Ixxx REPORT—1874. 
nervous system. You begin at one end of the body, and show that its 
parts may be removed without prejudice to the perceiving power. What 
if you begin at the other end, and remove, instead of the leg, the brain ? 
The body, as before, is divided into two parts; but both are now in the 
same predicament, and neither can be appealed to to prove that the other 
is foreign matter. Or, instead of going so far as to remove the brain 
itself, let a certain portion of its bony covering be removed, and let a 
rhythmic series of pressures and relaxations of pressure be applied to the 
soft substance. At every pressure ‘the faculties of perception and of ac- 
tion, 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 unexpectedly 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 con- 
sciousness. 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 for- 
gotten 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 ner- 
vous system, which plays a similar part between the perceiving power 
and external things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery, de- 
magnetize his needle: by this means you certainly sever his connexion with 
the world; but inasmuch as these are real instruments, their destruction does 
not touch the man who uses them. The operator survives, and he knows that 
he survives. What is it, I would ask, in the human system that answers to this 
conscious survival of the operator when the battery of the brain is so dis- 
turbed as to produce insensibility, or when it is destroyed altogether ? 
‘«‘ Another consideration, which you may consider slight, presses upon me with 
some force. The brain may change from health to disease, and through such 
a change the most exemplary man may be converted 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 not act in this distempered way without the intervention 
of the immortal reason? If it can, then it is a prime mover which requires 
only healthy regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, and there is no 
apparent need of your immortal reason at all. Ifit cannot, then the im- 
mortal reason, by its mischievous activity in operating upon a broken instru- 
ment, must have the credit of committing every imaginable extravagance and 
erime. I think, if you will allow me to say so, that the gravest consequences 
are likely to flow from your estimate of the body. To regard the brain 
as you would a staff or an eyeglass—to shut your eyes to all its mystery, 
to the perfect correlation of its condition and our consciousness, to the fact that 
a slight excess or defect of blood in it produces the very swoon to which 
you refer, and that in relation to it our meat and drink and air and 
