By W. C. Morrow
In my travels abroad I once encountered an extraordinary illustration of the shifts to which Nature will resort in her efforts to overcome the inconvenience arising from a deprivation of the tools with which she is accustomed to work; and the facts of the case are sufficiently peculiar and tragic to warrant their relation.
I was summoned from Calcutta to proceed to the heart of India, being wanted by a certain rich and powerful rajah to perform a dangerous surgical operation upon one of the women of his household. I found the rajah to be a man of lofty character, noble and generous; but, as circumstances afterward developed, he was possessed of a sense of cruelty purely Oriental and in sharp contrast to the extreme indolence of his disposition. He was so grateful for the success which attended my mission that he urged me to remain his guest at the palace as long as it should please me to stay; and, as may be surmised, I thankfully accepted the invitation.
One of his servants early attracted my notice, for he was a man of marvelous capacity of malice and vindictiveness. His name was Neranya, and I am certain that there must have been a large proportion of Malay blood in his veins; for, unlike the Indians (from whom he differed also in complexion), he was extremely active, alert, nervous, and sensitive. He had one redeeming trait, and that was love for his master.
Once his violent temper led him to the commission of an atrocious crime—the fatal stabbing of a dwarf. In punishment for this the rajah ordered that Neranya’s right arm (the offending one) be severed from his body. The sentence was executed in rather a bungling fashion by a stupid fellow armed with an axe; and I, being a surgeon, was compelled, in order to save Neranya’s life, to perform a second amputation upon the stump of the arm, which left not a vestige of the limb remaining.
Just here, as a possible partial explanation of the terrible and extraordinary things which followed, I must call intelligent attention to a matter which has long engaged my notice.
We see that when one arm has been lost, the other acquires an unwonted dexterity, thus measurably compensating for the loss. Further, if both arms have been removed, an extraordinary nimbleness is exhibited in the feet, for they come to discharge to a considerable extent the functions of hands—to so great an extent that the toes display a power of prehension which one might suppose had not existed in them since our abandonment, in the evolutionary process, of the tree-climbing habit. Thus, with the toes an armless man may learn to hold a pen and to write, to load and fire a pistol, to cut food with a knife, and convey it to his mouth with a fork, to sew, and to do a hundred other useful things, and some which are purely ornamental, as painting, playing a harp, and the like. I once saw an armless man give his wife a sound thrashing with a rawhide whip.
If, now, one of the legs be removed, the remaining foot will develop an almost redoubled capacity, its agility being marvelous. But suppose that this member, too, should be parted with—has Nature reached the end of her resources? Remember, the dexterity that she developed in those members which remained after the amputation of others was primarily of a character to take the place of that which enabled the others to minister to the needs of life. Granted that both arms and both legs are gone, has Nature, I have asked, reached the limit of her resources, in the accomplishment of an earnest and controlling purpose, praiseworthy or perverted?
Let us inquire into the philosophy of the process by which this compensating dexterity is developed. It is easy for the scientists to tell us that this is done by the concentration of the will and the persistent exercise of the muscles in obedience thereto; but to my understanding this explanation is not sufficient. The principle of life, the amazing persistence of this principle, and the ways in which this persistence is maintained, are all inscrutable mysteries, necessarily and forever beyond our comprehension. It is the fashion of transcendentalism (not followed, however, by the greater scientists) to maintain that we have a spiritual, as well as a material, nature; and by evolution there has grown out of that belief another, that this spiritual nature is imperishable, indestructible—the fashionable, though inaccurate, term is “immortal.” The spirit is assumed to be the ego, the consciousness—that which fixes individuality and determines identity.
Now, we know that mind is consciousness, and that the mind has its seat within the brain. But the brain is identical in its chemical, structural, molecular, and functional characteristics with the nerves which lead from it and ramify throughout the body; therefore the mind, and consequently the spirit, ramifies throughout the body; and hence it follows that if the spirit is indestructible and should be separated from the body (by death or otherwise) it must have the essential form and appearance of the body. The fact of our being unable to see it presents no obstacle to the argument; for we are unable to see countless things which we are certain exist. The argument thus put in logical shape may account, by unconscious synthetical reasoning, for the prevalent belief, seemingly inherent, that the spirit retains the form of the body after death; for there is no other conception of the human spirit’s form—we never imagine it as having the shape of a ball, or a comet, or a balloon, or a cloud, or as being formless.