236 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



cost of its monism [put into it by Mr. Martineau], your 

 scheme seems hardly to gain its end ; for by what 

 manipulation of your resources will you, for example, 

 educe Consciousness?"' 



This reads like pleasantry, but it deals with serious 

 things. For the last seven years the question here 

 proposed by Mr. Martineau, and my answer to it, 

 have been accessible to all. The question, in my 

 words, is briefly this : ' A man can say, " I feel, I 

 think, I love," but how does consciousness infuse itself 

 into the problem ? ' And here is my answer : The 

 passage from the physics of the brain to the corre- 

 sponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted 

 that a definite thought and a definite molecular action 

 in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not possess 

 the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of 

 the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process 

 of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear 

 together, but we do not know why. Were our minds 

 and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, 

 as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the 

 brain ; were we capable of following all their motions, 

 all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such 

 there be ; and were we intimately acquainted with the 

 corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should 

 be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, 

 " How are these physical processes connected with the 

 facts of consciousness ? " The chasm between the two 

 classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually 

 impassable.' l 



Compare this with the answer which Mr. Martineau 

 puts into the mouth of his physicist, and with which I 

 am generally credited by Mr. Martineau's readers, both 



1 Bishop Butler's reply to the Lucretian in the ' Belfast Address ' 

 is all in the same strain. 



