THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 87 



scientific inference from the parallelism of mind and brain, 

 and think the brain is merely an elaborate grand piano on 

 which a ghostly visitant plays mysterious music. It is a 

 strange issue for a man of science who holds that a very 

 complex grouping of atoms " is likely to have properties 

 differing not only in degree but in kind from the properties 

 of simple substances" (p. 186). When we do offer him a 

 grouping of atoms of the most inconceivable complexity 

 the human brain he will not even allow that it has 

 developed properties differing in degree from those of the 

 lowly animal ganglion. Its energies have had to be over- 

 ruled by an intangible something from another world, which 

 forbids science ever^to hope to analyse consciousness in 

 this world. In the old unscientific way, life and mind are 

 set aside with the mysterious label, " spirit," on them, and 

 the biologist and psychologist are told that their central 

 objects of interest lie in a hazy world to which they have no 

 possible access until their brains their organs of thought 

 and reason are paralysed by death. One must judge 

 leniently the hard language in which they have characterised 

 these airy speculations of our distinguished physicist. 



Sir Oliver Lodge might reply that it is the place of the 

 biologist to deal with the phenomena of life, and of the 

 psychologist to describe and classify the phenomena of mind; 

 that they are not concerned with the substance or essence 

 of either. It must be confessed that many men of science 

 have expressed their function in these terms, and so 

 provided some ground for the distinction. On such a 

 theory it could very plausibly be contended that while a 



