Avon Murder Mystery Monthly No. 41 — page 92: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

94 _ THE METAL MONSTER be called an intelligent, conscious entity. The gap between what we have long called the organic and the inorganic is steadily decreasing. Do you know of the remarkable experiments of Lillie upon various metals?” “Vaguely,” I said. “Lillie,” he went on, “proved that under the electric. current and other exciting mediums metals exhibited practically every reaction of the human nerve and muscle. It grew weary, rested, and after resting was perceptibly stronger than before; it got what was practically in- digestion, and it exhibited a peculiar but unmistakable memory. Also, he found, it could acquire disease and die. “Lillie concluded that there existed a real metallic consciousness. It was Le Bon who first proved also that metal is more sensitive than man, and that its immobility is only apparent. (Le Bon in “Evolution of Matter,” Chapter eleven.) “Take the block of magnetic iron that stands so gray and apparently lifeless, subject it to a magnetic current lifeless, what happens? The iron block is composed of molecules which under ordinary conditions are disposed in all possible directions indifferently. But when the cur- rent passes through there is tremendous movement in that apparently inert mass. All of the tiny particles of which it is composed turn and shift until their north poles all point more or less approximately in the direction of the magnetic force. “When that happens the block itself becomes a magnet, filled with and surrounded by a field of magnetic energy; instinct with it. Out- wardly it has not moved; actually there has been prodigious motion.” “But it is not conscious motion,” I objected. “Ah, but how do you know?” he asked. “If Jacques Loeb* is right, that action of the iron molecules is every bit as conscious a movement as the least and the greatest of our own. There is absolutely no differ- ence between them. “Your and my and its every movement is nothing but an involun- tary and inevitable reaction to a certain stimulus. If he’s right, then I’m a buttercup—but that’s neither here nor there. Loeb—all he did was to restate destiny, one of humanity’s oldest ideas, in the terms of tropisms, infusoria and light. Omar Khayyam chemically reincarnated in the Rockefeller Institute. Nevertheless those who accept his theories have to admit that there is essentially no difference between their im- pulses and the rush of filings toward a magnet. “Equally nevertheless, Goodwin, the iron does meet Haeckel’s three tests—it can receive a stimulus, it does react to that stimulus and it *Professor Jacques Loeb, of the sockeremer institute, New York, '"The Mechanistic Conception of Life.” GOGO .S (GO)