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bird's feet. Will you please notice that you have no right to be puzzled by any number of facts like these, and that all there is in Huxley's famous experiment is admitted truth concerning the automatic part of the nervous system, and that the puzzle consists in putting that fragment for the whole ?

8. As in man, the automatic and the influential nervous arcs are blended together by innumerable commissures, and are yet perfectly distinguishable by study, so the automatic and the free activities of man are, in experience, most intricately blended together, and yet are perfectly distinguishable by careful attention.

9. Sometimes the former may become so powerful as to overcome the latter; and sometimes the latter may overcome the former.

10. The power of habit, and, to a great extent, that of emotion, depends on the action of the automatic arcs.

Your classical orator of Boston stands upon some transfigured platform, and the warp and woof of his unpremeditated language fall from the loom of his mind, every figure perfect. You hold up in print the next morning his speech between your eyes and the merciless sunlight, and there is no flaw in the weaving. Your Phillips, your Everett, your Sumner, your Webster, have scarred into their nervous systems good literary habits. You know very well that a scar will not wash out, or grow out. Absolutely there is no doubt about this. But how vast and fathomlessly practical are the applications of the simple truth that scars are ineraseable! A two-edged sword this, and of keener than Damascus steel. Your dull inebriate, who scars his brain by the habit of intemperance, thinks, that, after his reformation, his nervous system will slowly recover all the soundness it once had. But in your finger a scar will not grow out; and on your brain a scar will not grow out. Here are scars which were made when my fingers were too young to be trusted with edged tools; but, although the particles of my body have been changed many times since then, the scars are here, reproduced with the reproduction of the particles of the body. Once in seven years we have a new body, the books used to say once in twelve months, as they say now, the particles of our physical system are changed. Scars, however, are absolutely unchangeable in the changing flesh. We carry into our graves the marks of boyhood's sports; and this is as true, if you please, of the sports that scar the brain as of those that gash the fingers. The most searching blessing on good habits, the most penetrating curse on bad, is found in the one fact, that the automatic nervous mechanism is such, that when a habit, good or bad, is scarred into the nerves and brain, the soul pours forth the result of the habit almost spontaneously.

The influential nerve-arcs can, indeed, hold back the activity of the automatic arcs. "The will counts for something as a cause," says Huxley himself. Dr. Carpenter explicitly teaches, that the influential nerve-arcs may resist, "keep in check and modify" the action of the automatic nervous mechanism.1

1 Carpenter, Physiology, eighth edition, 1875, p. 730. See, also, his Mental Physiology, passim.

But even

The power of volition resides in the influential arcs. a man is so far an automaton that, if he is an orator, he will scar himself with the complete oratorical habit, and may speak, as the bird sings, without effort. You wonder at the precision, fluency, and force of the language of your Burke or your Chatham. But the automatic nerve-scars representing good literary habits may have been in the mother, or in both parents, or in five generations. Certainly the habit of good extemporaneous speech has been cultivated through more than a quarter of a century by your Chatham and your Burke. It is now scarred deeply into the nerves; and scars do not grow out. And when, before any audience, the warp and woof of eloquent speech are needed, the automatic action of good habit sets its power behind the will of the orator; and nearly all that is required is, that some great thought and passion should throw the shuttles once, and then the figured, firm web flows spontaneously from the perfect loom. But just so, my friends, your tendency or mine to slovenly speech, our fearfully unæsthetic ways, and even the inebriate's thirst, or the sensualist's leprous thoughts, scar the nervous system in its automatic arc. When you, thus scarred by habit, and it may be, alas! by inheritance, pass the place of temptation, you are seized, you know not with what power you feel that there is necessity upon you; and that mystery is simply the fact that scars are ineraseable. You have scarred your nervous system with an evil habit; and now this terrific power of the automatic mechanism stands behind your will. Your musician yonder, under the same automatic law, derives power from the very source from which you derive weakness. He calls forth melody, spray after spray of the fountain of the anthem ascending and falling, with raptures all in rhythm; and we are lifted by it to the azure; we are ennobled by it mysteriously: but your musician is making no effort. So has habit ingrained his nervous mechanism, that he plays as the bird sings. Professor Huxley states, that once an old soldier, who had been accustomed all his life to come to a perfectly erect attitude at the word "attention," was carrying home his dinner on a London street, when a comrade who desired sport called out to him from the other side of the way, "Attention!" Instantly the inattentive soldier came into the upright attitude, and dropped his dinner in the street. Now, Professor Huxley says, that although the details of that anecdote may not be all correct, they might be, and that they might be because of the power of the automatic action of the nervous system. So you, holding your families' or your own pure character in your arms; you, citizens of Boston, holding your honour in this city in your bosoms, are some day tempted sorcerously by intemperance or passion, by the greed and fraud of crooked trade or politics, or by any of the bad impulses that habit or inheritance has woven into your nerves; and suddenly, under automatic trance, which might yet have been escaped by force of will, the things dearest to you are dropped by you in the draggled street of your private or public life at the sudden word "Attention" from the black angel.

1. The action of the influential arcs is not to be regarded as a

creation of force, but rather as the optional opening of a reservoir of force, given with the gift of life to each organisation that possesses free-will.

I touch here upon a great mystery, and am quite aware of the nature of the ground over which I pass; but you will notice that this proposition does not go as far as Sir John Herschel does, when he asserts that the soul is, to a small extent, a real creative force. Let us call it, rather, a power delegated for optional use. All the power we have is certainly delegated power. We have received it all from Almighty God. His force is all the force there is in the universe, intellectual or physical.

12. This fact, that free-will is exercised through the influential arcs of the nervous system, does not, therefore, necessarily contradict the law of the persistence of force.

13. In both the automatic and the influential arc there is a perfect adaptation of the structure to the agent that is to set it in activity. Sometimes, at the end of the automatic arc, you have an eye, with its marvellous lenses, or an ear, which Professor Tyndall calls "a harp of three thousand strings."

14. The eye is the outer portion of the automatic arc concerned in vision; and all parts of the eye are adapted in their structure to a wholly external agent,-light.

15. The ear is the outer portion of the automatic arc concerned in hearing; and it is adapted perfectly to an external agent, sound. 16. The nerves of smell are connected with a structure adapted to a wholly external agent,-odour.

17. The tongue is adapted in the same way to a wholly external agent,-flavour.

18. Many problems in biology are susceptible of an inverse solution : as, for example, given the nature of light to determine what must be the structure of the organ of vision; or, given the structure of the eye to determine what is the nature of light.

19. So, in relation to the agent which moves the influential arcs, we have the problem: Given the structure of the brain to determine tlie nature of the agent which sets it in action.

20. There is an absolute analogy in construction between the elementary arrangement of the fibres of the brain and those of any other nervous arc.

21. The influential, as well as the automatic part of the nervous system, has its centripetal and centrifugal fibres, which converge to sensory ganglia, or nervous centres.

22. Just as the automatic arcs in man's nervous system have vesicular material at their external extremities in the organs of the senses, so the influential have vesicular material at their external extremities in the convolutions of the brain.

23. But we know beyond question that the automatic nerve-arcs can display no phenomena of themselves: they all require an external agent to set them in motion.

24. The optical apparatus is inert without the influences of light; the auditory inert without sound. The organs of taste and smell, and

the nerves connected with them, are inert and without value, except under the influences of wholly external agents.

25. Established science asserts the absolute inertness of the cerebral structure in itself; or the entire incapacity of the influential as well as of the automatic nerve-arcs to initiate their own activities.

26. As, therefore, from the structure of the eye, we may infer the existence of a wholly external agent, light, or from that of the ear, the existence of a wholly external agent, sound, so, because of the absolute inertness of the cerebral structure in itself, we must attribute its activities to an agent as external to it as sound is to the ear, or light to the eye.

27. That agent is invisible to the external vision, and intangible to external touch.

28. It is positively known to consciousness, or the internal vision and touch.

29. That agent is the soul.

30. As the dissolution of the eye does not destroy the light, the external agent which acts upon it; and as the dissolution of the ear does not destroy the pulsations of air, the external agent which acts upon it; so the dissolution of the brain does not destroy the soul, the external agent which sets it in motion.

Gentlemen, there is more than one soul here besides mine sad with unspeakable bereavement. There are eyes here besides mine which weary the heavens with beseeching glances for one vision of faces snatched from us in fiery chariots of pain. Is death the breaking of a flask in the sea? Is there for me no more personal immortality than for a consumed candle? Cool precision, gentlemen, not rhetoric; even at the edge of the tomb, cool precision!

I open Professor Draper, and read, "If the optical apparatus be inert, and without value save under the influence of light; if the auditory apparatus yields no result save under the impressions of sound, since there is between these structures and the elementary structure of the cerebrum a perfect analogy, we are entitled to come to the same conclusion in this instance as in those, and, asserting the absolute inertness of the cerebral structure in itself, to impute the phenomena it displays to an agent as perfectly external to the body, and as independent of it, as are light and sound; and that agent is the soul."1 That is a very sacred kind of Scripture, for it is the record of God's work fairly interpreted.

I might quote twenty other authorities; but I cite this book because it has a great fame in Germany, and is accessible to all, and because Professor Draper, in a most painfully unfair volume on The Conflict between Science and Religion," has set himself somewhat outside the pale of what I call just sympathies in this great discussion. He, at least, has proved his freedom from all traditional opinions. The objection to the latter book is, that he confuses Romanism and Christianity, and shows that conflict has existed between some forms of the Church and science, and then infers that Christianity itself is

1 Draper, Physiology, p. 285.

in conflict with clear ideas. This man, with more than one compeer of his in the latest physiological research seconding his words, affirms, in the face of the world, that "It is for the physiologist to assert and uphold the doctrine of the oneness, the accountability and the immortality of the soul, and the great truth that, as there is but one God in the universe, so there is but one spirit in man.' "We have established the existence of the intellectual principle as external to the body." "That is Beale, and that is Hermann Lotze, too.

"1

There is a school of rather small philosophy in Cambridge yonder, among a few young men, who, very unjustly to Harvard, are supposed by large portions of the public to represent the University. I happen to be a Harvard man, if you please, and ought to know something of my Alma Mater. There is not a paving-stone or an elm-tree in Cambridge that is not a treasure to me. Who does represent Harvard? Hermann Lotze and Frey and Beale, rather than Herbert Spencer and Häckel, are the authorities which the strongest men at Cambridge revere. The North American Review, the Harvard chair of metaphysics, the Harvard pulpit, the Cambridge poets and men of letters, who are tall enough to be seen across the Atlantic and half a score of centuries, are not converts to materialism.

Must I infer that the New York Nation is possessed of a philosophy of materialistic tendency? I have not criticised, I have even defended, the theistic doctrine of evolution. I have endeavoured only to show that the atheistic and agnostic forms of that doctrine are violently unscientific. There is a use and an abuse of the theory and Dana represents the one, and Häckel the other. I have treated atheism and materialism without much reverence; for I revere the scientific method. But three weeks in succession I am assailed with ridicule without argument in a critical journal that claims to be courteous and fair. As this cultured, and, I may say, distinguished Boston audience knows, the New York journal has stated my positions with the most broad and painful inaccuracy. Am I to stand here before an audience that has as much culture in it as any weekly gathering in the United States, and be lashed before the world by this New York weekly, which is, indeed, well informed in politics, but in philosophy is so far behind our times as to be now predominantly Spencerian? Its editor, as you know, resides in Cambridge; and the small, disowned school in philosophy there seems to have taken possession of this periodical of very unequal merit. In philosophy, the Nation has no outlook beyond the Straits of Dover. I do not remember that I ever saw in it a single reference to Hermann Lotze, or any proof of large knowledge of so much as the outlines of the freshest German thought of the first rank on the physiological side of metaphysical research. As to present culture in the wide and rich theological field, I may say, that, so far as a specialist's judgment is worth anything, mine is, that the Nation cannot be trusted on this theme, it is so benighted by its insular philosophy, and by a very frequent arrogance toward all theology not Spencerian.

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