THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 165 



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 instruments goes at all to the 

 bottom of the matter. A telegraph-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, demagnetise his needle; by this means you 

 certainly sever his connection with the world; but, in- 

 asmuch 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 ap- 

 proved 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 



