
of innervation are cited. Muscle cells severed from their connec-
tion with nerve and brain soon atrophy and die. The same is
true of other tissues. Stimulation from the brain and spinal cord
is necessary to the life and fimction of all the associate tracts of
cells. These live only from their connection with the brain and
are dependent on it for motif to live and work. It is this pre-
eminent brain colony of cells which not only controls and domi-
nates, but continuously furnishes the stimulus — the tide of
corpuscles — that impels the servile tracts of cells to activity in
their appointed ways. Severed from the brain they turn idle,
run riot, or lapse into desuetude.

Moreover, there is the vast array of observed phenomena where
fixed beliefs and the mental state, known as expectation, are
seen to have profoimdly affected the operations of the human
body, even to producing the semblance of virulent diseases and
death itself; of scar, stigmata, and all the strange phenomena
that ensue from religious exaltation. In fact, the evidence is
complete as to the brain's dominancy over the organism.

Of the hypnotic theory, however, it must be observed that it
fails to account for the old-aging of animals, insects, and plant
life.

A celebrated physician was accustomed to say, that " sl man
is as old as his arteries; " and from this dictum, which has its
grain of truth, has come what may be termed the blood-circu-
latory theory of old age. Succinctly, that excluding what may
be classed as accidental deaths from bursting arteries or veins
and from arterio-capillary schlerosis, there is in aging organisms a
slow chemico-mechanical contraction and diminution of the
caliber of the capillaries, which results in starvation of the tissue
cells, from exclusion of the blood corpuscles and even of the blood
plasma. Oxygen and nutrient particles are from this cause slowly
excluded from the cell which starves like a captive shut up in a
dtmgeon. The progressive shrinkage and diminution of the

156 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

capillary tubes has been ascribed to chemical changes in the
" formed matter " of which they are composed. In foetal life
capillaries grow forward from a terminal cell-bud and are hol-
lowed into channels behind the cell as it advances. It has been
argued that, after a certain lapse of time, this formed tube deteri-
orates from chemical instability, irrespective of the personal life
and without reference to it.

A quarter of a century ago, w^hen research was younger, many
of us fondly believed that we held the key to the vital situation
in a discovery — then believed authentic — that unicellular life
was naturally immortal; that certain infusoria, bacteria, pro-
tozoa, meaning the first simple forms of life, lived and multiplied
by fission and division without dying; that there was really no
such calamity as death in this primary form of terrestrial life.

This fact, if fact it had proved, was perceived to be of tremen-
dous significance. It opened vistas of great hopes. For it was
already recognized that unicellular life was the basis of multi-
cellular organisms. If, therefore, these structural units of our
bodies were deathless under nature, the whole question of immor-
tal life for man resolved itself into one of proper care and hus-
bandry, protection and nutrition, of the physiological cell. Sys-
tems of such cell husbandry began to be outlined for practical
U-se ; and in the minds of many, the " fond dream of all the human
aggs " seemed to be on the eve of realization. The hope was
logical, the deduction legitimate, if these premises concerning
the natural deathlessness of the unicells were true.

Prof. August Weissmann — whose theories of life and death
are now common property throughout the world — made the
natural immortality of unicellular life one of the foundation
stones of his famous hypothesis; other German histologists
concurred, as also several noted English biologists; and for ten
years we really seemed to be at the bottom of the great problem
of life on the earth. It was then more logical to argue that the
attacks of disease bacteria, acute and chronic, might be the
ultimate cause of old-aging. For we contemplated the human
organism — the soma — as composed of cells, not essentially
unlike unicells, and originally derived from them; and if these
component cells were deathless unless crushed by violence.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 57

starved, suffocated, or otherwise killed, the problem of prolong-
ing human life indefinitely would be solved when we could ward
off cell dangers in our bodies. With the somatic cell potentially
immortal, death was due to organic errata. Our lives rested on
a fixed and sure basis of immortality which was in plain view;
the neurons of the brain were so many units of eternal life, if
only we could guard and protect them.

True, Professor Weissmann took the ground that mankind
continued to die periodically because prolonged human life was
not useful to the human species; in a word, that the individual
existed solely for the good of the species; that we die after we
produce offspring because there is no longer any reason for us
to live ; and that this must be accepted as the law of human life.

It required but a normal exercise of common sense, however,
to discern a palpable fallacy in this corollary of the Weissmann
theory. Hence, those who hoped for greatly prolonged life,
from the growth of knowledge, were not disheartened; for they
recognized the fact that the highest interests of the species will
be conserved far better by a race of perfected individual organ-
isms which were deathless, than by constant generations of
diseased mortals. It was perceived that the only possible reason
for thus exalting the species and sacrificing the individual on its
altars, must lie in the expectation that ultimately there would
be developed from the species a race of more perfect individuals.

The species, indeed, as conceived of in the Weissmann hypoth-
esis, was merely an abstraction; the individual after all was
the desideratum ; — but little points like this sometimes escape
the minds of great philosophers.

It must be confessed, too, that something equally nebulous
attaches to the Weissmann theorem of The Germ-plasm and
Heredity.

The germ-plasm of Weissmann is the human reproductive
tissue, a cell colony which lives on, deathless, from generation
to generation ; the soma alone dies ; the germ-plasm has survived
from the time unicellular life was the only form of life on the
earth. Rejecting the theory of Darwin and others, that gem-
mules from every cell of the organic tissues are garnered in the
reproductive tissue, to be extruded as embryonic cells, Weissmann
taught that the reproductive cells, by permutations and combi-

158 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

nations of the germinal substance, are equal to the task of ori-
ginating new generations of mankind, unaided, and that the
soma has nothing to do with reproduction save the servile task
of bearing the germ-plasm forward in the w^orld and supplying
it with food.

Here, again, common sense could not help thinking that as
between these rival theories of reproduction, the truth may lie
midway ; that the despised soma, while not transferring organized
" gemmules " to the reproductive cell colony, may yet by virtue
of " nervous currents," which pass to and fro, so influence, mold,
and individualize the germ-plasm as practically to impress the
ancestor on the offspring, and virtually reproduce the parent
in the child. This view, at least, had the merit of reconciling
opposed theories ; and — saving clause — it is not clearly known
as yet in what nervous currents which reciprocate between
the reproductive organs and the rest of the body, consist, or how
fully representative of every organ and tissue of the body they
may be. A nervous current is a great mystery and involves
many imknown quantities and qualities of matter ; it is a fruitful
field for investigation. When we are able to analyze a nervous
current, we will know a great deal more about human life than
at present. It would not surprise the writer, if a nervous
current were foimd to be capable of transferring the image
and character of one cell to another. It may prove a stream of
an almost infinitely more minute form or type of " gemmules "
than Darwin dreamed of, or Weissmann repudiated.

Then in 1885-86, and for a time, this sense of certitude, this
feeling of mastery of the great problem, was given a rude shock,
by deductions drawn from the observations of Maupas, confirmed
by contemporary biologists. Primitive unicellular life was not
deathless in any sense, after all. The intimate cause of old-aging
were foimd to be deeper-seated. The imicell was seen to " age "
and die, even as the multicells. The Weissmann hypothesis
associated death with sexual reproduction in the multicells, and
portrayed the causes of death as organic and extra-cellular. We
now learned that the causes of death are intra-cellular. Colonies
of tinicells conjugate to be regenerated by blending and exchange
of particles, sexually, not differently in principle from the sexual

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 59

congress of animals. Unicells increase in nimiber by division of
the adult, parturient cell into two smaller " daughter cells,"
each of which grows and divides into two others, generation on
generation, for a limited length of time, but not indefinitely, as
was at one time believed to be true of them.

On the contrary, after a certain number of cell generations,
such unicells must get together sexually. The millions of rhizo-
pods in a stagnant pool, for example, must thus conjugate or
they will cease to be reproductive and the species will die of old
age.

As observed by Maupas in 1885-86, and other observers since,
sexual conjugation is accompanied by profound changes in the
cells. The technique of these changes is of less consequence
here than an appreciation of the principle involved. When two
of the conjugating cells have paired and come into close contact,
the paranucleus, or sex organ, of each suffers a species of disso-
lution; it divides and appears to imdergo a kind of reorganiza-
tion; certain parts of it are rejected altogether and cast forth,
as if worn out, worthless, or deleterious. The remaining parts
of the paranuclei then come together and are differentiated as a
male and a female pronucleus. All this seems to take place as
if tmder stimulus of contact, or of sexual desire between the two
cells. Having paired, these changes in each begin and proceed
as above indicated. Immediately then the male pronuclei cross
over from cell to cell, the female pronuclei remaining stationary.
After passing over, the male pronuclei unite and fuse, each with
the resident female pronucleus. A transfer and exchange of
germinal matter from one cell to another is thus accomplished.

Following this exchange, a complete reconstruction and re-
organization of the entire nucleus of both cells take place. And
now the two unicells, having affected this swap-over of germinal
matter, and this profound reconstruction, slowly separate to go
each its individual way as before. Each feeds and grows and in
due time begins to multiply by fission and division in halves,
which form new individuals; and this asexual increase may go
on for fifty, a hundred, or even six himdred generations.

Maupas' observations indicated that sexual conjugation did
not take place successfully between imicells of the same family,
that is, between descendants of the same parent cell. The dis-

l6o SALVATION BY SCIENCE

advantages and observed enfeeblement, which result from in-
breeding in animals, and in consanguineous marriages, appear
therefore to be deep-seated in unicellular life. Sexual conjuga-
tion gave best results when the cells were of " stranger " parent-
age. If sexual conjugation were too long deferred, till the succes-
sive generations had grown very much enfeebled and senescent,
it was either unsuccessful or failed to be undertaken. Under
natural conditions it took place when the individual generations
were at their best.

Why individual generations from the same parent fail to con-
jugate with entire success, is thus far as little understood in uni-
cells as in animals. The proper elements for the sexual reaction
appear to be lacking, as if there were too great a sameness, too
much identity or similarity in the sexual elements of the para-
nucleus and pronucleus. To obtain the needful sexual reaction
or stimulus between the cells, they should come from another
stock and have been nourished in another place, in a different
environment.

Where sexual conjugation did not take place the generations
from the same cell parent, as time went on, became smaller and
often deformed. After several himdred generations the descend-
ants of a single cell parent all die and the line becomes extinct.

In principle nothing different takes place in multicellular life
in animals and man. There are modifications of the same method,
due to the extensive organization of the cells, but no departure
from the principle of cell renewal by an interblend of the nuclear
substance of two cells. This point should be kept clearly in mind,
since it helps to place the whole subject under better lights.
Cells from the reproductive tissue of one parent (spermatozoa)
meet a cell from that of another parent, and the same inter-
blending and fusing of nuclear elements takes place, followed by
a recast of the blend, and then a new life developing in due
course.

At first, and for a number of years, the discovery that the uni-
cells age and must have recourse to sexual conjugation, to escape
death, was most disheartening to the earlier hopes of natural
salvation. Death appeared to run far more deeply in the warp
and woof of living matter than had been supposed.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE l6i

For a time we were inclined to acquiesce in the extreme view
that this observed decHne and aging of the cell-of-Hfe was due
to an inevitable, irremediable exhaustion of the vivific molecules
of the cell nucleus. That even if the number of protoplasmic
molecules was restored by adjuvant chemical action, we might
yet find that the wear and tear of cell life depletes the large
mobile molecule, itself; and that the problem of its restoration
might be found out of range of the chemical activities and affin-
ities of terrestrial matter. In brief, that death reigned irre-
trievably on our planet, and that life is possible here only in the
parent-and-child mode. For it was easy to go farther and theorize
that molecules, atoms, and even corpuscles are depleted, and have
to meet, sexually, for renewal. There have been various fanciful
theories as to sex in the most minute particles of which matter
is composed.

These were years of doubt for the natural salvation idea. The
deduction then made was that the hard conditions of life on the
earth cause the cell to wane, deteriorate, or " run down," to the
extent that it inevitably dies imless reincarnated by sexual inter-
blending with other cells, that being nature's only method of
getting over the inherent obstacles to terrestrial life: obstacles
incident to gravitation, avid chemical activities, and the hetero-
geneous mixture of matter on the earth's surface. And this
deduction touching unicellular life is a true one. The imicells
have found life too hard to live endlessly as individuals. Under
the ordinary conditions of shore and pool, they die out imless
renewed by sexual regeneration ; — and this is the death of the
individual life.

It is race life, not individual life, which is perpetuated by sexual
renovation; the child may be like the parent, but is not that
parent personally. Those who have observed the profoimd
changes, the commingling and re-grouping of the cell contents,
that precede the fission and division of a unicell into two " daugh-
ter cells" — even when not immediately antedated by sexual
congress — must needs conclude that the parent does not live
on in one of these cells, but came to an end, personally and in-
dividually, at fission. So that the declaration of Weissmann and
other biologists of that time, concerning the immortality of the
tmicells, was erroneous from the start, fotmded on faulty ob-

1 62 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

servation; the fact being that a unicell always dies, person-
ally, when it gives birth to offspring by fission; the profound
breakup and reassembling of the nuclear contents being equivalent
to the obliteration of the parent cell as an individual.

But in accepting this grim conclusion, touching the mortality
of the tinicells, those who had hoped that the human organism
may be perfected for greatly prolonged life, looking toward
immortal life, overlooked for a time a most important fact, and
failed to take cognizance of what nature had itself been doing to
alleviate these same hard terrestrial conditions which cause
death in unicellular life. We failed to perceive that in every
organism, animal, or plant, a united, continuous effort is made to
render cell life easier and safer, to provide a better cell food and
secure more perfect nutrition, to eliminate poisonous substances,
and remove " dirt."

We failed at first to comprehend that while in exposed, unpro-
tected iinicellular life the individual could not live for more than
a few days or weeks at most, and was obliged soon to resort to
reproduction to escape race extinction, cells could be found in
multicellular organizations, the brain of a man or an elephant,
for example, that live for a century, or two centuries. In short,
that multicellular life is a long-established, cooperative method
on the part of cell life, to live longer and better, looking to com-
plete cell salvation imder nature.

At that time we failed to comprehend this larger effort of cell
life. Our mental concepts did not then as now embrace the out-
lines of the Earth's life scheme. Nor did we then perceive that
these grand cooperative imions of differentiated and specialized
cell life give rise not only to animal organisms, but to a higher,
organized, personal life which redacts strongly to preserve and
perpetuate the component cell imits, and that the more intelli-
gent that personal life becomes, the stronger grows the effort
for self -maintenance and self -salvation.

To have a human personality, with mind and reason, with
memory running back to childhood, binding the entire life experi-
ence together and blending it in a coherent whole, the brain
neurons must largely survive throughout the personal life-time;
the cell must live on, its individual life must be preserved.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 163

This marvelously organized animal body which we inherit,
the origins of which are in the depths of unhistoric time, has
come up imder nature, self-maintaining, self-repairing, in obedi-
ence to an instinct and impulse to live on and not die. It is the
embodiment of the cell effort to be deathless. It started and de-
veloped to that end. The impulse to this comes from the sen-
tience of the cells — the sentient side of matter. It is a self-
sentient mechanism which feels its hurts and possesses the re-
source of self-repair. From perception of injury issues energy
for restoration, as, for example, when a muscle is wounded, or a
bone broken. Even the blood circulatory tubes grow again,
and are repaired and reopened, round and about, as the wants of
the tissues make urgency. Wherever a sense of loss, damage and
danger is felt, this current of vis viva stimulates the phagocytes
to act and sets the cells of the injured organ in extraordinary
activity to produce new tissue. Something more and in addition
to chemical action is displayed here; it is chemical action,
prompted and initiated by sentience, by a swift current of minute
corpuscles, out-flowing at the command of self-consciousness,
bearing its will to the cells.

It is the nature of this current, this stimulus from the neurons,
that we have great need to study and control; to learn how it
may be generated, artificially perhaps, and how it may be used
to stimulate repairs throughout the organism.

We have a working hypothesis as to how currents of negative-
electric corpuscles are derived in the cells, to issue forth as the
vehicle of their will. Apparently it comes from decomposition
of the atoms in the protoplasmic molecule; a decomposition
initiated by the cell's self -sentience. It starts from the sentient
side of matter, and involves a great law of nature and the cos-
mos ; — but the scientific evidence in proof of this is not yet in
form for statement.

The growth of biological knowledge, during the decade, has
greatly enlarged our conceptions of what the cell-of-life is capable
of doing and becoming. We are recognizing more ftilly than ever
before its inherent plasticity and marvelous adaptability to every
form and use in organized life. And when we contemplate these
astoimding metamorphoses as seen in the intricacies of insect

164 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

mechanism, the beauty of flowers, the texture of ivory, bone and
shell, the coining of spore and germ, the achieved resistance to
cold and heat, and, in brain, the elevation of simple sentience
to intellect ; when we contemplate these marvelous achievements
of the cell, past and present, there seems no good reason to doubt
that this same cell may achieve greatly prolonged life — if it
sets itself to the task. Prolonged life would be a feat no greater
than others which it has accomplished in the past. Our survey
of organized life constantly strengthens this conception of the
cell's plasticity and its possibilities. It may be molded, bent,
and directed to do almost anything, perform almost any function
and live briefly, or long, as the greater life or personality of the
organism enjoins upon it. It is Nature's Proteus and may be
made to live a day, or a millennium.

For slowly, over the stumbling-blocks of many errors and mis-
leading hypotheses in the past, we have been drawn to the con-
clusion, that although the tissue cell is still seen to decline and die
with the organism, there is attainable for it an exceptionally
well-noiu"ished, well-protected condition where it may live on
without time limit. We mean by this that the alleviation of old
age is now as largely a question of regulating and controlling
the life of the organism — this larger personal life — as of
combating intrinsic obstacles to long life in the cell, itself; that
it is the organism as well as its component cells which must
be put in trim for longer life. What the cell needs to insure its
continuance in fimction and in life, is stimulus from the organ-
ism as a whole, and that atmosphere, or aura, of vitality, which
pervades a healthy, strong animal body. As long as these
stimuli remain constant and strong, and the cells are well nour-
ished, they are not of themselves the sole factors of old age.
It is the whole life of the organism that quickens cell life; that
is to say, the volimie or sum total of cell life in the animal
body when well blended in a vital aura, seems adequate to
stimulate and maintain in healthy function each individual
cell of the vast union for much more than a century. Blended
together, these millions of cell lives maintain a stable vital
atmosphere, which sustains, invigorates and redacts, and but for
damage and errata in nutrition would do so for great periods of
time.

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 65

Yet let no misapprehension accompany this deduction. The
cell is itself a small organism which, as it at present lives, suffers
an old-aging process, a progressive deterioration; although the
ideal and intent of the metazoic imion is to purvey for the cell a
perfect, deathless life.

This ideal and intent are quite possible of accomplishment.
If the chemical processes on which life foimds could be conducted
in the cell as accurately as we often see done in ordinary chemical
synthesis, the cell might live forever. By this we mean to say
that terrestrial chemistry, at its best, guarantees deathless life
to a cell, or an organized union of cells. But the nutrition of the
cells, as it goes on in the human organism, is still far from well
accomplished, and is vitiated by errata.

In 1892, while conducting a microscopic examination of the
brain neurons in dogs, the writer was led to observe the differences
between the cells of young and old canine brains. These ob-
servations were afterwards extended to other canine tissues.
Later still, the same results were verified in the genus sus, and
finally in human tissues ; the result of the entire series of observa-
tions being to establish conclusively that the cell-of-life in animal
organisms has its period of adolescence, maturity and " old
age; " that old age as we know it in man comes from an ante-
cedent old age of the cells. These little founts and seats of
life, themselves, first become shrunken, smaller and senescent;
and our human old age is a resultant condition, reflected outward,
from this old aging of the tissue cells.

There is therefore, first, cell old age, and following it, organic
old age. Our problem of alleviation is concerned with both, but
the former primarily. If we could induce a chemically perfect
nutrition of the cell, or even better it largely, the old-aging of
the human organism would be vastly retarded, if not arrested.

The unified, organized metazoic life of cells in an animal
organism, aims at perfect cell nutrition from the blood, aims at
it, but still fails of it.

Such is the human situation on the earth, a situation which
appears to have come about under nature, without let or hin-
drance from external worlds. It has been an unaided and so far

1 66 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

as the scientific evidence goes, an unwatched, unprotected evo-
lution from the lowly, primitive sentience of matter.

At what will it finally arrive?

Or, in the light of our growing knowledge, what can we make
of it?

This, at least, is fairly certain of it, that the continued effort
at natural salvation will remain our own, unhelped, imhindered.
If we can save ourselves from " sin " and death, well and good.
There seems to be liberty to do it — a working chance for it;
and the question constantly recurs, what can we do to this end,
personally, individually, to forward the grand intent of life to
natural salvation? What can we accomplish, or illustrate by
personal effort in our own organisms, in imison and harmony with
the deep cosmic push of life?

Undoubtedly one of the first, most practical steps to this end
is the subjugation and extirpation of the disease-producing bac-
teria. This great campaign, along the well-known lines of sani-
tation, sterilization, and immimization, is now fairly inaugurated;
its progress is a matter of daily news.

The second step in order of importance and timely need, is an
extended study of nutrition — the nutrition of the somatic cell —
with the acquisition of accurate knowledge how the cell assimi-
lates and of what its proper food consists, having in view to
supply that food, or form of nutriment, to the cells and to relieve
wholly or in part the present hard, exhaustive processes of
digestion, peptonization and rectification, which set up so heavy
a drain on the powers of the whole organism, and now devote
the human body largely to animal and vegetative fimctions.

A third most promising line of effort lies in the husbandry of
the nervous system, and the intelligent cultivation of the brain
colony of cells.

This is a wholly new line of effort, to which little or no
attention, in this sense, and from this point of view, has ever
been given.

Education as we now obtain it is an exhaustive process, pur-
sued without regard to the life of the brain cell and, in truth,
without recognition of its existence.

In organic and in cellular old age, the cells of the brain and
spinal cord share at length and are borne down to death, but as

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 67

a rule, are the last to give up the struggle. Soft and easily dissol-
uble as brain appears to be, it is yet the most vitally resistant
of tissues, perhaps because the best protected and best nourished.
Brain cells secure nutriment from the blood-stream, while muscle
cells, bone cells and gland cells starve. Intellect confers strength
and endurance. Here, as throughout nature, knowledge brings
an endowment of power. The brain colony is the most enduring
of cell unions.

To begin with conditions easily recognized, it may be stated,
without metaphor, that after the age of thirty-five, most persons,
especially Americans of this generation, die because they are
literally tired to death. After education begins, the brain cells
are rarely or never sufficiently rested from day to day, and there
follows what may be termed cumulative fatigue. Improper food
taken at bad hours, with abnormal excitements and untimely
stimulation, play their part, with the general result that there is
an increment of unrelieved fatigue going over from week to
week and month to month, imtil an abnormal condition is reached
where restful sleep is no longer possible.

In typical American cases, these cumulative effects of unre-
lieved fatigue begin in youth and set up a series of changes in the
brain cells which result either in the popular " nervous prostra-
tion," or more frequently, in an abnormal shrinkage of the mental
life, a diminution of personality, accompanied by sub-innervation
and lowered vitality.

In this latter condition the organism is dangerously subject
to invasions of the disease bacteria. This lowered vitality from
insufficient or faulty innervation — the result of chronic brain
fatigue — is primarily the cause of many prevalent diseases,
since the germs of these diseases are always quite constantly
present, and whether they are resisted by the nervous aura and
destroyed by phagocitosis or not, is largely a question of normal
as against sub -normal innervation.

This condition is often set up in children at school, under
improper conditions of study, faulty nutrition, or eye strain, in
some cases going on rapidly to complete nervous break-down
before the age of twenty is reached, but in most instances im-
pairing clear mentation and inducing various phases of ill health
before middle age.

1 68 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

A lamentable number of cases also occur in adults, as middle
life is reached, among ambitious, hard-worked business men who
may have passed school and college with nervous systems not
greatly impaired, but encountering the cares and exigencies of
business life, find themselves imrested from day to day, nervously
depleted and victims of insomnia. In these cases the kidneys
immediately suffer.

Several of our physiologists. Professor Hodge among the first,
have demonstrated the visible, physical effects of fatigue in the
nerve cell, the shrinkage in substance and the lack of fvmctional
power ; also the direct results of rest and food for the restoration
of a tired cell to its normal size and condition of dynamic effi-
ciency.

Sleep, with the diurnal darkening of the hemispheres, is the
time when all the millions of brain neurons cease acting in their
united, corporate capacity and revert each to its own personal,
tmicellular life. Through the hours of daylight they act together,
as a whole, for the good of the entire organism. But now, when
sleep supervenes, the cells let go hands, so to speak, continuity is
broken, the resultant self-consciousness stops short, the per-
sonality ceases, and each individual cell attends to its own per-
sonal affairs, nam.ely, nutrition, expulsion of waste products,
self-adjustment, and rest. Sleep is the time when the brain cell
is again living the original unicellular life of its remote ancestry,
resting, restoring its powers.

So exhausting is the daily, corporate life, the maintenance
of the intellect, that this succeeding period of unicellular life is
necessary to the neiu"on's restoration. It must have time to
attend to its imicellular wants and necessities before again devot-
ing itself to the imited brain life of another day.

It is not difficult, therefore, to understand what takes place
when from any cause the cell is prevented from properly attend-
ing to this its necessary individual life, that is, when it does not
wholly break continuity with the other cells; when its waste
products, accumulating during the day, are not cast forth; and
when it is not permitted to pass into a state of cell rest. Dis-
turbed, broken sleep leads to constant interruptions of tnese
necessary processes of unicellular life. The brain is now like an
army of soldiers, harassed by constant night attacks, to the ex-

INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE 1 69

tent that the individual soldier is kept in line, day and night, with
no time to eat, sleep, or attend to his personal wants.

The brain cells, although still unrested, and but half purged
of their waste products, are compelled to resume unification in
self -consciousness, when a person wakes. In consequence, they
enter upon the labor of another day, fagged, unrested — the
condition which thousands of our people know so well.

In time, these cumulative effects of unrelieved fatigue show
themselves in depressed function throughout the organism; the
organic harmony is vitiated ; nutrition is permanently impaired ;
and a shrunken, deranged condition of the neurons becomes
chronic. Pari passu, the personality slackens, and character
sinks to lower levels. In fact, it is not too much to say that
humanity at present is composed largely of the chronically tired.
The process of cell deterioration begins, and the first downward
step is taken, when we rise in the morning with a distinct sense
of being not yet rested, and enter on the toils and duties of the
day still unrefreshed.

In America, at present, no other one reform is so urgently
demanded for the national well-being, as proper, normal rest for
the brain cells of the people. After the age of thirty few among
us know what natural sleep and sound rest are, or ever will know
again. For many have passed the point of brain damage where
soimd rest can again come to them. Thousands of these hapless
ones take refuge in that dreary land of drugged slumber, where
chloral, morphia, and the later host of commercial nostrums hold
nightly orgies over " the carcase of murdered sleep." These
are, indeed, " lost souls " who, like weary Macbeth, will never
sleep properly again.

All of us who have had a normal childhood and youth, can
recall the time when we were wont to wake in the morning feeling
rested, with a wiUingness to rise and resume the business and
pleasures of living; when we wakened with a happy sense of
having been soundly asleep, so soundly that the world looks
almost strange for the moment in its newness. That is the
normal time, when the neurons are properly refreshed and reno-
vated ; it is that ideal condition which we should strive to main-
tain through life.

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-
MAINTENANCE

THE CULTURE AND HUSBANDRY OF THE BRAIN
AND NERVOUS SYSTEM

(Practical Methods)
(1907)

Confessedly then, our hopes of immortal Hfe for the individ-
ual man are placed in those future achievements of research,
discovery and amelioration of the human lot which the greater,
commimal life of the nation and the race will render possible.
That is the clearly indicated course and promise of life on the
earth, from the tmicellular ages to present times. That is the
way and the law.

But meantime — pending the retarded organization of this
greater communal life for these larger labors — what can the
individual man do for himself, what can we do, personally, in
the line of self -salvation ?

We can do much. At least, not a little. We can put ourselves
in trim to utilize the greater discoveries as they come. By
individual effort, with the data already in hand, we can meas-
tirably prolong our days and prolong them in health, by a trained
use of the output of energy from the brain cells. By culture and
husbandry of the brain and nervous system, we can conserve our
lives to a considerable extent.

That, indeed, is what we see being done in a kind of blind way
by " faith cure," " Christian Science " and the psycho-ther-
apeutics of certain chiu-chmen. What is thus attempted is a
reflex effort of the mind on the body ; practically stronger in-
nervation, under stimulus of personal encouragement and mental

training.

170

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 171

Self -salvation — salvation of the individual man by personal
effort alone and unaided by the larger communal life — resolves
itself into the simplified question, How much can the isolated
fifty or sixty ounces of the central nervous system which stands
for the human personality, do to conserve and maintain itself in
the midst of the illimitable universe about it?

And the answer is, that by husbanding and training its small
powers it can really do something in that line; something, but
not everything. The reflex action of mind on body, to the degree
we are now able to exercise it, produces an appreciable, curative
effect, particularly in ftmctional disorders. It is a demonstrated
adjuvant for health and prolonged life; and hence, as such, is
well worth cultivating and training. Let us study it.

Animal physiology founds on cell physiology; animal physi-
ology, indeed, is cell physiology in its larger, grosser aspects.
To comprehend in any proper, modern sense the functions of
organic life, we must first study the life and fimctions of the com-
ponent tissue cells ; for this cell life is to the animal Hfe what the
single note is to the whole oratorio.

In our study of the thirty or more groups or tracts of tissue
cells the lives and functions of which make up the composite
life of man, our attention and interest come inevitably to center
in that remarkable group which, originally not imlike other
protozoons, have as metazoic life developed, become the brain
and nervous system ; the tissue of the personal self-consciousness
and intellect.

The protozoon, every cell-of-life, indeed, feels, is self-conscious,
possesses rudimentary psychic powers and lives a lowly personal
life. But in the animal organisms, preeminently the himian
organism, we find a certain group of cells which has made psychic
effort and thought its business; just as the muscular group of
cells assumed the business of contraction and locomotion. To
the brain cells fell the magisterial fimction of sensing the environ-
ment for all the others, and directing what all should do for the
common good. And hence as the organic evolution proceeded,
we find this brain group of cells putting forth fibrils and filaments
to the superficies of the whole imited mass, filaments which in
time assumed the form of the sensory nervous system ; and also

172 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

other filaments to all the other tissue groups for conveying the
"behests of the brain group, to become in time the motor system
.of nerves.

The better, too, to accomplish the fimction of sensing and
thinking for all, we find the brain cells uniting in a consentient
•mass by means of a mazy system of interlacing fibrils, thus ena-
•blmg the entire congeries of cells to live together and think in
imison, as one great cell might feel and think. We find all the
principal cells, or neurons, of the brain group thus sentiently
united and imified.

The brain cell group therefore presents the aspect of a group
within the other groups, protected and housed about by thick
bone and tough integument, sentiently unified about a single
axis of self-consciousness and devoting itself entirely to psychic
operations, governing all the other groups, innervating all and
compelling all to act each within its province for the common
good. In a word, holding all together in a human life.

In the human organism the sway of the brain and cord cells
is far greater even than is self-consciously apparent to the person ;
for the larger portion of it is sub -conscious ; for example, the
fimctions of the cerebellar and medullar centers and those of
the spinal cord. This cerebro-spinal group of cells, indeed,
upholds, maintains, directs and governs all. It is at once the
personality, the intellect and the source of innervation. De-
prived of it, the other groups of cells cannot go on living together,
nor yet living at all.

It is apparent therefore that every effort to conserve and pro-
long human life must be made through this exalted brain group
of cells; the brain and its out-reaching nerves. Yet every uni-
cell of the ancient earth could do in minor degree everything
which a brain neuron can now do. It could feel, it could see, it
could hear, it could smell and taste; in a rudimentary way, it
could think and it was self -mobile ; it could generate, by willing,
dynamic impulses for locomotion, or for aggression, or for de-
fence.

We now wish to examine and study this latter power or capacity
of all cell life, namely the power to generate dynamic impulses
intra se, by willing it, and make those impulses felt on its environ-
ment. And it need hardly be added here, that this is the most

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 73

wonderful transformation of energy known in the universe, the
correlation of self -consciousness with matter-moving energy;
the inauguration of chemical activity in protoplasmic matter,
by an exercise of the self-conscious will of that matter. The
matter in this dot of protoplasm, the protozoon, is ordinary
matter, differing from that about it only in its arrangement and
organization; but here we see it display self-consciousness and
the ability to will motion in its own substance, and set contiguous
matter in motion.

The static self-consciousness of the cell wills motion and motion
results. In the will of this living dot of protoplasmic matter,
we see the germ of omnipotence. This embryo omnipotence
resides in the brain cell, in every cell of life. Deeper, it resides
in every last corpuscle of universal matter; for the cell is but a
self-organized aggregation of corpuscles and atoms.

It is here therefore that our studies, looking to the control
of the energies of matter, the conquest of the universe, must
begin, to wit, in the cell-of-life, and in the light of our new
knowledge of matter.

By the phrase, " our new knowledge of matter," we refer of
course, to those later discoveries concerning the intimate struc-
ture of " atoms," with which the researches of Thomson (Lord
Kelvin), Rutherford, Becquerel, the Ctiries and many others were
identified ; researches of the greatest importance to the biologist
as well as the physicist, since it is by aid of them that we now
gain a deeper insight than formerly into the nature of cell life.
For matter ever presents itself to our inspection in two-fold
guise, the objective and subjective, the physical and the psychical,
the personal and the impersonal, the self side and the other side.

The atom of our older chemistry is now demonstrated to be a
dynamic union of vastly smaller bodies, known as corpuscles,
or electrons. Moreover, the " atoms " of certain elements of
matter are known to lose their component corpuscles and waste
away, becoming erelong the " atoms " of another element of
less atomic weight, as in the case of uranium and radium. In a
word, that the " elements " of matter are subject to evolution
and devolution.

It has been shown further that these corpuscles or smallest

174 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

bodies of matter now known to exist, are apparently identical
with negative electricity, giving rise to the conclusion that matter,
at bottom, is electric and dynamic, not inert and dead, what
seems its inertia being but an illusion of the senses which fail to
perceive its intimate constitution.

The " atom " of hydrogen, for example, is believed to be made
up of nearly a thousand corpuscles, revolving swiftly in orbits
within the atomic dimension; the " atom " of oxygen of at least
sixteen thousand corpuscles; the "atom" of radiiim of two
himdred and twenty-five thousands. The orbital velocity of the
corpuscles is estimated to be not less than twenty thousand
miles per second. It is this enormous initial velocity of the
corpuscle, revolving on intra-atomic orbits, that gives the
" atom " its hard, separate individuality.

The " atom " is therefore a small solar system, so to speak, of
those minute orbs, the corpuscles, a microcosm within the
macrocosm ; and the amount of energy locked up in their intra-
atomic velocities is so enormous as well nigh to defy computation.
As a result of his calculations Lord Kelvin concluded that one
grain of hydrogen has within it energy sufficient to lift a weight
of a miillion tons to a height of more than three hundred feet;
that a grain of oxygen contains sixteen times more than this,
and a grain of radium fourteen times more than oxygen.

Indeed, all our previous conceptions and estimates of energy
are so dwarfed by these later revelations of science, that one
stands appalled by the immensity of Nature's resotirces! Our
old-time atom is a veritable magazine of vis viva. Here, in
smallest compass, is stored power sufficient to set the industries
of a planet in motion.

No practicable method of liberating the intra-atomic energy
of the " elements " is yet known. The atoms of several of them,
however, radium, uranium, thorium, et al., disintegrate naturally
and constantly, being what is termed radio-active, and giving
rise to the remarkable phenomena now associated with these
substances. Within the next half century methods will be devised
for utilizing the intra-atomic energy of matter. Erelong a ton
of coal, or oil, or gasolene, will be made to do the work of a million
tons as at present burned. Unlimited power lies here under our
hands. We have only to learn how to use it, to seam the surface

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 75

of this planet with the canals of Mars, to maintain genial warmth,
to change our climate to the " summer of paradise " and oblit-
erate noxious germ life.

Radio-activity and the resolution of " atoms " into corpuscles
have incidentally brought to notice other minute bodies, among
these the " ion," so called, which emanates from gas flames and
red-hot metals, and carries a charge of positive electricity, in
contrast to the negative charge of the corpuscle. The size and
weight of ions are believed to be nearly equal to that of an atom
of hydrogen, or about a thousand times greater than a corpuscle.
The nature and constitution of the positive ion are but little under-
stood as yet ; beyond much doubt it is a highly complex system
of still smaller bodies.

All the variously named " rays " to which the radio-activity
of matter gives rise, viz. Becquerel rays, Niewenglowski rays.
Roentgen rays. Alpha rays. Beta rays. Gamma rays, et al., are
associated with these exceedingly minute bodies, and propagated
in a still more attenuated medium.

Uranium, radium, thoriimi are demonstrably radio-active
elements. But even oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur,
phosphorus may be slowly, secularly perhaps, radio-active,
under certain circtimstances, as for example when associated in
the cell-of-life.

The corpuscles (negative electricity) are the lowest resolution
of matter at present demonstrated. But that these minute
bodies are the smallest that exist, the ultimate resolution attain-
able, may well be doubted. It is quite possible, much more likely,
indeed, and more in keeping with what has been learned already,
that the corpuscle is itself composite, made up of systems of yet
smaller corpuscles; and these in turn of smaller still.

Gradually, in view of the steady growth of our knowledge of
matter, we are coming to adopt Mendeleif's view that the ether
is an element far below the corpuscle, from which the corpuscle
is developed.

More expHcitly, that the corpuscle is made up of still more
minute corpuscules of the ether, revolving in orbits about a central
point or axis, even as the atom of hydrogen is composed of a
thousand or more corpuscles.

In view of certain phenomena, too, associated with the act of

176 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

willing, the present writer has been drawn to a working hypothesis,
that it is this etheric corpuscule which is Hberated in the cell and
is the active agency, when will power is exerted.

At present, however, we are able to estimate currents of
nervous energy from the brain only by means of instruments
which measure and record ordinary electricity. To these instru-
ments the ether is still imponderable; but this apparent im-
ponderability should be attributed to the imperfection of the
instruments.

In good truth, all that we are now learning of matter — the
periodicity, or rhythm, of its so called " elements " and the
radio-activity of their atoms — goes to substantiate the now
nascent hypothesis, that it is a spectrum of energy, an energy
which is at bottom Sentient Impulse, and that we shall ultimately
resolve it to that, and work with it as such. Life comes from
the life-side of matter, its personal side, its potentially divine
side.

Upward from the life-side of matter, the cell has developed
as a small personal being, a self, in the midst of the world of
imorganized matter. The matter in the living portion of the cell
is to a degree segregated from the rest of the universe, its bond to
other matter in part disrupted, and new bonds formed within
itself. The atoms and molecules thus living together in a cell
have formed new relations with each other and broken certain
other relations in which they formerly stood toward other un-
organized matter.

What then is this new bond of self -hood set up in the cell?
In what does it consist?

From the very nature of things we can hardly hope ever to see
sentience itself, or observe feeling. That would be to pass over
from what is naturally visible to sense, to what is naturally to
sense invisible; in other words to expect sense to sense itself.
The senses are concerned with things external to themselves.

Yet we may hopefully wait to learn more of the process by
means of which the atoms of matter stand in vital relations with
each other in a cell, how they do it and what takes place in order
that this small modicum of matter may behave as a living per-
sonality. In the past this has been the great puzzle of biology,
the unsolved riddle. Master minds have long pondered it; but

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 77

they lacked the data which has come from our later knowledge
of the constitution of matter.

It is with the sentient side, the self side of matter, that life and
the personal intellect of man are concerned. Beyond any doubt
the corpuscles, or their more minute corpuscules, of matter univer-
sally possess this sentient property in low, undeveloped degree.
Each is a minute personality and lives a lowly individual life.
When assembled in a certain way, a group of them may pool their
individual lives in one, forming of their thousands of small selves
one larger sel'f to which those thousands of corpuscles are all
subjective, embraced within the cordon of one personal life.

What then is the nature of this bond or cordon which is capable
of extending the sense of self-hood from one corpuscle of matter
to another, in such a manner as to embrace thousands of them in
one self?

What takes place between these hitherto separate particles of
matter, these separate selves, which thus unifies them as one ?

Where an appreciable mass of matter is found thus living as a
self, a bacterium for example, we have long been accustomed to
term the mass " protoplasm," although the word has now little
significance. Hitherto we have known nothing of the actual
physical relation of one particle of the mass to the others, nor
why the mass cohered and gave rise to life. It is certainly a
peculiar relationship, not easily set up, since so far as we know at
present, undeveloped matter on the earth's surface does not
now enter this state, and life is only transmitted from parent to
child, by means of fission and division of the parent cells; in
other words, that life now only comes from antecedent life.

Working from this basic knowledge of matter, our experi-
mentation has been directed to determine what emanations or
" rays " a living cell gives off. It is hardly necessary to say here
that such tests are not easily applied. The only fact established
is, that the cell-of-life gives forth energy of the nature of both
positive and negative electricity; negative electricity when the
cell is in a normal condition, positive electricity when fatigued,
distressed, or poisoned.

Nerve currents, meaning the impulses that move along nerve
trunks from the brain and cord of animals, to muscles and glands,

178 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

are more easily studied, by the ordinary methods. The result of
our observations has not been to identify these fully as electric
currents, but as electric currents plus other and more subtle
emanations. Their comparatively slow rate of motion along the
nerve trunks also indicates that a more complicated conduction
is involved than that of an electric current through a wire, or
other conductor. In a word, a " nervous current " now appears
to be a current of negative electricity — since it responds readily
to the electroscope — but one either much modified, or bearing
along with its component corpuscles a " charge " of something
more ethereal.

As to the nature of this charge it would be easy but unprofitable
to theorize at present. The only point established is, that the
cells of the brain and cord generate normally — among other
products — a great and well-nigh constant quantity of negative
electricity which imder certain circumstances changes to positive
electricity. What corresponds to electric current proceeds from
them quite steadily and they remain as constantly " charged,"
or surrounded, by a " field " or " atmosphere " of an electrical
nature.

If Thomson, Becquerel and other eminent exponents of our
new knowledge are right, this electrical output from the cell-of-
life is nothing else than a stream of corpuscles, and sometimes
of positive ions.

Thus far we are on firm groimd. Nor will it be deemed a
wholly im justifiable hypothesis, if we conclude that this stream
of free corpuscles is generated in the cell by the disruption of
atoms there, since to maintain the cell in bulk and substance,
from minute to minute, requires a constant incorporation there
of adjuvant atoms from the blood.

Elsewhere in nature, something analogous to brain cell phenom-
ena is displayed in the phosphorescence of noctiluca, seen at
sea, by night; in the fire-fly, and noticeably in the electric eel.
The brain cell is therefore not the only generator of electricity
and light, in nature. The cell-of-life ever3rwhere gives rise to
similar currents of energy.

The phrase, currents of energy, might be held to imply that the
cell-of-life acts as a battery cell, or dynamo, and tindoubtedly it
does. But we believe it to do more than this, that it creates

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 79

energy in the sense of willing chemical action and instigating or
directing corpuscular motion, from the sentient or life-side of
matter. Protoplasmic matter is staticly conscious of itself, and
motion is the expression of its conscious will.

We by no means wish to be understood here as carr^ang the
idea that liberation of corpuscles in the cell-of-life is the only
process going on there. The cell is, in fact, a comparatively
large organism, if we may be allowed thus to express it. Ordi-
nary chemical action and the formation of carbon dioxide go on
in it. What we have described above is rather, as we conceive,
what takes place within the protoplasmic molecule than in the
cell as a whole. In the cell we have assimilation and oxidation,
and also, as we believe, a liberation of intra-atomic energy.

There is much in support of this view. The amount of energy
often termed vital, which is generated in animal organisms, has
never been fully accounted for, when referred to oxidation of the
food. It is more than can be accounted for; but physiologists
have assumed that it must come from oxidation.

Hence the animal organism has been constantly cited as by
far the most economic machine known for the generation of
power. Compared with it the best coal-combustion engines are
but one-tenth as effective. A pigeon, for example, with but two
ounces of seed food in its crop, expends energy in flights of him-
dreds or thousands of miles, and in maintaining its body heat,
vastly in excess of the oxidation of twenty times that amount
of food. This has been set down to the utilization of a surplus,
stored up in its body in advance, even though no corresponding
decrease in body weight is demonstrable.

The chickadee of our northern forests generates in its tiny body
an amount of heat, during the long winter nights, impossible to
account for from the few grains of moss spores which it ingests.
Twenty times the heat that comes from its food would seem to
be required, in zero weather, to maintain the little creature's
body at 100 degrees Fah., for fifteen hours of darkness.

But if our present experimentation is trustworthy and our
hypothesis from it correct, the puzzle of this great output of
energy from the cell-of-life is solved. It is far from being all due
to oxidation; it is largely intra-atomic energy. Life in the cell
taps the reservoir of energy within the atom.

I So SALVATION BY SCIENCE

But how?

How is disintegration of the atom and the liberation of the
energy which the corpuscles carry, accomplished ?

Is it from sentient contact there?

Does this mysterious impulse — the initial, sentient impulse
of life — act to break up the iron clutch of death in the
atom and set free its living corpuscles, or their more minute
corpuscules?

We can conceive no other hypothesis. It is as if, when in this
peculiar protoplasmic jiixtaposition, the atoms were so placed
relatively to each other, that attractions to and fro, or affilia-
tions begin, causing depletion of their corpuscles and a liberation
of corpuscular energy.

In fancy, at least, we may sketch this, and picture what goes
on when the corpuscles of the component atoms in " proto-
plasm " are liberated, to form outward-flowing currents and that
aura, or " field," which is necessary to enable two or more cells,
a million or a billion, to live together in one personality. For we
may be sure that this pooling of separate cell lives in one greater
life — the human personality for example — has a physical basis.
At present this basis seems to be a reciprocal confluence of cor-
puscles, or their more etheric corpuscules, first from atom to
atom and, in larger volume, from cell to cell. And the energy,
thus liberated from the corpuscular velocities, constitutes not
life itself, but the will power with which life acts.

The bearing of this hypothesis on the problem of cell preserva-
tion and cell restoration in the human organism will scarcely
fail to be apparent. If verified, it would prove a long step toward
our hoped-for control of Hfe at its soturces. It is but hypothesis,
however, at present, and nothing more is claimed for it, until
further proof is obtained.

What we do claim as established by our experimentation, is
that the brain neurons, in the exercise of their function of stimu-
lating and actuating the subordinate tissue cells of the organism,
generate and emit a flow of corpuscles of the nature of electric
currents.

On the other hand, certain physiologists contend that the nerve
currents which emanate from the brain originate solely in the
oxygenation of the blood, and that the great relative amount of

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE l8l

electricity within the cranium is accounted for by the greater
relative volume of blood which goes to the brain.

We are far from arguing here that even this latter contention
may not contain its modicum of truth. Nature has this constant
trick of mixing effects from her agencies ; and nothing is more
erroneous than ascribing concrete effects to single causes.

Nor do we assert that a more minute attenuation of matter
than the corpuscles is not present in nerve currents. But we
are now able to prove that a tide, or "atmosphere," of cor-
puscles is present in the brain ; at this stage of research we can
speak positively of no other.

Around and throughout the affiliated mass of brain cells there
is a swift " circulation," so to speak, of the emitted free corpuscles,
comparable to an eddy, or vortex, ensuring practically instan-
taneous, reciprocal action of cell on cell ; so that the whole assem-
blage of neurons is instantly unified in one consciousness, to wit
the human personality. Within its containing walls of bone and
membrane, the brain is charged and electrified by this scintillant
aura of free corpuscles which fly to and fro with the velocity of
light. The mazy arborizations of the neurons — their interlaced
fibrils, making protoplasmic contact — facilitate the process of
sentient unification and have plainly developed to this end.
But it now appears to be the swift circulation of the corpuscles
which is the immediate agency for pooling the separate cell lives
in the one greater life of man.

Moreover, this circulation or scintillant eddy appears to go
on around a center, or axis, which we have elsewhere termed the
personal axis, or axis of self-consciousness. It is akin to the
" circulation " of corpuscles (electrons) which goes on around a
magnet.

Keeping to the firm groimd of what is proven concerning the
constant out-put of corpuscular currents from the brain, and its
residual charge, or aura of the same, it may be definitely stated,
that this is the key-note to metazoic life, the agency by means
of which the brain cells actuate and control the organism. The
paramoimt importance therefore of keeping this agency constant
and normal becomes apparent. Many, in fact most, of the ills
of advancing years start here and are due to slackened tension
of the currents and weakening of the corpuscular aura.

1 82 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

This, it may be said, is an unavoidable concomitant of old-
aging. During adolescence the tissue cells grow forward to the
organic dimensions, cease growing when the type limits are
reached, and pass thereafter into the stasis of adult life, yet re-
taining for fifty years or more the capacity of further growth for
organic repair, if from accident a demand is made for it. But
even by the end of adolescence certain restrictive causes have
begun to inaugurate organic decline. The organism at first so
fresh, clean-tinted and plastic, shrinks, chemically hardens and
wastes at a thousand points. Growth having stopped, the cells
fall into a condition of desuetude and dormancy from which
they are only roused by some urgent need of the organism, as
from a wound, or a broken bone.

As the time-effects on the organism continue and the harden-
ing and shrinking of the tissues go on, the cells are not only
desuete and inert, but become encysted, smothered by their
hardened products and lose the opportunity if not the potency,
to live longer. They die out in skin and bone and muscle fiber.
For nutrient particles from the blood no longer reach them freely
through the shrunken capillary tubes; nor do the toughened,
hardened nerve fibrils transmit freely, as in youth, ciurents of
incitation from the brain and cord. They are insulated from the
actuating neuron, isolated from each other and lose touch with
the rest of the organism. Hence they slowly die out. Such is
old age.

Yet we must ever keep in view, that all this is due to ordinary,
mechanical causes, such as are within the province of science to
deal with and remove. Nothing worse, more final, nor more
esoteric.

We must also keep in view this other fact of human physiology,
namely, that owing to the growth of knowledge, and hence the
coming of larger interests into himian life, with greater ambitions,
brain has become a progressive tissue of the human body. That
is to say, much more so than muscle or bone or any of the other
associated tissues or groups of cells. Brain is the cell group which
is now leading off in human evolution, drawing the other groups
after it. The human brain would now live two centuries instead
of one, were it not dragged down to death by the growing in-
firmities of the inferior tissues.

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 183

With the incentives and opportunities which modern Hfe now
offers, there is, in fact, almost no Hmit to the Hfe-time of the brain
neurons, if only the rest of the human organism held out and was
equally progressive.

Equally, too, and less hopefully, we have to reckon with that
other fact that these very incentives to brain evolution have
disturbed the natural balance betwixt brain and the inferior
tissues; that modern life, especially in America, tends not only
to develop brain, but to repress the development of the rest of
the organism and enfeeble it. In a sense the strong incentives
to brain activity and brain growth monopolize the vitality of the
whole organism. Hence we constantly see persons, men in the
heyday of intellectual life, cut off by the bursting of a blood vessel
in the brain, failure of the renal or hepatic tissue, or a breakdown
of the alimentary tissues. The fundamental reasons and causes
of these disasters must be kept sharply in mind, in devising
rational systems of self-conservation.

As prefatory, too, we must again call attention to a premature
deterioration of the brain cells in ninety-nine out of every hun-
dred adults in America, from lack of good habits of resting them.
Ninety-nine out of every htmdred of our people, as middle age
is reached, drift into bad habits of sleeping, resulting in insuffi-
cient brain rest from day to day and year to year. The neurons
shrivel and become wizened from worry and lack of normal rest.
This is the physiological fact, and the physical aspect which
examination reveals: to wit, prematurely shrunken, blighted
neurons.

On the psychic side we have the well known, joyless mental
condition, the haggard, hurrying mind, with scarcely a smile on
the face; the type one sees on the streets of our great cities.
Instead of a pleasurable process, thinking appears to have become
a pain, a hot, tremulous effort of cell activity.

Under continued pressure of business, the goad of ambition to
attain wealth, the miscarriage of plans, or the dread of financial
disaster, the brain cells go on for months and even for years,
never once normally rested, refreshed, or freed from the incubus
of worry. Often there is insomnia, inducing a condition of anguish
from which suicide is a blessed relief. Unrested neurons may come
to that bad pass where life is a torture and the personality that

184 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

rises from their combined sentiences so much condensed
wretchedness.

Such a life is not worth Hving, but the victim does not w^ell
understand the causes. Generally he takes more coffee and tea,
or resorts to whiskey, chloral, morphia, et al., all of which adds to
the misery of the imrested, over- wrought neurons that uphold
his self-conscious life.

Unless properly rested, this congeries of cell life within the
brain cannot be adequately noiu-ished from the blood. There
must be sound, normal sleep, allowing these cells to cease from
their corporate labor and free themselves from the unremoved
waste products of waking life. That is what sleep means; that
is its object under nature. These at-one-time protozoons, now
affiliated in a brain, must revert to their erstwhile unicellular
life and live it again, separate, for eight or ten hours daily, to
restore and refresh themselves for the great task of producing
the human personality for another day. For them it is a true
labor of Hercules. So heavy a labor, indeed, that it must be
intermitted regularly and patiently ; — but our exigent American
life often garbs them with the shirt of Nessus !

The sense of mental comfort, well-being and personal enjoy-
ment can coexist only with well-rested, well-nourished brain cells.
The cells — each a living creature — must be comfortable and
happy in their small lives, in order that their consentient union
in the human self-consciousness may be a happy one.

Disturbed sleep, beset by dreams, but illy rests the brain. One
has only to examine the arrangement and relations of the neurons
to each other — their fibrils, their tentacles, so to speak, for
united activity — to imderstand what the physiological basis
of the personality is and see the reason why sleep is so necessary.
It seems to be a case of making and breaking contact. The pooling
of the cell lives ceases when we fall asleep. The elate, erectile
condition of the cell fibrils sinks down ; the whole brain occupies
less space in the skull; on the part of the neuron there is a re-
version to unicellular life. The onerous nature of the imited or
personal life renders this imperative.

Experiments with electroscopes show that fatigued brain cells
yield diminished currents of nervous energy. There is sub-
innervation, also unequal innervation, some organs and appara-

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 85

tuses receiving more nervous stimulus than others, the solar
and lumbar plexuses appreciably less. In passing it may be
remarked that this latter observation falls in with the frequent
manifestation of renal disease in organisms nervously depleted.
It is, indeed, not only remarkable but ominous, how little dis-
turbance in innervation from the brain and cord suffices seriously
to impair the organic harmony. Sub-innervation of the organ-
ism also opens the door to microbic attack, and of non-resistance
to sudden chill which induces pneumonia and other maladies.
Tired brain cells naturally crave narcotic and alcoholic stimulus,
where well-rested cells would feel no such craving. Normally
rested neurons feel no appetite for alcohol, coffee and tobacco,
rather a revulsion; nor yet for morphia or chloral. These all
may be termed not inaptly the jaded neurons' " desperate
refuges," so many proofs of sub-innervation.

Still further, it is demonstrated that the person with jaded
neurons is different mentally and morally than on occasions
when these cells are normally rested. Following brain fatigue,
character sinks to lower levels; the person is less optimistic,
less resistant to temptation to evil courses ; there is loss of " soul."
The sub-innervated person almost invariably takes dark views
of life, lasping insensibly to pessimism. Normal innervation
from rested neurons is therefore a question of public morals.
The tired brain reverts to savage instincts and grows insentient
to the call of mercy, honor or truth ; — as witness the frequent
exhibitions of ruthless savagery, trickiness and relentlessness at
the " Wheat Pit " and Stock Exchange. One has but to walk
the streets of New York and other large towns of America in
times of financial excitement, to see the faces of men who are
going back to savagery by leaps and boimds !

But the remedy?

At the present stage of our knowledge, but one line of advice
can be given.

Whatever the circumstances, whatever the seeming necessities
for going on, whatever is at stake, stop short and rest those tired
cells. Any loss is preferable to the loss of your " soul " by re-
version to the far-off brute from which, by so long a labor of
evolution, we have arisen. Stop short. Stay abed. Sleep.

Sleep may not be easy where long-standing fatigue and stimu-

1 86 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

lants have been at work. But keep abed all day. If insomnia
and throbbing cerebral arteries drive you up to rush to and fro,
do so for the time, if you must, but return to rest and persist
in it until you sleep long and well; and the calm, rested feeling
of your yoimg days returns to you, with comfortable sensations,
gentler, nobler sentiments and cheerfiil, hopeful views of life.
They will come back to you, if you stick to your resolve to sleep
ten hours in a night, for a week or a month. But get it back.
Save yourself from that inferno of imrested brain cells. There is
profound wisdom in the slang of the Western drummer who
coimseled his tired comrade to, —

" Beat it home and hunt the feathers.
Take a good long snooze."

The effort is worth while. It means the return to normal
mentation, the redemption of character, the elevation of judg-
ment, the purification of thought, the lustration of intellect.
In a word it means self -salvation.

If a battle has to be fought with previous use of stimulants, it
is of the greatest importance to sleep much and keep well rested
while the struggle is made. Even in cases of inveterate habit,
the craving is less when one sleeps a good deal and brings as
little stress and strain as possible on brain and nerves.

With this preface, I shall attempt, though not without dififi-
dence, to outline a method of brain cell husbandry, which I
believe will give gratifying results to those who have faith and
patience to practice it. It will never, as I am painfully aware,
prove a popular panacea, since it calls for self-effort and self-
control, and does not humor the inveterate human propensity
to swallow a large " dose " of something, and then wait for
internal wonders to be performed. It is doubtless true, too, as
often alleged, that our average contemporary does not care
enough for prolonged life to make a sustained effort to live, but
prefers the pleasiu-es of food, drink, sex, dress and recreation of
a type better described as dissipation ; in a word for the purely
animal pleasiires which go, physiologically, with a short life-
time; that mode of living which inevitably runs the organism
down in sixty years, or less.

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 87

Of the higher joys of Hving and looking forth on the infinite,
life-bearing imiverse, with the subHme sense of growing in knowl-
edge of it, there is, as yet, but little appreciation. The brute in
us has but begun to look up fitfully from his daily prey and feel
the mind-stir of those diviner joys.

Many, too, are so pitifully chained to the wheel of life, that
they have not, or think they have not, time for anything save
their daily task. Tired, or rested, they must plod the tread-
mill — or think they must.

So that it is to a few only, a few hundreds, or a few thousands,
that my present method of prolonging life will commend itself.

Briefly, it is a method of conserving nervous energy in the cells
of the brain and cord, that is to say, carrying a greater residual
charge of such energy there, a fuller " head " of vim in the brain.
Vim is a good and well-derived word for it. In the phrase of the
ancient Greek stadium it was ichor. Vim is perhaps the best
term to use here, for the time being.

We are not now regarding the brain cells merely in the light
of a storage battery, although the galvanometer shows that they
carry a considerable residual charge of electricity which may be
increased or diminished.

In healthy adolescence, too, and in exuberant yoimg adult
life, potential often accumulates in these cells to a degree markedly
exhilarating, beautifying the whole body, giving abimdant evi-
dence that such augmentation of potential there is possible and
natural ; — although youth as a rule immediately squanders it,
in excesses.

Augmenting it is an art which has to be learned from practice
and habit, the first almost irresistible tendency of the untrained
person being to dissipate the increase of potential, as soon as he
feels exhilarated from it. Training and practice will alone ensure
self-control in carrying a fuller residual head of vim.

Incidentally, it may be remarked that nothing is more imi-
versally common than the frittering away of nervous energy in
aimless, serni-involuntary activities, the least heightening of
nervous potential being sufficient to set the person ofi in various
ways. The first efforts, therefore, to raise a head of vim almost
invariably result in muscular, mental, or sexual excess ; the animal

1 88 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

impulses run away with the neophyte ; he has not yet got himself
in hand; and some perhaps could never acquire sufficient self-
control. Practice and a realization of the object for which he is
working, will at length foiuid the habit of self -retention.

This, however, is not the task of a day; six months or a year
may be required for it ; — but the result, when attained, will be
found worth the effort. The personality will be found to have been
raised to a higher plane of intellectual life by the achievement.

It is not easy to give a rule or rules for such self-control;
temperaments differ greatly ; but the principle of it lies in keep-
ing the object aimed at constantly in view, steadying the mind by
proper reflection and pulling one's self up short the instant xm-
disciplined impulses are felt. And for a time these tendencies will
be foimd insistent and importimate — the tendency of the sleek,
well-fed horse to prance and bolt. But he who would conserve and
prolong his life must resolutely check such instincts and form a
habit of ignoring them. He must steady himself, hold himself in
hand and apply the hard brake of his purpose to his vagrant
propensities, realizing that in so doing he is preserving his per-
sonality, conserving his life, saving his " soul."

This great art of prolonging life has yet to be acquired by hu-
man beings. It will come only from mental discipline and mental
evolution. It is a regimen which can be enforced only at the call
to a higher life — the greater life of the intellect with its better
joys, the life which outgrows the animal in us and leaves brutish
propensities behind.

If asked to describe in what this head of vim consists, or explain
what it is, I should have to say that, aside from the electrical
charge which is embodied with it, we do not know. It is elec-
tricity plus something else more ethereal which we know as yet
only by its vivific effects on every tissue of the organism: it is
the true elixir of life. It is vivific matter which invigorates and
holds in closer, sentient union every component cell and every
intracellular molecule in the organism. So long as this vivific
tide can be generated and a head of it maintained in the brain
and cord, there will be no death; it is death's antithesis.

This full, sustained head of vim when held in mental control,
tends to diffuse itself along the nerve trunks and fibrils, to every

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 89

muscle, gland and tissue cell of the organism. It reinforces and
holds all together in a sentient entity, around the axis of person-
ality. It heightens sensation throughout the body, renders the
special senses more acute and adds perspicacity to each mental
concept. It makes the person more vigilant, more careful in
danger, more clearly discerning, more moral, that is to say normal,
in his relations with his fellow-men.

Furthermore, a full, sustained head of vim in the organism is
the best of insurance against disease. Barring a few of the filth
diseases and contagious diseases, an organism surcharged by
nervous energy, is practically immune, and often moves scot free
amidst contagions.

Advancing from this consideration of the facts, we come
logically to look for some method of regulating, conserving and
applying this greater head of vim which the cells of the brain
and cord place at our command, some method of using it ration-
ally for improving and lengthening our lives, instead of allowing
it largely to run to waste, as is now the case in most human
organisms.

It should be possible to devise some practical method of self-
renewal, or at least of self-maintenance, from this fimd of vivific
energy which nature yields us, some method of reversion and
restoration.

This, of course, is an effort, or an art, which is still in its first
incipiency, never before attempted on a set plan, with such an
object in view.

Before attempting to outline so novel an effort and put it in
the form of a method, let us consider two well-established facts.
First, that the cell neurons of the brain and cord are capable of
generating and, in ordinary life, do continuously generate a
current of nervous energy which, in electrical terms, is equal to
half a milliampere at a very high voltage, since it has the effects
of light. This may be set down as the energy-producing capacity
of the brain, used ordinarily in mentation and the instigation of
muscular and glandular activity.

Second, in our study of the various forms of life throughout
nature, we observe that the cell-of-life has in it the power to
turn its stock of energy to almost any purpose which its needs

190 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

demand, and transform that energy to other modes, even to effect
chemical changes. For example, as cited above, the fire-fly and
glowworm produce light at will; the gymnotus eel, electricity,
the rattle-snake, the cobra and the adder, deadly chemical com-
binations of matter.

While it is true that the light-producing and the electricity-
producing cells of photuris and gymnotus have been a long time
developing to their present condition, it is none the less true that
they had to make a beginning and that this beginning was made
from sentient impulse. Also that the weak cell impulse of insect
and low animal Hfe is as nothing in intensity, compared with the
will power of a human being. In these and nimiberless instances
we see what the cell has actually done with its potential. It
teaches in a general way what transformation can be made and
what chemical changes in living matter can be accompHshed,
when backed by the will.

It is after an examination of these effects, produced imder
nature, in the course of life on earth, that we have ventured to
outline the following method of using the potential of the brain
and cord for self -restoration.

First of all there must be formed a fixed resolution, followed
by an effort of the will, to turn the current of vim to a particular
use, — as when the gymnotus wills to give an electric shock, or
the firefly to produce a flash of its light. Nature shows us that
these things can be done by willing to do them, that is to say,
willing chemical changes in the living substance of the cell.

Self -restoration, as set forth here, founds on the facts of scien-
tific research, but requires scientific training to put in practice.
We can demonstrate the existence of this current of nervous
energy, as also its preservative, curative effects on the organism.
We have it at our disposal and have learned that it can be accu-
miilated in the organism by skilful culture and husbandry of
the brain cells ; and we observe throughout nature what will and
sustained purpose can do with it. In the light of our growing
knowledge of nature and life, it is now our purpose to utilize this
great vivific form of the universal energy, put it under intelligent
control and use it remedially.

But what is the method of application?

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 19I

An answer to this question introduces a kind of effort, or
exercise of self-control, which is both new and novel to mankind.
And because novel, many will, of course, exclaim that it is im-
possible. In very truth, it demands that the debutant practise
a purposive effort, by will power, such as human beings have never
hitherto attempted upon any set plan. When done in the past,
it has been sporadically, without purpose or plan behind it. It is
a new use of nervous energy and the human will ; and first efforts,
too, are always crude efforts. Hence it is with diffidence that a
modus operandi is suggested. Yet the writer fully believes that
it can be done, and that once begun, increased facility will come
from practice.

For the neophyte the first suggestion would be, rest your cell
neurons until you feel that you have a full head of vim in the
organism, even if a week or a month is required for it. Rest and
recuperate imtil you are in the best condition possible. This is
the necessary first step, the sine qua non: a head of vim to work
with.

Then let us suppose that you wish to bring this head of nervous
energy to bear on the lower dorsal and lumbar region, " the smxall
of the back," where fibrils from at least sixteen pairs of the spinal
nerves lead to and connect the brain and cord with the sym-
pathetic system of nerves and ganglions, which supply and control
the abdominal and pelvic viscera ; the liver, kidneys, cyst et al.

This region is first mentioned because it is the one which, in
nine persons out of ten, is the weakest portion of the organism,
the one most in need of curative innervation. Here the brain has
many of its connections with the " vegetative system " of the
organism, so called, which acts for the most part automatically
and independently of volition.

For as all students of anatomy and physiology know, the
human body consists of two distinct sets of organs, or apparatuses,
first that of self-consciousness, thought, will, special sense,
muscular activity and locomotion, meaning the brain, cord, eye,
ear, muscles, bones and their appendages ; and second, the organs
and apparatuses of food preparation, assimilation, circulation,
excretion, etc., namely, the stomach and intestinal canal, the liver,
pancreas and other glands, the spleen, kidneys, etc.

192 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

The aspect presented is that of a double series of organs and
apparatuses, presided over, each, by a different system of nerves
and nerve centers, to wit, the brain and spinal cord for the first,
and the sympathetic system with its many ganglia, including the
solar plexus, the semilimar ganglion, the hepatic ganglion and
others, for the second.

In the early days of anatomy, it was believed that these two
nerve systems were wholly distinct and without connection one
with the other. But we now know that, although essentially
different systems, the two are associated by means of numerous
small nerve fibrils, through which the self-consciousness and will
of the brain may to a degree act on the sympathetic system and
influence its operation. It is in the lower dorsal, lumbar and
sacral regions that the connection is mainly accomplished, and
here, therefore, that the will can be brought to bear on the organs
of digestion and excretion. Brain cell energy appears also to be
transmissible by conduction through the tissues, otherwise than
along nerve fibrils.

Given then your accumulated, conserved head of vim with
which to work, seat yourself comfortably in an arm-chair, and
place the hands and fore-arms on the " arms " of the chair, in
such a manner as partly to support slightly the body weight on
them. (This or any other posture that appeals to the individual
preference.) In this position concentrate the attention on the
small of the back for five seconds, summoning the will ready to
act. Then by a muscular effort retrovert the lumbar vertebrae
backward and upward, thus increasing the flexure of the spine,
and by a sudden, strong exercise of will power, cast nervous
energy into the tissues.

We may use the word energize for the act. Energize those
tissues. Synergize, however, is the better term, since the act
results from a combined and reciprocating effort. The act itself
may be properly defined as a synergy.

It is best accomplished by a calm, purposive effort (not a
feverish, frantic one) and synchronous retro-flexures, six or eight
efforts, let us say, during a minute, to be repeated two or three
times after an interval of rest, daily, or night and morning.

For some reason the backward and upward muscular flexure
of the spine aids the process.

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 93

Many persons catch the knack of doing this immediately;
others find it difficult and have to practise it at intervals for a
considerable time; and there are those, perhaps, who cannot
learn to do it, through some insufficiency of volitional power, or
deficient nervous connection between the two nerve systems.

In one case, I have known the art to be acquired suddenly
after repeated failures. For it may be remarked here, that there
will be no doubt or uncertainty, when the act of transmitting
nervous energy is really done; that is, when the effort of willing
vim from the cord into the sympathetic system is actually accom-
plished. It will be felt to go.

It is the writer's opinion that this act, or art, can be attained
by practice, and accomplished much more effectively by con-
tinued practice, so as to become a step in the progressive control
of the organism by will-power — the ideal complete control
toward which we are moving.

For brain is a still progressive tissue of the organism, and has
possibilities of future evolution and growth which look to this
complete control and maintenance of the organism from the
intellectual side, through indefinite periods of time. We mean
by this, that the brain shows capacity to grow into a much larger,
more powerful organ, able to generate currents of nervous energy,
or vim, which may be directed to the restoration of all the asso-
ciated organic tissues. Our nascent " art " or method, as sketched
above, is therefore strictly in line with the entire scheme of human
evolution and natural salvation.

Direction and application of nervous energy, by will power,
to the lower dorsal and lumbar region, is suggested as one point
d'appui of it merely. The vivific energy can be applied equally
to an arm, a leg, the lungs, or even the heart; to any tissue of
the organism. Rest, nourish properly, conserve nervous energy
and use it remedially, purposively, on the organism, by will
power, under the intelligent direction of the mind, that is to say,
a dear mental concept as to what is to he done with it.

The historic instance of John Quincy Adams' eyes is an illus-
tration of this regulated application of the cell energy for curative
effects. At that time the statesman, himself, believed the
preservation of his sight due to daily manipulation of the eye-

194 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

balls with the tips of his fingers. The preservative effects were
undoubtedly due to the purposive transmission of cell energy
to the organ of sight.

No organs of the body respond more hopefully to this pur-
posive stimulation of their fimctions than the ears. After middle
age is reached, the ears should be massaged daily on the plan of
concentrating vim in the entire organ of hearing; applying the
tips of the fingers low about the external ear, exerting a bearable
pressure, imparting a rotary motion and by an effort of will trans-
mitting cell energy to the parts within.

Barring acute inflammatory attacks, no one need lose his
hearing who will learn to practise this treatment and form a
habit of it. Well-nigh perfect audition may be conserved up to
the century mark.

The author is convinced that the habit of applying brain cell
energy to those organs and tissues of the body which need it is
one which can be established in six months, and that a greater
degree of efficiency will be developed constantly from practice,
even up to the point of maintaining function undeteriorated and
holding one's own for twenty- five years in the very teeth of Time!

This is, of course, a bold assertion. None the less I feel sure that
great future possibilities lie in this purposive application of the
brain cell energy for bodily maintenance. It redacts, too, to the
greater growth and development of the brain and cord, looking
to a full ideal mastery and control of the entire organism by the
mind ; for that is the ideal in view, namely, to raise man above
the animal orders and make him the arbiter of his life and destiny.

Borne in mind be it always that this effort at energization
is a calm, purposive one, not a frantic straining. Rather it should
be a steadied direction of the attention. The direction of will-
power to best advantage is never " nervous," or violent. Much
of its efficacy depends on bringing that great tide of brain energy,
termed the subconscious mind, to act in consonance with the will.
Of the medullar and cerebellar control of the organism we have
little or no self-consciousness ; yet these centers can be influenced
by " suggestion "; they can apparently even be influenced to act
in a certain way or upon a certain tissue during the night, by
suggestion and by willing them so to do at the last moment before

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF -MAINTENANCE 195

falling asleep ; — and this, too, is a species of habit worth acquir-
ing.

The act of willing cell energy to a particularized organ, or
tissue, is never effectually accomplished unless there is a full
head of vim in the organism to draw on. We cannot conserve
oiu- lives and use them otherwise at the same time. This is
cause and effect. To labor, mentally or physically, all day and
then attempt to use cell energy for restorative purposes, would
do one greater harm than good. The modus operandi in view
here is to save up surplus energy, then apply it wherever it
appears to be needed, with an intelligent purpose to restore,
maintain and even rejuvenate. It is needful to put oneself in
economic training to this end, namely, to generate such a surplus
and live with a higher head of vim aboard the organism. This
greater head of energy ensures health of itself, since it is highly
protective against disease.

We are not here dissenting from a skilled use of drugs or other
remedies for bringing the organism into harmonious action.
Every adjuvant agency should be used to this end, when such use
proceeds on an adequate knowledge of the subject. We believe
vim, as above defined, to be a current of corpuscles and, it maybe,
of the ether itself, modified by the will, changed in frequency or
otherwise, in a manner to accomplish what the impelling intellect
and will, resident in the cerebrum, desire. Chemical modifica-
tion of living matter by sentience and will is in fact the oldest
thing in nature, seen in the thousand phases of insect and animal
life. It is the key-note of metamorphosis in all metazoic life.
This, indeed, is the principle on which the method founds, namely,
the domination of mind over protoplasmic matter, by will-power.
It is assumed that the human will, by trained, persistent effort,
is strong enough to produce transformative effects in the proto-
plasmic matter of the tissue cells.

Ordinarily, as the average human being lives, the currents
of nervous energy from the brain and cord go to accomplish
locomotion, muscular contraction and the usual activities of
life. When not used in this way, it is diffused, often dissipated,
without thought or intelligent direction. In healthy subjects
it goes, at a certain tension, to maintain the corpuscular " field "

196 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

or aura, which stands for the person's vital tonicity, or " consti-
tution," and is closely correlated with his character and morals.

At the present stage of human evolution, physical and intellec-
tual, this is wholly or very largely subconcious and, in that sense^
self-acting.

What the present system of self-conservation and self-mainte-
nance aims at, is to promote and foster the potential out-put of
nervous energy from the neurons, by rest, correct living and care-
ful nutrition ; to husband it in the brain and cord ; and to use it
methodically, to maintain and restore the organic tissues.

In this sense the present suggested method is a new departure
in bio-physics. It attempts to educate the will to a higher degree
of efficiency, as a director and transformer of nervous energy.

It is perhaps too early in the progress of this art to speak of
facilitating or aiding the action of the will in throwing nervous
energy into the organic tissues, by use of extraneous currents of
energy, generated outside the brain, and applied to the spinal
cord. Or, indeed, of schemes for uniting the will-power and nerv-
ous energy of five, ten, twenty or more persons, to act syn-
chronously, in combination, for healing the sick. Beyond doubt
this may be done and remarkable curative effects produced, as
soon as we can devise media and apparatus sufficiently delicate
to combine the nervous energy of many persons in a single current
or impulse.

We are still at the beginning of using will-power rationally,
in combination. Its great future is all before us. Yet even in
ancient days, we learn of untaught attempts at healing the sick
by united prayers on the part of many devotees, gathered to-
gether. In cases of sudden panic, too, affecting great crowds of
people, and also at popular religious assemblages, we have evi-
dence that the violently excited nervous energy of hundreds of
persons sometimes combines or coalesces, spontaneously, to
produce wild, overwhelming effects. Such manifestations rest
on a physical basis, beyond question. Hitherto this has been
wholly within the realm of superstition; but it offers a proper
field for scientific investigation and promises very hopeful results
for the control of life. There is no good reason why the will-
power of a thousand persons may not be united in one volume
or current, and directed to act remedially on the organism of a

SELF-CONSERVATION AND SELF-MAINTENANCE 1 97

single patient. Experimentation of this kind, having in view

combination and transference of will-power (vim) is already
going on.

I am fully aware that many who glance at this suggested " art "
of self -conservation will say, " Nonsense! This is trying to lift
oneself by the boot-straps! "

But try it, my Thomasian, try it fairly, earnestly, for two
weeks and see. It runs deeper than you think. Will power
touches down to the lower, self-motile levels of matter and is of
the nature of transformative energy there.

Others will say, " You are making the brain cells restore the
other tissues of the organism ; but what is to restore them ? You
cannot get nervous energy otherwise than from your brain cells.
If you use up their capacity to generate vim — as by your method
■ — what will replenish it or restore the personality at its source? "

Passing over the physiological fact that the brain cell group
is the most enduring tissue of the organism, also that it is the
best nourished, the last to perish in cases of famine and starva-
tion, and in general the most vital and the longest-lived ; passing
these considerations, we come to the higher, psychic truth, that
in the hope and reasonable certainty of longer, happier life, we
have a replenishing agency. Hope or faith that we may live
longer, happier, more successfully, affects life at its source and
strengthens its upward correlation from the lower planes of ele-
mental sentience.

Life, meaning the elemental sentience of unorganized matter,
struggles upward through the mazes of protoplasmic organiza-
tion, to attain greater intelligence, greater happiness. To this
psychic end, " creation groaneth and travaileth together "; and
whatever extends the hope and promise of more life and happier
life, increases the intensity of life in the protoplasmic substance
of the brain cell : in other words, replenishes it at its source. It
is the hope of achieving immortal joys which will carry us for-
ward to the attainment of immortal life.

198 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

At present writing an interesting line of experimentation is in
progress, using electric currents (those from a static machine, for
example) to steady and intensify the application, by will power,
of nervous energy from the brain and cord to the soma, generally:
its organs and apparatuses, seriatim.

PART III
LABORATORY STORIES

AN ENTHUSIAST IN TRANSIT

It is one of the diversions as well as one of the embarrassments
of life at a laboratory for investigating the causes which shorten
life, with a view to prolonging our years, that the place becomes
a Mecca for cranks (the inventive, not the criminal variety), en-
thusiasts and men of grand ideas.

I have little hesitation in classing the subject of this sketch as
a typical American enthusiast; and it is a class to which we owe
much. For be this said of enthusiasts and cranks: they are often
the liveliest, brightest, most lovable persons in the world. Some
of them, it is true, are quite wild in their theories ; some are laugh-
able; some, in fact, are precious near being lunatics. The majority,
however, are merely a little peculiar, from disproportionate mental
endowments. It is often a matter of hobbies. Some are distinctly
tangential. Some are on moderately safe parabolas; others, alas,
on hyperbolas, and will ultimately be lost forever in their own
immensity of ideas.

But with all their eccentricities, they are exceedingly interesting
and often profitable for acquaintanceship. The atmosphere they
bring along with them is cheery. They are all persons of hope
and faith. They believe that something can be done. They never
grunt pessimism which is but another name for a disordered body
or mind. As a class and altogether they afford a vivid though
bizarre picture of that restless American inventiveness which marks
this great formative epoch of the world's progress.

Moreover, they are the most unselfish persons in the world; in
fact, they are never thinking of themselves at all, and hence are
often robbed of their inventions by commercial Bashi-Basooks;
and the very sweetness of temper with which they endure these
outrages is proof that they are not of this world, but of a better.

Sometimes, as I listen to their ardor, I half believe that they are

199

200 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

" inspired." I have never known one of them that could not be
trusted implicitly, or that ever seemed to have a thought of guile
or deception in his heart. It is along of their self-forgetfulness
and the touch of star-fire in their souls. It is their faith in hu-
manity, the out-welling of an exuberant altruism which has never
yet thought of thus classifying itself.

Considered as people to meet, they are a thousand times to be
preferred to the Pooh-bahs, the men of fixed ideas et hoc genus
omne, in which stupidity and the lack of ideas so often pose as a
superior conservatism. Contrasted with this latter dull throng, let
me live and die with cranks, enthusiasts, and men of grand ideas.
They are the lux mundi.

The '87 Graduate had been making a summary of the differences
between old and adolescent muscle cells that day, and, well pleased
with his results, was in an exceptionally good humor, as we talked
before the laboratory fireplace that night. It is on such occasions
that he holds forth to us on the " Grasshopper theory of Human-
ity;" and if I remember aright, he was generalizing as to the
estimation in which human beings are probably held by the inhab-
itants of other worlds in space, when we heard a Voice at the outer
door, making inquiries of our chore boy. It was a Voice sui ge-
neris. The Neophyte dropped his much-elevated heels from the
jamb of the fireplace.

" 'Tis one of the ' inspired ! ' " he exclaimed. " Now keep quiet,
all of you, and let me play him."

When ushered in, the Voice proved to be incarnate ; and as the
stranger came down the room into the warm firelight, we perceived
that he was the usual brown-haired, gray-eyed American, five feet
nine, and apparently about thirty years old.

" My name's Stetson," said he. " There's no money in me for
anybody, yet. I'm merely a harmless crank."

" We knew it," said the Neophyte, genially. " Sit down, Mr.
Stetson, and be one of us. We are all cranks here, and more or
less harmless. That basket-bottomed chair, the red one with rock-
ers, is a good sitter. Haul that forward."

Mr. Stetson made himself comfortable and tried once or twice
to start himself off on general topics of conversation — flat failures,
in spite of the fairly good second we extended him. He was too
full of his idea.

LABORATORY STORIES 201

" I may as well out with it," he said, " although it sounds pre-
cipitate. I've got an idea. That's why I'm here."

" This is rhyme, at least," observed the Neophyte. " How old
is your idea? "

" Almost a year," replied our frank visitor.

" That is a good age," said the Neophyte. " They don't degen-
erate into hobbies under eighteen months."

" And I may as well out with it," the transient went on, " for
I want to ask a favor here — not money," he added, seeing that
the '87 Graduate shuddered as from the twinge of an old wound;
" just a chance to hammer and hack a little."

The '87 Graduate looked relieved.

" What is the Idea? " said the Neophyte.

The transient visitor swelled with the magnitude of it

" Cyclone- Fire- and Lightning- Proof Dwelling-Houses,"
said he, with enkindled eye and a joyous, sweeping glance, to mark
whether we were capable of appreciating it.

" That is truly a great idea, particularly the first part of it,"
remarked the Neophyte.

" Isn't it, though! " exclaimed the Transient Enthusiast. " Right
in line with your researches for prolonging normal, healthy human
life, too! You cannot but feel an interest in it. Let me explain
more in detail. Or, excuse me, would you mind?" He drew a
crumpled manuscript on brown paper from his overcoat pocket.
" I have prepared an article describing my invention. Oh, it's very
brief ! " he exclaimed, overhearing a groan from the Casual
Worker. " Just a few paragraphs. May I read them? "

And he did so. Briefly, it was a structure, with an iron skin
like a steamship, but of oval form, or rather half an ovoid, split
on its long diameter, so as to present no angles, or gables, to catcli
the violence of the wind. As devised it would probably withstand:
a tornado.

" Immense ! " the Neophyte exclaimed ; " but where does the
Fire and Lightning part come in ? "

" I was just coming to that ! " cried the Transient Enthusiast.
" Excuse me. A few sentences more only. Not three minutes
more, I promise you," — and the Transient Enthusiast resumed his
manuscript.

" At present date, the American dwelling-house is a more or less

202 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

comfortable, often showy, but makeshifty structure; and, save in
cities, the building material is commonly wood, as follows naturally
in a new country, much of which, when first entered, was covered
with forest. Pioneers and first settlers have not the means as a
rule to build otherwise than with the material that comes easiest
to hand. The style of architecture is in some degree from Old
World and even classic standards, but is also in a degree peculiar
to the country and to the material, and is as yet of no well-deter-
mined character.

" The disadvantages and dangers of wood as a building material
are well known, and have been frequently pointed out during the
last quarter of a century. Its cheapness and the ease with which
it can be manufactured and handled have hitherto recommended it
to the temporary poverty of the people.

" Americans are so habituated to the fire-fear, and bear it so con-
stantly in their minds, that they are after a manner reconciled to it.
Yet let the slightest odor of pine smoke be wafted to the house-
holder's nostrils, sleeping or awake, and he leaps to his feet with
terror in his eye, and the startled thought, ' My all will burn.'

" As one of the results of wood building in the United States,
we have a phenomenal development of the business of fire insur-
ance, such as has never been seen previously in any country. It
is variously estimated that from eighty to one hundred millions
of dollars are required to replace the structures destroyed by fire,
annually.

" If a spectator with a wide-ranging eye could mount to a suf-
ficient height to be able to overlook the whole country, he would
never, on any day of the year, see less than a hundred dwelling-
houses on fire. By night, especially, the glare of consuming home-
steads would be continuous. The scene presented to the Tutelar
Genius of the nation — if such a genius we have — must indeed
be a sad one. The smoke of incendiary fires, ' insurance fires/ fires
from carelessness and fires from lightning, rises to heaven con-
stantly and never will cease to rise as long as houses are built of
wood. For man is also a fire-making being and daily kindles his
culinary blaze inside his combustible house. The marvel is not that
there are so many fires, but by what grace and mercy of our house-
hold gods there are so few !

" Later generations will probably read of this age of combustible

LABORATORY STORIES 203

houses with astonishment and wonder that their ancestors survived
the fire-traps which they set for themselves.

" For the age of wooden houses now hastens to its close. It will
terminate largely in the natural order of things within the next
half century. For although an improvident population would no
doubt go on building of wood if lumber were cheap, the devasta-
tion of the woodlands wrought by lumbermen and the general
deforestation of the country incident to rapid growth of population
will ere long render lumber expensive and practically unavailable
as building material. Already in many sections, indeed, where
wood is used, it is no longer cheaper than stone, brick and metal,
but is employed for conventional reasons and because wood car-
penters and joiners are more conveniently hired than masons and
metal workers.

" The wooden house, moreover, is the plaything of the cyclone.

" Throughout the great midland west and northwest, twenty
millions of people, during the spring, summer and early autumn
months, live in a species of diurnal fear and trembling at the sight
of every dark cloud that rises in the sky. Ever present in their
minds, tingeing all their pleasures, is this Atra Cur a, this Black
Specter of a possible cyclone, lightning-armed and furious, — an
aerial Titan gone mad, dealing destruction and ruin on every hand !

" A little less constantly present, but a genuine life-fear none the
less, is the apprehension from lightning stroke, which with many
persons is a source of seasonal misery and transforms the refresh-
ing grandeur of every summer shower to a phantasmagoria of
terror. As nearly as can be gathered from local newspapers and
other sources of information, nearly five thousand houses and other
buildings were struck by lightning in the United States during the
year 1894, and nearly eight hundred persons either killed or seri-
ously injured. The popular fear of lightning is therefore a well-
grounded one.

" It cannot be but that this continuous apprehension and anxiety
concerning cyclones, fire and lightning stroke act as a vital depress-
ant in the life of the entire population, tending to make human
existence less happy and care-free; and that such sources of unhap-
piness and anxiety tend to shorten life.

" Now it will not have escaped attention that our proposed
cyclone-proof house is also a fire-proof house.

204 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

" It will be apparent, too, to all possessing even a rudimentary
knowledge of electricity, that the iron frame and iron skin, con-
nected by the fifty iron cellar rods with moist earth eight feet below
the surface, offer a complete protection to the inmates from light-
ning — even from the most forceful thunderbolt which ever fell
from the clouds. Such a house may be pronounced absolutely safe
from lightning stroke, since the thick masonry between the iron
covering and the rooms will act as a non-conductor and completely
insulate the occupants. Here the householder may sit down and
watch the fury of the black thunder squall with serene mind and
a sense of perfect security. The thunderbolt may fall, but the
huge metal shield will conduct it harmlessly into the earth.

" It is the opinion of architects, that a cyclone-proof house of
this description need by no means be found lacking in external
architectural beauty; and that so far as utility, fitness and strength
constitute comeliness, such a house, handsomely painted and orna-
mented, may be made very attractive, needing only the sanction
of ' fashion ' to commend it readily to the popular eye.

" Porticos, window awning frames, cupolas, piazzas, balustrades
at the apex of the domed roof and around the eaves line, for artistic
effects, in iron, or even wood, may be liberally added externally
without injury to the stability of the house, even if these light
structures were carried away by a tornado.

" Well, gentlemen, that isn't all. I have not described the internal
plan. But I will stop here," the Transient Enthusiast broke off
reluctantly. He had heard the '87 Graduate yawn. " You can
all read my paper when it is published. Now tell me what you
think of it."

" 'Tis a great thing, if you can float it," replied the Neophyte ;
and we all said so.

" I knew it would strike you ! " cried the Transient Enthusiast,
with conviction.

" Now, what I want," he resumed, in a less exalted, more matter-
of-fact tone, — " what I want is a place and a chance to make my
dummy, my model, you know; and I thought perhaps you would
give me work room here, tools and things to do with, you
know."

Welcome was extended to him.

LABORATORY STORIES 205

" No man with an Idea is ever turned away from this place,"
remarked the Casual Worker.

" There's work-bench, lathe, anvil, and all the tools you want in
the basement. Go ahead and God speed the Idea."

" That's kind ! " cried the Transient Enthusiast. " That's the sort
of men to meet ! I'll abide by any rules, regulations, or requisites
that you happen to have here. Are there any? "

" None," replied the Neophyte. " It is necessary merely that a
debutant here shall be a crank, an enthusiast, or a man with a grand
idea; you fill the whole bill, Mr. Stetson."

" Oh, one thing more," the Transient Enthusiast added, apolo-
getically. " I suppose I shall have to sleep and eat once in a while,
— but I can sleep anywhere and eat anything," he qualified.

The resources of the place were sufficiently stretched to provide
for him, and without further ado he became one of us.

He sojourned with us for five weeks.

He hammered and he pounded.

He made a horrible din.

He never picked up after himself.

He dulled every tool in the workshop and broke not a few.

And every night, after work, he sang peans to us, loud rounde-
lays of hope, joy, and approaching triumph, of which the '87 Grad-
uate nearly died.

Yet we loved him, in spite of the tarantula dance which he led us.

His dummy weighed seven hundred pounds! It required the
united strength of us all, with levers, to box it and get it out of
doors.

He left for Kansas City with it. May-day morning.

" I shall not write a word to you till I get started," he said.

And he hasn't written yet.

His plan was to form a company in Kansas City, Omaha, or St.
Louis, and then go about with his model, in the wake of cyclones —
wherever he heard of one.

In its present form I believe his idea wholly impracticable. But
it is one of those things of which we say, " There may something
come out of it."

THE PRESCIENT DISCOVERER

PLASMODIUM SENECTUTIS

We knew that he was a man with an idea, or at least strongly-
suspected it, from the moment he called at the laboratory ; the
symptoms of such possession were well-marked.

But he proved non-committal, being of a temperament and habit
of mind more self-contained and less centrifugal than enthusiasts
run. The Neophyte failed to " draw " him ; and the Neophyte has
grown skilful at this sort of diagnosis. He is making a study of
American enthusiasts, and aspires to become an expert in them.

The Prescient Discoverer remained all day with us and disclosed
nothing; and at night he departed as if to go his ways for good.
Moreover, he was but a youth, fresh from one of the most reputable
medical schools of the country, and the interest and appreciation
which he evinced in examining certain of our preparations showed
that he had been well instructed.

The Neophyte was puzzled. " That fellow has got an idea of
some sort aboard," said he, " but he is crafty. I think that he
came here to crib an idea to inspan with one of his own. It's that,
or mere modesty."

It was modesty. The Prescient Discoverer came back next day,
and at luncheon he unbosomed himself, with a blush at first, till the
Idea began to speak through him ; then, indeed, he was as bold as
the best of them. For none so brave as the man possessed by a
grand idea. It casteth out all fear, and putteth strength into the
weakest knee.

But though a little tardy in delivery, his idea was a bouncer when
born; had its teeth all cut, so to speak, and had already toddled
forward into a theory of human salvation.

" I would like to have you examine a series of slides which I
have lately prepared, and which I have brought here to-day," he
said to us. " I am confident that I have made a discovery, from
the bacteriological side of modern research. I have discovered
Plasmodium senectutis."

206

THE PRESCIENT DISCOVERER 207

" What, really? the microbe of old age? " said the '87 Graduate.
" Then, indeed, you are the very man whom we want to see here."

'' I have discovered a micro-organism within the cells of nearly
every tissue of the human body, which I am convinced is of the
nature of an intruder, a hostile parasite, a worm in the bud of life.
I believe that it is this bacterium, or intrusive Plasmodium, which
saps or eviscerates the tissue cell and causes that slow and as yet
unexplained decline of the organic life which we term old age,"
the Prescient Discoverer asserted.

" But in the matter of priority, an Italian biologist has already
laid claim to such a discovery, also a Frenchman and one or two
amateur bacteriologists in America," the Casual Worker observed.

" I have recently heard something of these claims ; but my re-
searches have been conducted quite independently of others," re-
plied our visitor, a little disturbed. " I do not even know what
these people claim to have found; I only know and have brought
here what I have myself found."

" In the cells of what tissues does it occur? " the Neophyte asked.

" In the brain cells and in muscular tissue, in hepatic tissue, and
in a few instances I have found them in ordinary connective tissue;
and I believe that I can show you two slides where I have demon-
strated it in bone cells. It is not infrequently found embedded in
leucocytes, and occurs in the true blood corpuscles."

"Your material was taken from aged subjects, I suppose?"
observed the Casual Worker.

" All of it, save that on my control slides ; those were from ado-
lescent or young-adult cadavers; eight subjects in all," replied the
Prescient Discoverer.

" But admitting that you have found what you think you have
found, namely, an alien micro-organism, similar to the alleged Plas-
modium of malaria, within the tissue cells of the human organism,
what evidence have you that it produces the phenomena of old-
aging? " the '87 Graduate asked. " Do you mean to tell us that you
have worked it out in conformity with Koch's laws? Those con-
stitute our present criterion, you know. Before you can legiti-
mately christen this new bacterium as Plasmodium senectutis, it
must be shown to exist in aged subjects. It must be propagated
in cultures. It must produce old age in subjects inoculated with it."

The Prescient Discoverer laughed.

2o8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

" Well, naturally, I have not inoculated anybody with either my
newly discovered plasmodium, or its virus, or ptomaines. And if
I had, there would hardly have been time to develop a case of typ-
ical old age in the patient," he said.

The Neophyte and the Casual Worker joined in the merriment;
but the '87 Graduate stood to his guns.

" Then you had better abrogate your christening of Plasmodium
senectiitis, or at least place a conspicuous interrogation point after
it," he rejoined.

" That is the bane of scientific research," he continued, " the
abuse which most brings discredit on science, — this wild jumping
at conclusions, this zealous crowing before day, this premature
guessing at facts. It is bad form. It is wholly unscientific. It is
positively immoral."

The Prescient Discoverer's feelings seemed to be hurt. He was
on the verge of anger.

" What would you have ? " he asked. " Please reflect ; I have
as yet published nothing. I have found a bacillus, and I have come
to you, another bacteriologist, to show it to you and confer with
you about it. Is this so devilish improper? It seems to me that
you are yourself the one who has gone off at half-cock! "

The '87 Graduate came down promptly.

" Very true," said he. " I spoke hastily. I feel warmly on that
subject."

"Or a little sensitive, perhaps?" and the Prescient Discoverer
raised his eyebrows slightly. " Somebody has ' crowed ' in ad-
vance of you, perhaps? "

" Perhaps," replied the '87 Graduate humbly.

" But let's see your slides," said the Neophyte, impatient of this
irrelevancy. " New bacilli are by no means rare. But a supposed
Plasmodium of old age is interesting. Did you say that you had
made a culture of it ? Have you actually propagated colonies from
it? What did you use for your nutrient media, gelatine, bouillon
or agar-agar, — acid or alkaline? "

" Agar-agar. But I confess that I had bad luck with my cultures.
I sterilized carefully, but I had the worst of luck."

" That's nothing. Everybody has such luck till he gains knack
from experience ; and even then he will have bad luck," remarked
the Casual Worker.

THE PRESCIENT DISCOVERER 209

" Well and good, but what did you get your * seed ' from — not
from the tissues of cadavers, surely? " observed the '87 Graduate.

" Yes, I did. My theory is that this is a spore-producing Plas-
modium, and that the spores survive for days or weeks or months
in cadavers."

The '87 Graduate looked incredulous. " Have you any other
theories regarding it? " he asked. " In what manner do you con-
ceive that these spores are constantly transmitted from one genera-
tion of human beings to another, from parent to child, I mean? "

" Through the blood," replied the Prescient Discoverer.

"What! the placental blood of the mother, enfiltrated to the
embryo or the foetus? "

" That may even be. But I imagine that all old persons give off
these spores by millions in all their excreta, and that we constantly
ingest them from early youth upward," replied the Prescient Discov-
erer. " I imagine that it is as if phthisis were a hundredfold more
common than it is. From my point of view, old age is a universal
disease. Not only man, but every organized form of life, except
perhaps infusoria, has it and always has had it, and died of it, from
remote ancestry downward to present time."

The Casual Worker laughed.

" Well," said the '87 Graduate, " don't tell me that you stop
there. A man with your wealth of imagination must surely have
struck out some means of curing this — this universal disease? "

" It is a physician's business to cure disease," replied the Prescient
Discoverer, with an assumption of dignity. " Yes, if my theory of
this Plasmodium be correct, I hope to cure its ravages. I hope to
obtain a culture virus; I hope to inoculate dogs with it and con-
tinue the inoculations on a series of dogs, until they are immune.
Then, on the same plan which has been successfully pursued with
the bacillus of diphtheria in horses, I hope to use the blood serum
of the immunized dogs as an anti-toxine for Plasmodium senectutis.
Or, if this method proves impracticable, I shall try other methods
of procedure to obtain a remedial agent."

" No one can impeach your motives or intents," replied the '87
Graduate. " I bow to them with all respect. Now let's see your
slides."

The Prescient Discoverer undid his grip and produced two slide
boxes. " I did not bring a microscope stand," said he ; "I knew

2IO SALVATION BY SCIENCE

you must have plenty, and also objectives. I have used a 1-12
mostly."

The Casual Worker made haste to set his fine new stand under
a good north light.

" That's a ' bute ! ' " cried the Prescient Discoverer, enthusias-
tically; the vernacular of the undergraduate had not yet wholly
left him. " Wish I had such a stand. The working distance of
my objective is all too short."

The Casual Worker attached an Abbe condenser, screwed on a
1-20 objective, and set cedar oil and xylol handy.

The Prescient Discoverer then selected a slide from box No. i,
labeled " Nerve Tissue." " This shows you Plasmodium senectutis
in four large and two small pyramidal cells of the human cerebrum,"
he said. " The tissue is from the cortex cerebri of the superior
frontal lobe, right hemisphere. It was hardened thirty days in
alcohol and stained very lightly, as you will see, with eosin and
hsematoxylon. The subject was eighty-one years old; sex, female."

As he spoke he put the slide on the stand, applied a drop of cedar
oil, focused and looked attentively.

" This is, indeed, a fine instrument," he murmured, with his eye
at the eye-piece. " What a light ! what amplification ! Here must
be twenty-eight hundred diameters, and clear as a January morning!
And here they are," he continued, moving the slide slightly to and
fro. " Here they are, right in the center of the field to the left of
the cell nucleus," and he stood aside for the 'Sy Graduate to look
at them.

The latter has a slow eye, albeit a sure one when it has taken hold.
He looked for a full minute by the clock. The Prescient Discoverer
evinced impatience. " Well? " he said.

" Your microtome was none too sharp when you cut this section,"
observed the '87 Graduate at length, without looking up. " You
should sharpen the blades with an oiled strap, after honing.

" Your hsematoxylon solution had been made too long when you
stained this section," he went on, still looking. " But you have
learned to stain lightly ; that's a good point."

*' But what do you see in those cells? " exclaimed the Prescient
Discoverer.

" Oh, many very interesting objects," replied the '87 Graduate,
withdrawing his eyes and going to the window, as if to rest them.

THE PRESCIENT DISCOVERER 211

The Casual Worker took his turn at the eye-piece, and then the
Neophyte. Both wore a thoughtful expression as they withdrew.

The Prescient Discoverer regarded them with an anxiety verging
on indignation, which, however, he would not allow himself to
manifest,

" Let's see more of your slides," observed the Neophyte, tenta-
tively.

Without replying, our visitor selected eight others, which he
arranged in order on a rack by the microscope; he seemed discon-
certed, or doubtful, but proceeded to place the first of the series
under the objective. " This one is cortical cerebellar tissue, from
the same subject," he said, after focusing. " In the right center of
the field you will see a large Purkinje cell, in the cytoplasm of
which, near the nucleus, one of these same plasmodia is visible.
Below, to the left, is a second, and moving the slide slightly to the
right, still a third will come into the field. The similarity, I might
say the identity, of these plasmodia with those on the first slide will
be apparent to you, I think."

We experienced no difficulty whatever in seeing the intracellular
objects which he designated ; but a sense of estrangement had
supervened, which threw gloom over the exhibition.

The next slide was a muscle preparation and the fourth osseous
tissue, both from a male subject seventy-nine years of age, we were
told. Then followed a slide on which two white blood corpuscles
were in the field, in both of which were appearances resembling
those above particularized.

" Shall I show you others ? " asked the Prescient Discoverer,
coldly. The estrangement and the lack of sympathy had now grown
quite melancholy.

" Not unless you wish to do so ; but I would like to see your
cultures from the spores of this plasmodium," replied the '87 Grad-
uate, with a reserve deep as the snows which cover Maine in Feb-
ruary.

Self-wrapped and distant, our visitor placed three slides, succes-
sively, under amplification. By this time, the estrangement was
suspicion on his part.

Dionysius of the Ear was not less bereft of human confidence
than is a modern scientist in the presence of a fellow investigator
pursuing the same line of research.

212 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

The Prescient Discoverer wiped his sHdes and replaced them.
We perceived that he was inwardly cursing himself for rashly
bruiting his discoveries, and was perhaps meditating a rapid rush
into print, lest some one of us should forestall him, Alas for poor
human nature, which pursues fame over seas of piracy, and is some-
thing of a buccaneer itself!

" I have come here and shown you my work in a rather boyish
way," the Prescient Discoverer observed, frostily. " Of course, I
do not ask you to give away your opinions," he continued, after
replacing the slide boxes in his bag. " When I came here, however,
I had an idea that some such exchange of views might be pleasant.
Apparently I was mistaken," he added, still more icily, after a
moment's pause.

" No objection whatever to giving you my opinion," said the '87
Graduate, bruskly. " But I do not believe that you want it."

"What is your opinion, then?" said the Prescient Discoverer,
defiantly.

For reply the '87 Graduate went to a case which contains his
own collection of mounted objects, and fetching a slide, put it in
the microscope. "Look at this," said he; "and when you have
done so, we will take another look at that slide of yours — the one
you showed us first."

The two slides were examined one after the other. " Do you
see resemblances ? " queried the '87 Graduate, grimly.

The Prescient Discoverer flushed ; his hand shook as he changed
the slides for a second inspection.

" Now do you want an opinion? " asked the '87 Graduate.

" Give it," replied the Prescient Discoverer, sitting down in a
chair and facing us with a face that had grown suddenly wan.

" Well, then, what you call Plasmodium senectutis in these cere-
bral cells, from this aged female subject, is nothing more or less
than a rather large, faded pigment granule, such as are not unfre-
quently found in nerve tissue cells. Their office and effect on the
cell life are not well understood, yet there is no reason to suppose
that it is anything very formidable."

The Prescient Discoverer rose suddenly, protestingly, to his feet,
and again examined the two slides.

" My God ! I believe you are right ! " he exclaimed, and sat down
asrain.

THE PRESCIENT DISCOVERER 213

Only a microscopist can realize what a knock-out blow he had
received.

" In these other slides of yours," the '87 Graduate continued,
" there are a variety of things which you have ingeniously, though
in perfect good faith, picked out and classified together.

" On the cerebellar slide your plasmodia are again pale pigment
granules in two cases, and a dead nucleus in a third ; in the muscle
cells they are simply dead nuclei and vacuoles; in the hepatic cells
they are really, I think, intrusive bacteria, or else small secondary
nuclei, either degenerate or dead; and in these white blood cor-
puscles there are two encysted bacteria which are not sufficiently
well shown to be classified. And finally from your cultures you have
three quite common forms of cocci. I hope you are not offended,"
the '87 Graduate concluded.

" No," replied the Prescient Discoverer, doggedly. " No doubt
I ought to thank you."

" You had," said the '87 Graduate, calmly. " We have extri-
cated you from a scrape. We do not profess to know very much
here, but in this case we have been able to save you from a serious
mistake. If you had published your ' discovery,' you could hardly
have recovered in a lifetime from the confusion which it would
have brought upon you. Older microscopists than you have fallen
into such errors. The tissue cell, as at present prepared for exam-
ination, is a great field and contains many curious things ; and when
an investigator starts off with an already formed theory, as you did
to discover Plasmodium senectutis, he is quite likely to find it !

" I know exactly how you began your researches, for I once did
almost the same thing," the '87 Graduate continued.

" You first read a great deal about the germ theory of disease ;
and one fine day the idea popped into your head that old age was
a slow disease caused by a ' microbe.' Full of enthusiasm, you then
set to work to prove that your theory was true. You prepared a
great number of slides from the various tissues of many subjects;
and it would have been strange, indeed, if from them all you had
not found what you were in search of ; for, as I said a moment ago,
the physiological cell is a very fertile field for discovery! A man
isn't safe to go prospecting alone in it, until his imagination is
fortified by considerable experience."

" But these other bacteriologists who claim to have found a bacil-

214 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

lus of old age — what of them?" demanded the Prescient Dis-
coverer.

" I do not know what they have found," said the "^y Graduate.
" Whatever it is, it must require a long time to demonstrate it in
accordance with Koch's laws. The fact that any one should so
immediately announce the discovery of a ' microbe of old age '
appears strange on the face of it. Thirty years would be a short
time to demonstrate such a bacillus by Koch's third law."

" At this laboratory then you have found nothing of this descrip-
tion as yet ? " questioned the Prescient Discoverer.

" Nothing."

He went away sorrowful, as one who has lost great possessions,
or lingered too long at Monte Carlo. The enkindled eye had
quenched its inner spark; his step was not as light, his elate mien
had turned listless.

Ah, but it is a sad thing to have a beautiful theory come toppling
down about one's ears !

THE BIO -OSCILLATOR

This will sound like an echo from out the past, since it occurred
in 1898, before the world had quite heard the last of the then famous
*' Keely liberator," — not the " Keely cure." Yet even so long ago
the incident is still typical of many of more recent date, incidents
which mark the growth of the great new Idea which now begins
to take form in the Promethean Faith.

To the skirts of every such new idea charlatanism clings fondly,
for a time, at least, eager to turn its needful penny. As well be
tolerant, perhaps, even as we toss the penny to the other mendicant.

Well I recall the day. There was hilarity at the laboratory.
The Neophyte was trying his 'prentice hand, with the aid of a
new Leits microscope, in quest of the bacteria in ordinary vaccine
matter, taken from the quills of a well-known producer whose
heifers are warranted " perfectly healthy animals."

The Neophyte had found fifteen different kinds of cocci, bacilli,
and spirilla, and, so he announced to us, was hard after a sixteenth,
when a visitor entered.

Now experience shows that, besides transient callers, two species
of visitor come to the laboratory, the person with a grand idea
which he burns to unbosom, and the person in search of one to crib.

The observant, gray eye of this caller seemed rather to place him
in the second category. He was a man of good personal presence,
of cultivated, or at least worldly-wise bearing, and yet a man, as
one would have said, with the ghosts of not a few defunct enter-
prises haunting his face and mien — ghosts which had but sharp-
ened his glance and which drove him onward only the more keenly
to new ventures. The inventor's heart-break rarely falls till fifty,
and here and there a Keely works on with a westering eye till far
past the half-century mark, before the last icon is taken down from
the pillar of his earthly race.

Otherwise our visitor was a spare, brown-haired, bony man, above
middle height, well attired and silk-hatted to date. And the allu-
sion to Keely was suggested by him^ I should think; for after

215

2l6 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

presenting a card which bore the name of Thomas C. Thurston,
M. D., he preluded with a few introductory and complimentary
remarks, and asked a question : —

" Are you familiar with the discoveries of the inventor, Keely ? "

" Hardly," I replied. " Is anybody familiar with them, let me
ask? "

" No and yes. But I mean that you have of course heard of the
* Keely motor ' and the ' etheric liberator? ' "

" Heard of them, certainly."

" It is true that but a few persons, comparatively, know how fully
in earnest Mr. Keely is, or realize on the verge of what world-
revolutionizing discoveries he has arrived. Two public failures of
his ' motor,' so called, to do continuously what its inventor hoped
it would do, have undoubtedly injured his reputation popularly."

" You believe in it, then? " I said, by way of continuing the con-
versation, which I feared did not promise great things.

" Undoubtedly," replied Dr. Thurston. " I should say, indeed,
that his invention was already in the list of accomplished facts."

" Meaning the ' etheric liberator,' so called ? "

" Yes ; it bears that name."

" You have knowledge that it will actually liberate intra-atomic
energy, as claimed ? "

" I have seen it do so."

" That should be a comforting knowledge to not a few persons."

" Most people, forming their opinions from what is printed in
newspapers, believe that Mr. Keely is an impostor whose business
it has been to prey on the pockets of credulous rich men," remarked
Dr. Thurston. " The reverse is the fact concerning him. The man
is a devotee to his idea of a grand, slowly unfolding truth of nature.
And he will triumphantly demonstrate it."

" But what is the latest Keely conception of the ether? How does
it now stand to him? " I queried, in continuance.

" Quite like the common scientific conception, that of a rarified
medium of matter of exceeding tenuity and perfect elasticity which
pervades all space, even the pores of solids and fluids ; and also with
this in addition to that conception, namely, that this tenuous, elastic
medium is not a passive medium, but powerfully charged with
energy; that it is in itself the last embodiment of energy; a storage
medium for the universal energy which seethes there, so to speak,

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 21 7

at a tension of which we have or can acquire but a slight conception;
this energy being constantly exhibited in it as a quiver of intense
vibratory motion."

"And the 'liberator?'"

" Is adjusted to receive and set up vibration, synchronous with
those of the ether, and by thus getting ' into beat ' with it, is able
to take its impulse, or motive power, directly from the ether, or in
•other words directly from the entire universe, from all nature."

" A truly magnificent theory, which sounds so fine that one would
wish to have it true," I remarked. " I have heard it described some-
what differently, however ; and in both instances, I have been struck
by the resemblance of Keely's etheric liberator to Nicola Tesla's
electric oscillator, another theoretical device, nearly perfected, it is
said, for deriving unlimited electrical power from the earth's elec-
trical ' charge,' or otherwise getting en rapport with the source of
all our electricity."

" I was about to speak of the Tesla oscillator," said Dr. Thurston.
" It is plain to me that what Tesla describes as the earth's electrical
charge is nothing more or less than the Keely ether, or corpuscular
matter surcharged with energy. Tesla has approached the subject
from the standpoint of an electrical engineer, Keely from the less
special grounds of a natural philosopher ; hence their differences of
terminology; but both are in pursuit of the same game, and it is
a matter of great curiosity and interest to see what each will de-
velop. In any event, what has been accomplished by these two
experimenters appears to me to bear a very suggestive relationship
to the theory of elemental life in matter which you seem to make
the basis of your researches at this laboratory."

" Possibly; but what relationship? "

" Why, you hold that matter is, at bottom, sentient in low degree ;
that the ultimate atoms or particles feel and are, in a lowly sense,
living particles ; and that all living creatures have risen step by step,
developed from this primary sentient attribute ; in short, that matter
first feels, then moves and lives, after a purblind fashion at first in
the simpler organisms, afterwards more sentiently and intelligently
as the organic structures are improved."

" You have expressed the view held here fairly well," I said.

" If I apprehend the principle correctly," Dr. Thurston continued,
" the primary impulse of all energy in nature is feeling. Matter

2l8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

moves because it feels. It is not an insentient dead universe, but
a living one. Life, meaning consciousness and self-consciousness, is
the sentient side of the matter contained in the individual organism.
It is the natural bio-static condition of matter, risen, by means of
complex organization, from low sentience to a high intelligence."

" You are outlining our views very well," I remarked, with some
curiosity as to what was to come next.

" Well, then, it seems to me that if Keely can devise a means of
obtaining unlimited power from the ether by getting ' in step ' or
* in beat ' with it, and if Tesla can draw limitless electrical energy
from the earth by finding out the ' period ' of its vibratory motion,
or its electrotonus, and putting his oscillator in beat with it, there
may be a means discovered of vivifying or revivifying the human
organism, of restoring and renewing the flagging life of human
beings by getting in beat, in synchronous vibrating harmony, with
the bio-static condition of the ether, the earth, the universe, all na-
ture. In the language of Tesla concerning electricity, we may say
that by the proper devices we may connect the human organism
with the eternal, universal life of Nature and live directly from her."

" That is a very grand conception," said I. " Your idea is to
put each human life ' in beat ' with the biotonus of the earth, or,
to apply Tesla's phrases to life instead of electricity, to make human
lives consonant with the vibratory period of the earth's life ' charge.'
Is that the idea ? "

" Exactly, to a dot ! " exclaimed Dr. Thurston.

" May I surmise that you have already made some progress in
the way of a practical solution of this problem? " I ventured to ask.
" That you have in mind some device in the way of a bio-oscillator,
if I may coin such a word ? "

The Doctor appeared lost in thought for a moment, then said,
suddenly, " I have a lady with me. She is sitting in a carriage out-
side. May I — is it quite proper — shall I ask her to come in
here?"

The Neophyte, who was in his shirt-sleeves, made a rush for his
coat and plucked at his cuffs. Ladies, alas, are not every-day vis-
itors with us; the scrub-woman comes and goes, but the gayer
flowers of her sex find little to attract them here. Two, it is true,
have come within a year, gay flowers indeed they were, seeking,
boldly, devices for the renewal of facial bloom ; but what we could

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 219

suggest in this line required both self-restraint and time, and hence
did not elicit their gratitude which was keyed for immediate results
without painstaking.

We summoned our smiles and looked for a clean chair with a
cushion and rockers, and after an elemental sort of pause Dr. Thurs-
ton re-entered, followed by a young lady of truly remarkable phy-
sique, whom he introduced, generally, as " My companion. Miss
Althea Estes."

As I have spoken of her appearance as somewhat remarkable, I
may add that although her general mien was youthful, seemingly
that of a girl of twenty, her hair was quite white, luxuriant hair
none the less, combed upward and backward from a wide, low fore-
head. A health-abounding woman, with full red lips, large, clear
gray eyes, and a clear-tinted complexion verging to brunette. A
strong woman of good height, broad shoulders and the waist of a
Hygeia, to whom I was minded to compare her from the species of
girdle which confined her thick white wool dress, and the easy grace
with which she wore her outer garment, — an astrachan coat, if
I recollect aright. She had large, shapely wrists and hands, and
wore, as we had occasion later to observe, very beautiful rings in
unusual number.

Miss Estes entered, as I have said, and quietly acknowledging
our commonplaces, took her station among us as one who thor-
oughly understood her part. Indeed, she had no more than spoken,
in a voice low, but of unusual timbre, than I felt sure that she must
have enjoyed the advantages of a histrionic as well as a carefully
guided vocal training. She seated herself, as did the rest, save Dr.
Thurston, who remained standing near the lady's chair at her left
hand. He then resumed the previous conversation.

" Now an infant, a child, or any very young person, may be and
generally is, I think, much nearer * in beat ' with the life of nature
than an old person," he said; " yet bad ancestry acts here and many
or the most of infants come into the world ' out of beat ' with the
earth's life. Then, too, as we grow older and become more selfish,
and form ' set ' personal habits, we no doubt become more isolated,
more out of chord with the bio-static condition of nature. My own
idea is that this is why we die of old age. That, in fact, would be
my definition of old age, a falling out of synchronous vibration with
the earth's life. We live only as we keep ' in beat ' with it, and

220 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

slacken to final cessation as we gradually lose our relationship, our
consonance with it.

" Now my companion to-day, Miss Althea Estes," the Doctor con-
tinued, with a smile and a polite bow to her (and he never failed
in addressing or speaking of her to make use of her full name),
" is an admirable instance of this theory. She is in perfect health,
in the full prime of womanhood and, as I think, in well-nigh perfect
synchronism with nature or with the earth's ' charge ' of life, if you
please. She appears to be able to draw from that life charge of
nature and to communicate such impulses to others."

The Neophyte whose mental condition is " synchronous " with
beauty at sight, attempted at this point to short-circuit a top-lofty
compliment, which fell sprawling, however; yet the lady kindly
acknowledged it and helped him set it on its legs.

The Doctor went on, however, without noticing the interruption.

" A human life is, physically, a complex series of chemical actions
and reactions, accompanied by constant magneto-electric disturb-
ance of its environment, and by a personalization of the sentience
of matter. If we were to say that a human life is a bio-magnet
which maintains a constant ' field ' of energy and influence far and
near about it, as long as it lives, we should not have hit on a bad
simile. It can hardly be otherwise, therefore, but that one life
should influence others about it. Why such influences are not more
commonly felt is probably due to the difficulty of establishing a
really synchronous, or symbiotic condition, between two organic
lives. They are not ' in beat ' one with another. It becomes a desi-
deratum, therefore, to bring them into the synchronous relation-
ship."

The Doctor paused to audit criticism, but no one volunteering
any, he proceeded to our better comprehension of the object of the
visit.

*' I have long been a believer in the art of symbiotic healing, and
my more recent studies have led me to practise it in a somewhat
empirical manner, in the hope of developing my theories into a
science, or a system," he continued. " And I can say of these ex-
periments, what an empiric in drugs cannot be so sure of, that my
ignorance and my failures have never done any harm, even where
they have failed to accomplish cures. I have, therefore, seen nothing
wrong or deleterious in such attempts to cure patients by symbiotic

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 221

agency, and learning as I go on, from such cases ; for I have always
been too conscientious to dally or experiment in urgent or alarming
cases.

" Now in Miss Althea Estes I have found a subject who appears
to me to be more nearly symbiotic with nature, or to return to our
former borrowed phraseology, more synchronous and consonant
with the earth's life, or life-charge, than any person whom I have
previously met; and some very pretty and convincing results have
at times followed our efforts to relieve suffering by placing the suf-
ferer in chord with nature, through her instrumentality. These
effects are so tangible as to be distinctly felt by well persons as well
as the sick, as we shall be happy to illustrate to you here at the
present time and place, if you can afford to give us a few moments
more of your time."

Churls, indeed, and blind should we have been to plead lack of
time to witness an experiment of such moment, — a bio-oscillator
"in beat" with the earth's or nature's "vital charge!" We as-
sented by acclamation.

" Well, then, to the details," continued Dr. Thurston, briskly.
" Animals and plants, no doubt, live in closer harmony with the
earth's life than human beings; and my own conjecture is that
plants are more synchronous with the elemental life than animals,
for the reason, perhaps, that they are rooted in the soil. At least
my co-laborer here. Miss Althea Estes, is of the opinion that she
establishes the symbiotic continuity with the earth more easily and
more completely by the use of a tree as an intermediate connection,
or conductor. Is there a near tree? " the Doctor asked, stepping to
the window.

A very fine sugar maple stands about twenty meters distant from
the end of the building, and a large, very vigorous apple-tree nearer
still.

Dr. Thurston rapidly looked the locality over. " If the weather
were not quite so cold, I should suggest that we adjourn to one
or other of those trees," he observed. " For Miss Althea Estes has
a feeling that she acts most effectively when standing erect, with
her back to the trunk of a living, large tree. The tree, she believes,
assists her as a kind of conductor; but a copper wire connection
with the tree also aids her, she believes ; and this opens the very
interesting question whether the earth's life is identical with the

222 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

earth's electrical ' charge,' or whether, as is most likely, it is a fac-
tor or ingredient of it, and can be conveyed with it as by means
of a wire. I do not undertake to say anything as to that; I do
not yet know as to it. But would it be convenient to make a con-
nection with that apple or maple and bring the wires in here ? "
Dr. Thurston asked.

In a few minutes a coil of rather heavy copper wire was carried
from a window to the apple-tree, bent three times about it near the
ground and returned, both ends being connected with a metal plate
placed in the bottom of the chair in which the lady was to sit. Some
fragments of plate glass were also brought and the chair insulated
by placing one beneath each leg.

" Some of these details certainly look like hocus-pocus," Dr.
Thurston observed. " I do not undertake to endorse them in the
scientific sense ; it is simply our experience, or rather Miss Althea
Estes's opinion, that they aid her.

" And now there are a few additional details which, by rude
minds, might be misunderstood," the Doctor continued, " but which
will not here be thought to militate with delicacy. It is necessary
that the five persons present who participate shall sit in a circle, the
chair of each being insulated, like that of Miss Althea Estes ; that
we should clasp hands, and further to facilitate the symbiotic con-
nection, that our bare feet should either be in contact, or all of
them touch a metal conductor, resting on an insulator.

" Undoubtedly the best results in symbiotic healing are obtained
by bringing the entire body of the patient in contact with those of
well, strong persons," Dr. Thurston went on. " This, in fact, is
a matter of history and observation from most ancient times down
to the present. By contact of the entire body, or large areas of
it, something nearest like direct protoplasmic contact and direct
smybiotic connection is obtained. But our natures and habits at
present have their limitations and infirmities; and compromises
have to be made, even although such may impair the efficacy of
our efforts.

" A perfect scheme of symbiotic healing would be to bring the
bodies of a score or more healthy, strong persons into plenary con-
tact with the patient. But as that is not at present practicable, we
do what we can do with due regard to human weaknesses.

" Observe, please, that I am not attempting to teach anything as

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 223

to the nature or the manner in which the symbiotic healing impulse
acts ; I do not know. It may be an ethereal current, wholly distinct
and sui generis; or it may be a form or mode of electricity; or
again electricity may be the vehicle or medium by which it is con-
veyed from one organism to another, or from one protoplasmic cell
to another. What we shall attempt to demonstrate to-day is simply
the fact that a sensible impulse, presumably of a bio-dynamic nature,
is actually imparted."

A large hollow copper globe about eighteen inches in diameter,
which had once been used at the laboratory in electric experimenta-
tion, was brought forward as a means of this symbiotic pedal con-
tinuity, if this detail of our experiment may be thus described.

Heat, meantime, had been admitted to the room and the tem-
perature raised to about 80° Fahr. An anteroom was made to serve
the lady as a dressing-room. Each of the others made his prepara-
tions ; and at a signal from Dr. Thurston, all approached — in
slippers — and took their places, the one lady setting us all a beau-
tiful example of utter unconsciousness of any other sentiment than
a purely scientific one. That example the rest of us followed so
chivalrously that the Neophyte alone was afterwards able to declare
that " it was a regular Trilby foot — two of them — a perfect daisy
of a foot ! " But the Neophyte is still a very young man.

Such, then, was the situation : our hands clasped, sitting in a
circle on insulated chairs, with all our feet pooled about that copper
globe, which rested on a large pane of glass placed upon a low
foot-stool.

Dr. Thurston held the lady's left hand ; the Neophyte, rogue, had
her right hand. We fixed our eyes on the circle of feet about the
globe and sat in silent, but far from sad, civility.

Several moments passed. The Bio-oscillator seemed, I thought,
to draw in deep breaths which expanded her grand chest. She
appeared to concentrate herself as if making some sort of effort.
Then presently an unmistakable impulse was felt, similar to a slight
faradic shock. After another deep breath on the part of the Bio-
oscillator, this was repeated more perceptibly, three times.

" I feel something," said the Neophyte. We all acknowledged
that we did.

Without rising, conversation was resumed for some minutes, then
another effort was made, when four or five distinct, moderately

224 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

powerful impulses were communicated. There was no doubt of
their reality. The only question was as to their nature, whether
electrical or what?

Miss Estes herself made no attempt to explain anything; Dr.
Thurston did the talking. His idea was that Miss Estes was sym-
biotic with nature and in period with the earth's " vital charge."

" But I do not deny," he added again, " that electricity may be
the medium or agency by which the symbiotic impulse is imparted.
I only know of it that it appears adequate to cure disease. We have
been unusually successful with nervous diseases, some of them in-
veterate cases."

Still a third illustration was given, and I then bethought myself
to introduce a galvanometer into our circle; but the lunch bell had
rung, and one cannot ask a lady to sit barefoot indefinitely.

Our two visitors remained to lunch with us, and a remarkably
pleasant hour was passed ere they took leave. Dr. Thurston proved
a wonderful conversationalist, Miss Estes an equally wonderful lis-
tener. Little part as she seemed to bear in the conversation, how-
ever, we began to perceive that she was the directing spirit of it;
her manner simply of attending to what was said led others to con-
tinue or to drop a subject.

A-s they rose to take leave she remarked to the '87 Graduate that
Dr. Thurston and herself were trying to make progress with the
abstruse subject of symbiotic healing, adding that they also had
their way to make, and asked that we would kindly certify, in
writing, briefly, to what we had seen, but neither more nor less
than the facts.

" Certainly, to what I have seen, or rather felt, I will bear wit-
ness most cheerfully," replied our associate, diplomatically. " But
the subject is so interesting that I wish you would give us a fuller
knowledge of it and a greater opportunity to certify. Will you
not come again to-morrow, or soon, and let us see more of your
gift?"

Miss Estes hesitated for the moment. " I do not know how
Dr. Thurston may have planned his engagements," she said; "I
will speak with him as to that."

They consulted briefly, when the Doctor said, " Willingly, and
thank you for the invitation. To-morrow at the same hour, if that
will suit your convenience."

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 225

They then drove back to the village at the railway, where their
arrangements had been made for visiting us.

For my own part I had hastily jumped to the conclusion that
the lady was one of those by no means very rare individuals known
as " electric girls," something in whose physiological economy con-
stitutes them living, walking electrical batteries. I had little confi-
dence in the earth's " vital charge," as postulated by Dr. Thurston,
but a great deal of confidence in electricity, even as a remedial
agent in some forms of disease ; and by the use of a galvanometer
introduced into our circle of clasped hands when they called next
day, I anticipated proving beyond doubt that the " symbiotic im-
pulse " of the Bio-oscillator was an electric shock.

Talking the matter over before the laboratory fireplace that
evening, — for cold squalls were howling down from the White
Hills, — I cited the cases of our two most celebrated " electrical
girls," and ventured the opinion that Miss Estes would prove an
equally celebrated third.

The Neophyte laughed.

*' The Bio-oscillator is a fine, grand, wholesome sort of woman,"
he exclaimed, at length. " But she is an actress, I take it, and I
will bet my new sheepskin that she has got either a little storage
battery or a dry salts battery under that classic tunic of hers.
That's the kind of ' electrical girl ' she is, take my word for it ;
and how to find out in a decent, slick way just what kind of an
outfit she is carrying around is what I'm studying on to-night.
For it will never answer to let that precious couple come here and
do us out of any kind of an endorsement."

The Neophyte, as will be seen, is still in the gall of latter day
bitterness, whose unregeneracy not even the wand of Venus can
temper.

The '87 Graduate and myself were scandalized.

" And I have it! " exclaimed the Neophyte, unabashed. " I have
it. Just you all keep quiet to-morrow and watch out; you may
hear something drop."

Next morning we heard him hammering down in the basement ;
he bored holes, too, in the laboratory floor. It disturbed the '87
Graduate, who was inoculating guinea-pigs. " Hope that young
cock-sure will not outrage decency and common politeness to-
day."

226 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

he said, testily. " He has started up a faradic battery down-stairs;
I heard it buzzing when I was in the basement."

Our visitors came at ten in the forenoon, as on the previous day,
and after greetings and pleasantries, we prepared for another
exhibition of the lady's powers as a bio-oscillator. The same ar-
rangements were made as on the day before; the chairs and cop-
per ball, in fact, had not been removed from their places, and we
sat down in the same order as previously.

Again, after a few moments' silence, we felt a faint impulse,
then a second and third. In the interval of time which succeeded.
Dr. Thurston told us of a case of locomotor ataxia which they were
treating in Philadelphia, with a marked improvement and apparent,
arrest of the progress of the disease.

Another exhibition of the symbiotic impulse was attempted. We
had joined hands. As if inadvertently, the Neophyte then moved
his heel, when, shade of Volta ! we were all brought to our feet
simultaneously, and the copper globe spun round !

The Bio-oscillator screamed, then flushed. Her clear gray eyes
searched our faces, seemed to read our souls and rested on the
Neophyte with a magnificent sparkle of anger.

But only for the merest instant. An equally grand burst of good
temper and abounding bonhomie, such as only a great soul in a
healthy organism will rally to, succeeded it. She laughed outright.

" Oh, you bad young man ! That wasn't nice a bit. You hurt
me, you did!" she exclaimed, in mellow outcry, her face suffused
with color, and one great tress tumbling wildly down her cheek.

" Oh, I confess," she continued, reading our faces intuitively.
" You have trapped me. Oh, but you did it cruelly " (this last
to the Neophyte, who stood watching her, agrin). " I own up. I
make a clean breast of it. You shall see just how I managed it,"
and with an impulsive movement of both her hands she undid first
a brooch, then her dress from the neck, and amidst a frou-frou of
pink laces hastily unbuckled and drew forth a long, wide, thick
belt that encinctured her person.

The '87 Graduate and myself were too greatly perturbed to
direct anything more than casual glances to this bit of apparatus;
and as for Dr. Thurston, he seemed like one who is with difficulty
keeping up with the rapid course of events. But the Neophyte says
that it was some sort of electrical battery, consisting of the usual

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 227

elements, contained most ingeniously within insulating substances
and an outer sack, provided, too, beneath the left arm, with a cir-
cuit closer which could be opened or shut by alternating pressure
of the elbow, or upper arm.

Miss Estes threw the belt across her knees, for we had sat down
again, and fastened her brooch. " Now, you think that I have
tried to play a trick and that I am an impostor," she said, frankly.
" In a sense, I did ; and in a sense, I am. Yet I am not wholly
an impostor. I honestly believe in symbiotic healing, as does Dr.
Thurston. I believe that I actually cure patients and do good. I
cannot doubt it, because they get well and remain so. But I have
found that the symbiotic impulse is more effective when accentu-
ated by a current of electricity. I do not know why; perhaps the
electrical current aids to convey a vital healing impulse from me
to them; perhaps it is merely because the sensible shock of it aids
their faith and gives their confidence something real, tangible, or
sensible to hang upon. Who shall say? How much of all medi-
cine, homoeopathic, allopathic, is faith? There is the faith cure,
simple, and ' Christian science,' which is but another name for the
faith cure. It is plain that faith on the part of the patient is a
factor of some importance. It is desirable at least that the patient
should have faith. In symbiotic or vital healing, however, we
claim that an actual current or impulse passes from the physician
directly to the patient; I know this to be the fact from the sense
of exhaustion which I experience after treating the sick. After
even a few hours nothing save sound sleep and good food will
restore and recharge my nervous system. I actually give them
largely of my life, my vitality. Hence my own profound faith in
my art.

" We do it but badly yet," she continued, with a sigh, and re-
arranging her fallen hair with an absent movement of her fine
arms. " When I see people suffering, dying, and think what might
be done by symbiosis, if only we could in some way organize and
get into vital connection, so as to bring the strong combined life
currents of a score or a hundred or a thousand healthy human
organisms to bear on one sick person, why I am sometimes quite
transported by my faith and believe that miracles of healing, like
those described in the New Testament, might be wrought. I do
believe it. And isn't that really what Christianity means, this new

228 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

altruistic phase of it, namely, the combined and controlled action
of our vital currents to cure disease? To rectify error and set all
the erring right by a universal consonance of vital action; by get-
ting ' in beat ' or harmony with Nature's life, and working to-
gether to secure the health and well-being of all humanity."

The woman seemed transfigured by her earnestness and her
enthusiasm. An actress she may have been, a grand one, but there
could not be the least doubt of her earnestness and of a great
ardent purpose actuating her. The incident of the belt, which she
twirled in her hand as she made her appeal, suddenly sank to the
insignificance of the old family physician's bread pill; nor was it
even reverted to while they remained our guests.

It can hardly be denied, however, that there was something
resembling an attempt at deception — an attempt to give us the
bread pill — which rankled a little afterwards.

But the Neophyte, with all his young hardness of heart, had
forgiven it out of hand, quite forgotten it.

" She's a good egg\ " quoth he, looking regretfully after them
as they took leave and drove away. " She's a peach. I would like
her, myself.

" I served her just right, though," he added, reflectively. " She
knew that I did, too. But oh, didn't she face the music good and
large!"

"But now how do you put it up about Dr. Thurston?" the
Neophyte suddenly resumed that evening, before the fire. " As
near as I can differentiate it, he was as much at sea about that
belt as any of us. I don't think the doctor was in it. I think that
was a little private risk of her own, and not a part of the firm's
regular business."

The subject seemed to weigh on the Neophyte's mind. He sang
and whistled softly to himself as he filtered agar-agar next fore-
noon ; but he used up filter paper by the sheet.

" Now that was a grand idea. I don't see how it ever found
place in a woman's head," he observed to the '87 Graduate.

"What, the belt?"

" Oh, no, no ! that idea of symbiotic Christianity ; that scheme
she broached of uniting a thousand or so of healthy persons and,
by some special apparatus, combining and concentrating their vital
force on the sick to cure them. I tell you that was a big idea. I

THE BIO - OSCILLATOR 229

take stock in it, too. There would really be something to religion,
then. That would be taking hold of the world's ills to some pur-
pose. That would be business. That would be the millennium,
wouldn't it? Why, I never knew what that word really meant
before."

AN IMPASSIONED SOCIALIST

Professor Hamline remained with us but half an hour, and
would probably never have found his way to our laboratory in this
out-of-the- world corner of Down East but for the death of a rela-
tive whose obsequies he had come two thousand miles to attend.
Once in Maine, some whiff of local rumor that certain persons
were looking into the causes of old age with a hope of prolonging
life, piqued his curiosity and led him to call on us. Perhaps I
should rather say militated with his Idea. For the mien of our
visitor was from the first that of dissent and superior wisdom;
yet he appeared to think it worth his while to call and set us right.

Hence, on one dripping wet afternoon last April there appeared
at our door a tall man of thirty-eight, it may be, of somewhat
striking physiognomy, hair and beard glistening black, and an
irregular, high, white forehead ; a remarkable head for height, but
of short antero-posterior diameter. In a long, black, dripping
mackintosh he was personally a remarkable figure, with a flavor
of Munkacsy about him and a suggestion of the Parsee.

Our particular work that day was on the brittle old hip bone
of a woman, bedridden for ten years, at the age of eighty-eight ;
a sad object lesson in itself. The compact osseous tissue had
thinned to a perilous shell. Even the cancellous tissue had been
much reduced by absorption ; a mere old sham of a bone which
the slightest fall or even misstep might break. Contrasted with the
" control " bone from a young adult, it was indeed a pitiable ear-
nest of the present fate of aging, dying man.

Our visitor who had been made welcome and invited to see the
day's work, examined it with a certain interest, but an interest
manifestly measured by a dominant idea of his own. This delim-
itation of his sympathy was presently made more apparent by a
leading remark ; and this proved the harbinger of a plenteous out-
pour of his opinions, which were evidently fervid convictions, hot
from the man's heart.

" I grasp the central thought of your work here. I see the hope

230

AN IMPASSIONED SOCIALIST 23 1

you hold and the line of effort you are following," he exclaimed,
at length. " But do you not perceive, can you not realize, that
this conception of yours will never eventuate in what you hope for ?
That from its very nature it is un-moral and on a wrong course,
and hence ought not to succeed? "

This question was put forth with a solemn frankness which fairly
relieved it from any trace of rudeness; and the '87 Graduate re-
plied, civilly and pleasantly, that we had not been much disturbed
by such views or aspects of our inquiry.

The University Professor from beyond the Mississippi pene-
trated us with his earnest dark eyes in silence for a moment.

" Let me make plain to you the later, grander conception of
Christianity, the Christ idea of self-sacrifice and service, which is
the foundation and the basis of our new social science," he said,
with zeal suddenly unchained.

" Your effort here aspires to the culture and perpetuation of self,
to the preservation of individuality, to the apotheosis of separate
human personality, the indefinite prolongation of individual life.
But that is all wrong from the beginning. The idea is wrong at
the outset. It is the road to Death, not to Life, that you are fol-
lowing with such a painstaking of research."

" How so? " queried the Casual Worker.

" Because it is a retrogression to self, a segregation and an iso-
lation of life in self. Whereas the higher life, the only life worth
living, is an abandonment of self, a living outside and beyond self,
in the greater life of Humanity. There is no other real happiness
save in that self-abandonment and self-surrender in the social life
of the entire human race. We live and are immortal only as we
throw our lives into the one great Life which lives on from century
to century and from aeon to seon. Individual, bodily life is value-
less, worthless, Christless, save as it casts itself into the social life.
Hence, he who would save his life by personal effort loses it utterly
from the very nature of life's essence. All these separate strug-
gling human efforts to amass personal wealth and achieve personal
fame are on wrong courses and eventuate in sorrow and confusion.
Such efforts carry the unhappy devotee of self farther and farther
from the great, true Life of Man which ultimately is the Life of
Deity. To live for self and lay up treasures, either on earth or
some hoped-for heaven after death, is to leave Life and die! Those

232 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

who thus live for self-salvation and self -advancement are moral
monsters who stray off far from Life and God. Their lives are
hid not in God, but in dark holes of the earth, apart from Life.
They become, in very truth, lost souls."

" But these are generalities," remarked the Casual Worker.
" Your conception, to be fully clear to me, needs restriction to the
every-day conditions of our lives. You assert that we are wholly
wrong, at the outset. Now pray be a little more explicit. Do we
understand you to say that there is no such thing as personal or
individual immortality, that the hope of it and wish for it are im-
proper and immoral ? "

" I mean rather that such a wish is of the nature of a mistake,
an effort in the wrong direction," replied Professor Hamline. " It
is contrary to the moral order, an erratic aspiration which would
bring no real happiness with it. That is not the way to live. Per-
petuation of self is an anomaly of life, a contradiction of the very
terms of life, a reductio ad absurdam."

" But you speak of ' God,' " the '87 Graduate objected. " Under
your last deduction, * God,' if a living personality and a self, cannot
be immortal."

" God is the Greater Life of all humanity, the Life of all terres-
trial life, and not only of terrestrial life, but the Life of all life in
the universe, of unnumbered globes and spheres in outer space, the
Whole Life of the cosmos," rejoined the Socialist. " This grand
life is infinitely higher in degree and in quality than the life of
any organism, animal or human. This grander life is to the per-
sonal life of a man as the life of the entire brain, the intellect, is
to the life of a single cell of the brain. It is something loftier,
more intelligent, divine and omniscient, something to which the
individual self-life could never attain in quality, even if it could
prolong itself for a thousand years, or a million. You see now
why I think you are going wrong. You see now what I mean by
•coming out of the self-life and rising into this grander life of all
humanity. You see now why self -perpetuation, if possible, would
be a mistake and an impropriety, a contradiction of the moral
order, a failure to develop. It would be like the survival of some
old reptilian type which in the natural progress of species should
have become extinct. It would be retrogression, not progress."

" But what is your method, your formula, for entering into this

AN IMPASSIONED SOCIALIST 233

greater life, for leaving self behind and rising into the higher life
of ' God/ as you describe it?" the Casual Worker asked.

" Simply to forget all personal cares, all worries and fears about
self. Cease from self-consciousness and all selfish, personal plans
and schemes, and with these will vanish envy, pique, resentment,
hatred, grudges, desire for revenge, and also the fear of disease and
death. All such miseries pertain wholly to self. As soon as you
forget self these disappear from the intellect, and you are ready to
rise to the higher life. With the effacement of egotism, moreover,
sex-lust ceases to be felt, leaving in its place naught save a passional
love for every other fellow-being."

" Even if it were possible to become thus self-forgetful and yet
live, of what is one to think? " questioned the '87 Graduate. " For
one must think of something, or become cataleptic.

" Enter without self-reserve into the life and interests of all
men," replied the Socialist Professor, with enthusiasm. " Into our
national life, let us say, into all the great social and public questions
and enterprises of the times. Immerse yourself wholly in them.
Work and live in them. Transfer your personal life from self
into these currents of the national life. Throw your life into them.
Life is an etheric current in the brain. Instead of allowing it to
spend its force there, as a useless, tiresome eddy of self, direct it
outward into the great attractive currents of all human life, or, as
I said a moment ago, into the national life of these ninety millions
of people in the United States.

" The moment you really succeed in doing that, in diverting your
personal vital current out of your own confined organism into the
great social current, you will experience a sudden thrill of the most
exquisite happiness, a joy that you never felt before. You will
then catch your first intimation of what the higher life is. As
plainly as if God had spoken to you will the revelation what this
new higher life is come to your mind and your heart. You will
realize then how futile, meager and undesirable self-life is. You
will see then what I mean when I tell you that a personal, self-
immortality, either in the body or out of it, in some mythic ' heaven,'
would be worthless, wrong, and immoral, a solecism, a retrogres-
sion, a reversion of the intellectual type. The moment you enter
this grander life and feel the new joy and thrill of it, you will
cease, as in the twinkling of an eye, to wish to live in any other

234 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

way. The desire of continued self-life will cease. You will no
longer desire an immortality of self on earth, or in ' heaven,' for
you will feel that you have found something better and nobler.
This is strictly a physical process, the rising to a higher plane of
mentality. Not all the treasures of earth nor the promises of
* heaven ' would tempt you to go back, or accept immortal self-
life. For you have been rescued from self, and you will feel and
know, absolutely, that your ' soul ' has, indeed, been saved. For
the only ' hell ' is the hell of self.

" And this," continued Professor Hamline, " this life in the com-
mon life is the Christ-life. This is the great truth which Jesus
sought to teach humanity, the salvation of the human soul by self-
renunciation and self-sacrifice, — a transfiguration as demonstrable
even in terms of energy as is the transformation of heat into volts
of electro-motive force. This great new idea was the corner-stone
of Christianity. It is the keynote of modern socialism."

" And the human longing which we all feel for continued life,
for immortal life, what of that? " queried the Casual Worker.

" It is but a spasm of self ; it passes and ceases to be felt when
once the self and self interests are thrown forward into the higher
life," replied the Professor. " There can be no fear of death when
self is renounced, no dread, no sting, for all these emotions spring
from egotism, or egoism. Why, don't you see there is no longer a
self to die, or to fear death for? You have passed from death unto
life. You have already, before the cessation of the organic func-
tions, entered immortal life as a part of the higher Life of Man.
You have no longer anything to do with the thought of individual
immortality, either in the body or as a disembodied soul. You
are saved from that; for this is the real salvation of Christ, the
transfer of the human soul or intellect from self into the greater,
grander life of the universe. And when once we feel the thrill
and the joy of entry into that grander life, we gladly abandon self-
life and go to it, as to heaven."

" But this natural abhorrence of death, this dread of ceasing to
live, is deeply implanted, at least in me," remarked the Casual
Worker. " How shall I begin to abate it, or even to lessen it ? "

" By love, just as Jesus taught; by love for all men, love for all
one's fellow-beings, the passional giving of one's interests and ef-
forts for their good. Jesus experienced all this. He opened the

AN IMPASSIONED SOCIALIST 235

way, and showed us how to leave self and the fear of death and
rise into the heavenly life.

" And now can you not see that this enterprise of yours at this
laboratory is retrogressive and reactionary ? or in plainer language,
that you are on the wrong track, and that your very success would
defeat itself in the act of succeeding? "

" You put us on our defence," replied the '87 Graduate, laugh-
ing. " In reality this is the old question of individualism as against
communism and pantheism. In India, thousands of years ago, they
sought to work out this conception in Brahminism, and later in
Buddhism, where the leading idea or tenet is escape from individual
life into nirvana, the peace of universal life. I deem it quite pos-
sible to so train, discipline and school the mind and its emotions
as to throw one's personal interests, hopes and fears from self to
humanity as a whole. I think that it can, as you allege, be done
to a considerable extent, and that a certain solace may be found in
it. As a makeshift to assuage the personal fear and hardship of
death, it may even be advisable, since it usually redounds to the
public good. A person may meet death the more bravely for it,
and even die happily in such disciplined self-surrender. To those
who cannot achieve prolonged personal life it may even be an allow-
able solace. Temporarily allowable, I mean, for a few centuries
or a few thousand years longer, but not ultimately, or as a final
law of life."

" But it is a final law of life! " Professor Hamline interposed.

" On that point I differ from you, radically," replied the '87
Graduate. " I have no wish for an argument, however ; discus-
sions of individualism versus communism and pantheism always
end weakly and wordily. But the facts from hist-ology and biology
are all for individualism and for that self -life which you so much
decry. Not for a disproportionately selfish life, but for personal
intellect and character. The grand science of physiology is a well-
nigh perfect argument for individualism. The argument from the
icell which you have brought forward, i. e., the union of cell lives
in a human intellect, as illustrating and proving your position, is,
when understood, a complete refutation of that position. The evo-
lution of life on the earth has been the development of self, from
first to last. From unicellular life upward through metazoans to
man, the aim and motif have been to give field for individuality

236 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

and personal self. Not only do the united brain cells live consen-
tiently in order to utter a strong personal life, but by the very act
of thus uniting, they have each been made stronger and more force-
ful as cell selves. There can be no general weakening of cell self
without slackening and failure of the entire organic life.

" It is not otherwise with the life of a nation or of humanity
in its relation to the life of each citizen, or human being. For what
is the nation? What is this humanity into which you exhort us
to throw ourselves and renounce self? What is it but a million or
a billion of our personal individual selves ? Nor is it, as you claim,
a grander or higher life than that of the individual man or citizen.
On the contrary, it is notorious that the character and morals of
nations are never as high or lofty as the life and character of any
good citizen. Every great nation of the earth to-day is living a
life in its foreign and domestic policy such as any honest, educated
man among us must despise and condemn. How, then, can we cast
ourselves with full sympathy and veneration into that which is
lower and baser? "

" To make it purer ! " interjected the Socialist Professor.

" Oh, that indeed, but that is not the point here at issue," re-
joined the '87 Graduate. " It is the question of a loftier, higher
life. But a national life, or a life of all humanity, is an abstraction,
at best.

" A nation exists only in the selves of its citizens. The best
citizens of a nation, too, are always the men of strongest, staunchest
self-life, who make their personality a dominant force in the nation
and in the world, the men who from sheer force of self and per-
sonal character break out of the common national life and lead it
upward to something better. What would the world be but for
such men? And what are they but powerful eddies of personal
self? Why, Professor, your argument for the abatement of self
is contrary to the course of nature and matter. The sentient atoms
unite in a cell which sets up at once a personal axis and could not
live without one. The human organism is composed of cells, but
each cell retains and maintains its personal self-axis. You could
not have a human intellect without these millions of cell selves. If
they were each to abandon self, there would be no personal human
self. It is only by virtue of the component cell selves that the
larger personal self of a human life comes into being. When you

AN IMPASSIONED SOCIALIST 237

strike at the principle of self, you unwittingly deal your ideal life
of pan-humanity a mortal blow. You obliterate it at its source.

" Again, practically, as we now lead our imperfect lives, a young
man must live shrewdly and diligently for self to earn a competence,
make a home, select another, female self as a mate and bring other
young selves into existence. To do this he is absolutely compelled
to think for self and work for self and be very decently selfish. If
he failed to do so, where would your ' grander life ' of humanity be
in the course of thirty or forty years ?

" More practically still, it seems to me that you ought heartily to
endorse our idea of prolonging personal life, for if human beings
did not die so constantly, after a brief lifetime, they would acquire
greater stores of knowledge. Instead of being mainly lost by death,
as now constantly occurs, there would be a conservation of knowl-
edge and experience in the individual. Men would be wiser and
live more correctly, and thus ' the higher, grander life of humanity,'
on which you lay such stress, would be elevated and improved,
since the ' Life of Man ' is but the sum of individual lives and its
wisdom but the totality of human knowledge."

"Oh, but — you fail to grasp my idea!" exclaimed Professor
Hamline. He began to elucidate again, but merely iterated his
dominant idea, the idea of the Christ-life.

The '87 Graduate resumed confidently, and the argument would
no doubt have lasted the day out and ended " weakly and wordily,"
but that our visitor's stay was limited by a railway time-table.

" If I had but the time! " he exclaimed, impulsively, at the door,
" I would convince you ; I am certain that I could. I utter a great
world truth which must reach you in time."

" You have truth, no doubt, but don't think that you have all the
truth," said the '87 Graduate. " Truth is like the universe, bound-
less, infinite."

" And thank you for coming ! " exclaimed the Casual Worker.
" Come again and have it out with us whenever you can. The
truth is what we want here. Meantime, let us have an abounding
charity and toleration one for another, for that is in the ' Christ-
life,' too, is it not? "

So with a " charity " hand-shake all around we parted ; yet the
Professor went away with a baffled wrinkle in his brow, as of one
reluctant to quit the field till he has silenced all his enemy's guns.

238 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

The ardor of combat still lingered in the '87 Graduate's eye, also.

" What a purist! What a stark, staring purist! " he exclaimed,
as he watched the Professor striding rapidly down the misty path.
" When one of these college professors sets up as a socialist,
good-by to ajil moderation and common sense."

" But he has an idea," said the Casual Worker.

" An idea ! yes ; the idea of a termite communist, a beehive
socialist."

" But who knows ? Perhaps a white ant republic is the best that
can be done by humanity on so hard and baffling a theater of life
as this bleak old earth," remarked the Casual Worker, thoughtfully.

" What a lack of faith ! " exclaimed the '87 Graduate, warming
for battle again. '' Why, every step in the progress of humanity
has been due to the heroism or the hard work of the individual, the
scholar, the statesman, the military chieftain, the artist, the scientist.
Always to the single man, the individual, never to the herd of men.
And this modern communistic effort, what is it ? Rightly estimated,
it is all for the individual, all to give the common man a better
chance to live, develop, and enjoy his life than was possible under
the old conditions. I boldly assert that modern socialism, altruism,
communism, ' anarchism,' ' nihilism,' all are but the struggles of
individualism for a higher recognition. It is a great spontaneous
throe of humanity to give the obscure poor man fair gla-y^ to give
the common individual an equal chance in the world. In one word,
it is individualism."

A MERYCOLE

One who signs himself " A Good Catholic " has written in ex-
cellent spirit, to remonstrate against what he is led to term the
bitterness expressed in Salvation by Science against the Romish
Church.

I feel that this remonstrant misunderstands the Promethean
Faith. It is not Christianity, its spirit, its good works, or its
achievements in the past, of which Americans are doubtful for the
future, but the insistence with which the Church of Rome teaches
an outgrown dogmatism, forcing upon the mind of the child a
catechism and ritual which the child has infallibly to reject and
cast aside a few years later.

We deem this insistence dangerous to proper mental growth.

As illustrative in part of what is meant, allow me to relate the
story of a curious occurrence at this laboratory.

The first autumnal chill of the advancing season had come to us
that evening, Aug. 29; — for Maine verges northward under the
Seven Plow-oxen. From over the hills and woods. White Moun-
tainward, the wind puffed sturdily; the cold came with it, as it
often comes here by the last night of summer.

The Casual Worker, who had been with us four days on this
particular occasion, laid a fire in the laboratory fireplace, the first
of the season. The '87 Graduate drew up a creaky old basket-
bottomed rocking-chair, and raised his very American heels against
the right jamb; the Neophyte hauled in an oak settee upon the left
flank ; and the Casual Worker lighted a cigar, in the middle back-
ground. From their general air, it was plain that there would be
chat, argument, or agnosticism, as the case might be.

Peter Bubier, the chore boy, came in, fetching great sticks of
four-foot wood for the fire from the shed, and unwittingly fur-
nished the theme ; for Peter was chewing his cud. He is a French

239

240 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

Canadian from the Three Rivers region, emigrant from a parish
up the St. Maurice, but claims to hail from Three Rivers, for he
does not wish his priest to learn of his whereabouts.

The trouble is about Peter's cud. We fancied at first that it
was tobacco or spruce gum which he held so constantly in his
mouth. The cud, however, proves to be something of a phenome-
non ; Peter actually raises and re-masticates a part of his food, —
ruminates. In short, Peter is a merycole. Shall we call it bovin-
thropy? Is rumination in man a reversion of type, a freakish sur-
vival, or is it a still more freakish instance of nature's perverse
imitativeness across the gulf of species? What is the true history
of the vermiform appendix which has now fallen into the hands
of surgery? A young surgeon who visits us here says that this
antiquated appendix v. should be removed from each nursing in-
fant, and save trouble in the adult; no aspect of the thymus gland
discussion terrifies him. " It ought to be out," he asserts. He
would like exceedingly to examine Peter's, and runs an inventory
glance over him at times, the full significance of which Peter him-
self has no conception of, or we would not keep him long.

Peter is a sturdy, well-knit little dark fellow of twenty-four, pure
French from the days of Roberval, scrubby, provincial French.
He is alert, content, a good worker.

He fetches in the armful of four-foot wood; and the Neophyte,
swinging aside for him to throw it in the wood box, says, " Well,
Nebuchadnezzar, how does your old cud taste to-night? Sit down
here, Peter, and tell us what the priest said to you."

" Said, ' 'Pit it,' " Peter replies, reluctantly.

"Spit it out?"

" Old, oui; ' 'pit it.' "

But he will not sit down with us to talk about it.

*' Dis is too hort here," he exclaims, pointing to the fire; it is
but his excuse to get away. The truth is that Peter is afraid. We
l<now the facts, however. The Canadian priest had overhauled
Peter's nutritive habits and decided that they were unregenerate,
anti-Catholic and subject to church authority. Man, redeemed from
animalism and a candidate for salvation by grace of our Lord and
Saviour, must have done with the cud business. With the weight
of apostolic authority behind him, he directed Peter to repress his
desire to raise the cud by all the force of his will and by prayer;

A MERYCOLE 24I

and if anything rose inadvertently, to eject it at once from his
mouth.

And Peter " 'pit it," and in consequence grew wondrous ill at
ease; he could not sleep; he became thin and unwell. At length
he ran away to Maine without the knowledge of his priest. But
he was in fee of a sweetheart; and goaded by his fears of rivals,
he contrived to write a letter to her wherein he acquainted her of
his constancy and his present whereabouts, but enjoined strictest
secrecy as to the latter.

The Acadian damsel replied, promising to be silent as the grave ;
but her priest who had heard that she had received a letter, wrung
the entire matter from her at confessional, whereupon the girl
wrote yet again to Peter asserting that she had told no one !

Hence on a day which he could not know, his priest wrote to a
priest at Bangor enjoining Peter's reclamation to parochial au-
thority, and the latter came to find him. For be it known that the
French Canadian, coming into New England, was for a time in
a condition not a little resembling that of a fugitive slave in the
Northern States, before the days of John Brown.

" Ah, bitter irony of time, that Puritania should but too surely
become a Romish province, and its soil groan under an ugly burden
of Catholic church architecture!" the Neophyte exclaims.

It is too late; at least, our young associate says so. The mis-
chief is already done, he asserts. That priceless freedom of thought
which brought forth our national idea and founded the free public
school is to be smothered by the Papist catechism. The Norland
hill country which nurtured Websters and Sumners passes under
the yoke of that church whose synonym is intellectual blight ; that
church which so jealously inoculates the tender mind of the child
with doctrines which make a mental eunuch of him through life.
The Neophyte really thinks so ; and he adduces history and physi-
ology in evidence.

In New England, of all lands, the mental condition of Spain,
Italy and Mexico is to be reproduced. That very liberality and
breadth of thought which inspired the framers of our national
Constitution to make America the refuge of the oppressed every-
where, has proved our undoing; for the oppressed brought along
with him the oppressor, enshrined in his bosom.

And now whitherward shall the lover of intellectual freedom

242 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

turn, to stand clear of the octopus clutch of that hierarchy and the
fatal incubus of its indoctrination? To Australia? A century
hence Anglo-Saxon Australia will eclipse America, — if only Aus-
tralians are warned in time by the race catastrophe in America.
Geographically America has shielded Australia and stood to it as
the flood-gate and sluice-rack to divert the tides of emigration.
Trebly fortujiate in this, the progressive race may find on this last
of earth's continents a field for its slower growth and larger de-
velopment.

An English writer, the most remarkable literary light of this
generation, who at one time made New England his quasi place of
abode, has written not wisely nor well of the decadence of New
England and the " going to seed " of Puritanism, having for his
text and his illustration a rural county of our north country, to
which as yet few aliens have penetrated. In the condition of life in
that locality he believed that he saw the natural outcome of the
Puritanic flight to America.

Strange that a man as acute of vision should have gone so far
astray in his observation!

What he saw in that rustic county was but the graves of the
Puritans. The Puritans, indeed, are no longer in New England.
They migrated years ago; have been migrating for a century.
First came the migration to Pennsylvania and Western New York ;
then to Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Kansas, all
of the corn and wheat States. For a century, the brightest, the
strongest and the most energetic of New England's sons and
daughters have taken their way westward. The only wonder is
that anything remains over and above such an enormous depletion
of the best blood, brain and muscle ; that so much of intelligence
and energy is left behind. Why, all the Midland States, as also
Texas, California and Oregon, are but so many later New Eng-
lands. The leading spirits, the owners of property, the controlling
and directing minds are nearly all New Englanders, or of New
England parentage.

Pioneers from these six eastern Anglo-Saxon colonies carried
the first germs of business enterprise and civil government to every
new territory of the national domain. The extreme truth of the
above assertion will prove a matter of astonishment to any one who
will take the trouble to inform himself of both the early history and

A MERYCOLE 243

present social and industrial condition of every State of the Repub-
lic, save eight of the Southern States; and since the abolition of
slavery, these eight States are being revivified from the same fruit-
ful source. It is not more than the truth, that the well-spring of
the national life was from that one lonely colony on the Massa-
chusetts coast, in 1620. Nor in the now known correlation of the
physical and moral forces of man is this a fact to excite wonder.
For what was the dominant idea of the New England colonist?
Freedom of thought promoted by public instruction, and self-gov-
ernment based on such freedom. That was the Puritanic idea;
and for the fostering of it there went self-denial, continence, tem-
perance in all things, enforced with an austerity sterner than Cato's.
Such an idea, thus fostered, could but prove a prevalent force in
the world, a force that will be felt for a thousand years.

The Puritans still live in every State of the nation, and lend
power and vigor to the national life, and will so live, even although
the sterile soil of New England is populated by immigrant aliens,
and desecrated by that paganized form of Christianity which the
Puritans abhorred.

New England was the cradle of the nation's infancy; but now
the child has grown and left It, and the old cradle is relegated to
the barn for pups and kittens to nest in. It may not be worth while
to grieve or indulge in sentiment over It, yet it once rocked a divine
child. Let that only be remembered. Let it be as when we visit
Greece, or the shrine of a hero of old. Ordure of degeneration
will lie about; and as we pore, a vermin-infested beggar will
whine, " I too am a Puritan ! For the love of the Virgin, a few
cents."

Such are the vaticinations of the Neophyte touching Romanism
in America. On this woe he out-Cassandras Cassandra. His
lament, however, is not common property with us.

But Peter caught sight of the Bangor priest coming to his board-
ing place one evening, and slipping out at a back door fled again far
across the country and took service with us.

As we talked of these things before the first autumn fire that
night, and predicted the future of this quarter of our • common
country, Peter sat on the door-step outside and chewed his cud. It
may be partly fancy, but he really appears to lapse into an ox-like

244 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

mood as he ruminates ; the calm of an internal pre-occupation takes
possession of his brain. Otherwise his whole aspect, day by day,
is one of settled, plaintive anxiety. His sweetheart and his priest
lie heavy on his heart and lower its beating. Yet the dire corporeal
stress of his outlawed cud is heavier still; and his life drags on,
beset with miseries. He is happiest when ruminating, at least,
calmest, a bovine calm.

Observation shows that he masticates at meals, as thoroughly
as the average; and his teeth are excellent. Even after a break-
fast of well-cooked oat-meal, he shows a tendency to raise particles,
but not as much as after a dinner of meats, vegetables, green let-
tuce, etc., when for several hours subsequently, of an evening,
Peter is busy, indeed. While hard at work sawing wood, or wheel-
ing fuel into the shed, Peter rarely raises his cud, but on sitting
to rest for a time will begin soon to do so, and munch away with
apparent satisfaction, particularly when his breakfast has consisted
of tough beef-steak. Nor is he apt to evince much appetite for his
noon lunch if he has not had time during the morning to re-mas-
ticate his breakfast. Apparently, rumination is necessary to his
physical well-being; and no doubt he was a sufferer in many ways
not easily described, while attempting to break off the habit or
function, by ejecting what rose to his mouth. It is not unlikely
that his life might have paid the forfeit of a rigid adherence to
the commands of his spiritual director ; and that in a strictly literal
sense, Peter had been obliged to choose between a continuation of
his terrestrial life and the sacerdotal promise of a heavenly one.

In some way his priest again became aware of his whereabouts.
Peter had been with us for no more than a month, when a very
civil letter was received at the laboratory from a priest at a neigh-
boring factory town, inquiring whether one Pierre Bubier, who
was described with the accuracy of an anthropometric chart, was
sojourning with us.

To this tentative missive, the Neophyte replied with the unwise
warmth of youth, stating the facts, giving the physiological data
of the case, pointing out the folly of interference with a function
so deep-seated and requesting that the stress to which the poor
fellow had been subjected should cease at once. In his ardor the
Neophyte demanded that a promise to cover this latter request
should be communicated through him to Peter.

A MERYCOLE 245

In reply to this humane but indiscreet outburst, there was pres-
ently received as smooth a rejoinder as one would ever have ex-
pected from Machiavelli himself. In it showed forth that well-
organized, long-perfected policy of dominating mankind which has
been maturing for fifteen centuries. The promise, forsooth, was
not forth-coming; and summed up, the letter was to the effect that
the Holy Church, and not laymen, must decide by its canons all
final questions of life and salvation.

We made merry with the Neophyte that evening, and put him in
a state of mind so heated that he again replied to his canonical
correspondent, avouching succinctly that if Peter were molested
he would lodge a complaint against his persecutors and test the
matter in the courts. An answer to this democratic ultimatum has
not yet reached us.

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION

" But " — one writes — "I want a faith that comforts and
solaces me in sickness and in death. What is it to me that future
generations may achieve immortal life under nature? I want a
religion that will save me. You will find that nobody will want
this scientific faith of yours. What people want and what they
will adopt and pay for, is a religion that saves them, personally,"

The above is quoted from a recent letter, and others give ex-
pression to similar sentiments.

It reveals an attitude of mind which has supervened from cen-
turies of indoctrination by supernaturalism, namely, that it is a
religion per se, some religion, or any religion, which saves men,
and confers on them the gift of immortal life, as a reward for
believing in it.

It is an obsession which has come from that long-iterated doc-
trine, that men, or a certain number of men, will be "saved," by
divine favor or grace. Hence, naturally, such minds demand such
a religion, and — like the above writer — are inclined to feel ag-
grieved unless it is furnished to them.

Scientific research does not undertake to furnish faiths-to-suit,
or religions-to-please. That is the function of the paid priest.
Science points out the facts and brings truth to light. That is its
great office, its service to the world. To the facts and truths of
nature we have to adapt ourselves.

Because devotees and sectaries have been deluded in the past and
their minds wonted to pleasing, false promises, does by no means
constitute an obligation on scientific research to furnish further
illusions, either for solace, or comfort.

Nature is not especially merciful to man, nor to any order of her
fauna. We have to make our own way on the earth and do
the best we can with conditions as we find them. Such is the cos-
mos. No human religion can alter it.

In this present, imperfect life of ours, there is but one grand,
fascinating, ever-satisfying pursuit — the pursuit of truth. That
pursuit and that alone insures a progressive growth of mind and

246

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 247

bfl-ain, with mental health and moral elevation. In good sooth, as
a great Teacher once said, " The truth shall make you free," free
of error, free of disease and pain, free of death. Death is that last
enemy of life, which shall be destroyed in the future " Kingdom of
God " on earth.

For truth is life, the soul of the cosmos. Even as we grope for
it and dredge it up, bit by bit, from research with microscope and
test-tube, it invigorates and renews the mind. It brings joy and
hope. It breaks the stasis of mortal selfishness. It clears the
mental sky. It puts one in accord and in harmony with the steady
beat and throb of the whole universe. It is the true elixir of life,
the synonym of immortality.

Faith springs from the apprehension of truth. It is faith and
hope which have pioneered all the great achievements of man in
the past. Immortal life will not be achieved until the achievement
becomes a Faith. Faith leads the way and centralizes effort.

In this respect Salvation by Science will not differ from the other
great cults, or onward movements, of the human race. The ideo-
volts of Faith are ever required to push them forward to attain-
ment. It was so with early Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and the
lesser cults. Faith had first to be generated in the minds of men
to stimulate them to work and fight.

To achieve immortal life we have need to grasp the facts, dis-
cover the truth and perceive that this grand promise of life-on-
earth can be realized, that this great, sweet boon of life, free from
disease and death, can really be won. Then will begin the world-
wide effort of achievement. Then will be seen such a bending to
the task of the energies of mankind as the earth has never before
witnessed. Literally then, and in good truth, we shall be working
for life's sake with new-born hope ahead.

Another kindly critic, evidently a thoughtful mind, writes, " I
admire your devotion to the ' Promethean Faith,' and I fully be-
lieve that good will come from all earnest efforts at research. But
allow me to advise you (as a friend if you will permit me thus to
style myself) to say nothing of the bearing of these researches on
the doctrine of disembodied soul life. That doctrine is dear to the
hearts of millions ; and even if, as you believe, it is a delusion, no
good can come from controverting it. You will but subject your-

248 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

self to bitter attacks and even to personal hostility, which will in-
jure the Faith you are trying to teach, and lead thousands to reject
it, without a hearing.

" You will deprive yourself of the sympathy and cooperation of
thousands who would otherwise work with you. Among Christian
people, generally, you will be shunned and ignored, instead of
praised.

" My friend, the world, particularly the religious world, is not
ready for this sterner feature of the ' Promethean Faith.' People
still cling fondly to the doctrine of personal life after death. It is
almost cruel to attack it ; and, if you will pardon me for saying
so, it is hardly courteous or in good taste.

" As your well-wisher, I counsel you seriously to avoid all refer-
ence to this part of ' the new Faith of Science.' Let that come in
the future, if come it must. Break it gradually, graciously. Allow
the world time to ponder the idea of self-salvation, first, and the
grim alternative, later."

The above is manifestly the advice of a friend. It is gladly
received and deeply appreciated, all the more that the subject is
one which has been under consideration frequently for twenty
years, even including the question of bad taste and rudeness to
popular sensibility, which is not without its claim and weight.

In replying, it is well to call to mind that they who read Salvation
by Science are not those who throng the nave of cathedrals and
other places of public worship and adoration. That entire great
class, composed largely of immigrant, indoctrinated minds, will
never learn much of the Promethean Faith, and hence may be left
out of the present consideration. By estimate, there are one
million persons in America and in England, including one hundred
and twenty thousands in Germany and France, to whose thought-
ful attention and estimation Salvation by Science now bids fair to
come. These are persons of education and varied attainments,
often holding radical views and beliefs. In a word, they are people
who think for themselves and are quite capable of forming opinions
of their own on all subjects.

On maturest consideration, I do not believe that this class de-
sires, or requires, to have the truths of nature half stated or dis-
guised as something different, sugar-coated, or made into baby-pap.
I take it for granted that these persons want to know all that is

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 249

known, and all that is probable, touching life and death; that they
are ready to face the facts and act on them. I would deem myself
guilty of a piece of impertinence if I assumed any other position
toward them, and would expect to be laughed at. To pop one's
self up on such a pedestal before an audience of educated people
would be a piece of egotism, worthy only of ridicule.

The question touches deeper considerations. The plain fact is
that Salvation by Science reverses supernaturalism in all its forms
and tenets. It derives its present force in the world from the fact
that supernatural salvation is now invalidated. What is more, the
new faith cannot be properly and adequately stated without directly
■controverting the dogma of disembodied soul life after death.

If this earth is merely a species of green-house for propagating
human " souls " and bringing them forward for early transplanta-
tion by death, to a distant " heaven," then the achievement of pro-
longed life is nonsense and contrary to the alleged " divine scheme "
of things.

Natural salvation and supernatural salvation are diametrically
opposed to each other. It comes to a question of veracity between
them. The student has to decide for himself which he will accept
as truth.

The matter goes even deeper. If supernatural salvation be the
one true and only road to immortal life, then evolution is but a
futile divarication of earthly life and the growth of scientific knowl-
edge is scarcely worth while. That, in fact, is and always has been
the church view of the matter.

There is still another consideration. The writer is one who has
always felt that the discovery of truth carries with it the sacred
obligation for utterance; that it is not to be sequestered, hood-
winked, nor hidden under a bushel. The negative view of disem-
bodied spirit life is presented here in the interest of human progress ;
not in wantonness of giving pain, if pain is given, but in regret of it.
Truth is a necessity to that progress.

And this leads naturally to a question, raised by a casuist critic,
as to the real or relative nature of truth. In the course of a long
letter of dissent, not unleavened by sarcasm, this other critic says,
" To my mind it does not matter a rap whether your ' Promethean
Faith,' or Christianity, is * true,' or ' false,' judged by any standard
which you or I might set up. I do not believe there is any such

250 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

thing as truth in that sense. Truth is what a person beheves.
What is truth to him one year may be false to him next year. So it
is never worth while to introduce a new faith on the score of its
being the truth. Go on with the faith that people have, I say. It
is not worth while to start new ones. One thing is as true as an-
other, if people only think so."

It would be just as well, then, for people to believe that the moon
is a green cheese and the sun a huge smiling yellow pumpkin, or
in obeah, or witchcraft, or any other erroneous doctrine, contrary
to fact.

The difficulty with this critic is that he confounds what is truth
to the individual, subjectively, with truth, objectively. Such sub-
jective " truth " may or may not be delusion ; but objective truth
is absolute and eternal, the same yesterday, to-day, forever. The
idealism of Berkeley was but a fantasy. Objective truth is the
cosmic state of things in a real universe. A certain belief, or
tenet, may be true, subjectively, to a believer, yet be utterly untrue
de facto, that is to say objectively.

Unless what is true, subjectively, to the individual corresponds
with truth, objectively, his belief may be in the highest degree in-
jurious to him, putting him out of all harmony and peace with
nature as a whole.

The problem in religion and everything else in life, is ever to
make what seems true to us, personally, approximate real, objective
truth; in other words, to bring our minds in harmony with all
nature. That is what growth in knowledge signifies, namely, self-
rectification ; and the far outlook of such growth is " the spiritual
calm and peace of the gods," happiness, immortal life.

" By what authority do you style Salvation by Science the creed
of Science?" A Professor of Botany writes from a Western
University, to ask the above question, censoriously ; " I do not for
a moment believe," he continues, " that scientists endorse it. I am
sure that I do not, nor do I know one who does, or would. Your
claim that Science teaches it, or tacitly acquiesces in it, is prepos-
terous and misleading. Science is fast coming to learn, through
Psychical Research, that there is present everywhere an inner world
of disembodied spirits, into which we enter at death. Our knowl-
edge gro^ys in this direction, and will soon displace any such vagary

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 25 1

as your so-called * Promethean Faith ' which is a hopeless, im-
possible faith, at best. The earth is not a fit place for prolonged
human life ; nor do I beheve that it could ever be made such. Life
soon comes to an end here. Chemical action tends to limit all
animal organisms to comparatively brief life-times."

Replying to the last of this botanist's strictures, first, it may be
said that there are well-authenticated instances in plant life, where
trees (sequoias, baobabs) have lived for four thousand years; also
where animal organisms — the elephant, the whale — have roamed
either the land surface or the seas of the earth, for two and even
three centuries. We know, too, that the human organism has sur-
vived, in fairly good health, for a century and a half.

As a botanist this critic should have known — before saying that
prolonged life on earth is impossible — that under certain ideal
conditions plant life on our planet is deathless, in the sense of sur-
viving, potentially, as long as air and sunshine co-exist.

Furthermore, that the stable, well-nigh invariable formulas and
ratios of chemical action, on the earth's surface, are among the
best proofs we have that human organisms may be composed and
maintained indefinitely. In fact, the terrestrial chemical basis for
prolonged life is almost perfect. As to this, consult any well-in-
structed chemist. The corpuscle of negative electricity (electron)
and the atoms and molecules of nearly all the so-called " elements "
of terrestrial matter have not, so far as known, varied during a
hundred millions of years.

If the human organism under the imperfect conditions of en-
vironment and food which prevail at present, has survived in health
for a hundred and fifty years, is it preposterous to suppose that
under ideally better conditions it might survive double that length
of time; or even indefinitely, under progressively improved con-
ditions ?

Undoubtedly this question touches down to deeper levels. This
is merely a reply to the assertion of our botanist critic, on grounds
which he himself takes.

Reverting to the first of his criticisms, it may be said, frankly,
that no class of men differ more variously, or are less well organ-
ized, inter se, as regards their opinions than " scientists." Par-
ticularly is this true in the matter of their religious opinions.

Then, too, there are scientists and scientists, of all degrees of

252 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

erudition and cultivation, scientists soi-disant, and those so-called,
in honor, by common consent of their fellow-men; also thousands
of very lovable, cheerful Christian Scientists who claim that Jesus,
too, was a " scientist " and that Mrs. Mary B. G. Eddy was another
and still better one. It is a matter for congratulation that so many
of our fellow creatures are, or wish to be, scientists; it is a laud-
able ambition ; and science is large enough, broad enough, wide
enough, for us all to nestle fraternally together under its wing —
if we can only think so.

There was no intention to assert in these pages that Salvation
by Science (the Promethean Faith) is the faith or creed of all who
call themselves scientists, or of all college professors, physicists
and chemists, or that it is the belief even of all those most renowned
in scientific research. Science is still inchoate and unorganized as
regards the views and opinions of its vast personnel, scattered over
six continents and two hemispheres. One scientist often disputes
what another asserts, and we are driven to discriminate.

The intent and purpose here has been to convey the idea that
Salvation by Science is the belief which the most advanced scien-
tific knowledge of our times not only teaches, but necessitates ; that
it is the faith which future, educated America will be compelled,
logically, to adopt. On these grounds we are ready to array the
facts and meet the counter argument — when it is really argument
— of any opponent.

Since the first editions of Salvation by Science were published,
a number of reviewers and critics have described it as " an attempt
at a new religion," " a new cult of Nature," and, generally, as
something newly devised.

It would have been better described as the oldest of all religions,
the religion of cell life, the instinct-efifort of the protozoon to save
itself. Compared with this natural effort at salvation, on the part
of the unicells of the ancient earth, the World's five great Creeds
are as novelties of yesterday. A hundred millions of years ago,
natural salvation was operative and prevalent ; it is coeval with the
earliest metazoons; the first cult of unicellular life; the "golden
rule " of the cell. The golden rule of Christianity, indeed, is re-
flected upward from it, upward from this lowly sentiment for union
and cooperation on the part of the component cell life of the body.

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 253

" An opponent," thus styling himself, asks, with a flavor of
derision, " Do you actually believe that the protozoa, the unicellular
life on the ancient sea beaches, united of their ow^n accord, as
sentient creatures, to form the metazoa, and that the human or-
ganism, the human brain, has resulted from a plan or design on
their part to better themselves and rise in the scale of existence,
looking to cell immortality? "

The answer is, no ; nor has any such position been taken in
Salvation by Science. We do not know how or why cells combined,
whether by accidental cohering, or because they derived some im-
mediate advantage of safety or food by keeping together. We
have no more supposed that the combining unicells had a far-
reaching design, or foresaw the results of their unions, than that
the individual locusts of a swarm foresee the famine that may
follow its flight; or that the individual hoplite under Xenophon,
who marched with Cyrus the Younger, foresaw that this immortal
expedition would open the way to the victories of Alexander and
to the third great empire of antiquity.

We do not suppose that the unicell of the Silurian beach foresaw
its apotheosis in the brain neuron of a Webster, a Washington,
or a Lincoln. The cell but chose to do what felt best for itself;
or it may even have been coerced to what it did by the merest acci-
dent of its environment.

It would neither add nor detract from our present estimate of
the impersonality of cosmos, were we to learn that all the meta-
zoons, including mankind, started from the accident of a few
grains of sand falling foul of a cell, a hundred millions of years
ago. We have given up the idea of design in Nature to that ex-
tent. Nature neither lets nor hinders; the liberty of cosmos can in
no other way be conserved. Why speak of design? Nature needs
not design.

With greater justice one of the associate editors of the American
Journal of Science calls attention to the fact that the cells of polyzoa
— hristadella mucedo, for example, — are more fully organized
than I have seemed to describe them.

This is a deserved criticism, and I am glad to record it here.
At this late age of the earth's vital history, it is not easy to find
illustrations of early metazoons. None the less, we would be slow

254 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

to believe with the elder Agassiz, that all the present metazoons were
" created " as we behold them. Bristadella mucedo was cited in
this connection, not as being one of the early simple unions of uni-
cellular life, but merely as resembling externally, perhaps, what
these early unions might have been like.

The point really at issue here is whether the metazoons devel-
oped from unicells, or that the tissue cells of the animal organism
form, multitudinously, in this same organism after it was otherwise
created. The former position is the one held in Natural Salvation.

A reviewing editor writes to ask, " Is this * natural salvation *
idea of yours the same thing that Metchnikoff and Loeb are work-
ing on ? "

Professor Metchnikoff, of the Pasteur Institute, believes that
" old age " is accelerated by the abnormal activity (phagocitosis)
of the white corpuscles of the blood, which, after a manner, devour
the cells of bone, muscle, brain, and other tissues. Experiments
are now in progress at many European laboratories, bearing directly
or indirectly on these theories. Facts of great interest have al-
ready been brought out.

Professor Loeb has held the theory that life can be initiated
artificially by chemical agencies; he has claimed that fertilization
of the ovum can be thus accomplished chemically in the case of
the sea-urchin, without sexual union. If fully established, this
fact will be of the highest importance.

The present writer does not know what Professor Metchnikoff's
or Professor Loeb's views or beliefs are, touching immortal life
for human beings, nor whether they believe their discoveries have
any bearing on the subject.

Another critic, a venerable teacher of theology, writes in pained
surprise : — " Natural salvation ! How can salvation be natural ?
Nature dies. Salvation is from God and His Son. Salvation is
above nature. It is supernatural. Natural salvation is a contradic-
tion in terms — a self-contradiction ! "

What a picture do these words portray of the indoctrinated,
dogmatized condition of this man's mind! Salvation a supernatu-
ral rescue at the hands of a supernatural being. Otherwise incom-
prehensible.

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 255

This, indeed, is the conventional, church attitude of mind, the
attitude which regards the " soul " of man as a " spirit," detachable
from the human body at death, or, indeed, in trance, or catalepsy ;
a spirit to be saved by Divine favor or grace, divested of the body
and un-incorporate.

It is this conception of life which the growth of scientific knowl-
edge invalidates; and to me it seems only logical that theologian,
priest and sectary should oppose scientific progress generally. Sci-
ence wastes creeds as the warm spring torrents melt the ice of
winter. There is no way of chaining humanity to a creed, except
by arresting its mental growth. This latter is what Catholicism in
America seeks to accomplish. Its sustained struggle against popu-
lar education and the growth of knowledge here is one of the most
instructive spectacles which the times present. There is, indeed,
no other way of perpetuating creed and its establishments, except
by laying the spell of church authority on the brain, and effecting
a semi-paralysis of this troublesome organ of progress. This is the
long-existent condition in Mohammedan countries. This is what
the Christianity of Rome and of Constantinople have at times ac-
complished in Spain, in France, in Ireland, in Russia.

It is quite impossible to harmonize Judaism, Mohammedanism,
Catholicism, or Protestant sectarianism, with the growth of human
knowledge and the progress of scientific discovery. The obstacle
is something more than the mere fact that science invalidates cer-
tain dogmas of the church. It is rather that the mind of the scien-
tific student outgrows the crudeness and the injustice of the creeds.
Normally, naturally, the world grows away from them. Moreover,
between church doctrines and the science of our times, there is an
issue raised, a crucial question, this : —

Is the human personality, the ego of a human life, detachable
from the organism, capable of living on in the absence of that
organism, or not? Church authority says yes, the growth of sci-
entific knowledge, no. A grave question of veracity is thus raised.
One or the other is radically wrong.

It is the realization of this impasse which accounts for the pres-
ent attitude of the scientific world toward the church ; the attitude
of quiet tolerance, with a disinclination to discuss the matter; the
realization that the church has its uses and is endeared to a large
class of the population; the further realization that the regimen

256 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

it prescribes, is perhaps best for that class ; and, finally, the thank-
less nature of the task of teaching truths which would be certain
to be unpopular. Briefly, the biologist of to-day is shirking his
duty as a teacher rather than incur odium and resentment.

" Your contention is unique, to say the least of it," another critic
writes. " So far as I am able to follow your reasoning, you fail
wholly to distinguish between physical and psychic powers. You
treat them as if of common origin, as if there were no essential
difference between them. This to me is chaotic and would subvert
psychology. You confound sentience with the insentient forces of
matter. You make neither distinction, nor difference, between
them."

There is no difference, that is to say, none as to their ultimate
source or origin. Th-ere are no " insentient forces of matter."
Matter lives, that is, feels, and moves, because it feels. Indeed,
there is no such thing as matter, in the former sense in which the
word was used. Matter is energy and is sentient to us when it is
embraced within the symbiotic cordon of our organic being, or self.
It is then us, that is, personal to us. Outside that cordon, all energy
appears to each one of us to be insentient. Sentience and insenti-
ence are merely other terms for subjectivity and objectivity, per-
sonality and impersonality.

Every last corpuscle of matter is alive, in the sense that it may
take its place and contribute its life to culminate with others in the
life of a tree, or an animal. Each minute corpuscle is to itself a
living, personal particle.

There are, therefore, no insentient forces; the universe moves
because it lives, not lives because it moves insentiently. This
latter doctrine had its day in a cumbrous philosophy and has passed
to its bourne.

It is already apparent that the " atom," so called, is an organized
life. All these " atoms " and " molecules " of our old-time chem-
istry are living creatures, often comparatively long-lived, even to a
degree of immortality, yet still mortal and dissoluble under certain
stress and duress of environment.

The point of this newer, better conception of nature is, that
every corpuscle, " atom," or "molecule" is, in a lowly sense, a
living thing, having what is to itself a sentient life.

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 257

A busy New York lawyer who still finds time to consider res
'ultimas, writes in a friendly spirit, to criticize what he deems a mis-
use of the terms nature and natural. His conception is still another
instance of the hold which supernaturalism has even on the legal
mind. " I do not regard science," he says, " meaning astronomy,
geology, biology, etc., as being properly natural or in the order of
nature. I regard science as distinct from and extrinsic to nature.
Hence natural salvation, to be attained in the progress of science,
is to me a confusion of terms, a misnomer."

In other words, the growth of human knowledge is not in the
order of nature, but supernatural, or preternatural; not a part of
the natural evolution of life on the earth, but some thing super-
added to it, presumably from a supernatural source.

Another critic of more sectarian bias carries the same conception
to greater length. " But for Christianity," he says, " which is a
supernatural revelation from God to man, associated with a
divine effort to save mankind, there would be no science. It is
the elevation and enlightenment of the minds of men that come
to us through Jesus Christ, which makes modern science possi-
ble."

This writer appears not to remember that science and the sci-
ences were well advanced in India, Egypt, and Greece many cen-
turies before the era of Jesus.

A teacher of biology writes : —

" You speak of the ' personal axis ' of life, the axis of self-
consciousness in a cell, or in the human brain. What is meant
by the term? "

This question is answered in part, at least, on preceding pages.

Critics are of many types and tempers. Not a few condemn
what their fellows approve.

" Who would want to live for centuries in a world like this ! "
writes " one who dissents." " Three score years and ten is quite
enough of it. Too much. Think of the horrible monotony of a
thousand years of human life. It is a frightful picture. The Lord
deliver us from such as you! So far from encouraging an effort
like yours, it should be summarily stopped, if not by an indignant
public sentiment, then by government interference; that is, if there

2S8 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

were the slightest danger of your bringing about such a calamity.
I am happy to think there is not. Human life will never be much
prolonged, for the very good reason that it ought not to be. It is
not worth it; and nature will probably look out for that. So I do
not fear you. Death is as much a part of the great scheme of
things as Life. It is the other part of the great Plan. But lo and
behold, a little dying mortal now thinks that he is going to change
it all! It is enough to make the angels weep, and the devils
laugh ! "

We will allow this to stand, and pass to another of similar pur-
port, but bearing the impress of. a less passionate mind.

" I should fear such a gift as you seek to confer on human beings.
It does not seem to me that earthly life could be made of sufficient
interest to give us continual enjoyment for long periods of time.
The Wandering Jew was but a fiction, yet I believe it embodies
the truth concerning human life on the earth. It does not seem to
me that the earth offers, or can ever offer, a proper theater or arena
for immortal life. I am therefore inclined to consider death as
a blessing instead of an evil, and that your proposed effort to
* achieve ' immortal life on the earth by applied science is a mis-
taken one."

The above is a thoughtful statement of a widely prevalent view
of human life. It deserves an equally thoughtful reply.

It is conceded at the outset that life, as the majority of our race
now live, is not worth prolonging far beyond the pleasures of
youth. Immortalizing such lives, subject to all their present ills,
hardships, and discouragements, would be of the nature of a
penalty, instead of a reward. If a greater experience which came
from longer life did not enable them to attain a better mode of
life, with fewer pains and ills, immortality on the earth would be
inadvisable for them.

The earth is what we make it. The reason why the majority
of mankind are miserable on the earth instead of happy, is to be
found in them, in their ignorance and perverted minds, rather than
that the earth does not afford an " arena " for happy life. Some
are happy here, others not; the cause is largely subjective.

Considered physically, the terrestrial globe which we inhabit is
not, under nature, a comfortable abode for man. But it has vast
capabilities, enormous resources for improvement. It is capable

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 259

of being made a paradise, a true Eden in the universe. Unlimited
power falls on its surface from the solar sphere, power which can
be bent to human uses. Its climate can be controlled and made
whatever we desire it, its temperature regulated to the needs of life.
It is not the earth in its present condition which we contemplate
as the future abode of immortal man, but the earth improved and
made " heaven." The paradisation of the earth presents merely
physical problems, many of which are already being undertaken
successfully. The earth, made heaven, is one of the conditions
which will come with the achievement of immortal life. The dawn
of this grand future for the sons of men is already breaking on the
horizon of science; and what we have now most need of is faith
and courage to work for it; to cast aside our slavish fears of the
supernatural, and work to save ourselves from the ills of life; to
cease from idle prayers to be saved by supernatural agencies, and
devote our energies to self-salvation.

Again, life on earth is not desirable for those on whom old age
has set its insignia of infirmity and deformity with all the attend-
ant daily pains and aches. A natural revulsion from life ensues
from the senescent condition of the organism. Life grows less and
less desirable until often the aged one longs for release from it.

This mental attitude touching life is purely the result of the
decline of the associate cell life of which the human body is com-
posed. It is to the regeneration of the component cell life of the
organism that our present researches are directed. The object of
them is to renovate the tissues, renew the cells, and maintain the
human body in the adolescent condition : the muscles and digestive
organs in a state of normal health and efficiency, the brain in a con-
dition of mental power, hopefulness, and ambition.

It is not likely that such a person would desire to die, at least,
not on an improved and beautified earth where the growth of
knowledge and the rapid advances of scientific discovery gave
opportunity for continuous mental growth.

But, reverting to our passionate critic, it may be said that Sal-
vation by Science would by no means sentence a man to life. It
merely enlarges his freedom to live or not. He does not have to
live. In the phrase of firm old Marcus Aurelius, " the open door "
is always there, under his hand, with liberty to issue forth to the
unknown gods.

260 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

One who terms herself " a believer in Salvation by Science/' has
written to ask, " How can these truths be disseminated ? How can
this new, better Faith be propagated?"

The capacity to receive truth comes from mental growth and
the acquisition of knowledge. These truths will be apprehended
and accepted as mental evolution in American proceeds. It is the
growth of knowledge and the development of brain, which will
prepare the way to accept Salvation by Science. Unformed, un-
developed mind is the stronghold of erroneous creeds. Further
education is the only remedy. But my answer to this question
would be, By bringing the theory and promise of the Promethean
Faith to the attention of intelligent people who are beginning to
think on these subjects. By suggestion of it to them. By a clear
presentation of it. Thus leading them to think about it for them-
selves. It will then make its way in their minds by virtue of its
own logical strength and the eternal truths of life on which it rests.

" A Physiologist " from that great metropolis of much which
is new and good, Chicago, writes to propound the following query,
in dissent.

" With regard to an improved cell food and the lengthening of
cell life from it, how is this to be inferred? We derive the vital
energies of the human organism, mechanical and chemical, from
something akin to combustion (katabolism) of the 'protoplasm'
of the cell, which is thereby broken down, its stored-up energy
liberated and waste products — carbon dioxide, urea — continu-
ously produced.

" With any conceivable kind of cell food, however ' improved,'
would not these waste products have to be produced, if organic life
went on ? What real alleviation of the ' duress ' of cell life would
be effected? Granting that cell ' protoplasm ' has to be broken down
in order to liberate energy for organic maintenance, how will the
use of an improved cell food relieve the organism of the onus of
getting rid of its waste products ? "

In reply, it may be well to say again, that two parallel sets of
phenomena go on, pari passu, in the cell-of-life whatever its situa-
tion, namely the anabolic and kataboHc, a building-up or reinforce-
ment of the cell contents and a breaking-down of the same. Re-
stricted to the cell, the building-up or reinforcement is all that is

COMMENT AND DISCUSSION 261

properly covered by the term nutrition. The breaking-down and
consequent liberation of energy is quite another matter, required by
the necessities of the environment. In other words, the cell has to
" work " and use up its " protoplasm," in order to get on and live
in the world.

But here a qualification must be made. We do not know yet
what this apparent combustion of the cell " protoplasm " really
is, nor to what extent it affects the cell contents. It is not like
ordinary combustion ; so much is known. That is to say, a certain
part en masse of the cell " protoplasm " is not consumed, leaving
a certain per cent, unconsumed. The protoplasm of the cell is found
to be a highly organized fabric which shrinks throughout, when
the cell " works " and suffers, much as a fat horse grows thin and
poor when put to severe labors. There is combustion of proto-
plasm of the cell in no other sense.

Frankly, we do not know as yet just what takes place when
intracellular shrinkage occurs from work and the liberation of
energy. The cell protoplasm cannot be compared properly with
a quantity of coal, oil, or other combustible. It is highly organ-
ized, and tax it never so severely, that organization is preserved
as long as the cell lives. It is deteriorated as a whole rather than
expended in part ; — and we venture to predict that this qualifica-
tion will be found a very important one as our knowledge increases.

The same qualification must be made with regard to the build-
ing-up (anabolism) of the cell protoplasm by nutrition. It is not
added to en masse, or per centum, but improved and rounded out
as to its entire interior organization. It is a case of fatting
up the horse, grown poor from hard work and exposure, and not
of pouring so much oil into a nearly empty oil can.

True, carbon dioxide and urea result from work and fatigue of
the cell. A destructive metabolism appears to have taken place;
but we do not yet know the intracellular modus of it.

Reverting now to the matter in question, namely, the ameliora-
tion likely to be brought about in the life of the physiological cell
by a perfected cell food, the best estimate I am able to obtain at
present is in effect that fully seventy per cent, of the entire organic
energy, liberated by the average human organism, that is to say,
seventy per cent, of its entire available energies from protoplasmic
" combustion," is expended on our food stuffs, as at present in-

262 SALVATION BY SCIENCE

gested,, in order to accomplish digestion, peptonization, admixture
with bile, oxygenation, etc., etc., before the food is fit to enter the
blood circulatory and go to the cells for their nutrition. Seventy
per cent, of that entire combustion from which result waste prod-
ucts of carbon dioxide and urea.

If therefore this seventy per cent, of " combustion " and waste
products could be rendered unnecessary in the organism by the
introduction of a perfected cell food, the question asked by our
" Physiologist " critic would seem to be largely answered.

THE END.