230 CONSCIOUSNESS AND FORCE HAVE 



Relation of Consciousness to Force. " Thought," 

 says Fletcher,"* "is not, any more than life, anything 

 substantial, but an abstract term by which are signi- 

 fied certain phenomena peculiar to the higher orders 

 of living beings, and necessarily resulting from one 

 property of their organism, viz., the faculty of thinking 

 in action" (p. 92). " The alleged proof advanced by 

 Malebranche that ideas must be substantial, since they 

 have distinct properties, is quite untenable. Ideas 

 have no properties. They are nothing but a mode of 

 existence of the thinking organ, acted upon by its 

 proper stimulus, and no more substantial than com- 

 bustion or motion, which are, in like manner, modes of 

 existence of the thing burning or the thing in motion" 

 (p. 113). " We know matter, it is said, only by its 

 properties, extension, impenetrability, &c. ; and we 

 know mind also only by its properties, reason and 

 passion; and where the two sets of properties are so 

 decidedly dissimilar, they must indicate, it is 'argued, 

 different entities. Thought, therefore, may be attached 

 to matter, but it cannot be a mode of being of matter, 

 since matter in no case betrays those indications by 

 which we recognize mind. In no other case, certainly, 

 for in no other case is the organization of matter such 

 as to be susceptible of this mode of being "f (p. 92). 

 Such are the opinions of Fletcher on the much-vexed 



* " Rudiments of Physiology," Part III. 



t " If thought is to be called a function of matter, it must be ac- 

 knowledged to be a function -wholly peculiar and unlike any other" 

 (" As Regards Protoplasm," 2nd edit., p. 46). Well, why not ? The 

 spiritualists tacitly assume that merely to state the proposition is to 

 prove thought to be the function of an inconceivable something called 

 spirit, of which they, as men of science, know nothing, and can know 

 nothing. 



