is, properly speaking, just as acceptable, and as intelligible, as the separation would be, if that were the fact. The real difficulty is quite another thing.
What I have in view is this: when I speak of mind as allied with body—with a brain and its nerve-currents—I can scarcely avoid localizing the mind, giving it a local habitation. I am thereupon asked to explain what always puzzled the schoolmen, namely, whether the mind is all in every part, or only all in the whole; whether in tapping any point I may come at consciousness, or whether the whole mechanism is wanted for the smallest portion of consciousness. One might perhaps turn the question by the analogy of the telegraph wire, or the electric circuit, and say that a complete circle of action is necessary to any mental manifestation; which is probably true. But this does not meet the case. The fact is that, all this time we are speaking of nerves and wires, we are not speaking of mind, properly so called, at all; we are putting forward physical facts that go along with it, but these physical facts are not the mental fact, and they even preclude us from thinking of the mental fact. We are in this fix: mental states and bodily states are utterly contrasted; they cannot be compared, they have nothing in common except the most general of all attributes, degree, and order in time; when engaged with one we must be oblivious of all that distinguishes the other. When I am study
