SECT. III.] THE BRAIN A COMPOUND ORGAN. 445 



be injured, thought is injured; if destroyed, thought is de- 

 stroyed, and consciousness abolished. 



Eminent men of all ages have acknowledged this dependence of 

 the faculty of thought upon the body: of these I need onlymention 

 Hippocrates \ Galen, ^ Des Cartes,^ Abraham Kau Boerhaave,'^ 

 and Gaubius^. The force of truth also made Tralles subscribe to 

 this opinion^, for although he carried the doctrine that the 

 mind is independent of the body too far, yet he observes : " It 

 is indeed certain that experience teaches us that so long as the 

 soul is connected with the body, a well-constituted brain is 

 absolutely necessary for it to think, imagine, reproduce ideas, 

 and judge concerning them.^' Ernest Platner, also, in his 

 elegant essay, ' De Vi Corporis in Memoria,^'^ observes : " Since 

 such are the facts, it is manifest from the observations already 

 made as to the mode of perception, that every one of our senses 

 is put in action by the common agency of the body and mind, 

 so that no sensation or thought can be produced by the mind 

 without the body, nor by the body without the mind." And 

 this doctrine, that the soul, so long as it is connected with the 

 body, can neither think, nor have self-consciousness without a 

 properly-constituted brain, derogates certainly in no degree 

 from the immateriality and immortality of the soul, which God, 

 by special favour, can endow with an eternal consciousness of 

 itself and of things external to it, although the body it had in- 

 habited be destroyed, — a doctrine we are taught to believe by 

 religion, which also in every age has been desired by mankind^ 

 and which great philosophers have approved by their assent^. 



' In the Epistle of Democritus, • De Natura Hominis,' which is extant among the 

 works of Hippocrates. 



2 Cap. ix, Libri quod anirai mores corporis temperamenta sequantur. 



3 Diss, de Meth., n. vi, p. m. 38. 



* Impetum faciens dictum. Hippocrati, cap. i, he says : " The Supreme Ruler 

 has associated the mind with the body by such a law, that without a suitable state 

 of body the mind is evidently inactive, and becomes so disconsolate and unlike itself, 

 that you in vain search for mind in the mind itself." 



^ De Regimine Mentis quod Medic, est, Sermo i. 



^ De Animse existentis Immaterialitate et Immortalitate, p. 31. 



' In Baldinger, Syloge Selector. Opusculor. Argum. Medico-Pract., vol. iii, p. 86. 



8 This closing sentence is omitted in the edition published in the Opera Minora ; 

 the reference to the doctrines of Christianity at the commencement of Section I, 

 is also omitted. — Ed. 



