82 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 



ruling spirits and ideas which are enshrined in their institutions. 

 For epochs are the duration of the social life, and what is death and 

 birth for the individual is but the exchange of old atoms for new in 

 the marching epoch. These cerebral ideas are at first the private 

 ends common to the race in a given period, which appear on a new 

 morning in the field of individualities, and are the germ and birth- 

 day of a social state. The principle assumed, the grouping of the 

 cell, governs the composition from the least to the greatest, from the 

 single family to the epoch of twenty centuries. As the grouping 

 proceeds the action becomes grander, and the scale of operations is 

 transferred from homesteads to continents, but the same cause is 

 carried on in both extremes. Like fate it revolves through senates 

 and priesthoods, whose maddest strifes it builds into its plan. The 

 truths of the time enter the epoch through its own convenient 

 sciences or eyes. The acts and charities of life are interpreted ac- 

 cording to its familiar pattern, and committed to the spirit of its 

 nerves. In short, the collective brain has an animus like the in- 

 dividual. And like the individual it has its decline ; and also its 

 better successors, which are the appointed angels of time. 



These, however, are the animal brains of societies, receiving and 

 transmitting the rush of destiny as it tramples through the chaos of 

 the worlds. But another brain, with power over fate, is set above 

 us as our social sun. For a firmamental organism of Prophecy and 

 Revelation overarches the weltering centuries, and sends down spirit 

 and divine light to the nations and races of the intellectual clime. 

 Openness and circulation here are religions and adorations : the 

 pressure of the life comes manifestly from above : as there is a God 

 and Lord, it comes punctually to our wants, and the clank of our 

 dire necessity is His mercy heard in terrestrial echoes ; the sighs 

 and heavings of mankind coincide with the birth of larger souls and 

 societies, and with the advent of fresh dispensations. 



