214 UNIVERSAL EVOLUTION 



physical supports. But unfortunately for Descartes' 

 theory, his human sense did not penetrate beyond death. 

 He could only see the lifeless body which had lost the 

 process of thinking, while the process itself, and its 

 effects were no longer visible. How could he then 

 "suppose that I had no body, and that there was no 

 world, nor any place, in which I might be, but that I 

 could not suppose that I was not?" By mere intro- 

 spection, the mature brain cannot view consciously the 

 thinking process. One is conscious of the effects of such 

 a process, viz., the ideas and judgments. He is conscious 

 of the impressions made upon his sense organs by 

 objectivity, and of the final effects produced, in the 

 brain, by these impressions, or sensations. But whether 

 this conversion of sensation into ideas is done by a 

 spiritual entity permeating and working the brain 

 tissue, or simply by the physiology of the brain in 

 molecular metabolism, must be determined by each one 

 for himself according, as the evidence impresses his 

 brain. But it cannot be determined by direct observa- 

 tion, viz. : introspection. Both sides, the idealist and 

 the materialist, agree that accompanying every psychical 

 phenomenon, such as thought, there is a certain 

 molecular movement in the brain, or a chemical flux 

 inaugurated by what is called an excitation of the 

 sensory ends of the nerve fibres, which passes to the 

 motor fibres, by a connection called a ganglion. The 

 constant movement, in more than three billions of 

 nerves throughout the body, gives it all its functions, 

 and maintains life, thought, reason, and all the psychic 

 phenomena. 



THINKING NOT A MEASURABLE THING. But the con- 

 tention of those who do not believe that this move- 

 ment produces thought, viz: the parallelists, is that 



