He will provide a suitable exit for me. But neither I nor my
neighbors must decide my departure. Let laws of nature reign.
And if these two tremendous events are altogether removed from
conscious guidance, many others are but slightly amenable to it. The
great organic processes both of mind and body are only indirectly, or
to a partial extent, under the control of consciousness. A few
persons, I believe, can voluntarily suspend the beating of their
hearts. They are hardly to be envied. The majority of us let our
hearts alone, and they work better than if we tried to work them.
Though it is true that we can control our breathing, and that we
occasionally do so, this also in general we wisely leave to natural
processes. A similar state of affairs we find when we turn to the mind
itself. The association of ideas, that curious process by which one
thought sticks to another and through being thus linked draws after it
material for use in all our intellectual constructions, goes on for
the most part unguided. It would be plainly useless, therefore, to
treat our great distinction as something hard and fast. Nature and
spirit may be contrasted; they cannot be sundered. Spirit removed from
nature would become impotent, while nature would then proceed on a
meaningless career.
Then too there are all sorts of degrees in consciousness.
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