more light #269
On the mind all our knowledge must depend…
by Ed Halpaus
Grand Lodge Education Officer
Grand Lodge of A. F. & A. M. of Minnesota
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 useless 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 on 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 emotion.
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 in 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’
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 of 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 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 that 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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