58 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



ever improbably, become some day an object. In the 

 lower forms of life we observe machinery approximately 

 like our own, and a shorter and shorter interval between 

 sense-impression and exertion ; we may reasonably infer 

 consciousness, if in reduced intensity. We cannot, indeed, 

 put our finger on a definite type of life and say here 

 consciousness ends, but it is completely illogical to infer 

 its existence where we can find no interval between 

 sense-impression and exertion, or where we can find no 

 nervous system. Because we cannot point to the exact 

 form of material life at which consciousness ceases, we 

 have no more right to infer that consciousness is asso- 

 ciated with all life, still less with all forms of matter, than 

 we have to infer that there must always be wine mixed 

 with water, because so little wine can be mixed with 

 water that we are unable to detect its presence. Will, 

 too, as we have seen, is closely connected with conscious- 

 ness ; it is the feeling in our individual selves when 

 exertion flows from the store of past self-impresses " within 

 us," and not from the immediate sense-impression which 

 we term " without us." We are justified, therefore, in 

 inferring the feeling of will as well as consciousness in 

 nervous systems more or less akin to our own ; we may 

 throw them out from ourselves, eject them into certain 

 forms of material life. But those who eject them into 

 matter, where no nervous system can be found, or even 

 into existences which they postulate as immaterial, are 

 not only exceeding enormously the bounds of scientific 

 inference, but forming conceptions which, like that of the 

 centaur, are inconsistent in themselves. From will and 

 consciousness associated with material machinery we can 

 infer nothing whatever as to will and consciousness with- 

 out that machinery. We are passing by the trick of a 

 common -name to things of which we can postulate 

 absolutely nothing, and of which we are only unable to 

 deny the existence when we give to that term a meaning 

 wholly opposed to the customary one.^ 



1 Consciousness without a nervous system is like a man without a vertebral 

 column — a chimera, of which in customary language we deny the " existence." 



