76 METAPHYSICS 



upward progress of the race, and affords incentive to public 

 spirit to continue the use of every appropriate means to help 

 on such beneficent progress, physical, mental, and moral. 



To return to the subject of the meaning of the expres- 

 sion, " the mirid's eye," which is alike familiar to the 

 scientist and " the man in the street," we would claim 

 that it represents, in the psychic economy, very much the 

 same as the whole array of the senses represents in the 

 economy of cerebro-spinal function, apart from the purely 

 psychic, the material scene of its operations and functional 

 use being confined to that cerebral area in which repose, 

 in texturally inhibited but in functionally free and unre- 

 strained existence, the innermost, the most intensely 

 functional, the most dynamically and explosively endowed, 

 and the last to appear or be evolved, of the neuronal 

 structures, what we have denominated the mental or psychic 

 nerve cells or mentally endowed neurons. This area, 

 towering in functional character above the highest related 

 cerebral-spinal nerve centres, sheds the intensity of its light- 

 giving activity over the whole area of voluntarily controlled 

 nervine work, acting as an imperium in imperio with the 

 full responsibility of a " free will " agent and the necessary 

 amenability to praise or blame, with whatever these bring 

 in the way of reward or punishment. 



In this cryptic material region of the psychologically 

 endowed neurons there is, in the waking state, a continual 

 activity of thought, thought begetting thought, and the 

 law of "association of ideas" reigning supreme, setting 

 its mark and seal on each day's record. Here, in this 

 u mentally endowed" neuronium, to coin an expression, the 

 mind is continually engaged in its thousand and one daily 

 interests, saturated, it may be, with its daily cares, worried 

 with its daily occupation of meeting its material wants, 

 lurid with the flames of passion or the designs of avarice, 

 effulgent with the beams of benevolence, and it may be 

 " coruscating with wit and humour," or throwing its 

 searchlights into the immediate present, the long past, or 

 the far-reaching future. 



This neuronium or psycho-plasmic fabric, is ever, when 

 awake, aglow, like a taper of radium, with a light above 

 and beyond what its textural envelopments can. lay claim 



