REV. JAMES MARTINEAU AND BELFAST ADDRESS. 229 



feel pain or pleasure; I experience a sweet taste, or 

 smell a rose, or hear an organ, or see something red. 

 . . It is absolutely and for ever inconceivable that a 

 number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen 

 atoms should be otherwise than indifferent as to their 

 own position and motion, past, present, or future. It 

 is utterly inconceivable how consciousness should result 

 from their joint action.' 



This language, which was spoken in 1872, Mr. 

 Martineau ' freely ' translates, and quotes against me. 

 The act is due to misapprehension. Evidence is at 

 hand to prove that I employed similar language 

 twenty years ago. It is to be found in the ( Satur- 

 day Keview ' for 1860; but a sufficient illustra- 

 tion of the agreement between my friend Du Bois- 

 Reymond and myself, is furnished by the discourse on 

 ' Scientific Materialism,' delivered in 1868, then widely 

 circulated, and reprinted here. The reader who com- 

 pares the two discourses will see that the same line of 

 thought is pursued in both, and that perfect agreement 

 reigns between my friend and me. In the very Address 

 he criticises, Mr. Martineau might have seen that pre- 

 cisely the same position is maintained. A quotation 

 will prove this : ' Thus far,' I say, ' our way is clear, 

 but now comes my difficulty. Your atoms are indivi- 

 duajly without sensation, much more are they without 

 intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand 

 upon this problem ? Take your dead hydrogen atoms, 

 your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, your 

 dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and 

 all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which 

 the brain is formed. Imagine them separate and 

 sensationless ; observe them running together and form- 

 ing all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely 

 mechanical process, is eeeable by the mind. But can 



