Automatic Action of the Cerebrum. 833 



The organs which we inherit are very different in their degree of mobil- 

 ity, and our actions oftenest result from the stimulations of the most 

 mobile. We may distinguish among the organs two classes, which can 

 be called, respectively, the useful and the ornamental. We all have 

 both kinds. With the mass of men, it is the former that are the most 

 mobile, while with geniuses it is the latter. When a genius, with small 

 activity of the business faculties, under the stimulus of starvation, 

 makes a promise to perform a work, which is naturally an intolerable 

 task, as soon as his hunger is satisfied, the will, which resulted in the 

 promise, collapses with the disappearance of the stimulus which formed 

 it, and gives place to another sort of will formed by the stimuli then 

 present. If a man be descended from a manly and spunky race, the 

 promise itself becomes a motive of great force in the formation of the 

 subsequent governing will. The same observations apply to the or- 

 dinary run of men, that do to the so-called Geniuses ; but in their case 

 the active brain cells are those relating to the common concerns of life 

 and business, or light amusements, and the sluggish and immobile cells 

 are those relating to the artistic and ornamental side of existence. The 

 natural tendency of the race brain is to blossom out into this ornamental 

 quality, and if, in the distant future, it shall come to pass, as it proba- 

 bly will, that a few business workers can support a majority of geniuses, 

 the business men will be reckoned as the eccentrics. The law of selec- 

 tion and survival of the fittest, will always, as it does now, regulate the 

 proportions of the classes to each other and to the means of support. 



The value of promises, and the importance of observing them, arise 

 primarily and almost exclusively from men's business and social rela- 

 tions. It is therefore not wholly unaccountable that many who have in- 

 herited no business talent should be likewise destitute of a sense of 

 business honor. Mozart was another of those so-called weak-willed 

 geniuses. His resolutions and promises were of little value if their 

 performance involved work. To compose music was not work with him, 

 but only to write it down. He was the subject of every impulse. By 

 some fortuitous concurrence of antenatal causes he inherited an organ- 

 ization which automatically and instinctively composed music. This 

 congenital tendency ought to have been supplemented by the cultivation 

 of a habit of industry. A well-formed habit is a "second nature." 

 This proverb seems to recognize the essential identity between habit and 

 congenital tendencies. Most certainly the latter are to be regarded as 

 the result of the habits of our ancestors. 



A man's actions in life are governed in three modes, congenital 

 tendencies, acquired habits, and casual impulses. To the latter class be- 

 long those artificial stimuli which society has invented to act as restraints, 

 prohibitions, discouragements upon certain classes of actions, and en- 



