24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



beings now in the same way that they were first produced. And even 

 though we never could succeed in observing the original production of 

 organisms — to say nothing of experimenting on it — that fact would 

 constitute no absolute objection to our view. Were matter and force 

 intelligible to us, the world would not cease to be so, even though we 

 should conceive the earth to be covered with the most luxuriant 

 growth of vegetable life, from its emerald equatorial girdle to the last 

 lichen-gray cliffs of the pole; and it would remain equally so, what- 

 ever share in the formation of the vegetable world we might concede 

 to the laws of organic development, or to natural selection. 



But, for reasons which will readily appear, we must leave out of 

 view, in the present consideration, the now well-known indispensable 

 aid rendered by insects in the fertilization of plants. For the rest, the 

 grandest picture ever sketched of a primeval forest in the tropics by 

 Bernardin de St. Pierre, Von Humboldt, or Poppig, offers to the view 

 of theoretical science absolutely nothing but matter in motion. This, 

 I think, is the new and very simple form that can be given to the ar- 

 gument against " life-force," in the sense of the vitalists. 



But now there comes in, at some point in the development of life 

 upon the earth which we cannot ascertain — the ascertainment of which 

 does not concern us here — something new and extraordinary ; some- 

 thing incomprehensible, again, as was-the case with the essence of mat- 

 ter and force. The thread of intelligence, which stretches back into 

 negatively-infinite time, is broken, and our natural science comes to a 

 chasm across which is no bridge, over which no pinion can carry us : 

 we are here at the other limit of our understanding. 



This other incomprehensible is consciousness. I will now, conclu- 

 sively as I believe, prove that not only is consciousness unexplainable 

 by its material conditions in the present status of science, which every 

 one will readily admit, but that, even in the nature of things, it never 

 can be explained by these conditions. The contrary opinion, that we 

 must not give up all hope of getting at consciousness from its material 

 conditions, and that in the course of hundreds or thousands of years 

 the mind of man, having invaded now unthought-of realms of knowl- 

 edge, might succeed where we fail — this is the other error which I 

 propose to combat here. 



I use the term " consciousness " designedly, the question here 

 being only as to the fact of an intellectual phenomenon, of any kind 

 whatsoever, even of the lowest grade. There is no need to think of 

 Watt, engrossed with his parallelogram, nor of Shakespeare, Raffaelle, 

 or Mozart, engaged in producing their grand creations, in order to 

 have an instance of a mental fact unexplainable by its material con- 

 ditions. Just as the most powerful and best developed muscular per- 

 formance of man or animal is in fact no more obscure than the simple 

 contraction of a single muscle — as the single secretory cell involves 

 the whole problem of secretion — so the most exalted mental activity 



