Free C S Lewis and the Country House Murders (C S Lewis Mysteries Book 2) by Kel Richards Page B

suppose.’
    ‘And Dr Havard was telling me quite recently about a paper he read in
The Lancet
which apparently demonstrates that destruction of part of the brain does not necessarily mean destruction of part of the mind. He tells me that some sufferers from a stroke recover fully, and medical science now knows this happens because another part of the brain takes over the functions of the damaged part. This could not happen if the mind and brain were the same thing. Damage to the grey matter, the “little grey cells” your friend Poirot talks about, is just damage to the machinery. The operator of the machinery, the mind, the soul, remains intact and, in some cases, able to carry on working through a different part of the machine.’
    ‘Don’t blame Poirot on me! It’s your brother Warnie who reads all the detective novels.’
    ‘Stop trying to dodge the issue, Morris,’ hooted Jack good- naturedly. ‘Do you grant my point?’
    ‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘But even so, surely the mind or soul or whatever you call it
needs
the brain—so that when the brain dies, the mind, the soul, must cease to exist.’
    ‘Does the mechanic cease to exist when the machinery breaks down? The very idea is illogical. Think of the caterpillar in its cocoon. Once it’s completed its transformation into a butterfly it discards the cocoon—it no longer needs it. When the chicken emerges from the egg, it discards the empty shell as no longer needed. There is a pattern in nature telling us that the life within continues, indeed thrives, after it discards the shell, the cocoon, in which it began.’
    ‘What about evolution?’
    ‘Evolution does not present a single difficulty in the way of seeing the self as separate from the body. The physical body may well be the product of an evolutionary process, but the self is from the metaphysical realm, from the realm beyond nature. One thing we can be sure of is that evolutionary theory has no relevance to the non-physical—what Socrates called “the higher part of man”.’
    I didn’t reply immediately as I needed my breath to climb over a break in a dry-stone wall. Then I reached out to help Jack over. We stood at the bottom of a slope of heather- covered moorland. Above us, at the top of the slope, stood the crumbling remains of an old stone tower.
    I was puffing as we clambered up the slope, but I managed to ask, ‘Well, what is the relationship between the two—between the physical body and “the higher part of man”, to use Socrates’ phrase?’
    ‘Let me give you the answer Socrates would have given,’ said Jack, pausing to catch his breath. ‘In his Athenian death cell, waiting for the fatal cup of hemlock, this question was discussed. Some of the old philosopher’s friends compared man to a harp and man’s mental life to the melody played on the strings of the harp. The physical body, they said, is the instrument that gives voice to the music of the mind. And the music, they said, cannot outlast the destruction of the harp. But Socrates insisted that man is neither the harp nor the tune played on the harp. Rather, he said, man is the harpist who plays the tune upon the strings. The harpist depends on the harp to make music, but not for his existence, since the player may leave one instrument and find another. A good image of life after death, young Morris.’
    At this point he ran out of breath, and I didn’t try to reply as we both puffed up the last, and steepest, part of the slope.
    This brought us to the foot of the crumbling stone tower. I flopped down on a large block of stone and leaned back against the tower wall. Jack, now flushed and warm from walking, unwound his scarf and tapped the ashes out of his pipe.
    ‘What is this place?’ he asked when he’d caught his breath.
    ‘The locals call it “Bosham’s Folly”. Although I’ve heard the more superstitious among them call it the “Black Tower”.’
    ‘It’s made from a darkish