A BOOK OF EXPOSITION

The mystery of the human body has confounded man since his thinking skills arrived. Even in recent history, from Leonardo Da Vinci to the modern DNA geneticists, the mysteries of the human body continue to excite the minds of scientists. This reprint is one fine example of one man's study into the mechanics of the body, comparing its functions to other mechanical devices. A nice analysis between the 'natural' and the mechanical.

From the Author:

Another feature is worthy of mention. Although the material covers so wide a field-anatomy, zoology, physics, psychology, and applied science-that the collection will appeal to instructors in every type of college and technical school, the selections are related in such a way as to produce an impression of unity. This relation is apparent between the first selection, which deals with the student's body, and the third, which deals with another organism in nature. The second and fourth selections deal with kindred aspects of modern industry-the manufacture of paper and the Linotype machine, by which it is used. The fifth selection is a protest against certain developments of the industrial regime; the last, an attempt to reconcile the spirit of science with that of religion. While monotony has been avoided, the essays form a distinct unit. EXCERPT

The problem of religion-that is, of the relations of man with the supernatural, with God and immortality, with the soul, our personality or the ego, and its existence or nonexistence after death-is the greatest and deepest which ever confronted mankind. In the present state of human knowledge, science can give no definite and final conclusions on these subjects, because of the limitations inherent in science.

We must realize that all our knowledge and information and the entire structure of science are ultimately derived from the perceptions of our senses and thereby limited in the same manner and to the same extent as our sense perceptions and our intellect are limited. The success or failure of scientific achievement largely depends on the extent to which we can abstract-that is, make our observations and conclusions independent of the limitations of the human mind. But there are limitations inherent in the human mind beyond which our intellect cannot reach, and therefore science does not and cannot show us the world as it actually is, with its true facts and laws, but only as it appears to us within the inherent limitations of the human mind.

The greatest limitation of the human mind is that all its perceptions are finite, and our intellect cannot grasp the conception of infinity. The same limitation therefore applies to the world as it appears to our reasoning intellect, and in the world of science there is no infinity, and conceptions such as God and the immortality of the ego are beyond the realm of empirical science. Science deals only with finite events in finite time and space, and the farther we pass onward in space or time, the more uncertain becomes the scientific reasoning, until, in trying to approach the infinite, we are lost in the fog of unreasonable contradiction, "beyond science"-that is, "transcendental".

Thus, we may never know and understand the infinite, whether in nature, in the ultimate deductions from the laws of nature in time and in space, or beyond nature, on such transcendental conceptions as God and immortality. But we may approach these subjects as far as the limitations of our mind permit, reach the border line beyond which we cannot go, and so derive some understanding of how far these subjects may appear nonexisting or unreasonable, merely because they are beyond the limitations of our intellect.

CONTENTS