When, however, an infant is born, though physically fully developed, with face fully formed, but acephalous, without brain--that is, when an arrest of development has taken place--the babe cannot live, it cannot breathe, because the principal part of the nervous system is wanting--the medulla oblongata, cerebrum and cerebellum, etc.--though the lungs, heart, and all other organs are perfectly developed. This arrest of development may take place at any time. It is thus that congenital malformations are produced. Idiots are thus formed, or any other inferior formation of brain may take place. In proportion as the parts are present or wanting--the brain, or rather the nervous system--latent (better, inherent) qualities for future capabilities exist or do not exist. Supposing the optic nerve is arrested in its development, or any organ with which it is immediately connected, the special sense of sight is wanting. Though the eye itself, the organ of sight, may be perfect, all the training and education will never give it capability or skill in arts and sciences. This can never be acquired by that organ. You cannot educate that organ which you have not. Whatever perfect brain formation exists may be trained, fashioned, educated, in any one of the thousands of directions one pleases. It may be given any bent or bias, good, bad, or indifferent--depending upon the influences that are brought to bear on the young brain while it is in the process of developing. An infant has no mind, intellect, thought, idea, memory, or any other nerve quality that nerve structure is capable of developing. Talk of soul or spirit is absurd. It does not exist either in infant or in man any more than it exists in a plant or an animal--unless the term is applied to the collective functions of the great central organs, and in that case it would certainly not be supernatural. At the time when the books of Moses were written--we need not even go so far back as when the fable of creation was first related--they knew nothing of circulation or of respiration, or of the nervous system. It was not even thought of. I believe you may search the Bible from end to beginning and from beginning to end without finding such a thing. No such word as brain is mentioned. What is known of the nervous system is, comparatively speaking, of recent date. "What seems most marvelous is, that we, in the nineteenth century, boasting of a high grade of civilization, and, I may say, with all the modern improvements, should accept and still hold fast to an idea that originated in the brain of some barbarian four thousand or more years ago, away down in Mesopotamia (now Turkey) where they are still considered uncivilized. This is certainly very strange. But ah! that priestcraft! THE MIND.