grosser minds, who image the soul as a
Psyche which could be thrown out of the window--an entity which is
usually occupied we know not how, among the molecules of the brain, but
which on due occasion, such as the intrusion of a bullet, or the blow
of a club, can fly away into other regions of space--if abandoning this
heathen notion you approach the subject in the only way in which
approach is possible--if you consent to make your soul a poetic
rendering of a phenomenon which--as I have taken more pains than anyone
else to show you--refuses the ordinary yoke of physical laws, then I,
for one, would not object to this exercise of ideality." I say it
strongly, but with good temper, that the theologian who hacks and
scourges me for putting the matter in this light is guilty of black
ingratitude._'

Now if we examine this very typical passage, we shall see that in it are
confused two questions which, as regards our own relation to them, are
on a totally different footing. One of these questions cannot be
answered at all. The other can be answered in distinct and opposite
ways. About the one we must rest in wonder; about the other we must make
a choice. And the feat which our modern physicists are trying to perform
is to hide the importunate nature of the second in the dark folds of the
first. This first question is, Why should consciousness be connected
with the brain at all? The second question is, What is it when
connected? Is it simply the product of the brain's movement; or is the
brain's movement in any degree produced by it? We only know it, so to
speak, as the noise made by the working of the brain's machinery--as the
crash, the roar, or the whisper of its restless colliding molecules. Is
this machinery self-moving, or is it, at least, modulated, if not moved,
by some force other than itself? The brain is the organ of
consciousness, just as the instrument called an organ is an organ of
music; and consciousness itself is as a tune emerging from the
organ-pipes. Expressed in terms of this metaphor our two questions are
as follows. The first is, Why, when the air goes through them, are the
organ-pipes resonant? The second is, What controls the mechanism by
which the air is regulated--a musician, or a revolving barrel? Now what
our modern physicists fail to see is, not only that these two questions
are distinct in detail, but that also they are distinct in kind; that a
want of power to answer them means, in the two case