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ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES of the functions which I perform. Let your machine, my dear materialist, be as nicely balanced as you like, let it be of as fine a material as you choose, let it be capable of registering and recording the finest movements going on around it, --let all this be granted once for all, yet is it inconceivable that it should ever feel pleasure or pain, direct its own energy into particular channels of activity, express satisfaction when its work is done for the day, or anger if thwarted in carrying out its own resolves. It is impossible to explain anything of the facts of consciousness, the phenomena of feeling, willing and memory, on a mechanical hypothesis of the body. I can no more imagine the brain, formed of dead unconscious matter, deliberating over the affairs of the day, than I can conceive of a steam-engine thinking to itself that it ought to have tea and toast instead of the coal and water it always gets! How can a consciousness which is generated afresh every moment, remember what its predecessors thought, or felt, years ago ? I, therefore, come to the conclusion that the thinking, feeling and willing principle in me is not the material body, or the brain, but something which is associated with it, and whose conjunction, during life, is the cause of the phenomena, which, as we have just seen, materialism is unable to explain with its dead matter and unconscious force.
I am, then, consciousness itself. But whence came my association with the body of physical matter? Did my parents make it? Oh, no, for they cannot make another's body if they want to. Perhaps some god or goddess forced ine into the body? But I have to reject this possibility also, for if a god did so in my case, he must be doing so in the case of every other being in the universe ; but this is absurd, for I am assured that he gets very angry if people violate certain social rules about the marital relations. Hence, he cannot be credited with the creation of the bodies of children born of fornication and adultery, else we would be attributing inconsistency to him. In other words, we cannot imagine that he fructifies the very act which he unequivocaliy condemns. Therefore, if a god. cannot be credited with the making of the body of a child of fornication, he cannot also be said to be the author of the bodies of those that are born in lawful wedlock. Thus, there is no one left except
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