Mechanism in Thought and Morals 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: them out again as mental products: ' the ' spiritualist' believes in a conscious entity, not interchangeable with motive force, which plays upon this instrument.... more » But the instrument must be studied by the one as much as by the other: the piano which the master touches must be as thoroughly understood as the musical box or clock which goes of itself by a spring or weight. A slight congestion or softening of the brain shows the least materialistic of philosophers that he must recognise the strictdependence of mind upon its organ in the only condition of life with which we are experimentally acquainted. And what all recognise as soon as disease forces it upon their attention, all thinkers should recognise, without waiting for such an irresistible demonstration. They should see that the study of the organ of thought, microscopically, chemically, experimentally, on the lower animals, in individuals and races, in health and in disease, in every aspect of external observation, as well as by internal consciousness, is just as necessary as if mind were known to be nothing more than a function of the brain, in the same way as digestion is of the stomach. 1 ' It is by no means generally admitted that the brain is governed by the mind. On the contrary, the view entertained by the best cerebral physiologists is, that the mind is a force developed by the action of the brain.'— Journal of Psychological Medicine, July, 1870; Editor's (W. A. Hammond) Note, p. 535. These explanations are simply a concession to the timidity of those who assume that they who study the material conditions of the thinking centre necessarily confine the sphere of intelligence to the changes in those conditions ; that they consider these changes constitute thought; whereas all that is held may be, that they accom...« less