_ideas_ must be
extended and divisible because their objects or archetypes are so; and,
further, that the _mind_ itself must be material, because these
properties belong to the ideas which inhere in it as their subject or
seat. Now, _this_ argument is fairly met by the reasoning, or the
ridicule, call it which you will, of Dr. Thomas Brown: "In saying of
mind that it is matter, we must mean, if we mean anything, that the
principle which thinks is hard and divisible; and that it will be not
more absurd to talk of the _twentieth_ part of an affirmation, or the
_quarter_ of a hope, of the _top_ of a remembrance, and the north and
east corners of a comparison, than of the twentieth part of a pound, or
of the different points of the compass, in reference to any part of the
globe. The true answer to the statement of the Materialist,--the answer
which we feel in our hearts, on the very expression of the plurality and
divisibility of feeling,--is that it assumes what, far from admitting,
we cannot even understand, and that, with every effort of attention
which we can give to our mental analysis, we are as incapable of forming
any conception of what is meant by the quarter of a doubt, or the half
of a belief, as of forming to ourselves an image of a circle without a
central point, or of a square without a single angle."[170]

But the theory which supposes the soul to be extended and divisible, and
its ideas, feelings, and volitions to be extended and divisible also,
has given place to another, which does not represent the mental
qualities as inhering in every particle of the matter with which they
are associated, but rather as _the products of organization_, the
results, not of the atomic elements, but of the form, or figure, into
which they are cast. It seems to have been felt that it would be unsafe
to ascribe the power of thinking to every particle of the brain, and it
is now represented as the result or product of "the brain in action, as
light and heat are of fire, and fragrance of the flower."[171] This idea
is illustrated by a great variety of natural examples, in which certain
effects are produced by the _arrangement of matter,_ which could not be
produced by its individual particles, existing separate and apart, or
combined in other forms. Nor is this a new phase of the theory, or an
original discovery of the present age; it was familiarly known and fully
discussed[172] in the days of Clarke and Collins, and every simil