666 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



who have recovered from lightning-stroke have been much longer in 

 the same state ; and, indeed, in cases of ordinary concussion of the 

 brain, days may elapse during which no experience is registered in 

 consciousness. Where is the man himself during the period of insen- 

 sibility ? You may say that I beg the question when I assume the 

 man to have been unconscious, that he was really conscious all the 

 time, and has simply forgotten what had occurred to him. In reply 

 to this, I can only say that no one need shrink from the worst tortures 

 that superstition ever invented if only so felt and so remembered. I 

 do not think your theory of instruments goes at all to the bottom of 

 the matter. A telegraph operator has his instruments, by means of 

 which he converses with the world ; our bodies possess a nervous sys- 

 tem, which plays a similar part between the perceiving powers and 

 external things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery, 

 demagnetize his needle ; by this means you certainly sever his con- 

 nection with the world ; but, inasmuch as these are real instruments, 

 their destruction does not touch the man who uses them. The opera- 

 tor survives, and he knows that he survives. What is it, I would ask, 

 in the human system that answers to this conscious survival of the 

 operator when the battery of the brain is so disturbed as to produce 

 insensibility, or when it is destroyed altogther? 



" Another consideration, which you may consider slight, presses 

 upon me with some force. Tlie brain may change from health to dis- 

 ease, and through such a change the most exemplary man may be con- 

 verted into a debauchee or a murderer. My very noble and appro /ed 

 good master had, as you know, threatenings of lewdness introduced 

 into his brain by his jealous wife's philter; and, sooner than pe:*mit 

 himself to run even the risk of yielding to these base promptings, he 

 slew himself. How could the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned 

 against himself if the real Lucretius remained as before ? Can the 

 brain or can it not act in this distempered way without the interven- 

 tion of the immortal reason ? If it can, then it is a prime mover which 

 requires only healthy regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, 

 and there is no apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it 

 cannot, then the immortal reason, by its mischievous activity in oper- 

 ating upon a broken instrument, must have the credit of committing 

 every imaginable extravagance and crime. I think, if you will allow 

 me to say so, that the gravest consequences are likely to flow from 

 your estimate of the body. To regard the brain as you would a staff 

 or an eyeglass — to shut your eyes to all its mystery, to the perfect 

 correlation that reigns between its condition and our consciousness, to 

 the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces that 

 very swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to it our meat and 

 drink and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value and 

 significance — to forget all this does, I think, open a way to innumerable 

 errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in some cases initiate 



