no SCIENCE PROGRESS 



this negative asseveration, that therefore these higher intelli- 

 gences do actually exist. In other words he first refuses to 

 allow us a negative dogmatism and then immediately indulges 

 in a positive one. 



Again, he says quite rightly that it is a pitiful business 

 to suppose that nobody knows anything more about the 

 universe than we do ; but immediately goes on to assume 

 that there is someone who knows more about it than we do. 

 A third instance is his treatment of the question regarding 

 the brain. Some people think because a blow on the head 

 immediately interrupts consciousness that therefore the brain is 

 the centre of thought. No, he replies, the brain " is the organ 

 of mind. If you take a hatchet and smash that organ, the 

 organist will not be able to play. You have not smashed the 

 organist." He, and most of those who take this dualistic view, 

 seem to think that they have proved their case by such an 

 argument as this. It is indeed quite possible. The brain may 

 be a mere mechanism played upon by some superior outside 

 being. So may the liver or the digestion be mere mechanisms 

 played upon by some outside (probably diabolical) spirits of bile 

 formation or of digestion. We cannot assert the negative 

 certainty that they are not. But Sir Oliver and his friends, 

 after securing our assent to this view, immediately go on to 

 assume without further proof that these outside spirits, at least 

 in the case of the brain, actually do exist. Thus in an instant 

 from arguing that mind may possibly be the sonata performed 

 on the organ oi the brain by some mysterious outside spirit he 

 at once leaps to the conclusion that the may be is an is and that 

 this outside spirit exists and that the mind is nothing else but 

 its performance on the said instrument. Of course we may use 

 the same image of the organ and the brain in many other ways 

 which are not so agreeable to Sir Oliver's contention. Thus we 

 know that mind is influenced not only by the smashing of the 

 organ by a blow, but any physician will tell us that it is in- 

 fluenced in a thousand little ways by a thousand little things — 

 sickness, alcohol, opium, internal secretions, indigestion, want of 

 exercise. It will be admitted that all of these affect the organ, 

 but according to Sir Oliver's thesis they certainly should not 

 affect the organist. If the latter is an outside spirit, how can 

 he be driven by such despicably small agencies to play the 

 vile discords which as a matter of fact so often interrupt the 



