The Philosophy of Mystery

by Walter Cooper Dendy

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.