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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/418

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414
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
From a photograph in the Illustrated London News.

Professor Ehrlich and Dr. Hata.

dietable by Laplace 's calculator, given the initial positions, velocities and the law of acceleration of the molecules, but no mathematician could calculate the orbit of the common housefly. A spider in the galvanometer of a physicist would introduce a superphysical cause. Still the speaker did not defend vitalism as an appeal to an undefined cause. A living thing obeys the laws of physics like everything else, but it initiates processes and produces results that without it could not have occurred.

A wide public will doubtless be interested in Sir Oliver Lodge's statement of his conviction that occurrences now regarded as occult, not only can be examined and reduced to order by the methods of science, but that evidence so examined has convinced him that memory and affection are not limited to association with matter and that personality persists after bodily death, that evidence goes to prove that discarnate intelligence may interact with us on the material side and that ultimately we may hope to obtain some understanding of the nature of this