Part 14

May we not fear that, like the Promethean Preadamites of Shelley, the Cain of Byron, the fabled beings of Ovid, and the mythology of Milton, will be the vaunted discoveries of the geologist, in controversion of the Mosaic records, of the creation and the deluge; proving the wisdom of Bacon, that to associate natural philosophy with sacred cosmogony, will lead to heretical opinions? Indeed, I remember in the _Zendavesta_ of Zoroaster, the chronicle of the Magian religion (supposed to be a piracy from the book of Genesis), the sun IS created _before light_.

EV. Fear not this, fair Ida. Rather believe with Bouget, that philosophy and _natural_ theology mutually _confirm_ each other. The latter teaches us that which it is our duty to believe; the former to believe more firmly. And Lord Bacon himself, in his “Cogitata et Visa,” deems natural philosophy “the surest antidote of superstition, and the food of religious faith.”

The belief in existence of a preadamite world, presumes not to controvert the Mosaic record of the development of the globe, the creation of Adam, or the fall of man. Modern geology has peopled this preadamite world with _saurians_, or lizards, a race of beings _not concerned in the punishment of that delinquency_. Of the existence of these creatures there is no doubt; the discovery of their fossil remains, without a vestige of the human skeleton, marks the period of their destruction, and that the crust of the globe enveloping these relics, might have been reduced to that chaos when “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep;” and from which our beautiful world was fashioned by a fiat.

The truth of holy Scripture is too clear even to be disturbed by a sophist. You may recollect that Julian, the apostate, contemplated the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, in order to confute the prophecies; but Julian failed, and misfortune was the lot of all who were leagued in the impiety.

As to natural laws, think me not so profane as to cite such as the superstitious alchemyst, Paracelsus, in proof of their use in the working of a miracle; who says that “devils and witches raise storms by throwing up alum and saltpetre into the air, which comes down as rain-drops!”

And it were reversing this solemn argument were I to confess the doctrines of the Illuminaten, who, taught by Jacob Boehmen, and the mysticisms of his “Theosophia Revelata,” explained all nature’s laws by warping texts of Scripture to their purpose. Yet it is clear that even the miracles of the prophets may have been sometimes influenced by established laws. Elisha raised the Shunamite’s son by placing mouth to mouth, as if by inhalation.

Believe not then, fair Ida, that philosophy is set in array against religion, when the student of nature endeavours to explain her phenomena by physical laws, _for those laws the great Creator himself hath made_.

NATURE OF SOUL AND MIND.

“And for my soul, what can it do for that, Being a thing immortal?” HAMLET.

CAST. We have risen with the lark to salute you, Astrophel. And you have really slept in Tintern Abbey? Yet not alone; “I see queen Mab hath been with you,” and brushed you with her wing as you lay asleep.

ASTR. Throughout the live-long night, sweet Castaly, I have revelled in a world of dreams. My couch and pillow were the green grass turf. No wonder that tales of the times of old should crowd on my memory, that elfin lips should whisper in my ear—

CAST. “The soft exquisite music of a dream.”

IDA. Talk not of dreams so lightly, dear Castaly; the visions of sleep are among the most divine mysteries of our nature: these transient flights of the spirit in a dream, unfettered as they seem by the will, are, to my own mind, among the most exalted proofs of its immortality. Is it not so, Evelyn?

EV. The mystery which you have glanced at, Ida, is the most sublime subject in metaphysics. Yet in our analysis of the phenomena of intellect, it is our duty to discard, with reverential awe, many of the notions of the _pseudo psychologists_ in allusion to that self-evident truth, that requires not the support of such arguments.

In tracing the mystery of a dream to its association with our immortal essence, reason will at length be involved in a maze of conjecture. True philosophy will never presume to _explain_ the mystical union of spirit and of flesh; she would be bewildered even in their _definitions_, and would incur some peril of forming unhallowed conclusions. Even the _nature_ of the rational soul will involve him in endless conjecture, whether it be _fire_, as Zeno believed; or _number_, according to Xenocrates; or _harmony_, according to Aristoxenus; or the lucid fire—the Creator of all things, of the Chaldean astrologers.

He who aspires to a solution of the mystery, may wear out his brain in the struggle, as Philetas worked himself to death in a vain attempt to solve the celebrated “Pseudomenos,” the paradox of the stoics; or, like the gloomy students of the German school, he might conclude his researches with a question like this rhapsody—unanswerable.

“But thou, my spirit, thou that knowest this, that speakest to thyself, what art thou? what wast thou ere this clay coat was cut for thee? and what wilt thou be when this rain-coat, this sleeping-frock, fall off thee like a garment torn to pieces? Whence comest thou? where goest thou? Ah! where from and to, where darkness is before and behind thee? Oh ye unclothed, ye naked spirits, hear this soliloquy—this soul-speech. Know ye that ye be? Know ye that ye were, that ye are as we are or otherwise, in eternity? Do ye work within us, when a holy thrilling darts through us like lightning, where not the skin trembles but the soul within us? Tell us, oh tell us, what then is death?”

Now, if we reflect on the psychology of the Greeks, can we discern their distinctions of νους, πνευμα, ψυχη, σωμα, of soul or spirit—of spiritual body, or of idol and of earthly body; or of θυμος, ψυχη, and νους, ψυχη, and so forth?

This fine distinction may be reduced to one simple proposition:—that soul and mind are the same, under different combinations: mind is soul evinced through the medium of the brain; soul is mind emancipated from matter. This principle, if established, might associate the anomalies of many sophists; the existence of two minds, the sensitive and intellectual, taught by the Alexandrian philosophers, or the tenets of Bishop Horsley, in his sermon before the Humane Society, the separation of the life of _intellect_ from _animal_ life; and it might reconcile the abstract reasoning of medical philosophy, with the pure but misdirected arguments of the theological critic.

We believe the spirit to be the essence of life and immortality; and it signifies not whether our words are those of Stahl—that it presided over the animal body; or those of Galen and Aristotle—that it directed the function of life. It is enough that we recognize the πνοη ξωης, or that _breath of life_, which the Creator breathed into none _but_ man; and the εικων θεου, the _image of God_, in which he was created. In this one proposition all the points of this awful question are comprehended. And it is on this _combined_ nature that we must reason, ere we discourse on _sleep_ and _dreams_.

CAST. I condole with you, Astrophel; you must forget the splendour of your dreams, and listen to their dull philosophy.

ASTR. We may indeed sympathize with each other, Castaly; we are threatened with another abstruse exposition of the mind, although we are already sated with the contrasted hypotheses of our deepest philosophers: the _cogitation_ or self-reasoning of Descartes, (the essence of whose “Principia” was “_Cogito, ergo sum_;” and it is an adoption of Milton’s Adam, “That I _am_, I know, because _I think_:” forgetting that the very _ego_ which thinks, is a proof of prior existence;) and of Malebranche, who believed they existed because they thought; the abstract _spiritualism_ of Berkley, who believed he existed merely because others thought of him; the _consciousness_ of Locke; the _idealism_ of Hume; the _material psychology_ of Paley; the _mental corporeality_ of Priestley; and the absolute _nonentity_ of Pyrrho.

EV. I leave these hypotheses to speak for themselves, Astrophel; my own discourse will be wearying enough without them.

Over the intricate philosophy of mind, Creative Wisdom has thrown a veil, which we can never hope to draw aside. True, the beautiful mechanism of its _organ_, the brain, is apparent; and we can draw some analogies from inspection of the brain of a brute, and its progressive development in _fœtal_ life, in reference to comparative simplicity and complexity; but its phenomena are not, like most of the organic functions of the body, _demonstrable_.

Now, although we know not the _mode_ of this mutual influence, the _seat_ of mind is a subject of almost universal belief; not that Aristotle, and Ætius, and John Locke, are our oracles on this point, although they have even identified the _spot_, terming the _ventricles_ the mind’s presence-chamber, while Descartes decided on the _pineal gland_. It is, however, into the _brain_ that the nerves of all the senses enter, or from which they emanate: the senses constitute the _media_ by which the mind gains its knowledge of the world, and therefore we regard the brain as its seat.

We believe that the mind may possess _five_ faculties; perception, association, memory, imagination, and judgment, and their focus or concentration is in the brain. We may argue long on the _earthly_ nature of mind, contrasted with that of matter; yet, in the end, we commonly thus define it: _a combination of faculties, and their sympathy with the senses_.

That to different parts of this organ are allotted different functions cannot be doubted, when we look at its varied structure, its intricate divisions, its eccentric yet uniform cavities, its delicate and almost invisible membranes; and, indeed, physiological experiments are proof of it.

ASTR. Then there is some truth in the whimsical localities in the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and the pictures of the tenants and apartments of the brain in the ingenious romance of the “Purple Island” of Fletcher.

EV. Although I grant that these eccentric writers evince much reading, I am not sure that their impersonations (like the “Polyolbion” of Drayton,) do not tend to confuse, rather than elucidate, a natural subject.

Of a plurality of organs in the brain, I have been convinced, even from my own knowledge and dissections. I have seen that very considerable portions of the _cerebrum_ may be removed, the individual still existing. The _vital_ functions may continue, the _animal_ functions are deranged or lost. The most extensive injuries of the brain, too, are often discovered, which were not even suspected; and the converse of this is often observed,—the diseases of the brain being commonly found in an _inverse ratio_ to the severity of the symptoms. When chronic tumours and _cysts_ of water are _gradually_ formed, the extreme danger is averted by the balancing power of the circulation of the brain’s blood; without which its incompressibility would subject it to constant injury.

In _tubercles_ of the brain, it is curious that _memory_ is the faculty chiefly influenced; it is sometimes rendered dull, while the fancy is vivid,—often more perfect and retentive.

Brain, however, can no more be considered as mind itself, than _retina_ sight, or than the sealing-wax can be identical with the electricity residing in it. For if we look at the brain of a brute, we see how closely it resembles our own; then, if we reflect on human intellect and brute instinct, we must all believe at once that there is some diviner thing breathed into us than the _anima brutorum_ of Aristotle, something more than the mere vitality,—

“Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus 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.

As light, existing in remote stars, has not yet reached our earth, so the electricity is now residing in myriads of bodies, which will never be elicited; and thus (if I may extend the simile) the principle of life, whatever it be, may have an independent existence during life, may leave the body and yet not perish. Is not this a fine illustration of the living of the soul without the body; for here even a grosser matter, yet invisible, is evinced by its passage from one thing to another, although it is inert when involved in the substance?

IDA. May I not fear that the errors of philosophy, grounded on the difficulty of conceiving the nature of a self-existent spirit, will not stop until they lapse into the belief of annihilation?

For there are many suspicious sentiments even in the pages of well-meaning writers; such are the dangerous sentiments which Boswell has ascribed to Miss Seward: “There is one mode of the fear of death which is certainly absurd, and that is the dread of annihilation, which is only a pleasing sleep without a dream.”

There may be nothing terrible in the condition of annihilation, yet the moral effect is deplorable; indeed, to doubt the eternal existence is to argue that man’s life is but a plaything of the Deity. The notion of annihilation is so abhorrent, that he who believes it dooms himself indeed to a miserable existence; for the crowning solace of a Christian life is holy hope, and belief in the priceless gift of immortality.

“Know’st thou th’ importance of a soul immortal? Behold this midnight glory—worlds on worlds! Amazing pomp: redouble this amaze! Ten thousand add; and twice ten thousand more; Then weigh the whole; one soul outweighs them all, And calls th’ astonishing magnificence Of unintelligent creation poor.”

Would that Priestley had read wisely that prophetic truth in Ecclesiastes: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

EV. I do not approve his latitude of thought, yet it were severe to think this, even of Priestley, merely because he disbelieved _separate_ spiritual existence; for Aristotle also asserts, that “the soul could not exist _without the body_, and yet that it was not the body, but a part of it.” Zeno, and the Stoics, termed that which was called a spirit _material_; and not only Ray and Derham, but even Paley, and Johnson, disbelieved the separate existence. The archdeacon’s opinion, that we should have a _substantial_ resurrection, is founded on New-Testament evidence, and expressed in his discourse on a future state. The apostle’s simile of the wheat implies a _death_ of the grain: it dies, but there is no _remodelling_, for it is the _germ_ that lives and grows; so, although the body may not be restored, there is a development of _its_ germ in the transit or resurrection of _its_ spirit. The sage thought also the simile of St. Paul should be taken _literally_, and not _figuratively_: and yet he qualifies it thus: “We see that it is not to be the same body, for the Scripture uses the illustration of grain sown (which in its exact sense implies an offspring, and not a resurrection), and we know that the grain which grows is not the same with what is sown. You cannot suppose that we shall rise with a diseased body; it is enough if there be such a sameness as to distinguish identity of person.”

Blumenbach believed that when the soul revived, after death, the brain would equally revive; and there is, indeed, nothing very irrational in all this, for death is, even to our senses, not an annihilation, but only a new combination of matter. The Greek sceptics thought that the teeth would remain perfect, if all else was decomposed and lost; and the rabbins conferred this perpetuity on _one_ bone of the _spinal column_, which they called LUZ. These strange notions of the mystic union may explain to us that diversity of custom, in various nations, as to the disposal of the dead. While the Irish papists, with a superstitious reverence for inanimate clay, celebrate their wakes with rites often as licentious as they are profane; the cannibal _Calatiæ_ thought it more respectful to _eat_ the bodies of _their_ departed friends, at least so writes Herodotus; and the filial love of other Indian tribes invites the children to strangle their aged parents, as they sit in their fresh-made graves.

It is certainly more consolatory to associate our thoughts with the _immortal_ part of a lost friend; to believe the _spirit_ to be in celestial keeping, and that it still hovers around us. The collapse and change of features prove that the _body_ is then but as the dust from which it was first formed. I would not wish, like Socrates, to have my limbs scattered over the earth, because

“Cœlo tegitur qui non habet urnam;”

but, as the body _must_ be consumed, were it not better and safer, as the Greeks did, to _burn_ the dead, to resolve the corpse, as soon as possible, into its constituent elements. I shall ever remember with horror the scenes which I witnessed in Naples, when a _pile of bodies_, collected from the chapels by the dead carts, which go round the city at night, was thrown by irreverent hands into the public cemetery of the Campo Santo.

The fiat of the Creator MAY at once produce a reconstruction of the body, however widely scattered its particles, and the return of the soul to the brain, from which it had once departed; but is it not somewhat irrational to think that we should again be endowed with organs, without the functions and passions to which they are subservient?

IDA. It may be a bliss to gaze even on the _shadows_ of those we love. There is a beautiful allegory of this solemn question told in the “Spectator,” which, as Addison approves, it cannot be profanation to admire. It is the Indian legend of “Marraton and Yaratilda,” in which the devoted husband comes unawares on Paradise, and sees the shadowy _forms_ of his wife and children, without their _substance_. The story exquisitely blends the fond wish of Marraton to die, that he may be again admitted to the holy communion of those so fondly loved; for Paradise is painted in the mind’s eye even of the heathen, although, in his dearth of revelation, he associates the joys of his elysium with the sensual pleasures of terrestrial life. The Indian dreams of his dogs, believing that the greatest hunters shall be in the highest favour with Brahma; the proselytes of the prophet die in a vision of their houri’s beauty; and the warriors of Odin already drink the honey-water from the skulls of their enemies, served up to them by the beautiful “Valkhas” of the “Valhalla.” Thus even the creed of infidels is not atheism. What thinks Evelyn?