The Philosophy of Mystery · 16 of 35

Nature of Soul and Mind

“And for my soul, what can it do for that,

Being a thing immortal?”

Hamlet.

Cast. We have risen with the lark to salute you, Astrophel. And you have really slept in Tintern Abbey? Yet not alone; “I see queen Mab hath been with you,” and brushed you with her wing as you lay asleep.

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 —

Cast. “The soft exquisite music of a dream.”

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?”

Now, if we reflect on the psychology of the Greeks, can we discern their distinctions of νους, πνευμα, ψυχη, σωμα, of soul or spirit—of spiritual body, or of idol and of earthly body; or of θυμος, ψυχη, and νους, ψυχη, and so forth?

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.

Cast. I condole with you, Astrophel; you must forget the splendour of your dreams, and listen to their dull philosophy.

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.

Ev. I leave these hypotheses to speak for themselves, Astrophel; my own discourse will be wearying enough without them.

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.

Astr. Then there is some truth in the whimsical localities in the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” and the pictures of the tenants and apartments of the brain in the ingenious romance of the “Purple Island” of Fletcher.

Ev. Although I grant that these eccentric writers evince much reading, I am not sure that their impersonations (like the “Polyolbion” of Drayton,) do not tend to confuse, rather than elucidate, a natural subject.

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.

In tubercles of the brain, it is curious that memory is the faculty chiefly influenced; it is sometimes rendered dull, while the fancy is vivid,—often more perfect and retentive.

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, —

“Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus

Mens agitat molem.”

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. As the creation of light was before that of the sun, its reservoir, so the creation of the soul might be before the brain, in which the Creator subsequently placed it.

Ev. For this there is sacred evidence, Astrophel. There was light, ere the sun was created as its reservoir; but the soul was breathed into the body, which was already then created.

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?

Ida. May I not fear that the errors of philosophy, grounded on the difficulty of conceiving the nature of a self-existent spirit, will not stop until they lapse into the belief of annihilation?

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.”

There may be nothing terrible in the condition of annihilation, yet the moral effect is deplorable; indeed, to doubt the eternal existence is to argue that man’s life is but a plaything of the Deity. The notion of annihilation is so abhorrent, that he who believes it dooms himself indeed to a miserable existence; for the crowning solace of a Christian life is holy hope, and belief in the priceless gift of immortality.

“Know’st thou th’ importance of a soul immortal?

Behold this midnight glory—worlds on worlds!

Amazing pomp: redouble this amaze!

Ten thousand add; and twice ten thousand more;

Then weigh the whole; one soul outweighs them all,

And calls th’ astonishing magnificence

Of unintelligent creation poor.”

Would that Priestley had read wisely that prophetic truth in Ecclesiastes: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

Ev. I do not approve his latitude of thought, yet it were severe to think this, even of Priestley, merely because he disbelieved separate spiritual existence; for Aristotle also asserts, that “the soul could not exist without the body, and yet that it was not the body, but a part of it.” Zeno, and the Stoics, termed that which was called a spirit material; and not only Ray and Derham, but even Paley, and Johnson, disbelieved the separate existence. The archdeacon’s opinion, that we should have a substantial resurrection, is founded on New-Testament evidence, and expressed in his discourse on a future state. The apostle’s simile of the wheat implies a death of the grain: it dies, but there is no remodelling, for it is the germ that lives and grows; so, although the body may not be restored, there is a development of its germ in the transit or resurrection of its spirit. The sage thought also the simile of St. Paul should be taken literally, and not figuratively: and yet he qualifies it thus: “We see that it is not to be the same body, for the Scripture uses the illustration of grain sown (which in its exact sense implies an offspring, and not a resurrection), and we know that the grain which grows is not the same with what is sown. You cannot suppose that we shall rise with a diseased body; it is enough if there be such a sameness as to distinguish identity of person.”

Blumenbach believed that when the soul revived, after death, the brain would equally revive; and there is, indeed, nothing very irrational in all this, for death is, even to our senses, not an annihilation, but only a new combination of matter. The Greek sceptics thought that the teeth would remain perfect, if all else was decomposed and lost; and the rabbins conferred this perpetuity on one bone of the spinal column, which they called LUZ. These strange notions of the mystic union may explain to us that diversity of custom, in various nations, as to the disposal of the dead. While the Irish papists, with a superstitious reverence for inanimate clay, celebrate their wakes with rites often as licentious as they are profane; the cannibal Calatiæ thought it more respectful to eat the bodies of their departed friends, at least so writes Herodotus; and the filial love of other Indian tribes invites the children to strangle their aged parents, as they sit in their fresh-made graves.

It is certainly more consolatory to associate our thoughts with the immortal part of a lost friend; to believe the spirit to be in celestial keeping, and that it still hovers around us. The collapse and change of features prove that the body is then but as the dust from which it was first formed. I would not wish, like Socrates, to have my limbs scattered over the earth, because

“Cœlo tegitur qui non habet urnam;”

but, as the body must be consumed, were it not better and safer, as the Greeks did, to burn the dead, to resolve the corpse, as soon as possible, into its constituent elements. I shall ever remember with horror the scenes which I witnessed in Naples, when a pile of bodies, collected from the chapels by the dead carts, which go round the city at night, was thrown by irreverent hands into the public cemetery of the Campo Santo.

The fiat of the Creator MAY at once produce a reconstruction of the body, however widely scattered its particles, and the return of the soul to the brain, from which it had once departed; but is it not somewhat irrational to think that we should again be endowed with organs, without the functions and passions to which they are subservient?

Ida. It may be a bliss to gaze even on the shadows of those we love. There is a beautiful allegory of this solemn question told in the “Spectator,” which, as Addison approves, it cannot be profanation to admire. It is the Indian legend of “Marraton and Yaratilda,” in which the devoted husband comes unawares on Paradise, and sees the shadowy forms of his wife and children, without their substance. The story exquisitely blends the fond wish of Marraton to die, that he may be again admitted to the holy communion of those so fondly loved; for Paradise is painted in the mind’s eye even of the heathen, although, in his dearth of revelation, he associates the joys of his elysium with the sensual pleasures of terrestrial life. The Indian dreams of his dogs, believing that the greatest hunters shall be in the highest favour with Brahma; the proselytes of the prophet die in a vision of their houri’s beauty; and the warriors of Odin already drink the honey-water from the skulls of their enemies, served up to them by the beautiful “Valkhas” of the “Valhalla.” Thus even the creed of infidels is not atheism. What thinks Evelyn?

Ev. As you do, Ida. As to the atheist, one, perchance, may have lived, if we rightly interpret the sentiments of Diogenes, and Bion, and Lucian, and Voltaire; but, I believe, one never died. My solemn duty has summoned me to the death-bed of more than one reputed infidel, who have in health reasoned with fluency and splendour, and have penned abstruse theses on life and the world’s creation. But, when danger lay in their path of life, their stoic heroism fled, and left them abject cowards. They looked not even on the lightning’s flash without trembling, and the vision of death was a sting to the conscience. I have seen many a death-bed like that of Beaufort, who made “no signal of his hope,” not because he disbelieved a God, but because a conviction of his sin left him without a hope and faith in the promises.

Of course there cannot be an Euthanasia where irreligion has marked a life, but, believe me, there would be no fear of death in an atheist.

Astr. The mythologist and pagan may cite their tables, and worship their idols in the recesses of their pagodas and choultries; but some idea of the Deity has been unfolded to the mind of all. Even the eastern princes have had some glimpses of the true faith, and shahs and caliphs were once engaged in building their Nestorine or Christian churches.

The profane Chinese has, it is true, called his realm the celestial empire; Fohi, who is believed to have reigned three thousand years before Christ, established his “Iconolatria” or “idolatry,” and Si Lao Kiun struck at the establishment of polytheism, but the purer theology of Confucius prevailed over his rival.

The Deity, indeed, is the essence of every creed, for all believe in a great spirit as well as an immortal mind and a paradise. Like the reasonings of natural philosophy, our notions and epithets of the great Creator certainly differ, but in all there is faith in his perfection. Xam Ti is the great spirit of the Chinese, as Woden is the god of the Gothic races, and Brahma, or Alla, or the Kitchi Manitou, or even the sun, the source of light, and heat, and joy to the creation, are the deities of other nations. Nor may we wonder more that the Ghebir, and the Peruvian, and the Natches should worship their orb of fire, than that the Irish should, on the morning of their Beltane, light their peat fires to the sun.

The doctrines of the Brahmins all attest their creed of theism, if we interpret aright the evidence of the learned Pundits of Benares, especially in the Gentoo code; and the records of Abul Fazel in the “Baghvat Geeta,” an episode in the poem of the “Mahabarat,” written to prove the unity. The devout Christian will deem this creed a woful error, but he will confess his admiration of their sublime notion of the divine attribute, which Colonel Dow has thus imparted to us: “As God is immaterial, he is above all conception; as he is invisible, he can have no form; but from what we behold of his works, we may conclude that he is eternal, omnipotent, knowing all things, and present everywhere.”

I will grant that the oriental notions of cosmogony, or the creation of the world, are a blot on their scripture page: because the pagan theologians were shorn of the light of Christianity, they were prone to refer creation to natural causes within their own comprehension, and their ideas were fabulous and impure. Thus, among the Hindoos and Egyptians, there is a mass of obscenity adduced to account for the development of the globe, in the associations of Vishnu and Siva, and Osiris and Isis; and the temples of Elephanta and Elora are adorned with symbolic paintings of this incarnation of Vishnu. Yet, with all this error, there is in the “Vedas” or Hindoo scriptures, a not remote analogy to the Bible itself; and, granting that the cosmogony of Phœnicia is little more than a mysterious romance; yet, whether the great cause be the demiurgic spirit uniting with desire, or the being “That” of the Hindoos, the essence of all these mysteries still combines the grand scheme of the creation,—the formation of a beautiful world from a chaos of wide and dark waters.

Ida. You are wandering very far eastward, Astrophel: I will propose this question to Evelyn.

If it is so evident that the brain and mind, although not identical, exist in a most intimate union, may we not undervalue their relative influence by adducing the energy of intellect and brilliancy of conception possessed by many in advanced life? Remember the green old age of Plato, and Cicero, and Newton, and Johnson, and, above all, Goëthe, whose last work was brilliant as his first. And all this, coincident with that love of Infinite Wisdom that exists, (as we read in the “Consolations of a Philosopher,”) “even in the imperfect life which belongs to the earth, increases with age, outlives the perfection of the corporeal faculties, and, at the moment of death is felt by the conscious being.” Does this imply decay?

Ev. The retentive powers of old age, are the exception to a rule, which the ultra spiritualist assumes as a general rule, in attempting to disprove the growth and decay of mind, according to the age of the body. But as lives are of different duration and constitutions vary, so may mental powers indicate different degrees of vigour. If mind in creases, no doubt it de creases; and I have known many, who retain every faculty but memory, which is the first to decay and indicate failing power; and so also is it with idiots, in whose memory, usually, the greatest defects appear; the faculty of counting numbers reaches only to three, and of letters to C, the third letter in the alphabet.

Ida will grant that there is no more impressive lesson of humility than the dwindling and decay of genius, when, in the words of the Athenian misanthrope —

“Nature, as it grows again toward earth,

Is fashion’d for the journey, dull and heavy.”

Reflect on the painful end of Sheridan and other brilliant wits of their day; that

“From Marlborough’s eyes the streams of dotage flow,

And Swift expires a driveller and a show;”

and we may almost wish that biography should begin at each end, and finish in the middle, or zenith of a life.

Ida. If the fact be so, I grant the lesson to our pride, Evelyn; and we may dwell with fervent admiration on the divinity of that mind, which can ennoble and consecrate our body, so fraught as it is with basest passions, and so decayable withal.