ious from the Standpoint of
Physiology and Descent Theory"), Berlin, Duncker, 1872.

Strauss says, in the previously-mentioned work: "If, under certain
conditions, motion is transformed into heat, why may it not, under other
conditions, be transformed into sensation?" And Herbert Spencer says, in
his "First Principles of Philosophy," (page 217): "Various classes of facts
thus unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the
physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those
modes of the unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical
affinity, etc., are alike transformable into each other, and into those
modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, {129} emotion,
thought: these, in their turns, being directly or indirectly
retransformable into the original shapes."

But motion--even the finest material motion, that of ether, (which, in
consequence of the very important discovery of the conservation of force
and of the mechanical equivalent of heat, made by Robert von Mayer, at
present is taken to be heat)--is so decidedly a material process, the
sensation of motion is so decidedly a reflex of the material in something
immaterial, that the assertion of a transformation of motion into sensation
seems to us only to change the point of view, and not to explain the
difference, but to efface it. And we think that the appeal of Strauss from
his contemporaries, who do not understand him, to posterity, who would
understand him better and esteem him, has but little prospect of being
operative.

If that which has sensation and that which has it not, are to be brought
genetically near one another, and hence the difference between the two at
the point where the lowest sentient being has found its first existence, is
to be made void or at least bridged over, then it is much more reasonable,
and also in the line of Strauss's solution, to deny the difference between
that which has sensation and that which has it not, and to do this in the
sense in which we also declare that to be sentient which we have hitherto
been accustomed to regard as without sensation; and we should likewise
attribute sensation to the original elements of the world, be they called
atoms or whatever one may wish. This is done by Zoellner and by the before
mentioned "Anonymus." This conclusion is logical; it is even the only
possible conclusion, if we once start from the axiom that the new, which
comes