Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/165

Rh that, upon matter so adjusted and so acting as the brain is adjusted and acts, all color depends? Because there is no sound in bell, or breeze, or ocean, is there therefore no sound? And wherein is the wonder of it diminished when we have learned the construction of the ear, its possible relation to a particular fold in the brain, and the necessity of this for all the harmonies that fill the soul with glory? Are we, the thinking, sorrowing, hoping selves, any the less real because all this thinking, all this sorrowing, and all this hoping depend in strictest sense upon that most highly organized form of matter the human brain?

George Eliot spoke truly when she said, "To advance in knowledge is to outline, more perfectly, our ignorance"; and who does not wonder before the unknown? When man is brought, as, if he is capable of it, science will bring him, face to face with the darkness of mystery, does he boast himself of all that he has learned? We may rest assured that the glory of mystery has not departed from off the face of the heavens or of the deep. I know not where this mystery is greater, or the wonder of it more manifest, than in the relation which obtains between the brain and consciousness, between the brain and the personality that thinks and feels and wills. This relation is a fact. All that we call our soul-life, from the sensations, the "building-stones" of this life, to the most abstract thought and holiest desire, stands dependent upon the activities of nerve-matter. Surely no one will be led to say, so are these things dependent on stomach, lungs, and heart. Such dependence is indirect, mediate, the other direct and immediate. Between consciousness and the brain, between nerve-matter and ourselves, there is a relation close, constant, immediate; we may well strive to reason upon the character of this relation. Here at the outset, this term reason must have clear meaning. I intend to use the word as expressive of the process of inferring, of drawing a conclusion from premises. I have now no concern with those who intuitively perceive truths beyond the territories of sense and inference. Those for whom the immateriality of the soul is a direct deliverance of consciousness may smile at the crawling pace of my induction; still, it is an honest and a needful endeavor to search after those conclusions respecting brain and consciousness which the inductive, inferential process shall necessitate.

In such search, nothing, as I think, is more important than to be assured that, in reasoning from the knowledge given by our senses to conclusions which transcend such knowledge, we must proceed according to discerned resemblance.

Two things agreeing with, which means, for us, resembling, one and the same third thing, agree with, that is resemble, each other; and two things, of which one agrees with, that is, for us, resembles, and the other does not agree with, that is, for us, does not resemble, a third thing, do not resemble each other. If the manifestations of