Extend your generalities
to the course of the thoughts; determine what physical changes accompany
the memory, the reason, the imagination, and express those changes in
the most general, comprehensive laws, and you have explained the how and
the why brain causes thought, and thought works in brain. There is no
other explanation needful, no other competent, no other that would be
explanation. Instead of our being "unfortunate," as is sometimes said,
in not being able to know the essence of either matter or mind--in not
comprehending their union; our misfortune would be to have to know
anything different from what we do or may know. If there be still much
mystery attaching to this linking of the two extreme facts of our
experience, it is simply this: that we have made so little way in
ascertaining what in one goes with what in the other. We know a good
deal about the feelings and their alliances, some of which are open and
palpable to all mankind; and we have obtained some important
generalities in these alliances. Of the connections of thought with
physical changes we know very little: these connections, therefore,
are truly and properly mysterious; but they are not intrinsically or
hopelessly so.
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