The Native Races [of the Pacific states], Volume 2, Civilized Nations: The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 2Bancroft, Hubert Howe
History
The Native Races [of the Pacific states], Volume 2, Civilized Nations: The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 2
Bancroft, Hubert Howe
Indians -- Bibliography; Indians of Central America; Indians of Mexico; Indians of North America -- Pacific Coast of North America
It would be indeed strange, if, when all the universe is under the
governance of fixed laws--laws which regulate the motion of every
molecule, no less than the revolutions of suns--laws of such subtle
import, as for instance, regulate the transformations of heat, the
convertibility and correlation of force; it would be strange, I say,
if such laws as these, when they reached the domain of human affairs
should pause and leave the world of man alone in purposeless
wanderings.
[Sidenote: ANALOGIES BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE.]
To continue our analogies. As, latent in the atom, or in the mass,
there are energies releasable only by heat or friction,--as in
charcoal, which holds, locked up, muriatic acid gas equivalent to
ninety times its volume; or in spongy platinum, which holds in like
manner oxygen, equal to eight hundred times its volume; so, latent in
every individual, are numberless energies, which demand the friction
of society to call them out.
Force comprises two elements, attraction and repulsion, analagous to
the principles commonly called good and evil in the affairs of human
society; take away from mechanical force either of these two oppugnant
elements, and there could be neither organism nor life, so without
both good and evil in human affairs there could be no progress.
If none of the forces of nature are dissipated or lost, and if force
can no more be extinguished than matter, and like matter passes from
one form into another, we may conclude that intellectual force is
never dissipated or lost, but that the potential energies of mind and
soul perpetually vibrate between man and nature.
Or, again, if, as we have seen, energy of every kind is clothed in
matter, and when employed and expended returns again to its place in
matter; and if the mind draws its forces from the body, as it appears
to do, both growing, acting, and declining simultaneously; and if the
body draws its energy from the earth, which is no less possible; then
may not intellectual and progressional force be derived from man's
environment, and return thither when expended? Every created being
borrows its material from the storehouse of matter, and when uncreated
restores it again; so every individual born into society becomes
charged with social force, with progressional energy, which, when
expended, rests with society. Winslow's opinion on this subject is,
that "all electric and magnetic currents originate in--are inducted
from--and radiate either directly or indirectly out of the globe as
the fountain of every form and constituency of mechanical force, and
that abstract immaterial mechanical energy, as we have thus far
discussed and developed its dual principles, is absolutely convertible
through molecular motion into every form and expansion of secondary
force, passing successively from heat through electricity, magnetism,
etc., and _vice versa_, it follows that this same mechanical energy
itself, as hypostatical motive power, must proceed out of the globe
also."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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