THE MECHANISM OF NATURE 30/ 



why material events must take place in order, I do not see what 

 reason they have for thinking matter is any more bond than mind. 



Many authors have quoted with approval Tyndall's eloquent 

 statement of his conviction that the passage from motion to mind 

 is unthinkable, for his reasoning seems to be impregnable. 



"The passage from the physics of the brain to the correspond- 

 ing facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite 

 thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simul- 

 taneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently 

 any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a 

 process of reasoning, from one phenomenon to the other. They 

 appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and 

 senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us 

 to see and feel the very molecules of the brain ; were we capable 

 of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electri- 

 cal discharges, if such there be ; and were we intimately acquainted 

 with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be 

 as far as ever from the solution of the problem : How are these 

 physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness .'' The 

 chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain 

 intellectually impassable." 



While this statement of the case seems to me to be impreg- 

 nable, it does not seem to have any relevancy or any particular 

 significance, unless Professor Tyndall or others can show that we 

 have some organ or some rudiment of an organ which gives us 

 some other reason why an unsupported stone should fall than 

 the fact that it does fall. I do not see what new light the expan- 

 sion and strengthening and illumination of our minds and senses 

 could be expected to throw on the matter; for the illumination of 

 the molecules of the brain or those of any other body, until they 

 appeared like cannon-balls rolling in a ten-acre lot, would not tell 

 why a collision between two of them should change the rate or 

 direction of their motion. We could only say, as we say now, that 

 our implicit confidence that they will conform to Newton's laws 

 is reasonable and judicious because in all human experience it has 

 never been disappointed. If Professor Tyndall should assert that 

 this implicit confidence is itself a passage from one physical phe- 

 nomenon to another, and that this passage is so far thinkable, a 



