"Agreed!" cried Evelyn.

"Moreover, it is in proportion to the size, perhaps to the fineness of our brains," pursued Tremaine, "that we are wise and refined."

"But not good, kind, pious, or gentle," observed Evelyn.

"That the shape and size of the brain," said Tremaine," in short, that the attributes of matter, influence the properties of the soul, and the nature of thought, is enough for me to feel assured that they must themselves be material. Where the brain is hurt, the understanding is gone, though life remains : and even your favourite Being and ally, consciousness, may be annihilated, by the destruction of a portion, a very small portion indeed of human matter. Are Epicurus and Lucretius then indeed such fools in supposing that the soul is material? and how is this reconcileable with your argument from consciousness-which I own much impressed me?"

"The difficulty," observed Evelyn," is not new, and has been completely refuted by a knowledge of that very anatomy which you avouch in your support."

"I shall be not less pleased than surprised," exclaimed Tremaine, " if this can be made out.'

"Why thus," answered Evelyn. "The consciousness I spoke of, I rely on, you know, as an integral, identical, and ever-during Being. Its indivi

sibility, and therefore indiscerptibility, is in fact the only real and unequivocal proof that I am the same being now that I was forty years ago. All about me has changed; my flesh, my blood, and for aught I know my very bones may have so passed off in the wear and tear of my material nature, in the course of all its wonderful processes, perpetually and without intermission at work, in sleep as well as waking, that I know not the part of me that is actually the same as when I came into the world. Our hair, teeth, and nails, we obviously see changing; nay our very skin. Nature seems ever indefatigably employed in the business of subtraction, by perspiration and the various secretions, and of addition, by food. The changes are indeed so gradual as not to be perceptible; but they are not the less changes: so that we are like a ship, built perhaps in the last century, and still thought the same as was originally launched, yet so often repaired, that not a nail, rope, or piece of timber of the original, remains."

“Well then,—amidst all this transmutation, is the brain alone to escape? and if it do not, what becomes of that consciousness, which yet is supposed to be identified with it? If that too has been divided, thrust into other places, lost and renewed with new atoms, how is it, I say, that I know myself to be the same thinking conscious being now that I was forty years ago? My flesh and blood, nails, teeth, hair,

and skin are, I know, not the same; my mind is. There is but one consequence for your supposition, if just; namely, that the brain is the identical self same brain it always was.

"And may it not be so?" asked Tremaine.

"So far from it," replied Evelyn, " that of all the changes the body undergoes, the brain is proved to experience the most frequent, and the greatest; so much so, that the animal spirits which belong to it, and in which resides the very quintessence of that fine subtle matter, the flos Bacchi of your Lucretius, (in short, the soul you have supposed,) are said by some to flow through this brain, and return to the heart, and the brain itself is also dissolved, once in every forty-eight hours."

"I confess to you," allowed Tremaine, "this is very important."

"It is to me decisive," said Evelyn: "for what, let me ask, becomes of memory, as well as consciousness? Memory! that storehouse in which all our foregone knowledge is laid up for use, as it may be required, in endless variety, and boundless amplitude? The argument of the materialists upon memory itself I own I never could comprehend. Nor has the question ever been answered, or scarcely attempted to be answered, 'Where our ideas are de posited when actually not present to us?' We are told, in the brain. But in what cells?

How is

But

there room (it has justly been asked) for all that a man of learning or wisdom, or a mere old man that has seen the world, knows, forgets, and recovers ? Behold the volumes of science, history, arts, law, inventions! All are used, laid aside, and used again, by the same man, as occasion may require. Some ideas may have slept for half a century, yet come out again, fresh and green as when first conceived. We are told that association awakens them. where did they sleep? Is this lightly to be got over by a gratuitous supposition, neither proved nor proveable, that it is the result of some mechanism of the brain, which nobody even pretends to understand, much less explain? I ask if this palpable, tangible, natural, and everlasting difficulty, is to be answered by the mere gratuitous supposition of what is not even an hypothesis, (supported, or attempted to be supported,) that there is an asserted occult quality in the brain; in the same manner as, in the days of darkness, before the dawning of science, a thousand other occult qualities formerly supplied reasons for all phenomena that could not be explained?"

Tremaine was a little overpowered, and not the less so when Evelyn asked him pointedly, whether, and how, he ever knew memory accounted for on the mechanical principles; whether he could account for it himself?

He owned he could not, but supposed it a property of the brain, because it resided there.

"Well then," replied Evelyn, "taking the thing for granted, at least for a moment, I ask you how the ideas of fifty years standing, which have been sup. 'posed all that time in this storehouse of the brain, can have remained in undisturbed preservation, when it has been asserted that the storehouse itself has been in perpetual agitation, and even knocked down and built up again every two days throughout the year?"

Tremaine again allowed the immense importance of the argument, and a long pause ensued.

At length, breaking silence, as if struck with a new, or a suddenly recollected topic, he observed with seriousness,→

"There is, after all, to me, a fatal objection to all this excellent reasoning, (excellent I allow, whether it convince or not,) which I should be really glad if you could clear up. But I own I never knew any one who could do so.

“Name it,” said Evelyn.

"All the learning, thought, and reflection, and the genius too, which have been 'used upon this occasion, seem after all wildly wasted.”

"As how?"

"Why, in proving the indiscerptibility, and therefore immortality of the soul of man, you prove, (for