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the interminable series of representations, have no extension in space but only in time.
Thus he asks: --
Where then is there room in this for a mechanical theory? Objectors might argue
that this is so only in appearance, while in reality all these have a spatial
extension. But such an argument would be entirely erroneous. Our sole reason for
believing that objects perceived by the senses have such extension in the external
world, rests on the idea that they seem to do so, as far as they can be watched and
observed through the senses of sight and touch. With regard, however, to the
realm of our inner senses even that supposed foundation loses its force and there
is no ground for admitting it.
The winding up argument of the lecturer is most interesting to Theosophists. Says this
physiologist of the modern school of Materialism --
Thus, a deeper and more direct acquaintance with our inner nature unveils to us a
world entirely unlike the world represented to us by our external senses, and
reveals the most heterogeneous faculties, shows objects having nought to do with
spatial extension, and phenomena absolutely disconnected with those that fall
under mechanical laws.
Hitherto the opponents of vitalism and "life-principle," as well as the followers of the mechanical
theory of life, based their views on the supposed fact, that, as physiology was progressing
forward, its students succeeded more and more in connecting its functions with the laws of blind
matter. All those manifestations that used to be attributed to a "mystical life-force," they said,
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STUDIES IN OCCULTISM
59
may be brought now under physical and chemical laws. And they were, and still are loudly
clamoring for the recognition of the fact that it is only a question of time when it will be
triumphantly demonstrated that the whole vital process, in its grand totality, represents nothing
more mysterious than a very complicated phenomenon of motion, exclusively governed by the
forces of inanimate nature.
But here we have a professor of physiology who asserts that the history of physiology proves,
unfortunately for them, quite the contrary; and he pronounces these ominous words:
I maintain that the more our experiments and observations are exact and many-
sided, the deeper we penetrate into facts, the more we try to fathom and speculate
on the phenomena of life, the more we acquire the conviction, that even those
phenomena that we had hoped to be already able to explain by physical and
chemical laws, are in reality unfathomable. They are vastly more complicated, in
fact; and as we stand at present, they will not yield to any mechanical explanation.
This is a terrible blow at the puffed-up bladder known as Materialism, which is as empty as it is
dilated. A Judas in the camp of the apostles of negation -- the "animalists"! But the Basle
professor is no solitary exception, as we have just shown; and there are several physiologists who
are of his way of thinking; indeed some of them going so far as to almost accept free-will and
consciousness, in the simplest monadic protoplasms!
One discovery after the other tends in this direction. The works of some German physiologists
are especially interesting with regard to cases of consciousness and positive discrimination -- one
is almost inclined to say thought -- in the Amoebas. Now the Amoebas or animalculae are, as all
know, microscopical protoplasms -- as the Vampyrella Sirogyra for instance, a most simple
elementary cell, a protoplasmic drop, formless and almost structureless. And yet it shows in its
behavior something for which zoologists, if they do not call it mind and power of reasoning, will
have to find some other qualification, and coin a new term. For see what Cienkowsky (3) says of
it. Speaking of this microscopical, bare, reddish cell he describes the way in which it hunts for
and finds among a number of other aquatic plants one called Spirogyra, rejecting every other
food. Examining its peregrinations under a powerful microscope, he found it when moved by
hunger, first projecting its pseudopodiae (false feet) by the help of which it crawls. Then it
commences moving about until among a great variety of plants it comes across a Spirogyra, after
which it proceeds toward the cellulated portion of one of the cells of the latter, and placing itself
on it, it bursts the tissue, sucks the contents of one cell and then passes on to another, repeating
the same process. This naturalist never saw it take any other food, and it never touched any of the
numerous plants placed by Cienkowsky in its way. Mentioning another Amoeba -- the
Colpadella Pugnax -- he says that he found it showing the same predilection for the
Chlamydomonas on which it feeds exclusively; "having made a puncture in the body of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]