Powers of the Coming Brain.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 201, 30 April 1887, Page 6

Powers of the Coming Brain.

We say that education is a process of training and furnishing the mind, but what is the mind ? That its ultimate essence is an ethereal something, without weight or dimension, we believe ; but this is beyond the provinceof practical education. T he brain, for all practical purposes, is what we are called upon to educate. By studying this organ we find that it is composed of fibres, curiously and orderly arranged, and that the quantity of mind in the lower animals and man is determined by the number of its convolutions and the fineness of its texture. Could the brains of all the order of animals from a simple nerve-centre to the highest type of a human brain, be arranged m order before us, we should have an illustrated history of a mind. During long successions of eons the brains have been developing from the simplest convultion of nerves to the best brain yet evolved. All this, we believe, has been "worked up" under the guidance of a Supreme power, whose guiding hand has been active through all the ages in the multitudinous forms of progressive animal and vegetable, life until we hold today the advanced position we now occupy. But creation is on an onward march, and education hastens it, forward. At no time in the history of the physical universe has mind occupied so high 1 a place, whether we regard its quality or quantity ; at no time in the future will it occupy so low a place as now. The powers of the coming brain will far exceed anything the world has yet known.