A THINKING MACHINE. 599 



and look at the diversity of cats and dogs, goats and sheep, beetles 

 and butterflies, soles and shrimps, that even the ordinary unlearned 

 man knows and recognizes, and mostly remembers. Narrow the ques- 

 tion down to dogs alone, and still you get the same result. Consider 

 the St. Bernards and the mastiffs, the pugs and the bull-dogs, the 

 black-and-tans and the King Charlies, the sheep-dogs and the deer- 

 hounds, the shivering little Italian greyhounds and the long dachs- 

 hunds that you buy by the yard. Every one of these and countless 

 others has got to have its cell all to itself in the classificatory depart- 

 ment of the human brain, and I sujjpose another cell for its name in 

 the portion specially devoted to language also. Add to these the plants, 

 flowers, fruits, roots, and other well-known vegetable products whose 

 names are familiar to almost everybody, and what a total you have 

 got at once ! A good botanist, to take a more specific case, knows (in 

 addition to a stock of general knowledge about equivalent on the 

 average to anybody else's) the names and natures of hundreds and 

 thousands of distinct plants, to say nothing about innumerable small 

 peculiarities of stem, and leaf, and flower, and seed in every species 

 and variety among them all. No, the mere bare weight of dead fact 

 with which everybody's memory is stored and laden defies the possi- 

 bility of reckoning and pigeon-holing. Make your separate dockets 

 ever so tiny, reduce them all to their smallest dimensions, and yet 

 there will not be room for all of them in the human brain. The more 

 we think on it, the more will the wonder grow that one small head can 

 carry all that the merest infant knows. 



And now observe once more in turn a still greater and more fatal 

 diflSculty. I have spoken throughout, after the manner of men, as 

 though each separate object, or word, or idea had a clearly defined 

 and limited individuality, and that it could be distinctly located and 

 circumscribed by itself in a single solitary isolated cell of the nervous 

 mechanism. But in reality the very terms I have been obliged to use 

 in describing the matter have themselves contained the implicit con- 

 demnation of this crude, hard, and impossible materialistic conception. 

 For no idea and no word is, as a matter of fact, so rigidly one and 

 indivisible, like the French Republic. Take for example once more 

 our old friend " dog," and let us confine our attention just now to the 

 word alone, not to the ideas connoted by it. Dog is not one word : it 

 is a whole group and set of words. There is, first of all, the audible 

 sound, dog, as it falls upon our ears when spoken by another. That 

 is to say, there is, imprimis, dog auditory. Secondly, there is the 

 muscular effort, dog, as it frames itself upon our own lips and vocal 

 organs when we say it aloud to another person. That is to say, there 

 is, secundo, dog pronounceable. Thirdly, there is the written or printed 

 word, dog, DOG, in capitals or minuscules, script, or Roman, or italic, 

 as we recognize it visibly when seen with our eyes in book or letter. 

 That is to say, there is, tertio, dog legible. Now, it is quite clear that 



