QUESTIONS OF THE HEART: WHO AM I? (II)

Contemplating the human brain:

How is it possible? How could the immensity of human thought come out of this wrinkled object? The immensity of human feeling? Love? Hate? Consciousness? World-striding action? How could this thingbring forth the glories of art and music and science and religion and civilization? Along with colossal horror, brutality and evil? How could it know, understand? How could it be as a human being is?-- so infinitely more than what it, this thing, is? What magic supernatural forces did it contain? Did it oncecontain, this brain, when it was living within the grey flesh stretched out on this long metal table? How could it have ever been I am?

[from An Unknown World Notes on the Meaning of the Earth, p.122]