176 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



stroke have been much longer in the same state; and in- 

 deed 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 insensibility ? You may say that I beg the ques- 

 tion 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 instru- 

 ments goes at all to the bottom of the matter. A tele- 

 graph operator has his instruments, by means of which he 

 converses with the world; our bodies possess a nervous 

 system, which plays a similar part between the perceiving 

 power and external things. Cut the wires of the operator, 

 break his battery, demagnetize 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 

 sfight, 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 de- 

 bauchee 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 



