84 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 



The first is the analogy of the eye as " the organ of vision." 

 He labours to show that light would remain whether the 

 eye were destroyed or not. I pointed out to him in the 

 Hibbert that light is not the function of the eye, and so 

 there is not the remotest parallel. When he can tell us of 

 a case where vision has remained when the eye was des- 

 troyed, there will be a pertinent and instructive analogy ; 

 or when he finds Haeckel, or some more foolish person, 

 saying that when the brain is destroyed the things that 

 stimulated it also cease to exist. He seems to think this 

 curious fallacy is mended by adding that, in the event of 

 our eyes ceasing to act, " a term like ' vision ' might still be 

 employed to signify our mode of perceiving and experiencing 

 the agency which now manifests itself to our eyes " (p. no). 

 It certainly might, but " vision " would then be a function 

 of a different material organ altogether. The function of 

 the eye would not have persisted at all as a disembodied 

 something, and so again there is not the remotest analogy 

 to his theory of the survival of the disembodied mind. Sir 

 O. Lodge's expertness in revising the terms of Christian 

 theology seems to have its disadvantages. 



His second analogy is a slightly new variation on that 

 worn musical metaphor of brain being the " organ " of the 

 mind. The old, familiar version was that the soul was the 

 musician. Sir Oliver Lodge puts it that the organ is "an 

 instrument for the incarnation of music." He asks us to 

 believe that music say " the ideas of Sir Edward Elgar " 

 would still exist if all the organs in the world were destroyed. 

 This is a strange confusion of three totally different things, to 



