Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 November 1884 — What Is Mind? [ARTICLE]

What Is Mind?

Go into the chemical laboratory and touch the two poles of a galvanic battery. What is it that thrills through your bodies, and perhaps even burns the skin of your fingers; or, even, if the current be strong enough, strikes you dead on the instant ? Galvanism. What is galvanism? A force. Yes, and so is light a force, and heat and gravitation. 1 But when I am told this I am just as far from knowing what any one of the forces is as I was before. All that you could do, if 1 persisted in asking for a fuller explanation, would be to tell me something of the origin "and* properties of the force in question, and in this way I should obtain some idea of its characteristics, and should be in no danger of mistaking it for any other force. That is what your professor of physics does for you, and if you have only profited by the instructions you have received, you have a store of facts at your command that will enable you to recognize heat, light, electricity, gravitation, magnetism, whenever you see them manifested. When, therefore, you ask me what mind is, I answer that it is a force, possessing peculiar prop erties and developed by a substance constituting a part of the nervous organism of man and other animals, and known to anatomist and physiologists as gray nerve tissue.— Dr. Hammond.