tes man's spiritual nature, that is to say, ALL
his mind, is inseparably amalgamated with the whitish mass of soft
matter enclosed in his cranium and called his brain, is a question that
must, one supposes, be ever open to debate.

One knows that this whitish substance is the centre of the nervous
system and the seat of consciousness and volition, and, from the
constant study of character by type or by phrenology, one may even go on
to deduce with reason that in this protoplasmic substance--in each of
the numerous cells into which it is divided and subdivided--are located
the human faculties. Hence, it would seem that one may rationally
conclude, that all man's vital force, all that comprises his
mind--_i.e._ the power in him that conceives, remembers, reasons,
wills--is so wrapped up in the actual matter of his cerebrum as to be
incapable of existing apart from it; and that as a natural sequence
thereto, on the dissolution of the brain, the mind and everything
pertaining to the mind dies with it--there is no future life because
there is nothing left to survive.

Such a condition, if complete annihilation can be so named, is the one
and only conclusion to the doctrine that mind--crude, undiagnosed
mind--is dependent on matter, a doctrine confirmed by the apparent facts
that injury to the cranium is accompanied by unconsciousness and
protracted loss of memory, and that the sanity of the individual is
entirely contingent upon the state of his cerebral matter--a clot of
blood in one of the cerebral veins, or the unhealthy condition of a
cell, being in itself sufficient to bring about a complete mental
metamorphose, and, in common parlance, to produce madness.

In the deepest of sleeps, too, when there is less blood in the cerebral
veins, and the muscles are generally relaxed, and the pulse is slower,
and the respiratory movements are fewer in number, consciousness
departs, and man apparently lapses into a state of absolute nothingness
which materialists, not unreasonably, presume must be akin to death. It
would appear, then, that our mental faculties are entirely regulated by,
and consequently, entirely dependent on, the material within our brain
cells, and that, granted certain conditions of that material, we have
consciousness, and that, without those conditions, we have no
consciousness--in other words, "our minds cease to exist." Hence, there
is no such thing as separate spiritual existence; mind is merely an
eventu