[Sidenote:  Subserviency of the Body]

Let us summarize our study of man’s physical organism.  We have learned that the human body is a confederation of various groups of living cells; that in the earliest stages of man’s evolution, these cells were all of the same general type; that as such they were free-living, free-thinking and intelligent organisms as certainly as were those unicellular organisms which had not become members of any group or association; that through the processes of evolution, heredity and adaptation, there has come about in the course of the ages, a subdivision of labor among the cells of our bodies and a consequent differentiation in kind whereby each has become peculiarly fitted for the performance of its allotted functions; that, nevertheless, these cells of the human body are still free-living, intelligent organisms, of which each is endowed with the inherited, instinctive knowledge of all that is essential to the preservation of its own life and the perpetuation of its species within the living body; that, as a part of the specializing economy of the body, there have been evolved brain and nerve cells performing a twofold service—­first, constituting the organ of a central governing intelligence with the important business of receiving, classifying, and recording all impressions or messages received through the senses from the outer world, and, second, communicating to the other cells of the body such part of the information so derived as may be appropriate to the functions of each; that finally, as such complex and confederated individuals, each of us possesses a direct, self-conscious knowledge of only a small part of his entire mental equipment; that we have not only a consciousness receiving sense impressions and issuing motor impulses through the cerebro-spinal nervous system, but that we have also a subconsciousness manifesting itself, so far as bodily functions are concerned, in the activity of the vital organs through the sympathetic nerve system; that this subconsciousness is dependent on consciousness for all knowledge of the external world; that, in accordance with the principles of evolution, man as a whole and as a collection of cell organisms, both consciously and unconsciously, is seeking to adapt himself to his external world, his environment; that the human body, both as a whole and as an aggregate of cellular intelligences, is therefore subject in every part and in every function to the influence of the special senses and of the mind of consciousness.

The Supremacy of Consciousness

CHAPTER VI

THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM STUDIES IN HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY, ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY

[Sidenote:  Striking off the Mental Shackles]

Stop a moment and mark the conclusion to which you have come.  You have been examining the human body with the scalpel and the microscope of the anatomist and physiologist.  In doing so and by watching the bodily organs in operation, you have learned that every part of the body, even to those organs commonly known as involuntary, is ultimately subject to the influence or control of consciousness, that part of the human intelligence which is popularly known as “the mind.”