Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/768

 is it necessary for our argument that we should. Certain it is that many things, to all appearance the result of volition, are capable of being explained as absolutely unconscious acts; and when the swimming swarm-spore of an alga avoids collision, and, by a reversal of the stroke of its cilia, backs from an obstacle lying in its course, there is almost certainly in all this nothing but a purely unconscious act. It is but a case in which we find expressed the great law of the adaptation of living beings to the conditions which surround them. The irritability of the protoplasm of the ciliated spore responding to an external stimulus sets in motion a mechanism derived by inheritance from its ancestors, and whose parts are correlated to a common end—the preservation of the individual.

But even admitting that every living cell were a conscious and thinking being, are we therefore justified in asserting that its consciousness, like its irritability, is a property of the matter of which it is composed? The sole argument on which this view is made to rest is that from analogy. It is argued that because the life-phenomena, which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a property of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are accompanied must be also so regarded. The weak point in the argument is the absence of all analogy between the things compared, and, as the conclusion rests solely on the argument from analogy, the two must fall to the ground together.

In a lecture to which I once had the pleasure of listening—a lecture characterized no less by lucid exposition than by the fascinating form in which its facts were presented to the hearers—Professor Huxley argues that no difference, however great, between the phenomena of living matter and those of the lifeless elements of which this matter is composed should militate against our attributing to protoplasm the phenomena of life as properties essentially inherent in it; since we know that the result of a chemical combination of physical elements may exhibit physical properties totally different from those of the elements combined; the physical phenomena presented by water, for example, having no resemblance to those of its combining elements, oxygen and hydrogen.

I believe that Professor Huxley intended to apply this argument only to the phenomena of life in the stricter sense of the word. As such it is conclusive. But when it is pushed further, and extended to the phenomena of consciousness, it loses all its force. The analogy, perfectly valid in the former case, here fails. The properties of the chemical compound are like those of its components, still physical properties. They come within the wide category of the universally accepted properties of matter, while those of consciousness belong to a category absolutely distinct—one which presents not a trace of a connection with any of those which physicists have agreed in