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Mechanism in thought and morals: an address with notes and afterthoughts
Mechanism in thought and morals an address with notes and afterthoughts Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: double organ, like that of vision; its two halves being connected by a strong transverse band, which unites them like the Siamese twins. The most fastidious love... more »r of knowledge may study its general aspect as an after-dinner amusement upon an English walnut, splitting it through its natural suture, and examining either half. The resemblance is a curious freak of Nature's, which Cowley has followed out, in his ingenious, whimsical way, in his fifth ' Book of Plants;' thus rendered in the old translation from his original Latin :— Nor can this head-like nut, shaped like the brain Within, be said that form by chance to gain : For membranes soft as silk her kernel bind, Whereof the inmost is of tenderest kind, Like those which on the brain of man we find; All which are in a seam-joined shell enclosed, Which of this brain the skull may be supposed. The brain must be fed, or it cannot work. Four great vessels flood every part of it with hot scarlet blood, which carries at once fire and fuel to each of its atoms. Stop this supply, and we drop senseless. Inhale a few whiffs of ether, and we cross over into the unknown world of death with a return- ticket ; or we prefer chloroform, and perhaps get no return-ticket. Infuse a few drachms of another fluid into the system, and, when it mounts from the stomach to the brain, the pessimist becomes an optimist; the despairing wretch finds a new heaven and a new earth, and laughs and weeps by turns in his brief ecstasy. But, so long as a sound brain issupplied with fresh blood, it perceives, thinks, wills.1 The father of Eugene Sue, the novelist in a former generation, and M. Pinel in this, and very recently, have advocated doing away with the guillotine, on the ground that the man, or the nobler section of him, might be conscious for a t...« less