Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/767

Rh assert as much as we are justified in doing. Here we stand upon the boundary between life in its proper conception, as a group of phenomena having irritability as their common bond, and that other and higher group of phenomena which we designate as consciousness or thought, and which, however intimately connected with those of life, are yet essentially distinct from them.

When the heart of a recently killed frog is separated from its body and touched with the point of a needle, it begins to beat under the excitation of the stimulus, and we believe ourselves justified in referring the contraction of the cardiac fibers to the irritability of their protoplasm as its proper cause. We see in it a remarkable phenomenon, but one nevertheless in which we can see unmistakable analogies with phenomena purely physical. There is no greater difficulty in conceiving of contractility as a property of protoplasm than there is of conceiving of attraction as a property of the magnet.

When a thought passes through the mind, it is associated, as we have now abundant reason for believing, with some change in the protoplasm of the cerebral cells. Are we, therefore, justified in regarding thought as a property of the protoplasm of these cells, in the sense in which we regard muscular contraction as a property of the protoplasm of muscle, or is it really a property residing in something far different, but which may yet need for its manifestation the activity of cerebral protoplasm?

If we could see any analogy between thought and any one of the admitted phenomena of matter, we should be justified in accepting the first of these conclusions as the simplest, and as affording an hypothesis most in accordance with the comprehensiveness of natural laws; but between thought and the physical phenomena of matter there is not only no analogy, but there is no conceivable analogy; and the obvious and continuous path which we have hitherto followed up in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter through those of living matter here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between unconscious life and thought is deep and impassable, and no transitional phenomena can be found by which as by a bridge we may span it over; for even from irritability, to which, on a superficial view, consciousness may seem related, it is as absolutely distinct as it is from any of the ordinary phenomena of matter.

It has been argued that because physiological activity must be a property of every living cell, psychical activity must be equally so, and the language of the metaphysician has been carried into biology, and the "cell-soul" spoken of as a conception inseparable from that of life.

That psychical phenomena, however, characterized as they essentially are by consciousness, are not necessarily coextensive with those of life, there can not be a doubt. How far back in the scale of life consciousness may exist we have as yet no means of determining, nor