Studies in the Out-Lying Fields of Psychic ScienceTuttle, Hudson
Religion
Studies in the Out-Lying Fields of Psychic Science
Tuttle, Hudson
Parapsychology
To call the ingredients of these bottles a human being would be like
calling a pile of brick, mortar and lumber a house, except the
comparison fails in the house being built by outside forces, while the
living being must be organized from within. No mixing of the contents of
these bottles and jars can evolve life, or even the smallest speck of
protoplasm.
THE ANATOMIST.--The third scheme is that of the anatomist, who with
keen-edged scalpel bends over the body after life has gone out of it,
and traces the course of arteries and veins, the form and location of
nerves, the attachment of muscular fibers, and in connection with the
physiologist defines the functions of each separate organ. An
exquisitely fashioned machine it is, wonderfully and fearfully made,
growing up from an invisible germ. After anatomist and physiologist have
finished, and on their dissecting table only a mass of rubbish remains,
they triumphantly point to it and exclaim: “See! We have settled the
question of spirit! There can be nothing beyond this organism. We have
determined how every cell and fiber of it are put together, and the
functions they perform. No where is there an indication of any thing
superior or transcending this material form. Here is where the food is
digested; here it is assimilated; here this secretion is made; here
excretion of poisonous matter takes place; here in the brain, in these
gray cells, thought arises. Ah! it is a wonderful complex machine.”
Indeed it is, and what has become of the power which moved it? You have
a strange machine, unlike all others, for it is, according to your
ideas, an engine to make steam, instead of to be moved by it; a mill to
make a waterfall, instead of to be run by falling water. What is the
difference between a dead man and a living one? Incomprehensibly great,
and yet the dead man to the chemist, the anatomist, the biologist, is
identically the same as the living. That unknown element, life, escapes
the crucible, the retort, the scalpel, the microscope, and the
conclusions of those who take it not into consideration are the vague
conjecturing of children, who have gained but a half knowledge of the
subjects that excite their attention.
Yet science proudly claims the knowledge of all things possible to know.
It has searched into the foundations of the earth and ascended the
starry dome of infinitude; it grasps the inconceivably small and the
inconceivably great; it delves in the hard stratum of facts, and sports
in the most sublime theories. It gives the laws of the dancing motes,
and those which guide the movements of stellar worlds; the sullen forces
of the elements and the subtile agencies which sustain living beings.
WHAT IS BEYOND THE STRIFE FOR EXISTENCE?--What, O Science, is there
beyond the grave which shuts down with adamantine wall between this life
and the future?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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