_Lady Fritterly_ [_sharply_]. What are you saying, Lord Fondleton?

_Lord Fondleton_. Ahem--I was saying--ahem--I was saying that we shall
be having some Yankee inventing steam thinking-mills and galvanic loving-
batteries soon. What a lot of wear and tear it would save! I should go
about covered with a number of electric love-wires for the force to play
upon.

_Fussle_. I think this matter wants clearing up, Mr Germsell. Why don't
you write a book on mental and emotional physics?

_Mr Rollestone_. I would venture with great diffidence to remark that
the confusion seems to me to arise from the limit we attach to the
meaning of the word employed. It may be quite true that no idea or
emotion can exist except as the result of physical force; but it is also
true that its effect must be conditioned on the quality of the force.
There is as wide a difference between the physical forces operant in the
brain, and which give rise to ideas, and those which move a steam-engine,
as there is between mind and matter as popularly defined. Both, as Mr
Germsell will admit, are conditioned manifestations of force; but the one
contains a vital element in its dynamism which the other does not. You
may apply as much physical force by means of a galvanic battery to a dead
brain as you please, but you can't strike an idea out of it; and this
vital force, while it is "conditioned force," like light and heat,
differs in its mode of manifestation from every other manifestation of
force, even more than they do from each other, in that it possesses a
potency inherent to it, which they have not, and this potency it is which
creates emotion and generates ideas. The fallacy which underlies the
whole of this system of philosophy is contained in the assumption that