Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/170

156 steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected. I entirely agree with the sense of the passage from Dr. Tyndall."

In view of the dissimilarity, the thorough dissimilarity, between nerve-activities and consciousness-activities, we are not justified in regarding the former as the sole cause of the latter. Chemists, after a somewhat protracted examination of the substances found in nature, announce the discovery of sixty-four different bodies, from which they can not, by any means now at hand, separate simpler substances. This does not intend to say that these sixty-four elements are absolutely simple, but that "they are so as far as our knowledge extends." Now, why are these sixty-four elements maintained to have a real existence? Why is aluminium believed in as a fact distinct from antimony, or arsenic as a fact distinct from bromine, and so on throughout the list? Because, and simply because, the states of consciousness are persistently distinct when dealing with these so-called elements. The chemist is unable to experience resemblance between the actions i. e., the manifestations—of aluminium and antimony. Therefore, and therefore alone, he says, there are here different substances.

This is the kind of reasoning, and no other, that we wish applied to the subject of our examination. If the passage between brain activity and consciousness-activity be unthinkable, intellectually impassable, why is it so? Not from any a priori or "high-priori" inconceivability, but because these activities persistently fail to resemble one another, i. e., to produce in us similar states of consciousness. They can not be rationally called "diverse operations of energy mutually convertible like light, heat, and the other physical forces." Such correlation is opposed through and through to experience. Here is the irrationality of physiological materialism. This materialism makes a break in the physical continuity of Nature's workings; a break found nowhere else; a break, moreover, which is not found here by any examination of which we are capable.

Correlation requires that motion should be transformed into something not motion, and then resume its course as motion. Motion set up at the periphery of the body produces a definite and measurable quantity of motion in the brain; this is well called a mechanical problem out and out. We find no measurable consciousness, yet consciousness is a reality; we find no break in physical processes elsewhere, yet, if correlation be true here, such a break there is. It will, I hope, be clearly seen that this difficulty is nowise related to the old and worthless difficulty thought to be suggested by those who ask the materialist how motion is transformed into consciousness. As to the how of things they have learned most who have learned that they know nothing. The question is not how are brain-motions transformed into consciousness, but the question is exactly this, What ground have we to believe that such transformation exists?