270 From Matter to Man. 



state or act of consciousness is a motion and an 

 automatic action whether we are aware of it or not. 

 When we experiment with this object in view, we find 

 it to be so in innumerable instances. Where it seems 

 to elude us and to pass into an immaterial region, the 

 complexity and subtlety of our mechanism are 

 accountable for the intellectual gloaming. For, when 

 we are working with millions of cells, thousands of 

 which are in action every second, it would be an 

 impossibility to locate, follow, or dissect every act of 

 consciousness. We would be perfectly justified there- 

 fore in drawing a conclusion from what we do know 

 as to the materiality of our consciousness, more particu- 

 larly when it is corroborated in thousands of other 

 ways in lower organisms, as shown in previous 

 chapters, than to profess belief in mystical hypotheses, 

 originated in ignorant times, which are neither intel- 

 ligently explained nor comprehensively understood, 

 but are yet worked for all they are worth by dry-as- 

 dust philosophers in all our universities. 



Section 8. Summary: 



In summing up the materialistic explanation of the 

 origin, nature, and development of human intelligence, 

 we have practically demonstrated that the origin of all 

 intelligence, mineral, vegetal, and animal is in the 

 automatic motion of the atoms of which all intelli- 

 gences are composed ; that the fundamental nature 

 of this motion is magnetic and electric ; and that the 

 development of this motion into intelligence, from the 



