But we have also seen (section 31) that, as soon as men began to realize that the mind is not material, the question of its presence in the body became a serious problem.  If I say that a chair is in a room, I say what is comprehensible to every one.  It is assumed that it is in a particular place in the room and is not in some other place.  If, however, I say that the chair is, as a whole, in every part of the room at once, I seem to talk nonsense.  This is what Plotinus and those who came after him said about the mind.  Are their statements any the less nonsensical because they are talking about minds?  When one speaks about things mental, one must not take leave of good sense and utter unmeaning phrases.

If minds are enough like material things to be in anything, they must be in things in some intelligible sense of the word.  It will not do to say:  I use the word “in,” but I do not really mean in.  If the meaning has disappeared, why continue to use the word?  It can only lead to mystification.

Descartes seemed to come back to something like an intelligible meaning when he put the mind in the pineal gland in the brain.  Yet, as we have seen, he clung to the old conception.  He could not go back to the frank materialization of mind.

And the plain man to-day labors under the same difficulty.  He puts the mind in the body, in the brain, but he does not put it there frankly and unequivocally.  It is in the brain and yet not exactly in the brain.  Let us see if this is not the case.

If we ask him:  Does the man who wags his head move his mind about? does he who mounts a step raise his mind some inches? does he who sits down on a chair lower his mind?  I think we shall find that he hesitates in his answers.  And if we go on to say:  Could a line be so drawn as to pass through your image of me and my image of you, and to measure their distance from one another?  I think he will say, No.  He does not regard minds and their ideas as existing in space in this fashion.

Furthermore, it would not strike the plain man as absurd if we said to him:  Were our senses far more acute than they are, it is conceivable that we should be able to perceive every atom in a given human body, and all its motions.  But would he be willing to admit that an increase in the sharpness of sense would reveal to us directly the mind connected with such a body?  It is not, then, in the body as the atoms are.  It cannot be seen or touched under any conceivable circumstances.  What can it mean, hence, to say that it is there?  Evidently, the word is used in a peculiar sense, and the plain man cannot help us to a clear understanding of it.

His position becomes intelligible to us when we realize that he has inherited the doctrine that the mind is immaterial, and that he struggles, at the same time, with the tendency so natural to man to conceive it after the analogy of things material.  He thinks of it as in the body, and, nevertheless, tries to dematerialize this “in.”  His thought is sufficiently vague, and is inconsistent, as might be expected.