74 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is it necessary for our argument that we should. Certain it is that 

 many things, to all appearance the result of volition, are capable of 

 being explained as absolutely unconscious acts ; and when the swim- 

 ming swarm-spore of an alga avoids collision, and, by a reversal of the 

 stroke of its cilia, backs from an obstacle lying in its course, there is 

 almost certainly in all this nothing but a purely unconscious act. It 

 is but a case in which we find expressed the great law of the adapta- 

 tion of living beings to the conditions which surround them. The 

 irritability of the protoplasm of the ciliated spore responding to an 

 external stimulus sets in motion a mechanism derived by inheritance 

 from its ancestors, and whose parts are correlated to a common end 

 the preservation of the individual. 



But even admitting that every living cell were a conscious and 

 thinking being, are we therefore justified in asserting that its con- 

 sciousness, like its irritability, is a property of the matter of which it 

 is composed ? The sole argument on which this view is made to rest 

 is that from analogy. It is argued that because the life-phenomena, 

 which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a property 

 of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are accom- 

 panied must be also so regarded. The weak point in the argument is 

 the absence of all analogy between the things compared, and, as the 

 conclusion rests solely on the argument from analogy, the two must 

 fall to the ground together. 



In a lecture* to which I once had the pleasure of listening a lec- 

 ture characterized no less by lucid exposition than by the fascinating 

 form in which its facts were presented to the hearers Professor Hux- 

 ley argues that no difference, however great, between the phenomena 

 of living matter and those of the lifeless elements of which this matter 

 is composed should militate against our attributing to protoplasm the 

 phenomena of life as properties essentially inherent in it ; since we 

 know that the result of a chemical combination of physical elements 

 may exhibit physical properties totally different from those of the ele- 

 ments combined ; the physical phenomena presented by water, for 

 example, having no resemblance to those of its combining elements, 

 oxygen and hydrogen. 



I believe that Professor Huxley intended to apply this argument 

 only to the phenomena of life in the stricter sense of the word. As 

 such it is conclusive. But when it is pushed further, and extended to 

 the phenomena of consciousness, it loses all its force. The analogy, 

 perfectly valid in the former case, here fails. The properties of the 

 chemical compound are like those of its components, still physical 

 properties. They come within the wide category of the universally 

 accepted properties of matter, while those of consciousness belong to 

 a category absolutely distinct one which presents not a trace of a 

 connection with any of those which physicists have agreed in assign- 



* " The Physical Basis of Life" (see " Essays and Reviews," by T. H. Huxley). 



