SELF 213 



or abiding place may have been a very negligible 

 possibility. He would have discovered that the 

 infant, just born, had a brain, with all the cells and 

 machinery for thinking, just as the matured organism 

 has, but that it evidently did not think until it lived 

 long enough to have a past, in which memory was 

 weakly established by the experience of its five senses; 

 and that, as this experience grows, with the years of 

 its existence, the power of thinking is determined by 

 the brain structure, and not by a thinking entity inde- 

 pendent of such structure. Then, had he studied the 

 thinking process in the last days of a man's life, when 

 his power of thinking was waning, in his second child- 

 hood, he would have found that the process of psychical 

 development, in the infant, is exactly reversed; it de- 

 clines, as the time passes, just as the infant's 

 increases ; that those high modes of thought which come 

 comparatively late in life, are the first to cease in the 

 decline of life: arid those instincts, apparent in the 

 infant, survive to the last moment. Now, with these 

 facts of the infant's and the aged mind before him, how 

 could he conclude that the infant ego could think with- 

 out a body, when it could not think with one? And 

 if the body of the senile octogenarian ceases to live after 

 a large part of his thinking process has departed, will 

 his ego go on thinking in the incoherent manner it 

 does at the time of his death, or will the process it has 

 lost come back to it after death? If it come back, 

 where does it abide in the meantime? Could Descartes' 

 investigations into this process of thinking follow be- 

 yond the phenomenon of death, and could he see, with 

 the human senses, the process -of thinking still pro- 

 ceeding without a body, or a brain, there would be 

 some evidence that such a process does not require those 



