Part 29

We believe that the mind may possess five faculties; perception, association, memory, imagination, and judgment, and their focus or concentration is in the brain. We may argue long on the earthly nature of mind, contrasted with that of matter; yet, in the end, we commonly thus define it: a combination of faculties, and their sympathy with the senses.

That to different parts of this organ are allotted different functions cannot be doubted, when we look at its varied structure, its intricate divisions, its eccentric yet uniform cavities, its delicate and almost invisible membranes; and, indeed, physiological experiments are proof of it.

ASTR. Then there is some truth in the whimsical localities in the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and the pictures of the tenants and apartments of the brain in the ingenious romance of the “Purple Island” of Fletcher.

EV. Although I grant that these eccentric writers evince much reading, I am not sure that their impersonations (like the “Polyolbion” of Drayton,) do not tend to confuse, rather than elucidate, a natural subject.

Of a plurality of organs in the brain, I have been convinced, even from my own knowledge and dissections. I have seen that very considerable portions of the cerebrum may be removed, the individual still existing. The vital functions may continue, the animal functions are deranged or lost. The most extensive injuries of the brain, too, are often discovered, which were not even suspected; and the converse of this is often observed,—the diseases of the brain being commonly found in an inverse ratio to the severity of the symptoms. When chronic tumours and cysts of water are gradually formed, the extreme danger is averted by the balancing power of the circulation of the brain’s blood; without which its incompressibility would subject it to constant injury.

In tubercles of the brain, it is curious that memory is the faculty chiefly influenced; it is sometimes rendered dull, while the fancy is vivid,—often more perfect and retentive.

Brain, however, can no more be considered as mind itself, than retina sight, or than the sealing-wax can be identical with the electricity residing in it. For if we look at the brain of a brute, we see how closely it resembles our own; then, if we reflect on human intellect and brute instinct, we must all believe at once that there is some diviner thing breathed into us than the anima brutorum of Aristotle, something more than the mere vitality,—

“Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus Mens agitat molem.”

Brain is therefore the habitat of mind, the workings of which cannot be indicated without it; for, as the material world would be intact without a sense, so there can be no mortal evidence of mind without a brain, which is indeed the sense of the spirit. Thus, without adopting the creed of the Hyloist, the moderate materialist,—that the mind cannot have, during the life of the body, even a momentary existence independent of matter,—I believe, that when this matter is in a state of repose, mind is perfectly passive to our cognizance.

IDA. It is with diffidence, Evelyn, that I enter this arena with a physician, learned in the body; but is there no danger in this doctrine? does it not imply the office of a gland,—that brain is the origin of soul, and that its function was the secretion of thought.

EV. Such is the timid error of the mere metaphysician, Ida. There is no such danger; for, remember, if there be secretion, it is the soul which directs. Many a thought is referred to things which we cannot bring into contact with our consciousness,—except by the brain.

Dr. Gall writes of a gentleman, whose forehead was far more elevated on the right side than the left; and he deeply regretted that with this left side he could never think. And Spurzheim, of an Irish gentleman, who has the left side of the forehead the least developed by four lines,—he also could not think with that side, as indeed I have before hinted.

I may tell you the brain is double, and one healthy hemisphere is sufficient, as the organ of mind, if pain or encroachment of the opposite, when diseased, does not destroy life, and this especially when it is a chronic change, or exists from birth; so that I have often seen one hemisphere of the brain a pulpy bag of water, and yet vitality and many signs of intellect may still exist; nay, even if the whole brain be reduced to one medullary bag, animal life shall for some time be preserved.

To oppose this blending of mind and matter, Lord Brougham (in his Natural Theology) likens the marble statue hewn into beauty, to the perfect arrangement of organization in a being. While I admire the idea, I may observe that he forgets this truth,—that the maker of the one was a mere statuary, without even the fabulous power of Prometheus, or Pygmalion, or Frankenstein; the other, the Creator of all things, who breathed a breath of life into the shape he had made fitted to receive it. My lord thus halts at the threshold of discovery: mind is not the product of organization, but it works by and through it; and therefore, for its earthly uses, cannot be independent of the qualities of matter. We may as well agree with Plato, in endowing the soul with “a plastic power, to fashion a body for itself, to enter a shape and make it a body living.” I remember Plutarch (in his Quæst. Platon.) makes him say, that the soul is older than the body, and the source of its existence, and that the intellect is in this soul. But where is the sacred evidence of this? for, even in our antenatal state, we live, and yet there is probably no consciousness; there is vitality, at least, without the consciousness of an intellect.

ASTR. As the creation of light was before that of the sun, its reservoir, so the creation of the soul might be before the brain, in which the Creator subsequently placed it.

EV. For this there is sacred evidence, Astrophel. There was light, ere the sun was created as its reservoir; but the soul was breathed into the body, which was already then created.

ASTR. This is a specimen of your special pleading, Evelyn, allied to that perilous error of Priestley, that supposed function and structure to be identical, because they are influenced by the same disease, and seem to live and die, flourish and decay, together. Democritus also has written his belief that, “as the smell of a rose exists in the bloom, and fades as that dies, so the soul of an animal is born with its birth, and dies with its death.” You have conceded to me (and we must all be conscious of) the great difficulty of conceiving the nature of spirit; but, if we are required to prove its existence, we may answer, by analogy, that we cannot always palpably prove the existence of matter, although we know it to exist. The electric fluid may remain for an indefinite period invisible, nay, may never meet the sight,—it may even traverse a space without any evidence but that of its wonderful influence, and at length be collected in a jar.

As light, existing in remote stars, has not yet reached our earth, so the electricity is now residing in myriads of bodies, which will never be elicited; and thus (if I may extend the simile) the principle of life, whatever it be, may have an independent existence during life, may leave the body and yet not perish. Is not this a fine illustration of the living of the soul without the body; for here even a grosser matter, yet invisible, is evinced by its passage from one thing to another, although it is inert when involved in the substance?

IDA. May I not fear that the errors of philosophy, grounded on the difficulty of conceiving the nature of a self-existent spirit, will not stop until they lapse into the belief of annihilation?

For there are many suspicious sentiments even in the pages of well-meaning writers; such are the dangerous sentiments which Boswell has ascribed to Miss Seward: “There is one mode of the fear of death which is certainly absurd, and that is the dread of annihilation, which is only a pleasing sleep without a dream.”

There may be nothing terrible in the condition of annihilation, yet the moral effect is deplorable; indeed, to doubt the eternal existence is to argue that man’s life is but a plaything of the Deity. The notion of annihilation is so abhorrent, that he who believes it dooms himself indeed to a miserable existence; for the crowning solace of a Christian life is holy hope, and belief in the priceless gift of immortality.

“Know’st thou th’ importance of a soul immortal? Behold this midnight glory—worlds on worlds! Amazing pomp: redouble this amaze! Ten thousand add; and twice ten thousand more; Then weigh the whole; one soul outweighs them all, And calls th’ astonishing magnificence Of unintelligent creation poor.”

Would that Priestley had read wisely that prophetic truth in Ecclesiastes: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

EV. I do not approve his latitude of thought, yet it were severe to think this, even of Priestley, merely because he disbelieved separate spiritual existence; for Aristotle also asserts, that “the soul could not exist without the body, and yet that it was not the body, but a part of it.” Zeno, and the Stoics, termed that which was called a spirit material; and not only Ray and Derham, but even Paley, and Johnson, disbelieved the separate existence. The archdeacon’s opinion, that we should have a substantial resurrection, is founded on New-Testament evidence, and expressed in his discourse on a future state. The apostle’s simile of the wheat implies a death of the grain: it dies, but there is no remodelling, for it is the germ that lives and grows; so, although the body may not be restored, there is a development of its germ in the transit or resurrection of its spirit. The sage thought also the simile of St. Paul should be taken literally, and not figuratively: and yet he qualifies it thus: “We see that it is not to be the same body, for the Scripture uses the illustration of grain sown (which in its exact sense implies an offspring, and not a resurrection), and we know that the grain which grows is not the same with what is sown. You cannot suppose that we shall rise with a diseased body; it is enough if there be such a sameness as to distinguish identity of person.”

Blumenbach believed that when the soul revived, after death, the brain would equally revive; and there is, indeed, nothing very irrational in all this, for death is, even to our senses, not an annihilation, but only a new combination of matter. The Greek sceptics thought that the teeth would remain perfect, if all else was decomposed and lost; and the rabbins conferred this perpetuity on one bone of the spinal column, which they called LUZ. These strange notions of the mystic union may explain to us that diversity of custom, in various nations, as to the disposal of the dead. While the Irish papists, with a superstitious reverence for inanimate clay, celebrate their wakes with rites often as licentious as they are profane; the cannibal Calatiæ thought it more respectful to eat the bodies of their departed friends, at least so writes Herodotus; and the filial love of other Indian tribes invites the children to strangle their aged parents, as they sit in their fresh-made graves.

It is certainly more consolatory to associate our thoughts with the immortal part of a lost friend; to believe the spirit to be in celestial keeping, and that it still hovers around us. The collapse and change of features prove that the body is then but as the dust from which it was first formed. I would not wish, like Socrates, to have my limbs scattered over the earth, because

“Cœlo tegitur qui non habet urnam;”

but, as the body must be consumed, were it not better and safer, as the Greeks did, to burn the dead, to resolve the corpse, as soon as possible, into its constituent elements. I shall ever remember with horror the scenes which I witnessed in Naples, when a pile of bodies, collected from the chapels by the dead carts, which go round the city at night, was thrown by irreverent hands into the public cemetery of the Campo Santo.