invigorating
conflict among themselves, with philosophers joining in." "Ancient
postulates are being pulled up by the roots." "The modern tendency is
to emphasise the discontinuous or atomic character of everything."
"The physical discovery of the twentieth century, so far, is the
electrical theory of matter." "So far from Nature not making jumps, it
becomes doubtful if she does anything else." "The corpuscular theory
of radiation is by no means so dead as in my youth we thought it was."
"But I myself am an upholder of _ultimate_ continuity, and a fervent
believer in the aether of space."

{95}

"I have been called a vitalist, and in a sense I am; but I am not a
vitalist if vitalism means an appeal to an undefined 'vital force' (an
objectionable term I have never thought of using) as against the laws
of chemistry and physics." "There is plenty of physics and chemistry
and mechanics about every vital action, but for a complete
understanding of it something beyond physics and chemistry is needed."
"No mathematics could calculate the orbit of a common house-fly." "I
will risk the assertion that life introduces something incalculable and
purposeful amid the laws of physics; it thus distinctly supplements
those laws, though it leaves them otherwise precisely as they were and
obeys them all."

"The Loom of Time is complicated by a multitude of free agents who can
modify the web, making the product more beautiful or more ugly
according as they are in harmony or disharmony with the general scheme.
I venture to maintain that manifest imperfections are thus accounted
for, and that freedom could be given on no other terms, nor at any less
cost."

"I will not shrink from a personal note summarising the result on my
own mind of thirty years of experience of psychical research, begun
without predilection--indeed, with the usual hostile prejudice." "The
facts so examined have convinced me that memory and affection are not
limited to that association with matter by which alone they can
manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists beyond
bodily death."

{96}

Of the debates on the subsequent days those on "Radiation" and "The
Origin of Life" were, perhaps, the most remarkable. At the former the
point at issue was the amount of truth contained in Planck's "famous
hypothesis that energy was transferred by jumps instead of in a
continuous stream." Sir Joseph Larmor evidently expressed the
prevailing o