in doubt whether the machinery which moved the organ was in the organ or in the man. Unless he could take one or the other to pieces, he could not tell which was the agent and which the instrument; which acted, and which was acted upon. Now we cannot look within our neighbor to see whether the brain moves the mind or the mind the brain; but we can look inside ourselves and see which moves first. We do this by self-consciousness. And this assures us that the mind operates first, and the brain and nervous system afterward. The artist is conscious that he forms in his mind a picture before his hand begins to put it upon canvas. We know that we will to reach out our hand or stretch forth our foot before we move the organ. Walking does not make us desire to go; the desire to go makes us walk. So far as we can trace mental and moral action at all within ourselves, it is clear that first comes the desire, then the will, then the action. It is very evident that the visible organs, that is, the eye and hand and ear, are the servants, not the masters; there is no reason whatever to suppose that the invisible organs, that is, the brain organs, are the masters, not the servants. 3. If the organ produces the activity, if the brain secrets thought and feeling as the liver secrets bile, as has been claimed by the materialist, there is no such thing as right and wrong. Man is a mere physical machine. His thought and feeling and will have no more moral character than the sparks of an electrical machine. Garfield was simply a good and useful machine; Guiteau was simply a bad and dangerous machine. It is true that even on this theory we might still continue to put the good machine where it would do the most good, and destroy the bad one; we might elect a Garfield to the presidency much as we would put a good timekeeper on the mantle-piece, and destroy a Guiteau, much as we would knock to pieces an infernal machine. But we could no longer approve the one and condemn the other; and in fact materialists do either actually deny that there is any 24 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. such thing as virtue and vice, or make very little of the distinction between the two. But no philosophy of man can be true which denies the most fundamental fact in human experience, the fact of oughtness, a distinction between right and wrong, the sense inherent in all men that some things are right, honorable, praiseworthy, and that other things are wrong, dishonorable, worthy of condemnation and punishment. The family, society, citizenship, are all built on the recognition of this fundamental fact which materialists either deny or ignore. 4. If the organ produces the action there is no reason to suppose that the action will survive the organ; if the brain feels, thinks, reasons, wills, when the brain crumbles into dust the thinking, reasoning, feeling, willing, will cease. When the fuel is burned out the fire will cease; when the battery is exhausted the electrical current will cease. According to materialism the brain is a fire, and all mental and moral phenomena are only the heat it gives out; the brain is a galvanic battery, and all thought and feeling are only the electric current which it produces. Now we have nothing to do here with the morality of this doctrine; we are not considering its moral effect, but its reasonableness. A doctrine which has nothing whatever to support it, and has against it the almost universal instincts of mankind, is not reasonable. And the instinct of immortality is the almost universal instinct of mankind. We feel our immortality before we pass from the body, much as the bird feels conscious of the power of flight before it is fledged, or has attempted to leave the nest. We are conscious of something within which is imperishable. But if the organ produces the action, there is no such imperishable power within; the pains of remorse do not differ from the pains of dyspepsia, nor the joys of love from those of appetite. No one can really believe this; no one acts as though he did, not even those philosophers who imagine that they believe it. 5. Finally, if the organ produces the action, then there is no personality. There is no I that thinks, reasons, feels, acts; there is only a succession of nerve phenomena which we call thinking, reasoning, feeling, acting. If the brain is a kind of galvanic battery, and feeling and thinking are the sparks, then I am only the succession of sparks. This has been seen and acknowledged by the materialists themselves. Thus Hume, declaring that there is no such principle as self in one, goes on to affirm of mankind that "they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed one another with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." This is the logical conclusion of materialism, or the doctrine that the organ moves the organist, not the organist the organ; and it arouses against itself the instant testimony of our own consciousness. If there is any thing that we know, absolutely and positively, it is that we exist; that there is an I which perceives, feels, reasons, wills, and that is as separate and distinct from the mere succession of perceiving, feeling, reasoning, and willing, as the player is from the succession of notes which he produces on the organ. That there is both an I and a not I is perfectly clear to every one of us. The doctrine that there is no I, no self, no personal identity, can never make any greater progress among mankind as a practical doctrine than the doctrine of Berkley, that there is no external world, and that instead of real objects which we think we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, there is only a succession of impressions, a seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling; that we are all living in a dream, some in a delightful one, others in a nightmare; that life is only a kind of phantasmagoria. The one philosopher denies that there is any thing not I; I is all there is. The other denies that there is any I; what seems to be so is only a succession of physical forces. It is doubtful whether any man really believes either of these notions. And it has been necessary to point out the absurdities in 26 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. volved in the doctrine of materialism only in order to make perfectly clear to the reader the distinction between true and false materialism. The true materialism teaches that the mind and spirit act always in this life through organs, and that healthy mental and moral action depends upon healthy organs. This is established by a variety of physical experiments, and is now undisputed. The false materialism teaches that the material organism produces all mental and moral phenomena; and it is without any evidence whatever to support it, is a purely abstract notion, and is contradicted by our consciousness of our own actions, by our inward sense of the distinction between right and wrong, by our instinct of immortality, and by our certainty of personal existence and identity. CHAPTER IV. THE TEMPERAMENTS. FROM a very early age physiologists have recognized a characteristic difference between persons possessing the same organs, and yet manifestly possessing different qualities. These characteristic differences have been called temperaments. How far they are physical, how far mental, is a question not necessary here to discuss; certainly it has not been determined. But that they are partly physical is unquestionable. Various classifications have been suggested of these temperaments, no one of which is altogether satisfactory; but there is, perhaps, none better than the one which is at once the simplest, the most common, and very ancient, into the nervous, the sanguine, the bilious, and the lymphatic. In the person of nervous temperament the nervous organism is the predominant one; usually the head is large and finely formed, the skin fair, the complexion light, the hair fine and generally dark. Any one of these signs, however, may be wanting, and the person still possess a highly organized and delicate nervous system. A more certain indication of it is sensitiveness to impressions, both physical and mental, subtle and readily responsive sympathy, and quickness and alertness of action both in mind and body. The person of nervous organization is also often able to sustain an amount of labor or suffering far beyond what would be anticipated of him from his general physical condition, but always at the hazard of a sudden and sometimes an irretrievable collapse, following the expenditure of nervous force, not adequately kept up by other organs. Such a person is also liable to great fluctuation of feeling-both exaltation and depression, |