Byways of Ghost-Land

Whether all that constitutes man's spiritual nature, that is to say, ALL his mind, is inseparably amalgamated with the whitish mass of soft matter enclosed in his cranium and called his brain, is a question that must, one supposes, be ever open to debate.

One knows that this whitish substance is the centre of the nervous system and the seat of consciousness and volition, and, from the constant study of character by type or by phrenology, one may even go on to deduce with reason that in this protoplasmic substance?in each of the numerous cells into which it is divided and subdivided?are located the human faculties. Hence, it would seem that one may rationally conclude, that all man's vital force, all that comprises his mind?i.e. the power in him that conceives, remembers, reasons, wills?is so wrapped up in the actual matter of his cerebrum as to be incapable of existing apart from it; and that as a natural sequence thereto, on the dissolution of the brain, the mind and everything pertaining to the mind dies with it?there is no future life because there is nothing left to survive.