Page:Philosophical and scriptural proofs that brutes have souls as well as men.pdf/13

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With youth’s first bloom a finer sense acquires.
And Loves and Pleasures fan the rising fires"

The experiment of pressing the brain with the fingers, after the skull had been opened by a trapan, had the effect of rendering the person insensible to all sensation, or passing events;—the Mind or Soul, in this case, is the same as in that of a drowned person, not conscious of its own existence. This result I was assured of, by a Medical gentleman of Aberdeen, who had often seen the experiment tried, in a conversation we had on the phenomena of the mind, in its various ramifications. Still, however, to make a further illustration of what we have advanced, give the following passage, quoted from the Works of the learned Dr. Laurance, Professor of Anatomy, in London:—

"The same kind of facts, the same reasoning, the same sort of evidence altogether, which shows digestion to be the function, of the alimentary canal, motion of the muscles, the various secretions of their respective glands, prove that sensation, perception, memory, judgement, reasoning, thought, in a word, all the manifestations called mental or intellectual, are the animal functions of their appropriate organic apparatus; the central organ of the nervous system. The instrument of knowledge and reflection, the part by which we feel, perceive, judge, think, reason, the organ or organs connecting us with the external world, and executing the moral and intellectual department in