DETERMINISM AND SELF-DIRECTION. 63 



Dr. Carpenter had, indeed, endeavoured himself to pro- 

 vide an instrument for such culture. The fourth edition of 

 his " Human Physiology," which was completed in 1852 and 

 issued in 1853, contained a full outline of his vijws on the 

 nervous system.* It was his habit in preparing successive 

 editions of his large treatises to expand them by the in- 

 corporation of the latest researches ; but this did not 

 generally involve any fundamental reconstruction, though 

 sometimes three-fourths or four-fifths of the actual matter 

 might be fresh. In this case, however, the whole division 

 of the work was wrought anew from the beginning. He 

 rejected at the outset the doctrine that man's character was 

 formed for him and not (in part, at least) by him ; appealed 

 to his consciousness of possessing a self-determining power ; 

 and then proceeded to expand and enforce the conceptions 

 to which in his previous writings he had given partial ex- 

 pression. Without hesitation he boldly carried the idea of 

 automatic action into the intellectual products of the brain 

 itself under the name of " unconscious cerebration," while he 

 carefully discriminated from all forms of reflex operation 

 the voluntary control which should reign supreme over all. 

 This intelligent volition he recognized as the source of the 

 power we determinately exert through our bodily organism 

 upon the world around. Here he found the origin of that 

 conception of force which he discerned behind every 

 phenomenon of the external universe, and this supplied 

 him with a new basis for his interpretation of the visible 

 scene as the constant realization of Divine Thought and 

 Will. To the development of these views he returned 

 twenty years later ; and the last decade of his life, as the 

 essays in this volume will show, was largely occupied 



• In ncl<no\vledL;ing the receipt of a copy of this edition, his former teacher, 

 Professor \V. I*. AHson, of Edinburgh, wrote : " I liavc lound in your (Hscussion 

 " of the nervous system and its physiology much that was new to me, much that 

 " is original, and nothuig but what is valuable." 



