SCIENCE AND MORALS: A REPLY. 501 



minded of the quarter-deck walks of my youth. In taking that form 

 of exercise, you may perambulate through all points of the compass 

 with perfect safety, so long as you keep within certain limits : forget 

 those limits, in your ardor, and mere smothering and spluttering, if 

 not worse, await you. I stick by the deck, and throw a life-buoy now 

 and then to the struggling folk who have gone overboard ; and all I 

 get for my humanity is the abuse of all whenever they leave off abus- 

 ing one another. 



Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable 

 sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about 

 unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an un- 

 muzzled dog, not under proper control. I could find no label that 

 would suit me, so, in my desire to range myself and be respectable, I 

 invented one ; and, as the chief thing I was sure of was that I did not 

 know a great many things that the — ists and the — ites about mo 

 professed to be familiar with, I called myself an agnostic. Surely no 

 denomination could be more modest or more appropriate ; and I can 

 not imagine why I should be every now and then haled out of my 

 refuge and declared sometimes to be a materialist, sometimes an athe- 

 ist, sometimes a positivist ; and sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly 

 or reactionary obscurantist ! 



I trust that I have, at last, made my case clear, and that, hence- 

 forth, I shall be allowed to rest in peace — at least, after a further ex- 

 planation or two, which Mr. Lilly proves to me may be necessary. It 

 has been seen that my excellent critic has original ideas respecting the 

 meaning of the words " laboratory " and " chemical " ; and, as it ap- 

 pears to me, his definition of "materialist" is quite as much peculiar 

 to himself. For, unless I misunderstand him, and I have taken pains 

 not to do so, he puts me down as a materialist (over and above the 

 grounds which I have shown to have no foundation) ; firstly, because 

 I have said that consciousness is a function of the brain ; and, secondly, 

 because I hold by determinism. With respect to the first point, I am 

 not aware that there is any one who doubts that, in the proper physio- 

 logical sense of the word function, consciousness, in certain forms at 

 any rate, is a cerebral function. In physiology we call function that 

 effect, or series of effects, which results from the activity of an organ. 

 Thus, it is the function of muscle to give rise to motion ; and the 

 muscle gives rise to motion when the nerve which supplies it is stimu- 

 lated. If one of the nerve-bundles in a man's arm is laid bare and a 

 stimulus is applied to certain of the nervous filaments, the result will 

 be production of motion in that arm. If others are stimulated, the 

 result will be the production of the state of consciousness called pain. 

 Now, if I trace these last nerve-filaments, I find them to be ultimately 

 connected with part of the substance of the brain, just as the others 

 turn out to be connected with muscular substance. If the production 

 of motion, in the one case, is properly said to be the function of the 



