Automatic Action of the Cerebrum. 841 



I often returned to it, in fact kept by me an elaborate figure. Some 

 years after, and when the problem had not been touched by me for 

 some time, I had been sitting up till the small hours deciphering a 

 cryptograph for one of my pupils. Exulting in the successful solution, 

 I turned into bed ; and suddenly there flashed across my mind the 

 secret of the solution of the problem I had so long vainly dealt with, 

 this secret being a slight addition to my elaborate figure. The effect on 

 me was strange. I trembled as if in the presence of another being who 

 had communicated the secret to me." 



Dr. Bushnell is quoted as saying : ' ' There are two sorts of influence 

 belonging to man; that which is active and voluntary, and that which is 

 unconscious ; that which we exert purposely, or in the endeavor to 

 sway another as by teaching, by argument, by persuasion, by threaten- 

 ings, by offers and promises, and that which flows out from us unawares 

 to ourselves." These insensible influences come honestly from our real 

 character, while those exerted in consciousness and with a purpose, re- 

 present motives in which there is a large admixture of stimuli direct 

 from the environment and our social conditions, and which we have not 

 yet, and may never incorporate in our character. 



It is his subjection to these two sorts of stimuli that enables a man to 

 be a hypocrite. He may perform praise-worthy acts from motives of a 

 temporary and superficial nature, instead of from principle. 



Oliver Wendell Holmes says : (Mechanism in Thought and Morals) 

 "Our definite ideas are stepping stones; how we get from one to the 

 other we do not know ; something carries us, we [ i. e. , our conscious 

 selves] do not take the step. A creating and informing Spirit which is 

 with us, and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and in storied 

 life. It is the Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles, it is the Muse of 

 Homer ; it is the Daimon of Socrates ; it is the Inspiration of the Seer; 

 it is the Mocking Spirit that whispers to Margaret as she kneels at the 

 altar ; and the Hobgoblin that cried, * Sell him, sell him, ' in the ear of 

 John Bunyan ; it shaped the forms that filled the soul of Michael 

 Angelo, when he saw the figure of the great law-giver in the yet un- 

 hewn marble, and the dome of the worlds yet unbuilt Basilica, against 

 the black horizon ; it comes to the least of us as a voice that will be 

 heard ; it tells us what we must believe ; it frames our sentences ; it 

 lends a sudden gleam of sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all ; we 

 wonder at ourselves, or rather not ourselves, but at this Divine Visitor 

 who chooses our brain as his dwelling place and invests our naked 

 thought with the purple of the kings of speech and song. " 



Many a prophet and seer has thought he recognized in this voice within 

 him, a veritable message from a supernatural power, and has honestly and 

 wndoubtingly given to the world, as a divine oracle, that which in reality 



