[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Thrilling Wonder Stories February 1947.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They will be condemning Doctor Dixon's experiment, by now. He'll beblamed for what happened to me. The newspapers will yelp, "YoungScientist Loses Mind As Result of Rash Experiment!"
They will be wrong. I didn't lose my mind. It would be much truer tosay that my mind lost me.
Let me go back. I was Fred Ellis, thirty years old, instructor inpsychology at Midwestern University. At least, that's who I thought Iwas!
Doctor Francis Dixon, head of our department, was a dark, keen,brilliant man who was out of place in those poky classrooms. But he andJohn Burke, the assistant professor, carried on much private research.
Dixon's work was usually way over my head. His ideas were brilliant,if unconventional. Burke, a blond young giant with a strong facultyof imagination, understood him better than I did. I was the plodding,patient type of scientist, I'm afraid.
But I intensely admired Dixon and listened with deep interest to histheories and suggestions. One night, talking with Burke, he came outwith the most daring suggestion of all.
Burke had made the trite remark that "mind is just a function of thephysical body, after all."
"How do we know it is?" Dixon demanded. "All good little modernpsychologists repeat that, but how do we know? It may be that mind andbody are wholly different individual entities."
Burke gaped at him. "But that's going back to old-fashioned nonsense.How could mind and body be different entities?"
"Ever go deep-sea fishing?" Dixon asked him unexpectedly.
"Fishing?" repeated Burke.
"Down off Florida you catch big sharks and sea-bass that have remoras,or sucker-fish, a foot long solidly attached to their sides. The remorais part of the shark, yet they're different entities.
"Termites have flagellates in their body who digest the wood thetermites eat. Leguminous plants live in mutually profitable partnershipwith nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the plants fixing carbon and thebacteria nitrogen."
"I'm not a sophomore," Burke said a little resentfully. "You canmention symbiosis without defining it for me."
Dixon laughed.
"All right, I'm talking about symbiosis—the ability of two entirelydifferent species of creatures to live in closest conjunction, oneinside or attached to the body of the other."
He lighted a cigarette and looked at us.
"Suppose the mind and body also are two different species of livingcreatures, two utterly different species, living together insymbiosis?"
Of course the idea seemed a little crazy to me at first, and so it didto Burke.
"That's a wacky theory, Dixon. You can see and handle a remora, but whoever saw or handled an individual human mind?"
"Who ever saw or handled a radar beam?" retorted Dixon. "But we knowit's there. Maybe your mind falls into the same class. A living,individual creature, not of ordinary matter but of non-materialphotons."
I became so interested I ventured a question. "If my mind and body aretwo different creatures, how come I don't know it?"
"Don't you know it?" he said. "You do know it, Ellis. How many timeshas your reasoning mind urged you to do one thing, while the instinctsof your body led you to do another? Mind and body are always at strifein all of us—it's been so in all human history."
He seemed to kindle to his own idea.
"Why is it that of all animals, only homo sapiens had what we call aconsci