Without unduly exaggerating the importance of Dr. Mierzejewski's experiments, it must be admitted that very great interest attaches to them at this juncture, when attention is so widely directed to the mysterious connection between matter and mind. Unhappily, instead of solving the question, the Russian professor's researches tend to shroud it in a still deeper mystery, and show that what has been termed the "slippery force of thought--the _vis vivida animæ_"--cannot be weighed in the balance; and they fully justify the eloquent language of a recent writer when he says, "Far more transcendent than all the glories of the universe is the mind of man. Mind is indeed an enigma, the solution of which is apparently beyond the reach of this very mind, itself the problem, the demonstrator, the demonstration, and the demonstrants."
Those who maintain that the brain is the organ of the mind, do not tell us what we are to understand by organ, brain, or mind; they seem to me to confound two things, the one with the other. In fact, they make no distinction between thought, mind, consciousness, and the _instrument_ by which these attributes become externally manifested. It is true, we have no evidence to show that the mind can operate independently of the nervous system; on the contrary, all physiological data bearing upon the question of this mutual relation, go to prove that where there is no nervous system there are no mental manifestations. Moreover, as G.H. Lewes says, "It is the man, and not the brain, that thinks: it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts."[33]
Every faculty manifests itself by means of matter, but it is important not to confound the faculty with the corporeal organ upon which the external manifestation of such faculty depends. The word organ is the name given to a part of the human frame by which we have sensation, and by means of which we do a certain act or work; such are the organs of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. All these organs are passive, and require to be operated on _ab extra_, precisely in the same way as the musical organ, which is an instrument constructed by man, requires man's interference for the production of musical sounds.