SPONTANEOUS FUNCTIONS OF GANGLIA. 289 



in its registering ganglia is illustrated by the rapidity with which we 

 gather the sense of a printed page without individualizing each of the 

 letters it contains, or as a skillful accountant runs his jeye over a long 

 column of figures, and seems to come by intuition at once to the correct 

 sum. The capability which we thus possess of determining a final per- 

 ception or judgment of results, without dwelling on the intermediate 

 traces or steps, is also illustrated by our appreciation of music without 

 concentrating our thoughts on the time and intensities of vibration or in- 

 terferences of the notes, though these mathematical relations are at the 

 very bottom of the harmony ; and conspicuously does the Supreme In- 

 telligence, God, reach with unerring truth to every final result without 

 any necessary concern in the intermediate steps. 



From the preceding considerations we may infer that there is a neces- 

 sary limitation of the amount of impressions capable of being Finite nature 

 registered in the organism, and therefore, in this regard, all of human 

 human knowledge is finite. Yet its term is much farther off kn<mle(J g e - 

 than might at first sight appear. A library of a given size may only be 

 able to contain a given number of books upon its shelves, but the amount 

 of information it is capable of containing may be made to vary with the 

 condensation and perspicuity of the books. /. 



In the hypothetical language of physiology, the nervous centres are 

 spoken of as the origin of the nervous influence or force. A conclusion re- 

 close examination of the phenomena they display leads us, specting the 

 however, to receive such a doctrine with a certain amount function of 

 of limitation. Most of the ganglia produce no motor im- s an s lia - 

 pulses except under the action of external impression, and under the el- 

 ementary view we have just presented regarding the function of the 

 brain, the same remark applies even to it, since the immaterial principle, 

 whose instrument it is, must be regarded as an agent distinct from it, 

 and in that respect external. Indeed, the cases in which the nervous 

 centres seem to display the quality of spontaneously originating force are 

 so few, and in their nature so doubtful, that we are almost entitled to dis- 

 regard them. For example, the ganglia of the heart are by some sup- 

 posed to cause, by their own inherent power, the contractions of that or- 

 gan, which in cold-blooded animals, long after it has been excised, will 

 continue its rhythmic motions. But it is far more agreeable to the anal- 

 ogies of the nervous system to regard these cardiac ganglia, not as orig- 

 inators of power, but as merely depositories, reservoirs, or magazines of 

 it. There is nothing more extraordinary in then: ability to keep up the 

 motions of the organ with which they are connected than there is in the 

 subsidiary spring of a chronometer, which maintains the movement of 

 that instrument for the period during which the action of the mainspring 

 is taken off while it is being wound up. Yet the mainspring, and the 



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