ed mind consciousness still remains, the awareness of
the young child or baby stage of life. The connection between the upper
or conscious brain centers and the body has been tampered with; it no
longer is direct, but breaks off into switch-lines. But the contact
still holds between the lower or unconscious mind and the body; so the
automatic body functions go on, directed as they were in babyhood before
the independent mind assumed control. Hence, when all acute
consciousness is finally gone, the unconscious mind, a perfect
automaton, may still carry out the simplest vegetative activities of
existence.

When body is dead, mind, so far as its reactions to the world we know
are concerned, ceases to act. But when the conscious mind is "dead" the
body may yet live as a vegetable lives, with all its distinctively human
functions lost. Motionless, save for the beating of the heart and the
reaction of the lungs to air, the body may still be alive, though the
mind long since has ceased all earthly activity.

So we discover that an organ of mind is an essential, here, to life of
mind, and that mind only can induce this organ to any action above the
vegetative stage. But, on the other hand, we find that life can exist
without conscious mind, even if untended by others, for a limited time.

If the direct nerve connections between the brain and the hand, the
brain and the foot, or the brain and the trunk are cut off, the mind
henceforth realizes nothing of that part except as the sense of sight
reports upon it; for the optic nerves relate the hand and mind, through
this sense, as truly as the motor nerves which carry the mind's message
for motion to the hand, and the sensory nerves which carry back to the
mind the hand's pain. But let the optic nerve be inert, the sensory and
motor connections broken between brain and hand, or foot and trunk, or
brain and trunk, and the hand or foot may be amputated and the mind
never sense the fact; the trunk may be severely injured and the mind be
serenely unconscious. So the brain in man is "the one immediate bodily
condition of the mental operations." Take away all the brain and man's
body is a useless mass of protoplasm.

The brain's varied and intricate nerve connections with all parts of the
body, through nerves branching from the main trunks in the spinal cord,
we shall not discuss, for you know them through your study of anatomy.
For the purpose of our psychology we need consider only