"If," says Professor Allman, "we were to admit that every living cell
were a conscious and thinking thing, are we therefore justified in
asserting that its consciousness with its irritability is a property of
the matter of which it is composed? The sole argument on which this view
is made to rest is analogy. It is argued that because the life
phenomena, which are invariably found in the cell, must be regarded as a
property of the cell, the phenomena of consciousness by which they are
accompanied must also be so regarded. The weak point in the argument is
the absence of all analogy between the things compared: and as the
conclusion rests solely on the argument from analogy, the two must fall
to the ground together."

Try and assign to matter all the properties you can think of, its
impenetrability, extension, weight, inertia, elasticity, and so forth,
by no process of thought (as Mr. 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