THE BELFAST ADDKESS. 167 



demagnetise his needle ; by this means you certainly 

 sever his connection with the world ; but, inasmuch as 

 these are real instruments, their destruction does not 

 touch the man who uses them. The operator survives, 

 and he knows that he survives. What is there, 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 altogether ? 



' Another consideration, which you may regard as 

 slight, presses upon me with some force. The brain 

 may change from health to disease, and through such a 

 change the most exemplary man may be converted into 

 a debauchee or a murderer. My very noble and 

 approved good master had, as you know, threatenings 

 of lewdness introduced into his brain by his jealous 

 wife's philter ; and sooner than permit 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 intervention 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 of its condition and our consciousness, 

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



