Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 70.djvu/457

and guide and turn about the whole man, and when we see that none of these effects can take place without touch nor touch without body, must we not admit that the mind and soul are of a bodily nature?

But of what sort of bodies must we conceive this part of a man to be composed? The mind acts with great nimbleness; it is very easily moved, so it is inferred that it consists of bodies very small, smooth and round:

The following fact, too, demonstrates how fine the texture is of which its nature is composed, and how small the room is in which it can be contained, could it only be collected into one mass: soon as the untroubled sleep of death has gotten hold of a man and the nature of the mind and soul has withdrawn, you can perceive then no diminution of the entire body either in appearance or weight; death makes all good save the vital sense and heat. Therefore the whole soul must consist of very small seeds and be inwoven through veins and flesh and sinews; inasmuch as, after it has all withdrawn from the whole body, the exterior contour of the limbs preserves itself entire and not a tittle of the weight is lost.^[1]

Lucretius thinks that something analogous takes place 'when the flavor of a wine is gone, or when the delicious aroma of a perfume has been dispersed into the air.' Something is gone, but the weight of objects is not altered by the loss.

For hundreds of years it did not seem to men ridiculous to talk about the mind in this way. Yet they all had the common experiences of mental phenomena that we have. Nor was it the weakness of a single school to be thus grossly materialistic. The Stoic school, the great rival of the Epicurean, and also a long-lived one, was in its way as materialistic. The Stoics identified the soul of man with the warm breath that is found in his body.

Indeed, it is not too much to say that, among that very acute people, the Greeks, from whom we have gained so much, it did not seem at all unnatural to conceive of the mind of man as a breath, or a fire, or collection of fine small material particles. Some raised their voices in protest, but the protest was scarcely effectual.

Now, suppose someone had come to Lucretius and had initiated him into the mysteries of the microscope. Would he have scouted the idea of getting a direct vision of the 'seeds' that constituted the mind of man? I think not; there was certainly nothing in his doctrine to make the idea absurd to him. If, in general, invisible material things can be made visible, and the barrier set by their minuteness can be done away, why should not coughed-out soul atoms be captured and inspected?

But Professor Leidy was amused at the notion of the investigation proposed to him. Why was this? His experience of the mind was no more direct or complete than that of Lucretius. He had never

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1. 'De Rerum Natura,' III., trans. Munro.