THE MIND- STUFF THEORY. 149 



quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between 

 existence and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble. 

 The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature 

 comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is quite imma- 

 terial. The girl in ' Midshipman Easy ' could not excuse the 

 illegitimacy of her child by saying, • it was a little small 

 one.' And Consciousness, however little, is an illegiti- 

 mate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet 

 professes to exj)lain all facts by continuous evolution. 



If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape 

 must have been present at the very origin of things. Accord- 

 ingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary phi- 

 losophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the 

 nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom 

 of consciousness linked with it ; and, just as the material 

 atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing them- 

 selves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous 

 process of aggregation, have fused into those larger con- 

 sciousnesses Avhich we know in ourselves and suppose to 

 exist in our felloAv-animals. Some such doctrine of 

 atomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable part of a 

 thorough-going jjhilosophy of evolution. According to it 

 there must be an infinite number of degrees of conscious- 



and as they cannot pass through it simultaneously, they must pass through 

 it in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to become 

 greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity 

 of the changes to which this common centre of communication is subject 

 must increase — there must result an unbroken series of these changes — 

 there must arise a consciousness. 



"Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism and its 

 environment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to a 

 succession ; and by so doing evolves a distinct consciousness— & consciousness 

 that becomes higher as the succession becomes more rapid and the corre- 

 spondence more complete." (Ibid. § 179.) 



It is true that in the Fortnightly Review (vol. xiv. p. 716) Mr. Spencer 

 denies that he means by this passage to tell us anything about the origin of 

 consciousness at all. It resembles, however, too many other places in his 

 Psychology (e.g. g§ 43, 110, 244) not to be taken as a serious attempt to ex- 

 (tlain how consciousness must at a certain point be 'evolved.' That, 

 wlien a critic calls his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer 

 should say he never meant anything particular by them, is simply an 

 example of the scandaloiis vagueness with which this sort of ' chromo- 

 philosophy ' is carried on. 



