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be no doubt that cures have been effected by his method; but it appears most reasonable to regard these merely as new proofs of how much may be done by the strict regulation of diet, by the powers of nature, and by the wonderful influence of the imagination upon the body. When the patients are firmly convinced they shall be cured, the cessation of nervous pains-particularly those of a hysterical nature-may with justice be ascribed more to the influence of the mind, than to the infinitesimal doses of medicine. Everything leads us to the belief that the chemical, mechanical, and other physical forces at work, are of one nature, and inseparable from the mental phenomena; and that the physical forces which we know to be manifested in the actions of the brain, are in some inexplicable manner endowed with self-consciousness.

Matter, when in form of a muscle, can contract; when in the form of living nervous substance, it can think. Thought is, in some mysterious manner, connected with phosphorous (primarily emanating from the sun), and must in some way or other be an exaltation and refinement of properties naturally inherent in that substance, and in other elements of the brain; but in what way is yet totally unknown. On reflection, we perceive that as there is a chemical action attending every mental process,-just as there is one attending every act of life,-every change in the mind must be attended with an exactly corresponding change in the chemical actions. There is not a greater difference between joy and despair, than there is between the chemical changes which accompany them; and there is exactly equal beauty in the chemical change and

the mental emotion. The thought or the feeling expresses the meaning of the chemical changes. Are we joyful?

The chemical change which is taking place in our brain, is of an easy nature, and favourable to the powers of life and health within us. Are we sorrowful? The chemical change is a difficult one, and opposed to those powers.

The infinite varieties of thoughts and feelings, are the conscious expressions of the equal infinity of the organic chemistry within us. These considerations appear to us to be the simplest corollaries, from what we know of the physiology of nervous action; and they sound strange only from our mistaken preference for spiritual views of the nature of life. When we examine into the history of the earth, we find everything leading us to the conviction that matter existed long before mind; or, in other words, that the simpler chemical combinations existed long prior to the more complex ones, which are a comparatively recent birth of time. The evolution of mind is one of the latest triumphs of the natural forces: and if we follow the true path of induction, we are led to the conclusion that so infinitely complex an essence could not possibly have existed, except in the results of myriads of ages of elaboration. Festina lente-hasten slowly.

On looking back through the interminable vistas of geology, we see nature evolving this her most wonderful production throughout the series of plants (whose lives are constructive) a foundation for the mental existence (which is one of destruction) is laid; and in the animal series, mind rises by the most gradual steps, each of which took probably millions of years to surmount, to the plat

form of humanity. The principle of progress, (the same with the principle of good,) of which mention has been made as being the invariable guide of all living action, seems to form an inherent part of nature; and to make the most complex essence the origin of all things, is completely to reverse the natural order. Nature is all in all. GOD, or the supreme mind of nature, are they not one and

identical?

A word on external influences. Every human mind, however strong, has its weak bastion; every human heart, however hard, its soft corner; every human frame, however rugged, its invulnerable heel. Every one knows people who are quite different people according as they are in town and country. I know a man, an exceeding clever and learned man, who in town is sharp and severe, hasty, and just a shade ill tempered; who, on going to the country becomes instantly genial, frank, playfully, kind, and jolly: you would not know him for the same man, if his face and form changed only half as much as his intellectual and moral nature. Many men when they go into the country, just as they put off frock coats, and stiff stocks, and put on loose shooting suits, big thick shoes, a loose soft handkerchief round their necks; just as they pitch away the vile hard hat of city propriety, that pinches, cramps, and cuts the hapless head, and replace it by light, yielding "wide awakes;" so mentally, they seem to pass through a like process of relief, their whole spiritual being is looser, more free, less tied up. Such changes as that from town to country, must, I should think, be felt by all educated people.

Few men would feel the same among the purple moors round Haworth, and amid the soft English scenery that you see from Richmond hill. Some individuals, indeed, whose minds are not merely torpid, may carry the same animus wherever they go; but their animus must be a very bad one.

Mr. Scrooge, before his change of nature, was, no doubt, independent of external circumstances, and would doubtless have thought it proof of great weakness had he not been so. Nor was it a being of an amiable character in whose mind Milton has put the words "No matter where, so I be still the same." And even in his mouth the sentiment was rather vapouring than true. "But a dull, heavy, prosaic, miserly, cantankerous, cynical, suspicious, bitter old rascal, would probably be much the same everywhere."-Fraser.

Sir Humphrey Davy, when a boy, with the defiant constancy of youth which had as yet suffered nothing, held the opinion that pain was no evil. He was refuted by a crab, which bit his toe when he was bathing, and made him roar aloud so as to be heard half-a-mile off. If he had maintained instead, that pain was a good, his doctrine would have been unimpeachable. A drover went to sleep one winter's evening upon the platform of a lime-kiln, with one leg resting upon the stones which had been piled up to burn through the night. That which was gentle warmth when he laid down, became a consuming fire before he rose up. His foot was burned off above the ancle; and when roused in the morning by the man who superintended the lime-kiln, he put his stump,

unconscious of his misfortune, to the ground, the extremity crumbled into fragments.

Without the warning voice of pain, life would be a series of similar disasters. The crab, to the lasting detriment of chemistry, might have eaten off the future Sir Humphrey's foot while he was swimming, without his entertaining the slightest suspicion of the ravages which were going on. Without physical pain, infancy would be maimed or perish before experience could inform it of its dangers. In the impetuosity of youth, we should strike blows that would crush our hands and break our arms; we should take leaps that would dislocate our limbs; and, no longer taught by fatigue that the muscles needed repose, we should continue our sports, and our walking tours, till we had worn out the living tissue, with the same unconsciousness that we now wear out our coats and our shoes. The very nutriment which is the support of life, would frequently prove our death. Epicures, experiencing no uneasy sensations, would continue their festivities until they met with the fate of the frog in the fable, who was ambitious of emulating the size of the ox.

Sir C. Bell mentions the case of a patient who had lost the sense of heat in his right hand; and who, unconscious that the cover of a pan which had fallen into the fire was burning hot, took it out, and deliberately returned it to its proper place, to the destruction of the skin of the palm and fingers. This, of itself, would be an accident of incessant occurrence, if the monitor were wanting which makes us drop such materials more hastily than we

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