professor of physics in answer showed in how many ways the analogy
between a business concern, whose end is profit, and a physical
laboratory, whose end is the advancement of knowledge, is false and
misleading. The expert had suggested a general research board to
correlate researches; the professor cited the cases of Airy, the
astronomer royal of England, who by his dominating position held back
astronomical research in England for a generation, and of Sir Humphry
Davy, who discouraged the work of Faraday, when the latter was his
assistant.

The expert suggested that apparatus could be passed on from
one investigator to another: the professor replied that few men can use
apparatus designed for some one else's purpose, and that the cost of
reconstruction would exceed the cost of new machines. In short, he
completely riddled the argument from analogy set up by the expert.[27]

A notable example of conclusive refutation of an argument based on a
false analogy is to be found in William James's Ingersoll Lecture on
Immortality. He took up the ordinary argument against the immortality of
the soul, which, starting from the accepted physiological and
psychological formula, "Thought is a function of the brain," reasons
that therefore when the brain dies and decays, thought and consciousness
die, too.

This, then, is the objection to immortality; and the next thing in
order for me is to try to make plain to you why I believe that it has in
strict logic no deterrent power. I must show you that the fatal
consequence is not coercive, as is commonly imagined; and that, even
though our soul's life (as here below it is revealed to us) may be in
literal strictness the function of a brain that perishes, yet it is not
at all impossible, but on the contrary quite possible, that the life may
still continue when the brain itself is dead.

The supposed impossibility of its continuing comes from too superficial
a look at the admitted fact of functional dependence. The moment we
inquire more closely into the notion of functional dependence, and ask
ourselves, for example, how many kinds of functional dependence there
may be, we immediately perceive that there is one kind at least that
does not exclude a life hereafter at all. The fatal conclusion of the
physiologist flows from his assuming offhand another kind of functional
dependence, and treating it as the only imaginable kind.

When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off