afterwards it
recognises the likeness of that change in the parts inserted by
the nutritive process.18 This passage implies that the mind is an
agent, not a phenomenon; and it describes some of the machinery
with which the mind works, not the essence of the mind itself. Its
doctrine does not destroy nor explain the presiding and elective
power which interprets these assimilated and preserved changes,
choosing out such of them as it pleases, that unavoided and
incomprehensible power, the hiding place of volition and eternity,
whose startling call has often been known, in some dread crisis,
to effect an instantaneous restoration of the entire bygone life,
making all past events troop through the memory, a swiftly awful
cavalcade marching along the fibrous pavement of the brain, while
each terrified thought rushes to its ashy window to behold. We
here leave the material realm behind and enter a spiritual
province where other predicates and laws hold, and where,
"delivered over to a night of pure light, in which no unpurged
sight is sharp enough to penetrate the mysterious essence that
sprouteth into different persons," we kneel in most pious awe, and
cry, with Sir

18 Paget. Surgical Pathology, Lecture II.

Thomas Browne, "There is surely a piece of divinity in us,
something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the
sun!"

The fatal and invariable mistake of materialism is that it
confounds means and steps with causes, processes with sources,
organs with ends, predicates with subject.19 Alexander Bain denies
that there is any cerebral closet or receptacle of sensation and
imagery where impressions are stored to be reproduced at pleasure.
He says, the revival of a past impression, instead of being an
evocation of it from an inner chamber, is a setting on anew of the
current which originally produced it, now to produce it again.20
But this theory does not alter the fact that all past impressions
are remembered and can be revived at will by an internal
efficiency. The miracle, and the necessity of an unchanging
conscious entity to explain it, are implied just as they were on
the old theory. "The organs of sense," Sir Isaac Newton writes,
"are not for enabling the soul to perceive the species of things
in its sensorium, but for conveying them there." 21 Now, as we
cannot suppose that God has a brain or needs any material organs,
but rather that all infinitude is his Sensorium, so spirits may
perceive s