452 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



IS THE MIND IN THE BODY? 



By Professor GEORGE STUART FULLERTON 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



A NUMBEE of years ago the eminent anatomist, Dr. Joseph Leidy, 

 -£-*- told me that a modern Maecenas had offered to pay for the 

 finest microscopes if he would undertake a search in brains for ideas. 



The professor, who never pretended to be either a psychologist or 

 a philosopher, rejected the proposal on the ground that the investiga- 

 tion must be a profitless one. His common sense and common experi- 

 ence of mind and body led him to believe that mental phenomena are 

 not things to be captured as the result of such a method of attack. 



But what induced him to take this stand? Common sense and 

 common experience, in some sense of the terms, men have always had 

 — at any rate, they have had what may be called by these names from 

 a very early period. And yet there was a time, and a very long time, 

 during which such an investigation would not have impressed men of 

 acuteness and learning as necessarily an absurd one. 



There was a time during which, that is to say, men regarded minds 

 as something frankly and unequivocally material. Something elusive, 

 if you please; something too fine and subtle to be directly apparent to 

 the senses; but, nevertheless, something just as material as wood or 

 stone or flesh or bone, and just as really in this or that portion of 

 space. 



Almost at the dawn of reflective thought we find men identifying 

 the mind with the breath which we inhale and exhale ; and when, later, 

 the time was ripe for the birth of an atomic theory, a crude and hasty 

 one, it is true, but the forerunner of the one which was to appear later, 

 we find them describing it as composed of atoms, which enter and 

 leave the body as do other kinds of matter. 



About four hundred years before Christ, Democritus, who was a 

 man of scientific temper, even if of unavoidably limited scientific 

 attainment, placed before the world his atomistic doctrine. A hun- 

 dred years later that easy-going philosopher, Epicurus, adopted his 

 theory, and founded a long-lived school. In the first century, B. C, 

 the Eoman poet, Lucretius, wrote his magnificent poem e On Nature/ 

 and set forth in noble verse the Epicurean doctrine touching the uni- 

 verse of things physical and mental. 



The nature of the mind and soul, says Lucretius, is bodily; for when it is 

 seen to push the limbs, rouse the body from sleep, and alter the countenance 



