The mind very busy in attending to all its nerves.
A great business the mind has to do in attending to all these ends of nerves in the brain; and how strange it is that it does not get confused, when so many messages are coming to it over its wires from every quarter! It always knows where a message comes from. It never mistakes a message from a finger for one from a toe, nor even a message from one finger for one from another.
And so, too, in sending out messages to the muscles, there is no confusion. When you want to move a finger, your mind sends messages by the nerves to the muscles that do it. The message always goes to the right muscles. It does not go sometimes to the muscles of another finger by mistake, but you always move the finger which you wish to move. And so of all other parts. Messages go from your busy mind in the brain to any part that you move. You can see how wonderful this is, if you watch any one that is dancing or playing on an instrument, and think how the messages are all the time going by the nerves so quickly from the brain to the different parts of the body. I shall tell you more about this in another chapter.
Messages go from the brain by some nerves, and come to it by others.
The man in the telegraph office receives messages by the same wires by which he sends them out. It is not so, as I have told you before, with the mind’s wires, the nerves; the mind receives messages from the senses by one set of nerves, and sends messages to the muscles by another set. If you burn your finger, you pull it away from the fire. Now in this case the mind gets a message from the finger by the nerves, and so knows of the hurt. The message goes from the finger along some nerves to their ends in that bundle of them in the brain; and the mind, being there on the watch, receives it. Now what does the mind do? Does it leave the finger to burn? No; it sends a message at once along some other nerves to the muscles that can pull the finger out of harm’s way.
Questions.—What are some of the things that I have told you in the chapters before this? What is the body built and kept in repair for? In what part of the body does the soul live? Tell how it uses different parts of the body. When your arm is raised, how is it done? In what way does the mind make the muscles act? What are the nerves? How are they like telegraph wires? What is it that goes along the wires? Do we know what it is that goes along the nerves? Give the comparison between cut nerves and broken wires. From what does the mind receive messages? Tell about touching, smelling, tasting, and seeing. What is said about the brain? What is said about the number of nerves? What is said about the mind’s attending to all its nerves? What is said about its making no mistakes in its messages? Give what is said about the burning of a finger.
CHAPTER X.
HOW THE MIND GETS KNOWLEDGE.
Knowledge enters the mind by the senses.
The mind, as you learned in the last chapter, has a sort of telegraphic communication with all parts of the body by means of the nerves, and it is all the time receiving messages from the fingers, the eyes, the nose, the ears, the mouth, and other parts. These are instruments which the mind uses to get a knowledge of what is around us. It gets different kinds of knowledge by the different instruments. For example, it learns whether a thing is hard or soft by the touch of the fingers, and it learns how it smells by the nose, how it tastes by the mouth, and how it looks by the eyes.