ITS PERSONATION OF MIND AND LIFE. 39 



ness : and by almost all, that consciousness is where it seems, namely, 

 in the head, and not in the mind. But strike away the lower falla- 

 cy, that muscular or convulsive action has any necessary connection 

 with feeling, and the other fallacies also totter. For if without feel- 

 ing or motive we can be impressed and act through the spinal cord, 

 we can, without an inherent mind, understand and will in the cere- 

 bral hemispheres. Or, in other words, as dead a structure in the 

 brain may be in apposition with the mind, for mental purposes, as 

 that which is added to the brain in the spine for impressional and 

 motor ends. The corollary is, that life is not in the body at all, in 

 the brain any more than in the nails; but that the body is essen- 

 tially dramatic; can feel, as itivere } think, as it icere, and will, as it 

 were : which, indeed, is the reason why the soul, desirous of doing 

 all these things in a world which likewise is dramatic, adheres to a 

 frame which is so perfect a medium of representations or mundane 

 actions. 



But let us also consider for a moment the relation of the mind to 

 the brain, by an inverse analogy, namely, the relation of the brain 

 to the spinal marrow. What, then, is the latter? The difference 

 of place between the two, and the difference of calibre, are too ob- 

 vious to mention. The one is the head of which the other is the 

 foot, the one is the luminous globe of which the other is the ray.* 

 Now, the brain performs or instigates on new grounds, with new 

 efficacy, and in a thousand thousand new forms, the general auto- 

 matic actions of the spinal marrow; for it extracts the secret and 

 meaning from sensible impressions, and produces actions correspond- 

 ent with the circumstances which that meaning shows to exist. All 

 the actions of man are proximately brain-work; so also are all his 

 perceptions : whereas a few automatic movements and convulsions 

 are the whole of the actions that can be assigned to the spinal mar- 

 row. We have here a glimpse of the transcendent nature of the 

 next higher term of the series ; and if by the rule of three we may 

 say, as the spinal cord is to the brain, so is the brain to the mind, 



* Here we may remark that we agree with the ancients, that the spinal cord is 

 a continuation of the brain ; although it is also, as the moderns say, an axis of in- 

 dependent centres; but its dependence is a longer truth than its independence. 



