Perhaps this invisible musician, with Gyges' ring on his finger, has not been left without a witness of himself in the whitish-gray keyboard of the human organ. Perhaps the contrast between the automatic and influential nerve-arcs is just as important a fact in the instrument God has made as the distinction between your musician and the man who moves the bellows behind the organ is in the instrument man has made. Among the automatic and influential nerve-arcs, all philosophy ought to stand listening with hushed breath. 4. Man possesses in abundance both the automatic and influential arcs. 5. Whatever animal possesses the influential arcs has a depository, magazine, or reservoir of force not dependent on external impressions. Aristotle noticed with great keenness of interest the fact that men awake before they open their eyes. Professor Bain regards that circumstance, with which we are all familiar, as one out of thousands of proofs that external irritation is not necessary always to internal activity. By the way, Aristotle was accustomed to assert that the most interesting portion of human knowledge is that which refers to what he called the animating principle of physical organisms. We are beginning to think, I hope, that what is called bioplasm is the most interesting by far of all the objects know to physical science. That, in substance, is an ́opinion two thousand years old. Aristotle defined the animating principle as the cause of form in organ isms (Aristotle de Anima, passim). This to him was the most alluring of all the topics open to Greek philosophy. He said often, that, if we ought to be interested in a theme in proportion to its dignity, certainly nothing could be more entrancing than the study of the animating principle. 6. In man the influential arc is the seat of intellect, free-will, and conscience. 7. But, as man possesses the automatic arc also, many of his actions are automatic. We must expect to find in some animals which have a much more perfect automatic nervous mechanism than man, instincts, and, apparently, spontaneous movements, of the most marvellous kinds. I am not asserting that man is not in some respects an automaton; but he is by no means as good a one as might be chosen if the power of automatic nervous action is to be shown. Professor Huxley went before a great audience at the Belfast meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and took a headless frog, and put it on the back of his hand, and then turned his hand slowly over; and the frog kept his place till the hand had been reversed, and the frog stood in the palm. (HUXLEY'S Address on the Question, Are Animals Automata?) Now, said Professor Huxley, is there any will concerned in that? Is not this the result of purely physical stimulation of the frog's nerves? Have we not here an automaton? He meant to puzzle the world about the freedom of the human soul. But the bioplasts wove that frog too. After the automatic mechanism is woven, such results are very well known to follow the action of the merely automatic part of the ner vous system. A frog with his head cut off you may put on the back of your hand, and you may turn the hand over, and the frog will keep its place meanwhile without assistance, and stand on your palm. Of course, there is no action of the cerebral hemispheres there. The irritation of the feet has such an effect as to cause the muscles to enable them to cling to their support; just as, while the perching bird sleeps, the perch itself stimulates to action the muscles that cause it to be clasped by the 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. Huxley himself. The influential nerve-arcs can, indeed, hold back the activity of the automatic arcs. "The will counts for something as a cause," says Dr. Carpenter explicitly teaches, that the influential nerve-arcs may resist, "keep in check and modify" the action of the automatic nervous mechanism. (CARPENTER, Physiology, eighth edition, 1875, p. 730. See, also, his Mental Physiology, passim.) arcs. The power of volition resides in the influential But even 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 |