Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/769

 to matter as its proper characteristics. The argument thus breaks down, for its force depends on analogy alone, and here all analogy vanishes.

That consciousness is never manifested except in the presence of cerebral matter or of something like it, there can not be a question; but this is a very different thing from its being a property of such matter in the sense in which polarity is a property of the magnet, or irritability of protoplasm. The generation of the rays which lie invisible beyond the violet in the spectrum of the sun can not be regarded as a property of the medium which by changing their refrangibility can alone render them apparent.

I know that there is a special charm in those broad generalizations which would refer many very different phenomena to a common source. But in this very charm there is undoubtedly a danger, and we must be all the more careful lest it should exert an influence in arresting the progress of truth, just as at an earlier period traditional beliefs exerted an authority from which the mind but slowly and with difficulty succeeded in emancipating itself.

But have we, it may be asked, made in all this one step forward toward an explanation of the phenomena of consciousness or the discovery of its source? Assuredly not. The power of conceiving of a substance different from that of matter is still beyond the limits of human intelligence, and the physical or objective conditions which are the concomitants of thought are the only ones of which it is possible to know anything, and the only ones whose study is of value.

We are not, however, on that account forced to the conclusion that there is nothing in the universe but matter and force. The simplest physical law is absolutely inconceivable by the highest of the brutes, and no one would be justified in assuming that man had already attained the limit of his powers. Whatever may be that mysterious bond which connects organization with psychical endowments, the one grand fact—a fact of inestimable importance—stands out clear and freed from all obscurity and doubt, that from the first dawn of intelligence there is with every advance in organization a corresponding advance in mind. Mind as well as body is thus traveling onward through higher and still higher phases; the great law of evolution is shaping the destiny of our race; and though now we may at most but indicate some weak point in the generalization which would refer consciousness as well as life to a common material source, who can say that in the far-off future there may not yet be evolved other and higher faculties from which light may stream in upon the darkness, and reveal to man the great mystery of thought?