NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

Only by a double light on either hand, the mind being made known to itself, and the brain and nervous system being carefully inquired into, can we hope to trace obscurely and slowly the dependencies of the physical and spiritual worlds; even then reaching everywhere ultimate facts beyond our solution. Metaphysics, with all its erratic and fanciful reasonings, never gave explanations more absurd and inadequate than those sometimes rendered of intellectual phenomena from a study of physical organisms. The assertion that the brain secretes thought, is the crude idea out of which, with more subtile and obscure phraseology, those impotent reasonings from matter to mind arise.

This premature and preposterous union of the two realms, or rather absorption of the one by the other, is greatly aided by the admission of a region below consciousness, a region in some way attached to the mental field, though not fairly located in it. The mind thus allies in conception its phenomena to those of the physical world, taking place under a blind play of forces, and then readily unites them to nervous and cerebral action. Hypothetical, unlocated, unknowable facts are thus made to furnish a passage between the two departments; to give inlet to lower physical causes, whose service it ostensibly is to explain, but which really obscure and destroy, intellectual and spiritual powers.

We reject this region of subconsciousness as unexplored and inexplorable, either by the inner or the outer eye; as furnishing no ground for induction or safe deduction; as necessarily a region of myth and fancies, offering no solid explanations which can be subjected to any form of experience. Let positive science give us its positive facts, established with sufficient inquiry, located in the brain and associated organisms facts as material and sensible as those of brass or iron, oxygen and hydrogen, heat or electricity,