Lady Fritterly [sharply]. What are you saying, Lord Fondleton?
Lord Fondleton. Ahem—I was saying—ahem—I was saying that we shall be having some Yankee inventing steam thinking-mills and galvanic loving-batteries soon. What a lot of wear and tear it would save! I should go about covered with a number of electric love-wires for the force to play upon.
Fussle. I think this matter wants clearing up, Mr Germsell. Why don’t you write a book on mental and emotional physics?
Mr Rollestone. I would venture with great diffidence to remark that the confusion seems to me to arise from the limit we attach to the meaning of the word employed. It may be quite true that no idea or emotion can exist except as the result of physical force; but it is also true that its effect must be conditioned on the quality of the force. There is as wide a difference between the physical forces
operant in the brain, and which give rise to ideas, and those which move a steam-engine, as there is between mind and matter as popularly defined. Both, as Mr Germsell will admit, are conditioned manifestations of force; but the one contains a vital element in its dynamism which the other does not. You may apply as much physical force by means of a galvanic battery to a dead brain as you please, but you can’t strike an idea out of it; and this vital force, while it is “conditioned force,” like light and heat, differs in its mode of manifestation from every other manifestation of force, even more than they do from each other, in that it possesses a potency inherent to it, which they have not, and this potency it is which creates emotion and generates ideas. The fallacy which underlies the whole of this system of philosophy is contained in the assumption that there is only one description of physical force in nature.
Germsell. No more there is. Why, Mr Spencer says that the law of metamorphosis which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces; but mark you, what is the grand conclusion
at which he arrives? I happen to remember the passage: “How this metamorphosis takes place; how a force existing, as motion, heat, or light, can become a mode of consciousness; how it is possible for aerial vibrations to generate the sensation we call sound; or for the forces liberated by chemical changes in the brain to give rise to emotion,—these are mysteries which it is impossible to fathom.”
Lord Fondleton [aside to Mrs Gloring]. What a jolly easy way of getting out of a difficulty!
Drygull. Of course, if you admit such gross ignorance as to how it is possible for aerial vibrations “to generate the sensation we call sound,” I don’t wonder at your not hearing the tom-tom in the Himalayas we were listening to just now. If you knew a little more about the astral law under which aerial vibrations may be generated, you would not call things impossible which you admit to be unfathomable mysteries. If it is an unfathomable mystery how a sound is projected a mile, why do you refuse to admit the possibility of its being projected two, or two hundred, or two thousand? Under the laws
which govern mysteries, which you say are unfathomable, if the mystery is unfathomable, so is the law, and you have no right to limit its action.