[In mechanics there is actual and potential energy: work actually performed, and the capacity for performing it. As to the nature of molecular Energy or Forces], the various phenomena which bodies present show that their molecules are under the influence of two contrary forces, one which tends to bring them together, and the other to separate them.... The first force ... is called molecular attraction ... the second force is due to the vis viva, or moving force.[1145]
Just so: it is the nature of this moving force, of this vis viva, that we want to know. What is it?
“We do not know!” is the invariable answer. “It is an empty shadow of my imagination,” explains Mr. Huxley in his Physical Basis of Life.
Thus the whole structure of Modern Science is built on a kind of “mathematical abstraction,” on a Protean “Substance which eludes the senses” (Dubois Reymond), and on effects, the shadowy and illusive will-o'-the wisps of a something entirely unknown to, and beyond the reach of, Science. “Self-moving” Atoms! Self-moving Suns, Planets, and Stars! But who, then, or what are they all, if they are self-endowed with motion? Why then should you, Physicists, laugh at and deride our “Self-moving Archæus”? Mystery is rejected and scorned by Science, and as Father Felix has truly said:
She cannot escape it. Mystery is the fatality of Science.
The language of the French preacher is ours, and we quote it in Isis Unveiled. Who—he asks—who of you, men of Science:
Has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body, the generation of a single atom? What is there, I will not say at the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom? Who has sounded to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand? The grain of sand, gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science; she has turned and returned it; she divides it and subdivides it; she torments it with her experiments; she vexes it with her questions to snatch from it the final word as to its secret constitution; she asks it, with an insatiable curiosity: “Shall I divide thee infinitesimally?” Then suspended over this abyss, science hesitates, she stumbles, she feels dazzled, she becomes dizzy, and in despair says: “i do not know.”
But if you are so fatally ignorant of the genesis and hidden nature of a grain of sand, how should you have an intuition as to the generation of a single living being? Whence in the living being does life come? Where does it commence? What is the life principle?[1146]
Do the men of Science deny all these charges? By no means: for here is a confession of Tyndall, which shows how powerless is Science, even over the world of Matter.
The first marshalling of the atoms, on which all subsequent action depends, baffles a keener power than that of the microscope.... Through pure excess of complexity, and long before observation can have any voice in the matter, the most highly trained intellect, the most refined and disciplined imagination, retires in bewilderment from the contemplation of the problem. We are struck dumb by an astonishment which no microscope can relieve, doubting not only the [pg 734]power of our instrument, but even whether we ourselves possess the intellectual elements which will ever enable us to grapple with the ultimate structural energies of nature.