Fashionable Philosophy | Page 6

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.
Rollestone. To come back to the question of a possible distinction in
the essential or inherent qualities of dynamic or physical forces. There
is nothing in the hypothesis which may not be reasonably assumed and
tested by experiment; and before any man has a right to affirm that
there is only one quality of physical force in nature, which, by
undergoing transformation and metamorphosis, shall account for all its
phenomena, I have a right to ask whether the hypothesis, that there may
be another, has been experimentally tested. It would then be time for
me to accept the conclusion that there is only one, and that it is an
unfathomable mystery how this one force should be able to perform all
the functions attributed to it.
Germsell. I admit that the forces called vital are correlates of the forces
called physical, if you choose to call that a distinction; but their
character is conditioned by the state of the brain, and it comes to the
same thing in the end. The seat of emotion as well as of thought is the
brain, and it entirely depends on its chemical constitution, on its
circulation, and on other causes affecting that organ, what you think,
and feel, and say, and do. People's characters differ because their brains
do, not because there is any difference in the vital force which animates
them.
Rollestone. You might as well say that sounds differ because their
aerial vibrations differ, but those vibrations only differ because the
force makes them differ which is acting upon them. They don't generate
tunes, but convey them. And the result, so far as our hearing is
concerned, depends upon what are called the acoustic conditions under
which the vibrations take place. Just so the brain possesses no
generating function of its own; it deals with and transmits the ideas and
emotions projected upon it according to the organic conditions by
which it may be affected at the time, whether those ideas and emotions
are produced by external stimuli, or apparently, but only apparently, as
I believe, owe their origin to genesis in the brain itself. In the one case
the brain is vibrating to the touch of an external force, in the other to
one that is internal and unseen, just as the air does when it transmits

sound, whether you see the cause which produces it or not; and the
mystery which remains to be fathomed, but which I do not admit to be
unfathomable until somebody tries to fathom it, is the nature of those
unseen forces.
Germsell. How would you propose to try and fathom it?
Rollestone. By experiment: I know of no other way. The forces which
generate emotions and ideas must possess a moral quality: the
experiments must therefore be moral experiments.
Germsell. How do you set to work to experimentalise morally?
Rollestone. As the process must of necessity be a purely personal one,
carried on, if I may use the expression, in one's own moral organism, I
have a certain delicacy in attempting to describe it. In fact, Lady
Fritterly, if you will allow me to say so, as the whole subject which has
been under discussion this afternoon is the most profoundly solemn
which can engage the attention of a human being, I shrink from
entering upon it as fully as I would do under other circumstances. I
people begin to want a new religion because it is the fashion to want
one, I venture to predict that they will never find it. If they want a new
religion because they can't come up to the moral standard of the one
they have got, then I would advise them to look rather to