STRUCTURE, ACTION, AND THOUGHT. 749 



sacred, mythical, and allegorical personages, in a blazonry of 

 symbolic adornment. A fine description of these and how the 

 artist worked from them may be found in Brown's manual on the 

 fine arts to which reference has been made. 



Artistic inspiration arises from the stimulation of the imagi- 

 nation, the faculty of movement and form, by some strong feeling 

 seeking expression. Among the feelings which have been most 

 productive of such stimulation we may mention the religious 

 sentiments, which open a limitless field for imaginative activity ; 

 the emotions of love, which stir imagination to the delineation of 

 human beauty ; the moral sentiments, which excite it to portray 

 the heroic and sublime qualities of character ; and the passion for 

 natural scenery, which attracts it to the representation of the 

 beautiful in Nature. All these feelings awaken a faith in some 

 higher possibility, opening the quest for the ideal, or beauty 

 stripped of its imperfections. Art thus becomes the appeal of 

 personality to personality, of intelligence to intelligence. Its 

 highest office, toward which it has been slowly striving, is to 

 serve as a language for the embodiment and communication of 

 ideas and sentiments which have a value for human sensibility. 

 As Emerson has tersely said, " Art is the path of the creator to 

 his work." 



THE CORRELATION OF STRUCTURE, ACTION, AND 



THOUGHT.* 



By T. LAUDER BRUNTON, M. D., F. K. S. 



MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: Allow me to re- 

 turn you my most grateful thanks for the honor which 

 you have done me in asking me to address you to-night. I be- 

 lieve that there are none here excepting myself who can under- 

 stand how grateful I feel, because no one else can know how 

 much I owe to this society. I have been compelled during my 

 life to do a good deal of speaking and of writing, and yet these 

 are the two things which above all others I dislike and for which 

 I am naturally entirely unfit. Had it not been for the training 

 which I received in this society I do not think that I should ever 

 have been able to speak in public at all. In relation to speaking 

 and writing, I often recall an anecdote told me by my poor friend 

 the late Dr. Milner Fothergill, regarding a beaver which an 

 American said he had chased so hard that it had been forced to 

 climb up a tree to escape him. " But," said his hearer, " beavers 



* Inaugural address delivered at the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh on October 

 21, 1892. Abiidged from the London Lancet. 



