A PSYCHOLOGY BASED ON PHYSIOLOGY.

148

the food, and even in the atmosphere, are necessary to thought. We want the physical facts bearing on the production of the human intellect. In the dry atmosphere of America the nervous system unduly predominates, and in England John Bull's mind is getting smothered in fat, and we get genius at the expense of the vital functions. But we must learn how to combine the temperaments of genius with robust health, and bring back Holy to its original meaning-healthy. The germ of the oak seems little influenced by the surrounding pabulum in the acorn, upon the chemical changes in which its growth depends; but the human germ depends more upon the woman than the man. It is fed upon the mental and vital forces of the mother, and yet there has been no attempt to dictate what those forces shall be. If we would make Shakspeares and Newtons we must begin with the germ and race, but the coming child is left to chance, and when it does come there is no attempt to gauge its capabilities, to train its special faculties, and to save it an infinity of pain and labour through life by starting it in the right direction: or at least what effort is made is altogether unscientific in its character, judged even by the light we already possess on such subjects. Few get right aims, and the failures in life are in proportion. No doubt we are

"We, in our dry atmosphere, are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, attenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need to be made grosser. John Bull, on the other hand, has grown bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted, material, and, in a word, too intensely English. In a few more centuries, he will be the earthliest creature ever the world saw. Heretofore, Providence has obviated such a result by timely intermixtures of alien races with old English stock; so that each successive conquest of England has proved a victory, by the revivification and improvement of its native manhood. Cannot America and England hit upon some scheme to secure even greater advantages to both nations?"- Our Old Home, vol. i., p. 99. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.

bordering upon a great advance. With a Psychology based on Physiology we can have any kind of men we like, with any type of body, and any kind of feeling. At present man is little better than an animal of the pig and peacock species; building a golden sty, feeding from silver troughs, and strutting, and spreading his tail, for all the world to admire. But I trust we are about to rise above the mere animal, to the exercise of those faculties that distinguish God becomes conscious of Himself only in humanity. The supreme good is to be found only in our higher nature; the inner sense does not open till the outer of the mere animal is closed; and it is in that serene quiet only that Nature unveils, and admits us to communion and union.

man as man.

The Coming Spirit World Evolved from the Spirit Atmosphere, the Result of Cerebration.

We have, I think, yet to discover Man's place in Nature, but in "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," Mr. Huxley tells us "The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe, that, in view of the intimate relations between man and the rest of the living world, and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed, from the inorganic to the organic, from blind force to conscious intellect and will.” As we have seen, I do not recognize blind force anywhere, and the persistence of force shows that in that respect there is no difference between one force and another, either conscious or unconscious. Every atom tends to purpose; then, we have the

MAN'S POSSIBLE SUCCESSOR.

145

intelligent but unconscious vital powers; for vital action is not less intelligent than mental, only it goes on unconsciously; we have instinct or sentient intelligence without reasoning, and conscious and reasoning intellect and will, but all are equally caused, all are effects or second causes. Purely mental states or conscious volitions, when sufficiently repeated, pass into the unconscious, and all the great laws of nature are probably but the automatic or unconscious will of the Great Supreme. But I did not quote Mr. Huxley to show in what I differed from him, but to show that I recognize fully the great law of evolution. "From the formless to the formed, from the inorganic to the organic," we have the conversion of force or power into sentiency, culminating in "the conscious intellect and will of man;" but as Huxley elsewhere tells us, "Naturalists find man to be no centre of the living world, but one amidst endless modifications of life," and that "present existences are but the last of an immeasurable series of predecessors." Undoubtedly man is the highest in the series, but is he to remain so? The aggregate of mind, as it has been passing and repassing during countless ages through living forms, from the monad to man, has been gradually improving in delicacy and intensity of feeling and consciousness, and what may be the next form it may take who can tell? May not the spiritualist theory be merely casting its shadow before? Plants prepare the food for animals, and the elaborate machine of the animal body prepares the food for mind, that is, sentiency and conscious intelligence, and may not this result of cerebration, which has been intensifying for centuries, furnish ground for a new start-for the existence of mind, in an individual form, without all the present cumbrous machinery for the correlation of force? We have a world of spiritual food already prepared, so that there would be no necessity for the old apparatus. If it be true, as is testified by the

L

spiritualists, that hands and arms are now formed in such an atmosphere, who can tell what will be the ultimate effect of will power-for I hold the whole universe to be the effect of will power on certain prepared conditions. as the thought or spirit atmosphere intensifies by the greatly increased action of brain now going on? If such an additional link should ever be added to the chain of intelligence, if such a creation of a new being should ever take place, it will probably be evolved and come into existence, as man did, out of the newlyprepared circumstances and conditions, and not individually representing any previously existing living entity. Such beings would be clairvoyant, would certainly require no railroads, and no electric telegraph, being governed by a law of levitation, rather than of gravitation, and would possess all the powers in a higher degree of which we have only had a glimpse; and cerebration having furnished a sufficient atmosphere and food for their existence, might cease, and the world, with all its increased and increasing beauty, be given up to them. The "spheres," the present abode of spirits, according to the Spiritualists, seem very comfortless regions. But, of course, this is mere speculation. What we have now to do is to investigate and test the abnormal powers surrounding us- - to reduce them to law, and thus to pass them on from Man, by whom they have hitherto been only abused, to Humanity, by which they might be used to make the greatest spiritual advance hitherto achieved.

THE END.

APPENDIX.