structure, unless an
external Power has added the mind power, as a faculty of His endowing;
then He may be allowed to have connected that faculty ever so
mysteriously with physical structure; we are content. And I must insist
on the total failure of all analogy between the development of bones or
muscles and the development of mind; and even if we grant a certain
stage of instinct to have arisen, we are still in the dark as to how
that could develop into intellect such as man possesses, including a
belief in God. On this subject let us hear Professor Allman. Between a
development of material structure and a development of intellectual and
moral features, the Professor says, "there is no conceivable analogy;
and the obvious and continuous path, which we have hitherto followed up,
in our reasonings from the phenomena of lifeless matter to those of
living form, here comes suddenly to an end. The chasm between
_unconscious_ life and _thought_ is deep and impassable, and no
transitional phenomena are to be found by which, as by a bridge, we can
span it over.[1]"

There can be _life_ or _function_ without _consciousness_ or _thought;_
therefore, even if we go so far as to admit that life is only a property
of protoplasm, there can be no ground for saying that _thought_ is only
a property of protoplasm.

[Footnote 1: British Association Address.]

"If," says Professor Allman, "we were to admit that every living cell
were a conscious and thinking thing, are we therefore justified in
asserting that its consciousness with its irritability is a property of
the matter of which it is composed? The sole argument on which this view
is made to rest is analogy. It is argued that because the life
phenomena, which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a
property of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are
accompanied must also be so regarded. The weak point in the argument is
the absence of all analogy between the things compared: and as the
conclusion rests solely on the argument from analogy, the two must fall
to the ground together."

Try and assign to matter all the properties you can think of, its
impenetrability, extension, weight, inertia, elasticity, and so forth,
by no process of thought (as Mr. Justice Fry observes in an article in
"The Contemporary Review [1]") can you get out of them an adequate
account of the phenomena of mind or spirit. We just now observed that
consciousness, though