Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in scienceTyndall, John
Science
Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in science
Tyndall, John
Science
You see I am not mincing matters, but avowing nakedly what many
scientific thinkers more or less distinctly believe. The formation of
a crystal, a plant, or an animal, is in their eyes a purely mechanical
problem, which differs from the problems of ordinary mechanics in the
smallness of the masses and the complexity of the processes involved.
Here you have one half of our dual truth; let us now glance at the
other half. Associated with this wonderful mechanism of the animal
body we have phenomena no less certain than those of physics, but
between which and the mechanism we discern no necessary connexion. A
man, for example, can say _I feel, I think, I love_; but how does
_consciousness_ infuse itself into the problem? The human brain
is said to be the organ of thought and feeling; when we are hurt the
brain feels it, when we ponder it is the brain that thinks, when our
passions or affections are excited it is through the instrumentality of
the brain. Let us endeavour to be a little more precise here. I hardly
imagine there exists a profound scientific thinker, who has reflected
upon the subject, unwilling to admit the extreme probability of the
hypothesis, that for every fact of consciousness, whether in the domain
of sense, of thought, or of emotion, a certain definite molecular
condition is set up in the brain; who does not hold this relation of
physics to consciousness to be invariable, so that, given the state
of the brain, the corresponding thought or feeling might be inferred;
or given the thought or feeling, the corresponding state of the brain
might be inferred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account