78 . THE HUMAN BRAIN. 



emotions which always and involuntarily transfer the state of the 

 brain into the visceral lives. Convivial joy, the brain's joy, makes 

 the stomach do double digestion with no harm to itself. Energy, 

 brain tension, fires the muscles to feats that muscles never meant. 

 Other passions scourge the liver or the kidneys into speed of manu- 

 facture, quite beyond their proper powers. The function of the 

 brain then to the body is one of forcing or culture. The brain 

 makes no clod of the body, no drop of the secretions : it makes no 

 seed that the body grows. But it is the husbandman of the corpo- 

 real farm. The farm may go wild, and it is still something, though 

 then called a desert. And organization may subsist without brains, 

 but it becomes more and more tangled, lower and lower, until you 

 cannot say that it is alive. The ratio of the brain to the body, is 

 that of man to the planet. The planet is ready-made; every stone, 

 plant and animal, night and day, the greater and the lesser light, 

 are all there, and could not be created by us if they were not. But, 

 man comes, the brain comes, as the cultivator. He is set there to 

 have dominion over all; to be the image of the wisdom who made 

 all; to spread himself as a head over all; and to modify all, as the 

 last result, or the secondary soul of all. Therefore, until the brain 

 has penetrated every viscus and function, it has not cultivated the 

 body, as until man has grasped the climates, and forced them 

 through their products and exotics, he has not cultivated the earth. 

 The relation of the brain then to the body is, as the cultivator of 

 the fields, originally wild, of nutrition, secretion, excretion, and the 

 like. The cultivation begins as soon as the emotions of the brain 

 begin, and every state of the brain plays in good or bad husbandry 

 upon the brute or visceral powers. 



But the brain could do nothing of this, if it were not itself among 

 the natures that it commands. For what commander can speak to 

 his soldiers, unless he be a common man like themselves, though an 

 officer to boot? And, if man be not the supreme animal, the lion 

 and the lamb^o;* excellence, how can he wield the animal tribes? 

 And again, if spirit have not all that matter has, how can the soul 

 govern the body ? Now, we have shown in detail, that the brain, 

 as commanding organ, possesses the attributes of the lower organs 

 in a superlative degree. We have shown that it is the heart of 



