OF HEALTH AND HUMAN NATURE. 4J) 



The ANIMAL FUNCTIONS demonstrate mind. This is seated in 

 the brain, to which the spinal marrow, nerves, and voluntary 

 muscles are subservient. Mind is the functional power of the 

 living brain. As I cannot conceive life any more than the power 

 of attraction unless possessed by matter, so I cannot conceive 

 mind unless possessed by a brain endowed with life. (666. F). 

 I speak of terrestrial or animal mind ; with angelic and divine 

 nature we have nothing to do, and of them we know, in the 

 same respects, nothing. To call the human mind positively a 

 ray of the divinity, (Divinae particula aura?,* Ex ipso Deo decerp-> 

 tus, Ex universa mente delibatus-f ) appears to me absolute non- 

 sense. Brutes are as really endowed with mind, with a con- 

 sciousness of personality, with feelings, desire, and will, as man. 

 Every child is conscious that it thinks with its head, and common 

 language designates this part as the seat of mind.J Observation 

 shows that superiority of mind in the animal creation is exactly 

 commensurate with superiority of brain (666. F) ; that activity 

 of mind and of brain are coequal ; and that as long as the brain 

 is endowed with life and remains uninjured, it, like all other 



life, although when produced it becomes an instrument of life. The errone- 

 neousness of the French doctrine to which Mr. Lawrence is a proselyte (Two 

 Introductory Lectures, &c.), that " life is the result of organisation," was 

 refuted in the Annals of Medicine and Surgery, (1816, Sept. p. 346. 386.) and 

 subsequently by the Christian advocate of the University of Cambridge in his 

 Remarks on Modern Scepticism, &c. The error appears to have arisen in some 

 measure from the want of definition the word life being used sometimes pro- 

 perly for the power, sometimes improperly for the result. Even if the re- 

 sult of life the functions of a part, should be called its life, life could not be 

 said to be the result of organisation, but of a power to which organisation is an 

 instrument. 



* Horace. 



f- Cicero, De Scnectute Sf Qutest. Tuscut. 



J A stupid person is honoured with the expressions numb-sciill, thick-Aef/, 

 adAlc-patetl, shallow-^a/ei/, badly furnished in the upper story; a clever person 

 with strong-headed, long-headed, having plenty of brains; a madman is said 

 to be wrong or cracked in the head, touched in the brain, &c. &c. 



E 



