/ 56 Human Physiology. 



will not be pretended that works of the highest genius consume 

 more blood and therefore require more food than those of the 

 most ordinary character. Every one who has attended to his 

 intellectual operations must be conscious that fasting even to 

 bodily weakness is often accompanied with great clearness and 

 vigour of the intellectual powers. Fasting has, from the remo- 

 test ages, been considered favourable to the activity of the 

 spiritual life. There is abundant evidence that in some cases 

 the soul has been able in some mysterious way to sustain the 

 strength of the body. It is beyond a doubt that many persons 

 have lived for months and years upon no more food than is 

 required by hibernating animals; just as it is beyond a doubt 

 that frogs and toads are sometimes found alive imbedded in 

 solid rock hard limestone or marble, where they must have 

 remained, without nutrition or waste, for an unknown but 

 immense period. 



Remove the bones and muscles, the organs of nutrition, and 

 the blood vessels and nerves that feed and govern them 

 remove so much of the brain as presides over bodily functions, 

 and how little matter of any kind remains to the soul ! De- 

 stroy sight, hearing, taste, smell, and the whole sense of feeling; 

 yet the soul or spirit, the real life of man, remains. The won- 

 derful faculty of memory, all the powers of thought, imagination, 

 will, love; all that constitutes the individual man, with all his 

 faculties, remains, related, perhaps, to a few ounces of brain, 

 95 hundredths of which is water, and the rest albumen and fat 

 dry, it is a pinch of grey dust. I must be excused from believ- 

 ing that such matter constitutes me what I am conscious of 

 being; and that when this matter is dust, or becomes part of 

 a worm, a vegetable, or another human being, I shall exist no 

 longer. I use this matter, but this matter is not ME. 



If we can see without eyes, hear without ears, feel without 

 contact or material proximity and there is abundant evidence 

 4.hat we can, in some cases, do all this it follows that the real 





