THE MOTION OF THE BRAIN. 65 



stirrings of the great brain concur with the tune of the stars, which 

 measure the ages in their vortical tread. In fact the idea of a plan 

 or a relative Providence, cannot subsist, without insinuating to us 

 the oneness of all the motions of the brain, and their combination 

 into a rhyme coordinate with the poetry of every universal law. 

 Thus to look at them from above and beyond the organ, shows them 

 all as one motion, coincident with the wants and aspirations, or in 

 other words, with the breathings of their subject, man. And so 

 again the outward and inward wants, the thoughts and the breaths, 

 are married to each other. In isolated thoughts we cannot recog- 

 nize so much; but the thought of epochs suggests a fate of thought, 

 a movement involuntary as the respiration of sleep, in which the 

 parts succeed each other as breaths, though full of the special will 

 and intellect which are the life of the brain and the race. 



For the last part of the subject, or the function of a brain moving 

 or animating in this wise, it will lie in the distribution of the nerve 

 life according to the principles and forces of the soul, and in the 

 mind, of the understanding and will, considered both as powers and 

 organs. If the fibres and nerves are the roads of life, and if the 

 globular heads of the nerves are its stations and reservoirs, then the 

 expansion and contraction of these in the times of the breathing, 

 amounts to the constant injection of life into every portion of the 

 body, at the moments when the body itself gasps or opens or wants 

 to receive them. And this takes place in successive moments. Thus 

 organic thought and will are present everywhere with a breathing 

 or animating motion : a stimulus superior to nutrition is poured into 

 the frame; and all this, with no thought on our parts. But on the 

 other hand, during our intervals, and from our states, of conscious- 

 ness, the distribution of the cerebral fluid is varied, just as the same 

 consciousness varies the supply of air, or the evenness of the pul- 

 monary respirations. And by the coincidence or synchronism of the 

 latter with the brain-movements, the unity of life is maintained : the 

 lungs dilate the frame to receive, while the nerves dilate to give. 

 Thus the respirations of the brains and lungs are the beginning and 

 end of the animal system, which therefore is poised in freedom 

 like the planet, not supported upon a tortoise of dead matter, but 

 swimming in double tides of motion. 



6* 



