After completing college and university courses the writer became a natural scientist by profession and is now in active practice. The training in these sciences has proved invaluable, because it has led him to turn from appearances to realities, and seek causes amid effects, as indictated in the following argument which starts with familiar natural science assumptions.
Nothing happens; there is no chance. All phenomena are but effects, manifestations, proofs of causes understood or not. And these causes may be grouped and re-grouped systematically until a primal cause is reached. But no matter how evident the effects may be, neither the immediate nor the primal cause is tangible in the present state of our understanding; their action is apprehended solely through their phenomena.
The swaying of trees and the ripples or waves upon a lake prove the presence of a cause,—wind: wind is caused by variations of temperature; the falling of a stone proves the cause,—universal attraction or gravitation; the arc light and the movement of a trolley car are phenomena of electricity; ice melts and water evaporates because of heat; rain falls and dew is deposited when the air becomes saturated with moisture; a trumpet note and katydid's call result from invisible vibrations controlled by the performer; a thunderclap is said by physicists to be due to the crashing together of two temporarily separated bodies of air; odors and flavors are due to the action produced upon the organs of smell and taste, and the pleasant or unpleasant effects observed by various individuals are due to the action of diverse undefined causes dominant in one individual and dormant in another; evaporation of liquids absorbs heat, and condensation releases it, the former observable in the cooling of the skin moistened with water, or more evidently with alcohol or ether, and both familiar in the action of refrigerating machinery, which makes practical use of these causes and phenomena.
