UNITY AND DISUNITY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 41 



as man domesticates the animals, or chooses those which suit his 

 purpose, and abolishes the rest, so does reason govern the moods of 

 the brain, feeds upon its tranquil emotions and compresses those 

 which are fierce, governs its imaginations, and, in a word, civilizes 

 the savage countries of the original head. All this is no work of 

 passion, or simple pleasure or pain, but of artist-like struggle and 

 contest, whereby reason, or the true ratio between the mind and the 

 brain, begins to be established, and the little spots already cultivated 

 are extended until the rest is won. In this high state of the brain 

 the human faculties permeate the cerebrum, and the animal faculties, 

 prodigiously cultivated beyond the wild state, are everywhere parallel 

 with the rational powers. And so, too, the mechanical faculties, all 

 the manufactures of thought, or the mere motions of the body : these 

 are surrounded by a consciousness which knows what they will be, 

 before they appear ; they are developed into mechanism after me- 

 chanism — all the inventions of reason and will in the mechanical 

 sphere. This is a condition of the nervous system which is seldom 

 witnessed, but we place it as a counterpart to the state of disunion 

 considered before : the ordinary state is a kind of composition be- 

 tween the two, and can easily be constructed out of these extremes. 



I do not know that we can escape generalities in treating of the 

 functions of the brain. Certainly at present, when we go inwards, 

 whether into the head or the mind, a few powers present themselves, 

 very little colored, and with none but a general outline. The gray 

 and white shadows of metaphysics seem to answer to the cineritious 

 and medullary groups of the nervous system. But there is no doubt 

 that the truths of this class are valuable, as the pure science of the 

 body; and that they are the outlines of a multitude of moreinterest- 

 ing sciences. 



There is indeed a branch -which it has been thought throws a 

 broader light on the nature of the brain : we allude to phrenology. 

 This office of phrenology we regard however as a misapprehension. 

 As we understand phrenolog} T , it is a science of independent obser- 

 vation, which is completed in tracing the correspondence between the 

 surface of the living head and the character of the individual. It 

 was as such that its edifice arose stone by stone in the hands of the 



illustrious Gall. He noticed that portions of the surface of the head 



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