The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, by J.D. Bernal

The brain in a vat (mentioned in Chapter 1) is the most recognizable twentieth-century variation on this theme, and in the 1960s it became one of the professional philosophers’ favorite thought experiments about personal identity. It might have become especially familiar after the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam used it in the first chapter of Reason, Truth, and History (1981), but it had by then made a good number of literary (and filmic) appearances, from J. D. Bernal’s futuristic The World, the Flesh, and the Devil of 1929 to Curt Siodmak’s 1942 Donovan’s Brain [...]

Vidal, Fernando and Ortega, Francisco. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (Forms of Living)....

The World, The Flesh and The Devil on Google Books

John Desmond Bernal on Encyclopedia Britannica