I can see many a reader smile after perusing the foregoing, and perhaps saying:
"Here is a Jules Verne of a new type come to deal with a novel subject."
Yet the time will come when the reader will cease to smile, and look upon these matters seriously. I do not mean, however, to throw down a gauntlet to science on these momentous questions in a vaunting and reckless spirit; but come as a petitioner rather, asking it to investigate.
My time and generation are but like a flash from the orb of eternity, but the laws I have discovered are as eternal as that orb itself. With all the scientific investigations now going on, there has not even an approach been made which might have led up to them; nay, not a hint or a hypothesis, even, leading toward the same. Science, in fact, had nothing to do with them; the first man might have made them almost as well as the latest. They are all grappling with matter, while I have grasped the spirit that is in, yet above, all living matter.
In making these discoveries I have bent a sail upon the crafts of physiology and psychology, which have been aimlessly, almost hopelessly, drifting on the shallow waters of the examination of isolated material phenomena. This sail will enable them to reach the broad expanse of the ocean, where they will be able to make soundings in its deepest waters.
Professor Huxley declared that during his fifty years of experience as a student and teacher not one thing really new had ever come under his observation. Had he lived to become acquainted with these facts I feel confident he would have declared them to be new.
The venerable Professor Virchow, the other day, in an address before the International Congress of Physicians at Moscow, made use, in substance, of these words: "The cell is immortal—there must have been a previous cell for its generation. On this fact as a basis (ascertained by the aid of the microscope) the science of the coming century may securely rest."
And he set this down as the greatest achievement of science in respect to the recognition of the phenomena of life. Yet there is nothing more fallible than the microscope in ascertaining facts regarding the knowledge of life. It may to some extent reveal the essence of matter, but it is not given to it to assist in recognizing the principles which govern life and the spirit of life.
FRAGMENTS
This book, in a sense, is a personal narrative, and necessarily must be so, giving an account, as it does, of observations in experiments upon myself. In making these experiments I have endeavored to treat myself impersonally, as a subject, so to say, placed at my disposal for experimental purposes; my ego having been the object as well as the subject of my investigations. In occasionally speaking of the results thus obtained in a eulogistic manner, this should not be looked upon as self-praise, therefore, but rather as an impersonal mode of describing what has come under some one's observation—this "some one" being myself. I want to place the matters I have observed before the reader in the right light, and do not hesitate to say or fear to say just what I think to be the truth. If I were to wait for others to say these things the reader who does not comprehend their latitude as I do might have to wait a long time before he could grasp the subject in its entire importance. I want to say this much as an apology and a vindication for frequent indulgences in apparent self-eulogism.