FOOTNOTES: 

[33] The argument has been used in this exact form by Professor Clifford.

[34] Dreams and Realities, by Leslie Stephen.

[35] The feebleness and vacillation of Dr. Tyndall’s whole views of things, as soon as they bear on matters that are of any universal moment, is so typical of the entire positive thought of the day, that I may with advantage give one or two further illustrations of it.  Although in one place he proclaims loudly that the emergence of consciousness from matter must ever remain a mystery, he yet shows indication of a hope that it may yet be solved.  He quotes with approval, and with an implication that he himself leans to the view expressed in them, the following words of Ueberweg, whom he calls ’one of the subtlest heads that Germany has produced.’ ’What happens in the brain, says Ueberweg, ’would in my opinion not be possible if the process which here appears in its greatest concentration, did not obtain generally, only in a vastly diminished degree.  Take a pair of mice, and a cask of flour.  By copious nourishment the animals increase and multiply, and in the same proportion sensations and feelings augment.  The quantity of these preserved by the first pair is not simply diffused among their descendants, for in that case the last would feel more fully than the first.  The sensations and the feelings must necessarily be referred back to the flour, where they exist, weak and pale, it is true, and not concentrated, as in the brain.’ ‘We may not,’ Dr. Tyndall adds, by way of a gloss to this, ’be able to taste or smell alcohol in a tub of fermented cherries, but by distillation we obtain from them concentrated Kirschwasser.  Hence Ueberweg’s comparison of the brain to a still, which concentrates the sensation and feeling pre-existing, but diluted, in the food.’

Let us now compare this with the following. ‘It is no explanation,’ says Dr. Tyndall, ’to say that objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon.  Why should phenomena have two sides?  There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness.  Does water think or feel when it runs into frost-ferns upon a window pane?  If not, why should the molecular motions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion consciousness?’

Here we have two views, diametrically opposed to each other, the one suggested with approval, and the other implied as his own, by the same writer, and in the same short essay.  The first view is that consciousness is the general property of all matter, just as motion is.  The second view is that consciousness is not the general property of matter, but the inexplicable property of the brain only.

Here again we have a similar inconsistency.  Upon one page Dr. Tyndall says that when we have ’exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty Mystery stills looms beyond us.  We have made no step towards its solution.  And thus it will ever loom.’ And on the opposite page he says thus:  ’If asked whether science has solved, or is likely in our day to solve, the problem of the universe, I must shake my head in doubt.’