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in the production of human consciousness. It is quality 
which is wanted,, and the physicist is ever seeking to fulfil 
the requirement by accumulating quantity. In illustration 
of this topic, I cannot forbear borrowing a quotation of 
Tyndall’s, from the German Materialist Ueberweg, in a letter 
to Lange. The passage is as follows : — What occurs in the 
brain would, in my opinion, not be possible, if the process 
which here appears in its greatest concentration did not 
obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree. Take a 
pair of mice and a cask of flour. By copious nourishment the 
animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion 
sensation and feelings augment. The quantity of these latter 
possessed by the first pair is not simply diffused among their 
descendants, for in that case the last must feel more feebly 
than the first. The sensations and feelings must necessarily 
be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale, 
it is true, and not concentrated as they are in the brain.” 
This passage presents itself to me, I confess, as quite a 
burlesque of the doctrine of Mind-stufi*. Ueberweg, it will be 
seen, prefers to trace the sensations of the increasing family 
of young mice not to the organific power transmitted through 
the parents, and impressing a form on the assimilated 
particles of the food consumed, but to similar feelings, weak 
and pale, it is true,” in the flour itself ! A Cheshire cheese or 
a bunch of tallow candles would, no doubt, be found to possess 
like sentiments. Surely Ueberweg, in penning this absurd 
passage, cannot have reflected that the same particles which 
might nourish mice might also form the food of a pair of cats, 
or even of a human couple, and would, in that case, be proved 
by his argument to possess the sentiments, not of mice alone, 
but of their natural enemy and of mankind. 
At the beginning of this lecture I adverted to the theory of 
Darwin, as tending to favour the spread of Materialism. Darwin 
has, in fact, revived “ the simple and penetrating thought,” as 
Lange calls it, first offered by Empedocles to the thinkers of 
antiquity, — that adaptations preponderatein the animated world 
just because it is their nature to perpetuate themselves ; while 
what fails in adaptation has long since perished. In the light 
of this idea the appearance of design in creation may seem 
explicable without resort to the hypothesis of a creative 
mind. Now and then, though rarely, Mr. Darwin himself 
writes as if this were a legitimate inference from his theory. 
Thus at the beginning of the last chapter of his work On 
the Origin of Species * we have the following passage : — 
^ Sixth edition, p. 204. 
