BT A. JEFFERIS TURNER, M.D. 43 



attribute it to a drop of water, or a grain of sand, in fact to all 

 matter. What we should mean by the word consciousness used 

 in such connections it is impossible to say. We seem to have 

 come back to something like the old " vitality," but with 

 extensions to inanimate nature, like the "plastic nature "of 

 John Ray ; execept that we do not invoke this " plastic 

 nature " to explain physical phenomena. Furthermore, these 

 speculations offer no explanation whatever of the nature of 

 consciousness; they merely extend the problem. And it might 

 with great force be urged that the chain of analogy has been 

 strained to breaking-point. Starting with the human conscious- 

 ness, the nature of which is quite inconceivable to us, we have 

 imagined the existence of an infinite series of "consciousnesses" 

 equally inconceivable, but certainly different to the first. We 

 have landed ourselves into a region where assertion and denial 

 are both little more than verbal, and therefore, to my mind, 

 alike illegitimate. 



It is no help to the understanding of consciousness, as we 

 know it, to attribute it to the combination of the separate 

 " consciousnesses " of some thousand nerve-cells. To speak of 

 the human mind as built up of such particles, as a wall is 

 composed of bricks, or as water is composed of oxygen and 

 hydrogen, is to use materialistic propositions of something which 

 is not matter ; to misuse language, not to express mental 

 conceptions, but to conceal their absence. The synthesis is 

 unthinkable. We have no right to forget that all our knowledge 

 of matter depends on sensations represented in consciousness. 

 Our molecules, atoms, ether, vortices, are all only extensions of 

 sensation. They are what, if our inductions are trustworthy, 

 we should see and feel if our sense-organs had their range 

 sufficiently extended. Of what lies behind the sensations we do 

 and can know nothing. The real nature of the external universe 

 is as much beyond the possibility of knowledge as the nature of 

 consciousness itself. There is nothing in science to contradict 

 the familiar lines of the poet : — 



" The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

 " The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 

 " Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 

 " And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 

 " Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 

 " As dreams are made of, and our little life 

 " Is rounded with a sleep." 



