Is Life Worth Living?Mallock, W. H. (William Hurrell)
Philosophy
Is Life Worth Living?
Mallock, W. H. (William Hurrell)
Ethics; Life
Now if we examine this very typical passage, we shall see that in it are
confused two questions which, as regards our own relation to them, are
on a totally different footing. One of these questions cannot be
answered at all. The other can be answered in distinct and opposite
ways. About the one we must rest in wonder; about the other we must make
a choice. And the feat which our modern physicists are trying to perform
is to hide the importunate nature of the second in the dark folds of the
first. This first question is, Why should consciousness be connected
with the brain at all? The second question is, What is it when
connected? Is it simply the product of the brain's movement; or is the
brain's movement in any degree produced by it? We only know it, so to
speak, as the noise made by the working of the brain's machinery--as the
crash, the roar, or the whisper of its restless colliding molecules. Is
this machinery self-moving, or is it, at least, modulated, if not moved,
by some force other than itself? The brain is the organ of
consciousness, just as the instrument called an organ is an organ of
music; and consciousness itself is as a tune emerging from the
organ-pipes. Expressed in terms of this metaphor our two questions are
as follows. The first is, Why, when the air goes through them, are the
organ-pipes resonant? The second is, What controls the mechanism by
which the air is regulated--a musician, or a revolving barrel? Now what
our modern physicists fail to see is, not only that these two questions
are distinct in detail, but that also they are distinct in kind; that a
want of power to answer them means, in the two cases, not a distinct
thing only, but also an opposite thing; and that our confessed impotence
to form any conjecture at all as to the first, does not in the least
exonerate us from choosing between conjectures as to the second.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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