Report of the ... Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 38. köide

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Page xvii - To give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific inquiry, — to promote the intercourse of those who cultivate Science in different parts of the British Empire, with one another, and with foreign philosophers, — to obtain a more general attention to the objects of Science, and a removal of any disadvantages of a public kind, which impede its progress.
Page 19 - Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of...
Page 18 - ... and by the application of purely mechanical principles demonstrate that the cycle must end, as it is seen to end, in the reproduction of forms like that with which it began. A similar necessity rules here to that which rules the planets in their circuits round the sun.
Page 18 - And now let us pass from what we are accustomed to regard as a dead mineral to a living grain of corn. When it is examined by polarized light, chromatic phenomena similar to those noticed in crystals are observed.
Page 18 - But I must go still further, and affirm that in the eye of science the animal body is just as much the product of molecular force as the stalk and ear of corn, or as the crystal of salt or sugar.
Page 19 - The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable. Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we love, that the motion is in one direction, and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other; but the ' WHY ?' would remain as unanswerable as before.
Page 19 - Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain ; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be ; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, " How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness ? " The chasm between...
Page 18 - ... which are also to be regarded as a kind of vibratory motion. And as the motion of common heat with which the grain and the substances surrounding it were first endowed, enabled the grain and these substances to exercise their...
Page 20 - That may or may not be the case ; but even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is this
Page lxxiii - To matter or to force The All is not confined ; Beside the law of things Is set the law of mind ; One speaks in rock and star, And one within the brain, In unison at times, And then apart again ; And both in one have brought us hither That we may know our whence and whither. The sequences of law We learn through mind alone...

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