HIGHER ANALOGUES OF THE BRAIN. 81 



are the open men of their time, who hinder God the least : more 

 rays shine through them than through the rest : you cannot say what 

 their genius is, apart from what it shows and does, unless it be a 

 natural road from heaven to earth : influx and the fluid kingdoms 

 are their substances, and they know that the solid world is fuel laid 

 up against the day of heat; also that truths and ideals are kings and 

 priests, whose mortal namesakes, visceral and vegetating, are clay 

 as in the potter's hands when that clay comes. Their private 

 thoughts seem the wants of the time and the schemes of societies; 

 they are said to be sent and to have their mission ; for the Maker 

 has set them in the rhythm of his plan, and this world and that 

 world heave to help them to shoot their lightnings to their destined 

 ends. And still they are only the first brains that the epoch touches, 

 and which, therefore, it publishes; and being the highest they are 

 the longest visible as we pass away : but, as we said, every man is a 

 genius or an end, a space crowded with ideals, and these ideals are 

 the brain of the soul, or the personal life. 



This word, genius, reminds us also of what we may call the So- 

 cratic brain, which attends upon the mortal organ. In this sense 

 the brain-principle is an organization of guardian spirits, who live 

 with our minds, fight our battles over our heads, whisper wisdom 

 more than belongs to us, make our lights and resources exceed our 

 days, and extend our debts into the unseen land to which we are 

 adjourning. This vicarious function of souls is the result of their 

 concatenation on the cortical plan. For here, where we are, our 

 purer minds are infant, not yet detached from the matrix of the 

 brain, and they sorely need guardians on the other side of time — as 

 it were, parent hands and instructions to see them fairly through 

 this big nursery, the world. We know not how little our lives 

 would be, or how inanimate, if the gaps of power and the passing- 

 ness of the day were not filled and compensated from another source 

 where power is incessant and wisdom eternal. It would be as though 

 each nervous fibril had but one cortical dot prefixed to it, and not 

 the whole brain; or as though each mind stood alone, and were not 

 environed and kept upright by an array of minds as long as the ages 

 and as high as the heavens. 



But epochs have brains as well as individuals, and these are the 



