The Native Races [of the Pacific states], Volume 2, Civilized Nations: The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 2Bancroft, Hubert Howe
History
The Native Races [of the Pacific states], Volume 2, Civilized Nations: The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume 2
Bancroft, Hubert Howe
Indians -- Bibliography; Indians of Central America; Indians of Mexico; Indians of North America -- Pacific Coast of North America
Between mind and matter there exists the most intimate relationship.
Immateriality, in its various phases of force, life, intellect, so far
as human consciousness can grasp it, is inseparable from materiality.
The body is but part of the soil on which it treads, and the mind can
receive no impressions except through the organs of the body. The
brain is the seat of thought and the organ of thought; neither can
exist in a normal state apart from the other. As a rule, the power of
the intellect is in proportion to the size and quality of the brain.
Among animals, those of lowest order have the least brains; man, the
most intellectual of animals, has relatively, if not absolutely, the
largest brain. True, in some of the largest animals the cerebral mass
is larger than in man, but, in its chemical composition, its
convolutions, shape, and quality, that in man is superior; and it is
in the quality, rather than in the quantity of the nervous tissues,
that their superiority consists. Intelligence enters the brain by the
organs of the senses, and through the nervous system its subtle
influence radiates to every part of the body. All human activities are
either mental or mechanical; nor will it be denied that mental
activity is produced by mechanical means, or, that mechanical activity
is the result of mental force. Corporeal motion is mental force
distributed to the various parts of the body.
The action of immaterial forces on the material substances of the
human body manifestly accords with the action of immaterial forces
elsewhere. All the physical and mechanical actions of the human body
accord with the physical and mechanical forces elsewhere displayed.
Man, we are told, was the last of all created things, but in the
making of man no new matter was employed; nor in setting the body in
motion can we discover that any new force was invented. Thus the heart
beats upon mechanical principles; the eye sees, and the voice speaks
in accordance with the general laws of optics and acoustics.
To the observer, organic activity is but the product of combined
inorganic forces. The same processes are at work, and in the same
manner, in living and in so-called dead matter. Life, to all
appearance, is but the result of combined chemical and mechanical
processes. Assimilation, digestion, secretion, are explainable by
chemistry, and by chemistry alone. The stomach is a chemical retort,
the body a chemical laboratory. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen,
combine and separate in the body as out of the body. The blood
circulates upon purely mechanical principles; all muscular action is
mechanical. In the phenomena of life, the only perceptible difference
is in the combinations of fundamental elements; yet chemistry and
mechanics cannot produce a live body.
With the foregoing well-recognized principles before us, let us now
notice some few parallelisms between mechanical and social energetics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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