44 LIFE: ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE 
dinary. Professor E. B. Thorndyke, in his 
“Elements of Psychology,” (p. 151) says: 
“It would take a model as large at St. Paul’s 
Cathedral to make all the neurons in the brain 
visible. A man counting at the rate of fifty 
a minute, working twelve hours a day, would 
take probably over seven-hundred years to 
count all the nerve cells in one man.” There 
are well over ten-thousand million of them in 
the body. 
Such, then, is the complicated nature of the 
nervous mechanism upon which life depends, 
and which is the basis for the manifestation of 
life and mind. Our nervous system, even more 
than any other portion of the human anatomy, 
has been slowly perfected through countless 
ages of evolution, and the comparative growth 
of the nervous system has now been clearly 
traced. Life and mind on the one hand, and 
the nervous system on the other, have some¬ 
how evolved together; but whether life and 
mind have become more complicated and ex¬ 
pansive as the nervous system has evolved 
(materialism), or whether the nervous system 
has become more complex because of the con¬ 
stant urge of higher forms of life-energy, tend¬ 
ing to manifest through it (idealism)—this is, 
as yet, an unsolved question, which only an 
ultimate interpretation of the nature of things 
can decide. A further discussion of this ques¬ 
tion undertaken in the chapter dealing with life 
and mind. 
LIFE AND MIND 
In the year 1886, a little book was published 
entitled “Can Matter Think?” Considerable 
