To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has been more and more becoming the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibers, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it.
Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them -- the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound -- processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.
將所有事物和事物的原則歸結(jié)為經(jīng)常變化著的形態(tài)或風(fēng)尚,已日益成為現(xiàn)代思想界的趨勢(shì)。我們可以從我們的生理活動(dòng)等表面的事情說(shuō)起。比如我們選定在酷暑中猛然浸入滔滔清流這樣一個(gè)令人感覺(jué)極其愉快的微妙時(shí)刻,在那一瞬間的所有生理活動(dòng),難道不可以說(shuō)是具有科學(xué)名稱的各種元素的一種化合作用嗎?但是,像磷、石灰、微細(xì)的纖維等這些元素,不僅在人體中可以發(fā)現(xiàn),而且在與人體沒(méi)有絲毫關(guān)系的地方也能檢查出它們的存在。
我們的生理活動(dòng)不外乎是這些元素?zé)o休止的運(yùn)動(dòng)——血液的流通,眼睛中水晶體的消耗和恢復(fù),每一道光波、每一次聲浪對(duì)于腦組織所引起的變異——科學(xué)把這些運(yùn)動(dòng)過(guò)程還原為更為簡(jiǎn)單和基本的力量作用。