466 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



faculties of perception and of action' vanish; at every 

 relaxation of pressure they are restored. Where, during 

 the intervals of pressure, is the perceiving power? I once 

 had the discharge of a large Leyden battery passed unex- 

 pectedly through me: I felt nothing, but was simply blotted 

 out of conscious existence for a sensible interval. Where 

 was my true self during that interval? Men who have 

 recovered from lightning-stroke have been much longer in 

 the same state; and indeed 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 question 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 

 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, 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 sur- 

 vives, and lie knows that he survives. What is there, I 

 would ask, in the human system that answers to this con- 

 scious 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 examplary man may be con verted 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 



