CONSCIOUSNESS AS A VITAL FUNCTION 307 



lems as such. But when philosophical conclusions, no 

 matter how these were arrived at, are presented to 

 him as a basis for the prosecution of investigation in 

 his own field (and this not infrequently happens, 

 either by design or unwittingly), he must examine the 

 fitness of these conclusions for his own purposes. If 

 they do not square with the facts as he knows them, he 

 must lay them aside, for the time at least. 



The biologist, in adopting the simple and na'ive 

 doctrine that consciousness is a function of the body, 

 of course does not claim to have solved the philo- 

 sophical problems of consciousness; he does not know 

 how the processes which constitute his subjective 

 experience, his awareness, have arisen genetically, nor 

 the method of their connection with the related 

 metabolism. Neither does he know the ultimate na- 

 ture of muscular contraction or of any other vital 

 function; or what may be the reason why when 

 hydrogen and oxygen are combined in the ratio of 

 2 to I there results a compound called water with 

 properties so apparently incommensurable with those 

 of both of the constituent elements. These are all 

 matters of pattern of combination of simpler units, 

 and it is a reasonable hope of science that the laws of 

 all of these combinations will some day be discovered. 

 In the meantime, our ignorance of the way in which 

 the properties of water are related to those of hydro- 

 gen and oxygen and our ignorance of the way in which 

 the manifestations of consciousness are related to 



