ses with which sensation, consciousness, pain, or pleasure are bound
up, into their most intricate and delicate details, if we could make the
brain transparent, and enlarge its cells to the size of houses, so that,
with searching glance, we could count and observe all the processes, and
even follow the dance of the molecules within it, we should never see
"pain," "pleasure," or "thought," or anything more than bodies and their
movements. A thought, such as, for instance, the perception that two and
two make four, is not long or broad, above or beneath; it cannot be
measured or weighed in inches or pounds like matter, tested with the
manometer, thermometer, or electrometer for its potential or intensity and
tension, measured by amperes or volts or horse-powers like energies and
electric currents; it is something wholly different, which can be known
only through inner experience, but which is much better known than
anything else whatever, and which it is absolutely impossible to compare
with anything but itself. Even if we admit that it can only become actual
and develop as an accompaniment of processes within bodies, and only
within those bodies we call "living," and that wherever bodies exist
psychical phenomena occur; even if we were able, as we never shall be
able, to produce living beings artificially in a retort, and even if
psychical phenomena occurred in these also, we should still have made no
progress towards explaining what the psychical really is. It would still
only be the blazing up in these bodies of a flame which, in some
inexplicable way, had fallen upon them, and associated itself with them.
We do not doubt that this association, where it takes place, does so in
obedience to the strictest law and the most inexorable necessity;
therefore, that wherever and however the corporeal conditions are
produced, sensation and consciousness will awaken. For we believe in a
world governed by law. But the mystery is in no way lessened by this, and
the modern theory of evolution throws no light into this utterly
impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of "explaining"
in terms of "evolution" is a futile one. The process of becoming is
pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of
intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the
introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even of
the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole rid