256 From Matter to Man. 



from ascertained facts, because we assume it is not 

 subtle or mysterious enough, we are traitors to our 

 own intelligence. Educated as men have been in 

 our universities to attach a transcendental definition 

 to the term mind or consciousness, it is heresy to 

 accept a physical definition. But if we admit the 

 necessity of progress in philosophy, as in other things, 

 man cannot be bound either with the thongs of 

 ignorance or chicanery. Intellectual perception must 

 mark time with the progress of science and intelli- 

 gence. Accepting, therefore, the fullest explanations 

 of physiologists regarding the processes of conscious- 

 ness in the human organism, down to where they 

 apparently lose the scent and wander into the region 

 of mental mares' nests, we must believe, until it is 

 disproved, that the motions in our brain and body are 

 the whole of human consciousness. The proof being 

 that we can trace (as we practically have already 

 done), the origin of consciousness from its physical 

 basis — the atom and its energy, to its most complex 

 condition as animal intelligence. And this has been 

 done by but continuing the method adopted by 

 scientists and physiologists in evolving the present 

 accurate knowledge of all natural phenomena, mental 

 or otherwise — namely, observation, experience, and 

 scientific verification. 



Thus instead of attempting, like philosophers, the 

 impossible feat of dissecting our own brain and 

 nervous connections, we follow those scientists who 

 have dissected other men's and other animals' brains 



