Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/372

358 matter, and matter determines the form of energy, so consciousness determines their form and they determine the form of consciousness. It is well known to the most superficial observer that the body affects the mind, and the mind affects the body. A man with toothache, drunk, or in a fever, in in a bad state to think. When mentally depressed or in great excitement, the body is affected, and disease or even death may be induced by a fright. A blow on the head may destroy memory for all past events or only part of them. How easy for men, who look upon memory as the substance of consciousness, to declare that that blow on the head suspended consciousness, because memory was a blank for some minutes or hours after it! As well might we talk of energy being suspended from the time motion ceases to be seen as such in the magneto-electric machine till it reappears as motion again in the electromagnetic machine. While the body rests in sleep, the forms of consciousness are, to all intents and purposes, still, and we say the sleeper is unconscious. Give the alarm of fire, and see how quickly the so called unconscious man will be aroused. Did he first hear that call and then awake, or did he awake first and then hear the call? If he heard the call before awakening, then consciousness was awake to hear it while the body slumbered. If he awoke before he heard the call, then the call did not awaken him. No matter how deep the slumber of the body, something remains awake to catch the signals from without.

Every form of consciousness being built of that form we call the ego feeling, or feeling of individual identity, that feeling may be expected to persist wherever consciousness persists. As the connections of matter and energy, so far as form is concerned, are perfectly continuous and complete in every form that each assumes, so the connections of mind and body from beginning to end will be found just as perfect and thorough-going throughout. Given the form of matter, and the form of energy can be at once inferred. The forms of matter, motion, and consciousness, have from beginning to end the most intimate relations with each other. Each moulds the other into the form in which it appears, and it would, indeed, be remarkable from this view of the case if our experiences of the power of bodily condition over mind were not as they are. Nerve-waves are not sensations. The nerve-matter is there and the wave and sensation are there, but by no effort of thought can we conceive them as less than three. Whether any one of these can exist independent of the others cannot be known. We know matter as possessing energy, and when the philosophic mind attempts to divest it of all energy it melts into inconceivability. In attempting to separate energy from matter we are foiled. We know consciousness as connected with matter through energy. When we attempt to remove consciousness in thought from this relationship, it slides out of thought completely. In an ultimate analysis each of the three appears with a substantive basis of its own, but the natures of