Aug. 20, 1874] 



NATURE 



313 



ness, then, a necesary element of the true self? If so, what do 

 you say to the case of the whole body being deprived of con- 

 sciousness? If not, then on what grounds do you deny any 

 portion of the true self to the severed limb ? It seems very 

 singular that, from the beginning to the end of your admirable 

 book (and no one admires its sober strength more than I do), 

 you never once mention the brain or nervous system. You 

 begin at one end of the body, and show that its parts may be 

 removed without prejudice to the perceiving power. What if 

 you begin at the other end, and remove, instead of the leg, the 

 brain ? The body, as before, is divided into two parts ; but 

 both are now in the same predicament, and neither can be ap- 

 pealed to to prove that the other is foreign matter. Or, instead 

 of going so far as to remove the brain itself, let a certain portion 

 of its bony covermg be removed, ard let a rhythmic series of 

 pressure and relaxations of pressure be applied to the soft sub- 

 stance. At every pressure ' the (acuities of perception and of 

 action ' vanish ; at every relaxation of pressure they are restored. 

 Where, during the intervals of pressure, is the perceiving power ? 

 I once had the dischage of a Leyden battery passed unexpect- 

 edly through me : I felt nothing, but was simply blotted out of 

 conscious existence for a sensible interval. Where was my true 

 self during that interval? Men who have recovered from 

 lightning-stroke have been much longer in the same state ; and 

 indeed in eases of ordinary concussion of the brain, days may 

 elapse during which no experience is registered in consciousness. 

 Where is the man himself during the period of insensibility ? 

 You may say that I beg tlie question when I assume the man to 

 have been unconscious, that he was really conscious all the time, 

 and has simply forgotten what had occurred to him. In reply 

 to this, I can only say that no one need shrink from the worst 

 tortures that superstition ever invented if only so felt and so 

 remembered. I do not think your theory of instruments goes at 

 all to the bottom of the matter. A telegraph operator has his 

 instruments, by means of which he converses with the world ; 

 our bodies possess a nervous system, which plays a similar part 

 between the perceiving powers and exiernal things. Cut the 

 wires of the operator, break his battery, demagnetise his needle : 

 by this means you certainly stver his connection with the 

 world ; but inasmuch as these are real instruments, their de- 

 struction does not touch the man who uses them. The operator 

 survives, and he knou-s that he survivru What is it, I wculd 

 ask, in the human system that answers to this conscious survival 

 of the operator when the battery of the brain is so disturbed 

 as to produce insensibility, or when it is destroyed altogether? 

 *' Another consideration, which you may consider slight, 

 presses upon me with some force. Tlie brain may change from 

 health to disease, and through such a change the most exemplary 

 man may be converted into a debauchee or a murderer. My 

 very noble and approved good master had, as you know, threat- 

 enings of lewdness introduced into his brain by his jealous wife's 

 philter ; and sooner than permit himself to run even the risk of 

 yielding to these base promptings he slew himself. How could 

 the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself if 

 the real Lucretius remained as before? Can the brain or can it 

 not act in this distempered way without the intervention of the 

 immortal reason? If it can, then it is a prime mover which 

 requires only healthy regulation to render it reasonably self- 

 acting, and there is no apparent need of your immortal reason at 

 all. If it cannot, then the immortal reason, by its mischievous 

 activity in operating upon a broken instrument, must have the 

 credit of committing every imaginable extravagance and crime. 1 

 think, if you will allow me to say so, that the gravest conse- 

 quences are likely to flow from your estimate of the body. To 

 regard the brain as you would a staff or an eyeglass — to shut 

 your eyes to all its mystery, to the perfect correlation that 

 reigns between its condition .and our consciousness, to the fact 

 that a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces that very 

 swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to it our meat and 

 drink and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value 

 and significance — to forget all this does, 1 think, open a way to 

 innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in 

 some cases initiate and foster that very disease, and consequent 

 mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious organ 

 would have avoided." 



I can imagine the bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument, 

 lie was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the con- 

 sideration of a point of this kind. After due consideration, and 

 having strengthened himself by that honest contempl.it ion of the 

 facts which was habitual with him, and which includes the desire to 

 give even adverse facts their due weight, I can suppose the bishop 



to proceed thus : — " You will remember that in the ' Analogy 

 of Religion,' of which you have so kindly spoken, I did not 

 profess to prove anything absolutely, and that I over and over 

 again acknowledged and insisted on the smallness of our know- 

 ledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as regards the whole 

 system of the universe. My object was to show my deistical 

 friends who set forth so eloquently the beauty and beneficence of 

 Nature and the Ruler thereof, while they had nothing but scorn 

 for the so-called absurdities of the Christian scheme, that they 

 were in no better cotxiition than we were, and that for every 

 difficulty they found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty 

 was to be found on theirs. I wtU row with your permission 

 adopt a similar line of argument. You are a Lucretian, and 

 from the combination and separation of ato-ns dedu>-e all ter- 

 restrial things, inc'uding organic forms arid their phenom>'nn. 

 Let me tell you in the first instance how far I am prepareil to go 

 with you. I admit that you can build crystalline forms out of 

 this play of molecular force ; that the diamond, amethyst, and 

 snow-star are truly wonderful structures which are thus produced. 

 I will go further and acknowledge that even a tree or flower 

 might in this way be organised. Nay, if you can show me an 

 animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it also might 

 be put together by the suitable play of molecular force. 



" Thus far our way is clear, but now comes my difhculty. 

 Your atoms are individually without sensation, much more are 

 they without intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your 

 hand upon this problem. TaUeyour dead hydrogen atoms, your 

 dead oxygen atoms, your de,id carbon atom.s, your dead nitrogen 

 atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all the other atunis, 

 dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine 

 them separate and sensationless ; observe them running to- 

 gether and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a 

 purely mechanical process, is secahle by the mind. Btjt can you 

 see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mecha- 

 nical act, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, 

 thought, and emotion are to arise? You speak of the difficulty 

 of mental presentation in ray case ; is it less in yours ? I am not 

 all bereft of this I'orslellmigs-krafl of which you speak. I can 

 follow a particle of musk until it reaches the olfactory nerve ; I 

 can follow the waves of sound until their tremors reach the water 

 of the labyrinth, and set the otoliths and Corti's fibres in 

 motion ; I can also visuali;e the waves of ether as they cross the 

 eye and hit the retina. Nay, more, I am able to follow up to the 

 central organ the motion thus imparled at the periphery, and 

 to see in idea the very molecules of the brain thrown into tremors. 

 My insight is not baffled by these physical processss. What 

 baffles me, what I find unimaginable, transcending every faculty 

 I possess — transcending, I humbly submit, every faculty you 

 possess — is the notion that out of those physical tremors you 

 can extract things -so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, 

 thought, and emotion. You may say, or think, that this issue 

 of consciousness from the clash of atoms is not more incongruous 

 than the flash of light from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. 

 But I beg to say that it is. For such incongruity as the flash 

 possesses is that which I now force upon your attention. The 

 llash is an affair of consciousness, the objective counterpart of 

 which is a vibration. It is a flash only by our interpretation. 

 ]p;/are the cause of the apparent incongruity ; and iw« are the 

 thing that puzzles me. I need not remind you that the great 

 Leibnitz felt the difficulty which I feel, and that to get rid of 

 this monstrous deduction of life from death he displaced your 

 atoms by his monads, and which were more or less perfect mirrors 

 of the universe, and out of the summation and integration of 

 which he supposed all the phenomena of life— sentient) intel- 

 lectual, and emotional — to arise. 



"Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is quite 

 as great as mine. You cannot satisfy the human understanding 

 in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes 

 and the phenomena of consciousness. This is a rock on which 

 materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a 

 complete philosophy of life. What is the moral, my Lucretian ? 

 You and I are not likely to'indulge in ill-temper in the discussion 

 of these great topics, w here we see so much room for honest 

 differences of opinion. But there are people of less wit, or more 

 bigotry (I say it with humility) on both sides, who are ever ready 

 to mingle anger and vituperation with such discussions. There 

 are, for example, writers of note and influence at the present day 

 who are not ashamed to assume the ' deep personal sin ' of a 

 great logician to be the cause of his unbelief in a theologic dogma. 

 And there are others who hold that we, who cherish our noble 

 Bible, wrought as it has been into the constitution of our fore- 



