5 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the very few who cultivate that specialty, to enable them to formulate 

 principles for the scientific study of that most important product of the 

 human brain human testimony. If, then, Bacon and Descartes, Hume 

 and Hamilton, Whewell and Jevons, Greenleaf and Wharton, have 

 failed to adapt their analyses of the principles of evidence to the needs 

 of our time, their failure is due to the backwardness of physiology and 

 pathology that must constitute the basis of the study of evidence, and 

 on which the foundations for a reconstruction must be laid. 



We do not yet know all of the human brain, either in health or dis- 

 ease; but our knowledge of it is sufficiently advanced to make it possible 

 to see, with considerable clearness, its relation to testimony. If we do 

 not know just how the cerebral cells evolve thought, we do know that 

 thought is evolved by them or through them, and that various diseases 

 of the brain and nervous system now pretty well understood, but of 

 which, twenty years ago, little or nothing was known may utterly de- 

 stroy the objective worth of thought, and render it, scientifically speak- 

 ing, valueless. 



The progress of cerebro-physiology and pathology, in recent times, 

 has been mostly along the line of the Involuntary Life a phrase which 

 I have elsewhere and often used to designate those phenomena of mind 

 or body, or of both, in their reciprocal relations, that are independent 

 of will or consciousness, or of both. This Involuntary Life is the 

 branch of physiology that has been least studied and least understood ; 

 its importance, however, is supreme, not only in itself, but on account 

 of its relations to all other sciences. It is the one strategic point of 

 modern thought, around which all the leaders in controversy are uncon- 

 sciously gathering, and for the possession of which opposing hosts will 

 soon contend. Here, as I have previously shown, is the last stand of 

 modern delusions, of every name and form. 1 



The scientific study of human testimony requires a recognition of 

 these three facts, in the physiology and pathology of the brain : 



1. The Limitations of the Human Brain in Health. Literature is 

 so crowded with laudations of the human intellect, from the classic 

 apostrophe of Hamlet " What a piece of work is man ! how noble in 

 reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form and moving, how express and 

 admirable! in action, how like an angel ! in apprehension, how like a 

 god ! " down to the motto of Sir William Hamilton : " On earth there 

 is nothing great but man ; in man is nothing great but mind ; " and so 

 strong is the tendency in man to view himself from one side only, and 

 to compare himself with the lower animals, or even with inorganic 

 matter, that we are scarcely prepared for the conclusion to which a sci- 

 entific study of the subject compels us, that, considered from all points 

 of view from what is above and beyond it, as well as from what is 

 below and near it, from the aspirations that can never be realized, the 

 vast but simple problems of the universe that it hopelessly strives to 



1 "The Scientific Basis of Delusions ; or, a New Theory of Trance," etc., 18*77. 



