170 FKAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



of the brain thrown into tremors. My insight is not 

 baffled by these physical processes. What baffles and 

 bewilders me is the notion that from those physical 

 tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as 

 sensation, thought, and emotion can be derived. You 

 may say, or think, that this issue of consciousness from 

 the clash of atoms is not more incongruous than the 

 flash of light from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. 

 But I beg to say that it is. For such incongruity as 

 the flash possesses is that which I now force upon your 

 attention. The c flash ' is an affair of consciousness, 

 the objective counterpart of which is a vibration. It is 

 a flash only by your interpretation. You are the cause 

 of the apparent incongruity; and you are the thing 

 that puzzles me. I need not remind you that the great 

 Leibnitz felt the difficulty which I feel ; and that to 

 get rid of this monstrous deduction of life from death 

 he displaced your atoms by his monads, which were 

 more or less perfect mirrors of the universe, and out of 

 the summation and integration of which he supposed 

 all the phenomena of life sentient, intellectual, and 

 emotional to arise. 



' Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to 

 admit, is quite as great as mine. You cannot satisfy 

 the human understanding in its demand for logical con- 

 tinuity between molecular processes and the phenomena 

 of consciousness. This is a rock on which Materialism 

 must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a 

 complete philosophy of life. What is the moral, my 

 Lucretian ? You and I are not likely to indulge in 

 ill-temper in the discussion of these great topics, where 

 we see so much room for honest differences of opinion. 

 But there are people of less wit or more bigotry (I say 

 it with humility), on both sides, who are ever ready to 



