Page:Mind and the Brain (1907).djvu/232

 mechanism is sufficient to draw to itself all the effects which general belief attributes to the moral. The parallelists on this point go very much further than the materialists; the latter at least concede that the consciousness is of some use, since they compared it to a function or a secretion, and, after all, a secretion is a useful liquid. The parallelists are so strongly convinced that mechanism is alone efficacious that they come to deny any rôle to thought. The consciousness for them has no purpose: yet it keeps company with its object. The metaphors which serve to define it, part of which have been imagined by Huxley, are all of a passive nature. Such is the light, or the whistling noise which accompanies the working of an engine, but does not act on its machinery. Or, the shadow which dogs the steps of the traveller. Or a phosphorescence lighting up the traces of the movements of the brain.

It has also been said that the consciousness is a useless luxury. Some have even gone further, and the fine and significant name of epiphenomenon, that has been given to thought, well translates that conception, according to which semi-realities may exist in nature.

All these objections certainly carry great weight, but they are not capable of killing the doctrine—they only scotch it.