Habit and Intelligence, in their Connection with the Laws of Matter and Force

Abstract

I.

THE flood of light that has been thrown on the obscurest and most recondite of the forces and forms of Nature by the researches of the last few years, has led many acute and speculative intellects to believe that the time has arrived when the hitherto insoluble problems of the origin of life and of mind may receive a possible and intelligible, if not a demonstrable, solution. The grand doctrine of the conservation of energy, the all-embracing theory of evolution, a more accurate conception of the relation of matter to force, the vast powers of spectrum analysis on one side, showing us as it does the minute anatomy of the universe, and the increased efficiency of the modern microscope on the other, which enables us to determine with confidence the structure, or absence of structure, in the minutest and lowest forms of life, furnish us with a converging battery of scientific weapons which we may well think no mystery of Nature can long withstand. Our literature accordingly teems with essays of more or less pretension on the development of living forms, the nature and origin of life, the unity of all force, physical and mental, and analogous subjects.

Habit and Intelligence, in their Connection with the Laws of Matter and Force.

A Series of Scientific Essays. By Joseph John Murphy. (Macmillan and Co., 1869.)