64 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 



ing going on during consciousness, we know that it means profound 

 cogitation; slow breathing concurs with deliberation, meditation, 

 &c. And so on through a thousand states of thought and emotion, 

 in which we reason instinctively on the principle of a correspondence 

 between the motions of the brains and lungs. And diseases aug- 

 ment these phenomena. Stertorous breath signifies an oppressed 

 brain ; hurried breath in fevers, a hurried state of mind. And so 

 forth. We take no similar indications from the heart, or any other 

 organ but the lungs, which represent all visceral locomotion, as the 

 muscles represent the locomotion of the outward body. The heart, 

 indeed, is felt by its owner to have a correspondence with the emo- 

 tions particularly, but it is not influenced perceptibly by the will or 

 the understanding. 



In the chest the condition of the nervous system confirms what 

 we are advocating. For the great nerves run through a space 

 governed by the pumping of the lungs, and their external coats, of 

 necessity, are drawn outwards when we inspire the air, and are 

 pressed inwards when expiration occurs. So also in the spinal cord. 

 As these parts are continuous with the brain, the effect also is con- 

 tinuous ; i. e., the brain is subject to the reciprocal invitations and 

 pressures of the lungs. The nervous motion is, notwithstanding, 

 automatic ; and if its expansion be invited, or its contraction pro- 

 moted, it is only that these happen as the true circumstances of the 

 freedom of the brain. 



To carry the thread into another sphere, but one which is in- 

 cluded in our plan, would it not seem that one of the first deside- 

 rata in brains is movement, and in all further progress, a history of 

 the movements of brains ? not only a history of fitful, but of organic 

 and providential thought. In the realm of science this translation 

 of our position is indispensable ; the pistons of aspiration and prac- 

 tice go up and down, the brain opens for life, and opens the body 

 for work, as truth after truth is brought in and converted for the 

 moving intelligence of man. In the sphere of conception and phi- 

 losophy the same strokes of the mental engine are perceived; and 

 the more we contemplate them from the point of a Providence or a 

 plan, the more regular they seem; the more rhythmical thought is 

 found to be; the more its elements are measured; and the more the 



