Shall we conceive of these last as atoms, as void space, or as the motion of atoms?  There really seems to be no place in the world for them, and these are the mind so far as the mind appears to be revealed—­they are mental phenomena.  It does not seem that they are to be identified with anything that the Atomistic doctrine admits as existing.  They are simply overlooked.

Is the modern materialism more satisfactory?  About half a century ago there was in the scientific world something like a revival of materialistic thinking.  It did not occur to any one to maintain that the mind consists of fine atoms disseminated through the body, but statements almost as crude were made.  It was said, for example, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

It seems a gratuitous labor to criticise such statements as these in detail.  There are no glands the secretions of which are not as unequivocally material as are the glands themselves.  This means that such secretions can be captured and analyzed; the chemical elements of which they are composed can be enumerated.  They are open to inspection in precisely the same way as are the glands which secrete them.

Does it seem reasonable to maintain that thoughts and feelings are related to brains in this way?  Does the chemist ever dream of collecting them in a test tube, and of drawing up for us a list of their constituent elements?  When the brain is active, there are, to be sure, certain material products which pass into the blood and are finally eliminated from the body; but among these products no one would be more surprised than the materialist to discover pains and pleasures, memories and anticipations, desires and volitions.  This talk of thought as a “secretion” we can afford to set aside.

Nor need we take much more seriously the seemingly more sober statement that thought is a “function” of the brain.  There is, of course, a sense in which we all admit the statement; minds are not disembodied, and we have reason to believe that mind and brain are most intimately related.  But the word “function” is used in a very broad and loose sense when it serves to indicate this relation; and one may employ it in this way without being a materialist at all.  In a stricter sense of the word, the brain has no functions that may not be conceived as mechanical changes,—­as the motion of atoms in space,—­and to identify mental phenomena with these is inexcusable.  It is not theoretically inconceivable that, with finer senses, we might directly perceive the motions of the atoms in another man’s brain; it is inconceivable that we should thus directly perceive his melancholy or his joy; they belong to another world.

56.  SPIRITUALISM.—­The name Spiritualism is sometimes given to the doctrine that there is no existence which we may not properly call mind or spirit.  It errs in the one direction as materialism errs in the other.