e set in motion. And yet what body can or cannot
do no one has yet determined; body, i.e., by the law of its
own nature, and without assistance from mind. No one
has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its
functions and exhausted the list of them: and there are
powers exhibited by animals far exceeding human sagacity;
and again, feats are performed by somnambulists on which
in the waking state the same persons would never venture
--itself a proof that body is able to accomplish what mind
can only admire. Men say that mind moves body, but how
it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion it can
impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they
say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious
language. They will answer me, that whether or not they
understand how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain
experience that unless mind could perceive, body would be
altogether inactive; they know that it depends on the mind
whether the tongue speak or not. But do they not equally
experience that if their bodies are paralysed their minds
cannot think? That if their bodies are asleep their minds
are without power? That their minds are not at all times
equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject,
but depend on the state of their bodies? And as for
experience proving that the members of the body can be
controlled by the mind, I fear experience proves very much
the reverse. But it is absurd, they rejoin, to attempt to
explain from the mere laws of body such things as pictures,
or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however,
that we do not vet know what body can or cannot do, or
what would naturally follow from the structure of it; that
we experience in the feats of somnambulists something
which antecedently to that experience would have seemed
incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds infinitely
any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it."

We are not concerned to answer this reasoning,
although if the matter were one the debating of which
could be of any profit, it would undoubtedly have its
weight, and would require to be patiently considered.
Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and
in which we are trifling with what is inscrutable.

Objections of a far gr