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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



tions of a living being. Of the attributes of a 

 percipient we have, each jbr himself, profound 

 and immediate experience. Of the attributes of 

 the perceptible we have, I suppose, distint scien- 

 tific conceptions. Our notions of the one and 

 our notions of the other appear to attach to a 

 different order of being. 



It appears therefore to me that there is no 

 reason to believe, and much reason for not believ- 

 ing, that the percipient is perceptible under our 

 present conditions of existence, or indeed under 

 any conditions that our present faculties enable 

 us to imagine. 



And this is my case, which of course covers 

 the whole animal creation. Perception must be 

 an attribute of something, and there is reason for 

 believing that this something is imperceptible. 

 This is what I mean when I say that I have, or 

 more properly that I am, a soul or spirit, or rather 

 it is the point on which I join issue with those 

 who say that I am not. 



I am not, as Mr. Harrison seems to suppose, 

 running about in search of a " cause." I am in- 

 quiring into the nature of a being, and that being 

 myself. I am sure I am something. I am cer- 

 tainly not the mere tangible structure of atoms 

 which I affect, and by which I am affected after a 

 wonderful fashion. In reflecting on the nature 

 of my own operations I find nothing to suggest 

 that my own being is subject to the same class 

 of physical laws as the objects from which my 

 sensations are derived, and I conclude that I am 

 not subject to those laws. The most substantial 

 objection to this conclusion is conveyed, I con- 

 ceive, in a sentence of Mr. Harrison's: "To talk 

 to us of mind, feeling, and will, continuing their 

 functions in the absence of physical organs and 

 visible organisms, is to use language which, to us 

 at least, is pure nonsense." 



It is probably to those who talk thus that Mr. 

 Harrison refers when he says that argument is 

 useless. And in point of fact I have no answer 

 but to call his notions anthropomorphic, and to 

 charge him with want of a certain kind of imagi- 

 nation. By imagination we commonly mean the 

 creative faculty which enables a man to give a 

 palpable shape to what he believes or thinks pos- 

 sible ; and this, I do not doubt, Mr. Harrison 

 possesses in a high degree. But there is another 

 kind of imagination which enables a man to em- 

 brace the idea of a possibility to which no such 

 palpable shape can be given, or rather of a world 

 of possibilities beyond the range of his experience 

 or the grasp of his faculties ; as Mr. John Mill 

 embraced the idea of a possible world in which 



the connection of cause and effect should no* 

 exist. The want of this necessary though dan- 

 gerous faculty makes a man the victim of vivid 

 impressions, and disables him from believing 

 what his impressions do not enable him to realize. 

 Questions respecting metaphysical possibility 

 turn much on the presence, or absence, or exag- 

 ger. tion, of this kind of imagination. And when 

 one man has said, "I can perceive it possible," 

 and another has said, "I cannot," it is certainly 

 difficult to get any further. 



To me it is not in the slightest degree difficult 

 to conceive the possible existence of a being 

 capable of love and knowledge without the physi- 

 cal organs through which human beings derive 

 their knowledge, nor in supposing myself to be 

 such a being. Indeed, I seem actually to exer- 

 cise such a capacity (however I got it) when I 

 shut my eyes and try to think out a moral or 

 mathematical puzzle. If it is true that a particu- 

 lar corner of my brain is concerned in the mat- 

 ter, I accept the fact not as a self-evident truth 

 (which would seem to be Mr. Harrison's position), 

 but as a curious discovery of the anatomists. 

 But having said this I have said everything, and, 

 as Mr. Harrison must suppose that I deceive my- 

 self, so I suppose that in his case the imagination 

 which founds itself on experience is so active and 

 vivid as to cloud or dwarf the imagination which 

 proceeds beyond or beside experience. 



Mr. Harrison's own theory I do not quite under- 

 stand. He derides the idea, though he does not 

 absolutely deny the possibility 7 , of an immaterial 

 entity which feels. And he appears to be sen- 

 sible of the difficulty of supposing that atoms of 

 matter which assume the form of a gray pulp can 

 feel. He holds accordingly, as I understand, that 

 feeling, and all that follows from it, are the re- 

 sults of an "organism." 



If he had used the word " organization," I 

 should have concluded unhesitatingly that he was 

 the victim of the Anglican confusion which I 

 have above noticed, and that, in his own mind, 

 he escaped the alternative difficulties of the case 

 by the common expedient of shifting, as occasion 

 required, from one sense of that word to the 

 other. If pressed by the difficulty of imagining 

 sensation not resident in any specific sensitive 

 thing, the word organization would supply to his 

 mind the idea of a thing, a sensitive aggregate of 

 organized atoms. If, on the contrary, pressed 

 by the difficulty of supposing that these atoms, 

 one or all, thought, the word would shift its 

 meaning and present the aspect not of an aggre- 

 gate bulk, but of orderly arrangement — not of a 





