THE FACTS OF SCIENCE 57 



and we may legitimately speak of the " consciousness of 

 society " and the " consciousness of the universe." These 

 are but a few actual samples of the current method of 

 fallacious inference — usually, be it remarked, screened 

 beneath an unlimited flow of words, and not thus ex- 

 hibited in their naked absurdity. When we recognise 

 how widely inferences of this character affect conduct in 

 life, and yet grasp how unstable must be the basis of such 

 conduct, how liable to be shaken to the foundations by 

 the first stout logical breeze, then we understand how 

 honest doubt is far healthier for the community, is more 

 social, than unthinking inference, light-hearted and over- 

 ready belief Doubt is at least the first stage towards 

 scientific inquiry ; and it is better by far to have reached 

 that stage than to have made no intellectual progress 

 whatever. 



^ 9. — The Limits to Other-Consciousness 



We cannot better illustrate the limits of legitimate 

 inference than by considering the example we have dealt 

 with in ^ 5, and asking how far we may infer the exist- 

 ence of consciousness and of thought. We have seen 

 (p. 52) that consciousness is associated with the process 

 which may intervene in the brain between the receipt of a 

 sense-impression from a sensory nerve and the despatch of 

 a stimulus to action through a motor nerve. Conscious- 

 ness is thus associated with physiological machinery of a 

 certain character, which we sum up under brain and 

 nerves. Further, it depends upon the lapse of an in- 

 terval between sense-impression and exertion, this interval 

 being filled, as it were, with the mutual resonance and 

 cling-clang of stored sense-impressions and the conceptions 

 drawn from them. Where no like machinery, no like 

 interval can be observed, there we have no right to infer 

 any consciousness. In our fellow -men we observe this 

 same machinery and the like interval, and we infer con- 

 sciousness, it may be as an eject, but as an eject which, 

 as we have seen (p. 50), might not inconceivably, how- 



