PROTOPLASM AND LIFE. 749 



ing to matter as its proper characteristics. The argument thus breaks 

 down, for its force depends on analogy alone, and here all analogy- 

 vanishes. 



That consciousness is never manifested except in the presence of 

 cerebral matter or of something like it, there can not be a question ; but 

 this is a very different thing from its being a property of such matter 

 in the sense in which polarity is a property of the magnet, or irrita- 

 bility of protoplasm. The generation of the rays which lie invisible 

 beyond the violet in the spectrum of the sun can not be regarded as a 

 property of the medium which by changing their refrangibility can 

 alone render them apparent. 



I know that there is a special charm in those broad generalizations 

 which would refer many very different phenomena to a common 

 source. But in this very charm there is undoubtedly a danger, and 

 we must be all the more careful lest it should exert an influence in 

 arresting the progress of truth, just as at an earlier period traditional 

 beliefs exerted an authority from which the mind but slowly and with 

 difficulty succeeded in emancipating itself. 



But have we, it may be asked, made in all this one step forward 

 toward an explanation of the phenomena of consciousness or the dis- 

 covery of its source ? Assuredly not. The power of conceiving of a 

 substance different from that of matter is still beyond the limits of 

 human intelligence, and the physical or objective conditions which are 

 the concomitants of thought are the only ones of which it is possible 

 to know anything, and the only ones whose study is of value. 



We are not, however, on that account forced to the conclusion that 

 there is nothing in the universe but matter and force. The simplest 

 physical law is absolutely inconceivable by the highest of the brutes, 

 and no one would be justified in assuming that man had already at- 

 tained the limit of his powers. Whatever may be that mysterious 

 bond which connects organization with psychical endowments, the one 

 grand fact a fact of inestimable importance stands out clear and 

 freed from all obscurity and doubt, that from the first dawn of intelli- 

 gence there is with every advance in organization a corresponding ad- 

 vance in mind. Mind as well as body is thus traveling onward through 

 higher and still higher phases ; the great law of evolution is shaping 

 the destiny of our race ; and though now we may at most but indicate 

 some weak point in the generalization which would refer consciousness 

 as well as life to a common material source, who can say that in the 

 far-off future there may not yet be evolved other and higher faculties 

 from which light may stream in upon the darkness, and reveal to man 

 the great mystery of thought ? 



