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The Mind Defined

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 8, 1872

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 40, No. 17.

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The Mind Defined.

By D. T. BOURDEAU

In the Scriptures the term spirit sometimes refers to the mind, but even in those cases it does not denote an immortal, conscious entity in man that thinks and lives after the body is dead. Physiologically, as well as scripturally, there is no room for such an entity or being in man. The Bible and true science always agree. All the functions of the mind can be accounted for on natural principles. Many scientific men and physicians, being aware of this fact, and having been taught that the Bible sustains the doctrine of a separate, conscious, thinking entity, have been led to reject the Bible, for clashing with science. On the other hand, many learned men and physiologists have been converted from infidelity, and have been restored to confidence in the Bible, by discovering that the Bible teaches that man is a unit, and does not possess two minds—one mortal and the other immortal.
The mind is not the brain, but is the result of brain action, as instrumental music is not the instrument, but the result of action on or through the instrument; the impressions made on the brain through the five senses, answering to the fingering on the instrument. A thinking man without the senses of sight, hearing, smelling, feeling, and tasting, would be a contradiction of terms, an impossibility.
Accordingly, the Bible teaches that “the dead know not anything;” Eccl. 9:6; that in the day they die, their “thoughts perish.” Ps. 146:4.
Corroborative of these principles, science has recorded scores of cases in which persons, having had their skulls fractured, and lost their mind as the result of portions of the skull pressing on the brain, paralyzing one or more of its organs, have resumed the current of their thoughts on being trepanned. Those organs of the brain which were crippled for want of room, being set at liberty, the result was brain action, thought, mind.
D. T. BOURDEAU.