Butterflies; Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de, 1744-1829
“But who can believe that such a faculty, so divine, so godlike
and spiritual, can be the mere result of organization? That any
juxta-position of _material_ molecules, of whatsoever nature, from
whatever source derived, in whatever order and forms arranged,
and wherever placed, could generate thought, and reflection, and
reasoning powers, could acquire and store up ideas and notions, as
well concerning metaphysical as physical essences, may as safely be
pronounced impossible, as that matter and spirit should be homogeneous.
Though the intellectual part acts by the brain and nerves, yet the
brain and nerves, however ample, however developed, are not the
intellect, nor an intellectual substance, but only its instrument,
fitted for the passage of the prime messenger of the soul, its nervous
fluid or power to every motive organ. It is a substance calculated to
convey instantaneously that subtile agent, by which spirit can act
upon body, wherever the soul bids it to go and enables it to act. When
death separates the intellectual and the spiritual from the material
part, the introduction of a fluid, homogeneous with the nervous, or
related to it by a galvanic battery, can put the nerves in action, lift
the eyelids, move the limbs; but though the action of the intellectual
part may thus be imitated, in newly deceased persons, still there are
no signs of returning intelligence, there is no life, no voluntary
action, not a trace of the spiritual agent that has been summoned from
its dwelling. Whence it follows, that though the organization is that
by which the intellectual and governing power manifests its presence
and habitation, still it is evidently something distinct from and
independent of it[13].”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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