78 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



improves by action. It is a mistake to suppose that the 

 skull is a hard incasement of bone which allows no 

 enlargement of its prisoner : it is an arch strong as a 

 groined vault of masonry to resist pressure from without, 

 but it is the very reversal of an arch, with all its powers 

 of resistance inverted and turned against itself, when 

 opposed to pressure from within. Let us then, by every 

 attribute of our manhood, resist and defy these miserable 

 doctrines that would foredoom our noblest powers, and 

 write the scaring word " impossibility " across our paths 

 the arrogant fiat of charlatans and quacks. No cranium, 

 no physical form of our organization, exhibits at the 

 outset of this life the full development of which it is 

 capable. Adequate exercise only can give it that. The 

 metaphysical part of our being is the dominant part 

 the animating, energising, and controlling power and 

 the physical is merely subjective to it, just as external 

 matter also is to the forces which operate upon it. It is 

 quite as baseless and arrogant an assumption to say 

 that the physical development is the cause of propensity, 

 as that it is the cause of feeling and of life. The very 

 reverse is the case ; for life, and feeling, and propensity, 

 on the contrary, are the causes of the physical develop- 

 ment, which never would grow an inch from childhood to 

 age but for them. It is impossible to reason further 

 therefore with those who, assuming the position of 

 philosophers, mistake the effect for the cause, and the 

 cause for the effect, and invert the whole principles of 

 logic and sequences of truth to arrive at their ridiculous 

 conclusions ; for to them truth must appear only to be 

 error, and error only to be truth an idiosyncracy as 

 compared with which even lunacy has some lucid intervals 

 in its favour. 



But the result of all these various considerations of the 

 being and faculties of man, his internal Consciousness 



