This subject has been much in men's minds during the past two or three
dreadful years, often reminding me of that shock I received as a boy
of fourteen at the old gaucho's bitter story of his soul; I have also
again been reminded of the theory in which that younger and greatly-
loved brother of mine was able to find comfort. He had become deeply
religious, and after much reading in Herbert Spencer and other modern
philosophers and evolutionists, he told me he thought it was idle for
Christians to fight against the argument of the materialists that the
mind is a function of the brain. Undoubtedly it was that, and our
mental faculties perished with the brain; but we had a soul that was
imperishable as well. _He knew it_, which meant that he too was a
mystic, and being wholly preoccupied with religion, his mystical
faculty found its use and exercise there. At all events, his notion
served to lift him over _his_ difficulties and to get him out of
_his_ mangrove swamp--a way perhaps less impossible than the one
recently pointed out by William James.
Thus I came out of the contest a loser, but as a compensation had the
knowledge that my physicians were false prophets; that, barring
accidents, I could count on thirty, forty, even fifty years with their
summers and autumns and winters.
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