nsensibility, or when it is destroyed altogether?

'Another consideration, which you may regard as slight, presses upon
me with some force. The brain may change from health to disease, and
through such a change the most exemplary man may be converted into a
debauchee or a murderer. My very noble and approved good master had,
as you know, threatenings of lewdness introduced into his brain by his
jealous wife's philter; and sooner than permit himself to run even the
risk of yielding to these base promptings he slew himself. How could
the hand of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself if the
real Lucretius remained as before? Can the brain or can it not act in
this distempered way without the intervention of the immortal reason?
If it can, then it is a prime mover which requires only healthy
regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, and there is no
apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it cannot, then the
immortal reason, by its mischievous activity in operating upon a
broken instrument, must have the credit of committing every imaginable
extravagance and crime.

I think, if you will allow me to say so, that the gravest consequences
are likely to flow from your estimate of the body. To regard the
brain as you would a staff or an eyeglass--to shut your eyes to all
its mystery, to the perfect correlation of its condition and our
consciousness, to the fact that a slight excess or defect of blood in
it produces the very swoon to which you refer, and that in relation to
it our meat, and drink, and air, and exercise, have a perfectly
transcendental value and significance--to forget all this does, I
think, open a way to innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may
possibly, in some cases, initiate and foster that very disease, and
consequent mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious
organ would have avoided.'

I can imagine the Bishop thoughtful after hearing this argument. He
was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the consideration of a
point of this kind. After due reflection, and having strengthened
himself by that honest contemplation of the facts which was habitual
with him, and which includes the desire to give even adverse
reasonings their due weight, I can suppose the Bishop to proceed thus:
'You will remember that in the "Analogy of Religion," of which you
have so kindly spoken, I did not profess to prove anything absolutely,
and that I over and over again