(All of us are blessed with a “thinking machine” that sometimes has to run at a higher level than usual.  Dr. Frank Crane wants to get into our heads and explore some ages-old philosophical issues with his essay on the—)

BRAIN

The most amazing thing about the world is the human brain that appreciates it.

That mass of corrugated gray matter boxed in bone which registers the impressions received from all things, from stars to dust motes, is by far the most wonderful substance of all substances.

What would a tree mean if there were no brain to see it with its eye, to hear it with its ear, and to touch it with its hand?  Nothing. Practically, it would not exist.

There would be no sun if there were no eye, no perfumes if there were no nose, no sounds if there were no ear.

Blot out brains and the universe is extinguished.

There may be other suns in the sky, there may be spirit bodies moving among us, there may be stupendous music swirling around us, all of such quality that we have no organ to perceive them.  For us they do not exist.

A telephone would be a dead thing and usless without a receiver. The brain is the receiver of the universe.

Very wonderful is Paderewski’s performance upon the piano, Raphael’s colors upon canvas, Shakespeare’s words upon paper, and all of the Creator’s glory of landscape and sea view; but not so miraculous as the grayish stuff in our heads that can receive their messages, record them, and translate them into emotions.

It was not such a task to create a world as it was to construct this curious organ that the world can play upon.  For a world with no brain it would be an Ysaye* without a violin.  So also a Wagner opera is surpassed by the brains that can understand it. Newton’s mathematical theses, and Wordsworth’s poetry and Socrates’s reasoning, and Lord Christ’s life truths, greater than these are the people that can grasp them.

My mind is the ultimate miracle.

Long before this brain came into being there were electricity, light, sound, color, and all the phenomena of existence; but actually, the universe was created when I was born and when I die it will be the end of the world.

The whole cosmos, the sum of things, is all in that pulp in the bone-cup at the top if my spine.

More strange yet than our ability to perceive sights and sounds is our capacity for understanding those motions of pure spirit that go on in the other brains. We can see the hope, love, hate, joy, and sorrow of another, interpreting them by words, signs, and other indications.

We can grasp world plans, recondite scientific theories, and the subtlest refinements of thought. We can weep at poetry, laugh at comedy, mourn in sympathy, fear from our own fancies, feel sin and rightness, follow evil or worship God.

Of all jewels found in earth or sea, of all machines made by man’s cunning, of all the incomprehensible works of the Deity, nothing excels the handful of gray substance that functions like a locked-up god in the cranium of “the two-legged animal without feathers.”

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*Eugene Ysaye (1858-1931) was a Belgian violinist, conductor, and composer. In his time he was called the “King of the Violin.”