By this sacrifice it has been thought that the eliminated guidance and control can philosophically be reintroduced.
This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of a critical examination of the foundations of Physics by an American author, J. B. Stallo, in a little book called the Concepts of Physics. But the worst of that book was that Judge Stallo was not fully familiar with the teachings of the great physicists; he appears to have collected his information from popular writings, where the doctrines were very imperfectly laid down; so that some of his book is occupied in demolishing constructions of straw, unrecognisable by professed physicists except as caricatures at which they also might be willing to heave an occasional missile.
The armoury pressed into the service of Professor James Ward's not wholly dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism between the fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any intervention whether human or divine.
If this antagonism is substantial it is serious; for Natural Philosophers will not be willing to concede fundamental inaccuracy or uncertainty about their recognised and long-established laws of motion, when applied to ordinary matter; nor will they be prepared to tolerate any the least departure from the law of the conservation of energy, when all forms of energy are taken into account. Hence, if guidance and control can be admitted into the scheme by no means short of undermining and refuting those laws, there may be every expectation that the attitude of scientific men will be perennially hostile to the idea of guidance or control, and so to the efficacy of prayer, and to many another practical outcome of religious belief. It becomes therefore an important question to consider whether it is true that life or mind is incompetent to disarrange or interfere with matter at all, except as itself an automatic part of the machine,—whether in fact it is merely an ornamental appendage or phantasmal accessory of the working parts.
Now experience—the same kind of experience as gave us our scheme of mechanics—shows us that to all appearance live animals certainly can direct and control mechanical energies to bring about desired and preconceived results; and that man can definitely will that those results shall occur. The way the energy is provided is understood, and its mode of application is fairly understood; what is not understood is the way its activity is determined. Undoubtedly our body is material and can act on other matter; and the energy of its operations is derived from food, like any other self-propelled and fuel-fed mechanism; but mechanism is usually controlled by an attendant. The question is whether our will or mind or life can direct our body's energy along certain channels to attain desired ends, or whether—as in a motor-car with an automaton driver—the end and aim of all activity is wholly determined by mechanical causes. And a further question concerns the mode whereby vital control, if any, is achieved.
Answers that might be hazarded are:
(a) That life is itself a latent store of energy, and achieves its results by imparting to matter energy that would not otherwise be in evidence: in which case life would be a part of the machine, and as truly mechanical as all the rest.
Experiment lends no support to this view of the relation between life and energy, and I hold that it is false; because the essential property of energy is that it can transform itself into other forms, remaining constant in quantity, whereas life does not add to the stock of any known form of energy, nor does death affect the sum of energy in any known way.
(b) That life is something outside the scheme of mechanics—outside the categories of matter and energy; though it can nevertheless control or direct material forces—timing them and determining their place of application,—subject always to the laws of energy and all other mechanical laws; supplementing or accompanying these laws, therefore, but contradicting or traversing them no whit.
This second answer I hold to be true; but in order to admit its truth we must recognise that force can be exerted and energy directed, by suitable adjustment of existing energy, without any introduction of energy from without; in other words, that the energy of operations automatically going on in any active region of the universe—any region where transformation and transference of energy are continuously occurring whether life be present or not—can be guided along paths that it would not automatically have taken, and can be directed so as to produce effects that would not otherwise have occurred; and this without any breakage or suspension of the laws of dynamics, and in full correspondence with both the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum.