A THINKING MACHINE. 597 



fact. It may be inconceivable, but at any rate it exists. Logic may 

 demolish it ; ridicule may explode it ; metaphysics may explain it 

 away ; but, in spite of them all, it continues still itnperturbably to be, 

 and to perform the thousand-and-one incredible functions which argu- 

 ment conclusively and triumphantly demonstrates it can never com- 

 pass. Call it materialism or what else you like, experimental physi- 

 ology has now calmly demonstrated the irrefragable fact that on the 

 brain, and on each of its parts, depends the whole of what we are and 

 what we feel, what we see and what we suffer, what we believe and 

 what we imagine. Everything that in our inmost souls we think of 

 as Us, apart from that mere external burden, our body, is summed up 

 in the functions and activity of a single marvelous and inscrutable 

 organism, our human brain. 



But, though physiology can tell us very little as yet about how the 

 brain does its work, it can nevertheless tell us something ; and late 

 researches have made such a difference in our way of looking at its 

 mode of activity, and have so upset many current and very crudely 

 materialistic errors, that it may perhaps be worth while briefly to state, 

 in popular and comprehensible language, how the organ of thought 

 envisages itself in actual working process to the most advanced among 

 our modern physiological psychologists. 



Let us begin first with the old-fashioned and, as we now believe, 

 essentially mistaken view — the view which found its fullest and most 

 grotesque outcome in the spurious science of so-called phrenology, 

 but which still lingers on, more or less carefully disguised, among the 

 " localizations" and *' specific energies " of many respectable modern 

 authorities. 



According to this superficial view, overtly expressed or implicitly 

 suggested in different cases, each cell and ganglion and twist of the 

 brain had a special function and purpose of its own to subserve, and 

 answered to a single special element of sensation or perception, intel- 

 lect or emotion. In a certain little round mass of brain-matter, in the 

 part of the head devoted to language (if we push the theory to its 

 extreme conclusion), must have been localized the one word " dog"; in 

 the next little mass must have been localized " horse " ; in the next, 

 " camel," in the next again, "elephant," and so on ad infinitum. Here, 

 a particular cell and fiber were intrusted with the memory of the visi- 

 ble orange ; there, another similar little nervous element had to do 

 with the recollection of the audible note C flat in the middle octave of 

 a cottage piano. Thus reduced to its naked terms, of course, the the- 

 ory sounds almost too obviously gross and ridiculous ; but something 

 like it, not quite so vividly realized or pushed so far into minute de- 

 tail, was held not only by the old-fashioned phrenologists, but also by 

 many modern and far more physiological mental philosophers. 



When we come to look the question in the face, however, the mere 

 number of cells and fibers in the human brain, immense as it undoubt- 



