Germsell.  No more there is.  Why, Mr Spencer says that the law of metamorphosis which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces; but mark you, what is the grand conclusion at which he arrives?  I happen to remember the passage:  “How this metamorphosis takes place; how a force existing, as motion, heat, or light, can become a mode of consciousness; how it is possible for aerial 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.