432 
Correspondence. 
[July, 
THE BRAIN THEORY OF MIND AND MATTER. 
To the Editor of the Journal of Science . 
Sir, — As I have been absent from England for some time, the 
May number of the “Journal of Science,” containing a letter on 
the above subject from “ T. P. L.,” has only just come into my 
hands, and I now ask permission to make a brief rejoinder. 
“ T. P. L.” will find his problem already solved, and his 
“conclusion” refuted, in an article entitled “Animal Auto- 
matism,” which appeared in the “Journal” for April, 1882, so 
that only a few words of explanation are here necessary. I 
have said that all perceptions are merely subjective, and that 
the brain, considered as a phenomenon , must share in this sub- 
jectivity, but I have not asserted that nothing exists save per- 
ceptions. That would be equivalent to a denial of the possibility 
of any kind of aCtion, or even of continuous and valid thought. 
Every man is forced by analogy to believe that there are human 
perceptions other than his own, but not generically different, and 
expressed by such signs and sounds as accompany his own 
moods of thought and feeling. By means of these tangible, 
visible, and audible symbols he holds intercourse with his fellow- 
creatures. Now, by aCting upon that aggregate of physical 
phenomena called the body, he can modify the correlated 
psychical phenomena. Pain, for instance, can be relieved by 
the administration of suitable remedies ; but if the body existed 
only as a phantasm in the mind of the physician, no modifica- 
tion of the passive mental picture could possibly affeCt the 
sensations of the patient. We must therefore conclude that the 
body has not merely a phenomenal, but also a real or noumenal 
existence ; and as all feeling and thought can be ultimately 
traced to the grey matter of the cerebral hemispheres, it may 
well be said of the brain that it thinks, and therefore is. — I 
am, &c., 
C. Arden. 
COSMIC DUST. 
To the Editor of the Journal of Science . 
Sir, — The lines of dust visible in houses in England pervading 
the streams of light which enter windows, or accidental apertures 
