62 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 



of states will in this case depend upon the brain, and the brain is a 

 physical organ, the motion will not be a mental or ideal, but a phy- 

 sical motion. In other words, if the brain is physical and not mental, 

 then what seem to us to be mental motions in the brain are really 

 physical motions ; and in this case an open mind signifies an open 

 brain, an active mind a moving brain; and human language, or the 

 voice of common sense, contributes abundantly to the illustration of 

 the organ. For the predicates of mind can then be assigned in a 

 bodily, but not in a purely mental sense to the brain. If, however, 

 the mind be regarded, as by the materialists or cerebral Ptolemaics, 

 as the meteor and wandering lamp of the brain, then a mental, or 

 in other words an inexplicable influence or movement will account 

 for or rather accompany the cerebral states. But for ourselves we 

 cannot think of the mind as an ignks fatuus in the swamps of the 

 cerebrum, but as a distinct and superior organ, which has the cere- 

 brum and nervous system between it and the body. But now if the 

 brain has thought movements, there must not only be a law of suc- 

 cession in these, a beginning, a middle and an end of each; in other 

 words, an expansion and contraction ; but also, as we showed before, 

 a ground swell of motion on which they depend, and which if it were 

 not given by nature, no thought could lift the sluggish mass in time 

 enough to give a thought-like action. 



But after all, the question of motion is subordinate to the question 

 of what the motion is ? To show by rational arguments that the 

 planets move, without demonstrating their courses, would leave the 

 theory not only short, but curtailed of its strongest proofs. And to 

 raise the problem of the cerebral motion without showing its times 

 and rules, would be to rest in an embryo law, and to fail of the sup- 

 port which the body itself ought to proffer of so important a truth; 

 if a truth it indeed be. 



In turning to this new aspect of the question, we find in the body 

 that there are already two movements, which we will designate the 

 systemic and the sub-systemic; the movement of the respiration is the 

 systemic, that of the pulse the sub-systemic. The breathing of the 

 lungs is the largest revolution of organic life that the body executes ; 

 the beating of the heart is but a satellitial motion freely included 

 within the former. And if organic life or motion be concentric, a 



