122 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



by the poet, whose views of specific colour appear to show much 

 defect and confusion, while his sense of light was most vivid, 

 and his sense of form alike strong and refined. 



From DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.* 



Boston, Mass., U.S., May 9, 1874. 



I have been for such a long series of years your debtor, 

 having been familiar with your writings since the first essay 

 which brought you into notice, having always almost within 

 arm s length your Physiologies, Human and Comparative, and 

 your book on the Microscope, that you are a kind of classic 

 to me ; and to see my name in a treatise of yours is like re 

 ceiving an unexpected honorary degree from some institution 

 of note and name. I have always been greatly interested in 

 the subject of unconscious cerebration, to use the expression 

 which you, I think, first employed long ago in your Physiology. 

 Every man is more or less a metaphysician, and I think we often 

 feel, in reading the acutest or even the profoundest analysis of 

 mental actions, that we too are experts, and hold in transparent 

 solution the same ideas to which another has given the crystal 

 line solidity and defmiteness of language. In this way I have 

 often felt when reading your own subtle and searching observa 

 tions, and very likely with this feeling have borrowed more from 

 your suggestions than I was aware of. If I have done so in the 

 little book from which you quote, or helped myself from others 

 without giving them credit, you will, I know, set it all down to 

 unconscious cerebration and automatic manipulation. But as 

 we all handle the same tools in the same cerebral workshop, it 

 is no more wonderful that we should often work after the same 

 pattern, than that two gloves made in two different countries, 

 should each have four fingers and a thumb. 



From the REV. DR. MARTIXEAU. 



London, March 9, 1874. 



I am much gratified by your kind remembrance of me in 

 drawing up your list of presentations for your &quot; Mental Physi- 



* On receiving a copy of the &quot; Principles of Mental Physiology,&quot; in which 

 Dr. Carpenter had quoted Dr. Holmes s &quot; Mechanism in Thought and Morals.&quot; 



