abandon the interpretation of 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 cases, not a distinct thing only, but also an opposite thing; and that our confessed impotence to form any conjecture at all as to the first, does not in the least exonerate us from choosing between conjectures as to the second.