ble book
(and no one admires its sober strength more than I do), you never once
mention the brain or nervous system. You begin at one end of the
body, and show that its parts may be removed without prejudice to the
perceiving power. What if you begin at the other end, and remove,
instead of the leg, the brain? The body, as before, is divided into
two parts; but both are now in the same predicament, and neither can
be appealed to to prove that the other is foreign matter. Or, instead
of going so far as to remove the brain itself, let a certain portion
of its bony covering be removed, and let a rhythmic series of
pressures and relaxations of pressure be applied to the soft
substance. At every pressure "the faculties of perception and of
action" vanish; at every relaxation of pressure they are restored.
Where, during the intervals of pressure, is the perceiving power? I
once had the discharge of a large Leyden battery passed unexpectedly
through me: I felt nothing, but was simply blotted out of conscious
existence for a sensible interval. Where was my true self during that
interval? Men who have recovered from lightning-stroke have been much
longer in the same state; and indeed in cases of ordinary concussion
of the brain, days may elapse during which no experience is registered
in consciousness. Where is the man himself during the period of
insensibility? You may say that I beg the question when I assume the
man to have been unconscious, that he was really conscious all the
time, and has simply forgotten what had occurred to him. In reply to
this, I can only say that no one need shrink from the worst tortures
that superstition ever invented, if only so felt and so remembered. I
do not think your theory of instruments goes at all to the bottom of
the matter. A telegraph-operator has his instruments, by means of
which he converses with the world; our bodies possess a nervous
system, which plays a similar part between the perceiving power and
external things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery,
demagnetise his needle; by this means you certainly sever his
connection with the world; but, inasmuch as these are real
instruments, their destruction does not touch the man who uses them.
The operator survives, and he knows that he survives. What is there,
I would ask, in the human system that answers to this conscious
survival of the operator when the battery of the brain is so disturbed
as to produce i