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, thought, and so forth, are never exhibited apart from the
action of the brain; some change in the brain accompanies them all. We
do not deny that. But it is obvious that thought being manifested in the
presence of cerebral matter or something like it, is a very different
thing from thought being a _property_ of such matter, in the sense in
which polarity is the property of a magnet, or irritability of living
protoplasm.
[Footnote 1: October, 1880, p. 587.]
To all this I have seen no answer. The way in which the opponents of
Christian beliefs meet such considerations appears to be to ignore or
minimize them, so as to pass over to what seems to them a satisfactory
if not an easy series of transitions. If Life is after all only a
"property" of matter, then given life, a brain may be produced; and as
mind is always manifested in the presence of (and apparently
indissolubly united with) brain structure, it is not a much greater leap
to accept _life_ as a property of _matter_ than it is to take _thought_
as a property of a certain _specialized physical structure_. It is true
that the distance is great between the instinct of an animal and the
abstract reasoning power of a Newton or a Herbert Spencer; but (as we
are so often told) the difference is of degree not of kind, and as the
brain structure develops, so does the power and degree of reason.
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