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.