VISION. 78 
as to give the appearance of feeling, you would be 
quite insensible to every injury of it. The change 
which began in the nerve must run up the spinal 
marrow and into the brain before you can feel the 
pin-point. And although science can tell you that 
when an animal’s brain is removed it loses con- 
sciousness, and can tell you that intelligence is in 
proportion to complexity of brain structure, science 
cannot tell you why it should be so, nor why any 
commotion of particles of matter, the only change of 
which brain is capable, should be associated with 
operations of the mind, and even with the knowledge 
that the pin-point touches your finger. Thus we 
see that there is not only a long and difficult journey 
between the touch with the pin and our knowledge 
of it, but that there is a gap between our conceptions 
of mind and matter, utterly bridgeless in our present 
state of being; although all our ideas are shaped 
_ from that world of matter, our connection with which 
is so incomprehensible. Let us even believe, as I 
do, that the mind reaches more or less thoroughly 
at different times to the finger ends, and is 
actually present there so long as the connection 
with the brain is undivided, we do not by that 
supposition bring the mind into immediate con- 
tact with the external world; for you will admit 
that not one of you is conscious of the brain and 
