234 FKAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



sources will you, for example, educe Conscious- 

 ness?"' 



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 prob- 

 lem?' And here is my answer: 'The passage from 

 the physics of the brain to the corresponding 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 in- 

 tellectual 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 to- 

 gether, 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.'* 



Compare this with the answer which Mr. Martineau 

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

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

 in England and America: ' " It [the problem of con- 

 sciousness] does not daunt me at all. Of course you 

 understand that all along my atoms have been affected 



* Bishop Butler's reply to the Lucretian in the ' Belfast Ad- 

 dress ' is all in the same strain. 



