386 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 



It is gratifying to find how anthropological facts are being 

 received now with little or no conflict or protest. It is even more 

 gratifying to observe how these facts elucidate problems of life, 

 and how science and religion have joined hands to show man the 

 method and the means by which he can work out his own salvation. 

 The latest phase of Hegelianism and the earliest teaching of 

 Christianity had agreed on how man was to attain Ihe highest 

 possible realization of self, had found the gate he was to enter. 

 But it was left to yesterday's psychology to find the key. 

 The key to the whole science and art of self -culture is self-control 

 and how to obtain it. This depends on the power to fix — to rivet — 

 our attention on the things, the pleasant things, the good things, 

 the best things, that we want to dwell upon abstractly, that is, to 

 the exclusion or ignoring of those things that are undesirable. 

 And it depends, most of all, on the power to control and direct 

 our emotions, the raw material or pabulum of moral life. The 

 chief discovery -of recent years in regard to the emotions is that 

 they are, first of all, " states of the body." The mind has only 

 a second-hand relation to them. It enters at the end, not at 

 the beginning. This is Professor James's theory. We perceive 

 something by the senses, say a bear ; the bodily condition of 

 trembling ensues; and then we have the mental emotion of fear 

 subsequent to and consequent on the trembling. Now, if we can 

 check the trembling, or substitute some other bodily state for it, 

 or interpose some other emotion between the trembling and the 

 oncoming of the fear, we obviate, or prevent, the fear. Here is 

 the secret of all self-control. The moral is, assume the bodily 

 positions, and movements, and manners, and tones of the voice 

 that belong to the em.otional state you desire. Thus you will 

 become the thing you act. Be dead to one set of influences, alive 

 to another — in apostolic words, " Reckon ye also yourselves to be 

 dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God." 



Holmes, in the address I have already quoted, spoke of the 

 fatalism that characterized the theological thought, and the 

 metaphysical theories in reference to free will and self-control. 

 His feelings revolted against it, and his intellect protested. He 

 felt that, after all, man was man and master of his fate. He said — 

 " I reject the mechanical doctrine which makes me the slave of 

 outside influences, whether it woi'k with the logic of Edv\'ards, 

 or the averages of Buckle; whether it come in the shape of the 

 Greek's destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism [he might at 

 that time have added, ' or the oppression of an old theology or 

 the arrogance of a new science '] : or in that other aspect, dear 

 lo the band of believers whom Beesly, of Everton, speaking in the 

 character of John Wesley, characterized as ' The crocodile crew 

 that believe in election.' But T claim the right to eliminate all 



