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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
postpone, deliberate, compare or nicely balance one motive against another. But it is not the absence of these necessary organs of rational thought that debars him from these advantages ; on the contrary, their absence itself is to be laid at his door. For, whatever the moderns may say to the contrary, it is not the brain which manufactures the ego, but the ego who organizes the brain, so that the absence of the brain is to be accounted for by the grossness and lowness of the tendencies of the organizing ego or will itself. It is not the brain or the central mana which makes us pause and deliberate, but the force of the purer instincts of life which were developed undoubtedly in some pre-natal state or states. When the body came to be organized in consequence of those instincts, the brain and the central organ were evolved out in due course of things. The physical brain is, no doubt, a necessary part of the machinery of rational life, and injury to its substance is invariably accompanied by a corresponding impairment or loss of the functions of the mind, but it is not characterized by individuality which is the most indispensable trait of our psychic being, and cannot, for that reason, be regarded as the seat of consciousness or soul. It is like a shunting yard at a railway junction, and altogether incapable of regulating the movements of the mental rolling-stock. The same observations apply to the dravya mana which stands to the brain in the same relation as a signal-box does to the railway lines in the shunting yard. It, too, is unconscious, and, therefore, incapable of regulating the mental impulses originating in the will.
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