The Philosophy of Mystery

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 —

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, —

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. 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?

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.”