54 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 



the world would be virtually committed to man's reaso n, which 

 would exclude that of God; for man would have no chart but his 

 own faculties. And so, were the brain a solid, and shut at top, the 

 government of the body must depend upon it, and not upon the 

 soul, or only upon the soul, in so far as the brain chose to coincide 

 with its messages. Government is incompatible with such an idea. 

 But on the other showing, the brain cannot exclude the next higher 

 series, which permeates it in its own right, and exercises a provi- 

 dential and healing virtue upon what is so apt to go wrong of itself. 

 The truth, however, is, that the doctrine we are combating, is not in 

 the sphere of the nervous or open system at all : it belongs to the 

 muscular department of truth, or that which has both ends closed, 

 and is a solid body. Its spiritual correspondent is " earnestness," 

 spasmodic vigor, upon which so many and such famous men rely for 

 the salvations of the time. We might collect other problems, be- 

 sides that of the presence of the divine light in the world or Reve- 

 lation ; and that of the presence of the soul in the body, or spiritual 

 existence, to show that the doctrine of the animal spirits suffer in 

 the company of great truths; but enough has been said to show that 

 deism has dependencies everywhere; and that besides the vast irre- 

 ligion of excluding God from the universe, there is a series of lesser 

 impieties and disloyalties of a similar kind, which rob the body of 

 the soul, clip the world close to the limits of air, make man and 

 nature truth-tight, and reduce all things to petty selves, which can 

 choose whether they will have a God above them, a world around 

 them, and a soul within them, or the contrary. 



We postulate, then, that everything, according to its openness to 

 the sphere above it, has a spirit, or a quasi-spirit; and when the 

 organ is so constructed for opening as the brains — whose first great 

 faculty is openness — when it can take in so much, the capacious in- 

 flux or gift naturally takes the form of a nerve spirit, which is thence- 

 forth the tutelar genius of the system. Further, that everything, 

 whether a brain or a science, which is so roofed over that nothing 

 but itself can come into it — so thick-skulled and self-opinionated — 

 is dead at the top, however it may work reflexly or spasmodically, 

 according to the exigencies of the lower life. 



So much for the spirit within the brain. There is a spirit be- 



