Atrtl 1, 1886. 



KNOWLEDGE 



175 



remains which give the key to their relative place. Then, 

 on their upheaval above the sea, the eroding agents have 

 begun their slowly levelling work, and the debris of lands, 

 where life-forms have flourished and perished, has returned 

 to the watei-s whence they uprose, to become once more 

 " the dust of continents to be." And so " the thing that 

 hath been, it is that which shall be ; and that which is done 

 is that which shall lie done : and there is no new thing 

 under the sun." Between the opposing agents of waste and 

 repair, of upheaval and subsidence, with interplay of the 

 organic in growth and decay, as in limestone ranges, coral 

 isles and coal beds, and the action of man himself for evil 

 or good on nature, the ancient earth is maintained from age 

 to age mother of all living. 



MIND ACTING ON BODY. 



By FiiciiARD A. Proctor. 



HERE are few circumstances in mental 

 phj'siology more surprising when rigLtly 

 understood, few perhaps more suggestive, 

 than this, that ideas conceived in the mind 

 — that is, as we are in the habit of suppos- 

 ing, the results of processes taking place in 

 the grey matter of the brain — should in- 

 fluence not only voluntary but involuntary bodily processes, 

 nay, not onlj' respiration, circulation, and so forth, but the 

 various processes of secretion on which the nutrition of 

 diflerent parts of the body depends. There is no novelty, 

 of course, in the recognition of this circumstance, though I 

 venture to express the belief that quite a large proportion of 

 tho.se who may read these pages will find considerable novelty 

 in some of the evidence I shall adduce. But the f^ict that 

 the relations here considered have long been recognised by 

 physicians and student.s of mental physiology does not 

 detract from the interest of the problem presented by these 

 relations. It may truly be said that as yet they have not 

 been in the least degree explained. Yet the problem is not 

 one which appears at a first view so hopelessly beyond all 

 our attempts at solution as some which are connected with 

 mental and corporeal matters. We can understand, for 

 instance, that the student of mental physiology should at 

 present turn hopelessly from the attempt to explain how 

 thought should in any way depend on changes in the sub- 

 stance of the brain, or again, from the task of attempting 

 to determine how, by any process of evolution, the pheno- 

 mena of consciousness should have been developed from 

 cerebral changes which in their simpler form appear to 

 result in automatic movements. But we have no such 

 seemingly hopeless problem in the subject now to be con- 

 .sidered. For in reality it amounts simply to the question 

 how or why certain changes in one part of the body lead to 

 changes in other parts of the body. The distinctions 

 between mind and matter, between thought and cerebral 

 activity, are not here involved. A problem apparently 

 physical, and physical only, is submitted to our investi- 

 gation. Yet hitherto the solution of this problem has not 

 been attained ; nor, indeed, does there seem at present to be 

 good reason for regarding it as attainable. 



Let us turn, however, to the consideration of certain 

 remarkable illustrations of the influence of the mind on 

 bodily functions. The subject is specially suited for the use 

 of the inductive method. Indeed, the chief dithculty we are 

 likely to find in the application of this method resides in the 

 probability that our space will be too limited to aflford room 

 even for a single irstanoe of each class of illustrative cases. 

 By a coincidence it .so chances that the great modera 



advocate of the inductive method of research — Francis Bacon 

 — supplies a very eSective piece of evidence as to the in- 

 fluence of the imagination on external growths which seem 

 to have their origin in deficient vitality of certain parts of 

 the external surface of the body — as warts, wens, and the 

 like. Bacon did not, however, treat the evidence afforded 

 in his own case with the acumen which might have been 

 expected from the inductive philosopher. "I had from my 

 childhood," he says, " a wart upon one of my fingers ; after- 

 wards, when I was about sixteen years old, being then at 

 Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts, 

 at the least an hundred in a month's space. The English 

 ambassador's lady, who was a woman far from superstition " 

 (a statement which must be taken cum ijrano), " told me one 

 day she would help me away with my warts ; whereupon 

 she got a piece of lard with the skin on, and rubbed the 

 warts all over with the fat side ; and amongst the rest that 

 wart which I had from my childhood ; then .she nailed the 

 piece of lard, with the fat towards the siin, upon a post of 

 her chamber window, which was to the south. The success 

 was tliat within five weeks' space all the warts were quite 

 away, and that wart which I had so long endured for com- 

 pany. But at the rest I did little marvel, because they 

 came in a short time, and might go away in a short time 

 again ; but the going away of that which had stayed so long 

 doth yet stick with me." 



Bacon considered the result of the experiment to have 

 been due to some sympathy which he supposed to exist 

 between the lard and the warts after they had once been in 

 contact. It is diflicult for us to understand how so absurd 

 an explanation could even for a moment have been enter- 

 tained by Bacon — not when, as a mere boy, the experiment 

 was successfully tried upon him, but in after years, when he 

 had learned to stud}' the relations of cause and efi'ect. The 

 servant who places a poker across the top bar of the grate, 

 under the impression that in some occult way the fire will 

 be made to burn more actively through this arrangement, 

 adducing this or that case in which a fire so treated did burn 

 up as sufficient proof that the method is infallible, does not 

 seem to reason (if one can call such a mental process reason- 

 ing) more absurdly than Bacon did when the experiment 

 which " so stuck with him " satisfied him that the drying of 

 grease which had once touched his warts could cause the 

 warts themselves to disappear, though the skin was hung up 

 in one place while he and his warts were in other places, 

 and no contact remained between the warts and the skin of 

 lard. If the idea of some occult sympathy between the fat 

 and the warts could really arise in a mind " far from super- 

 stition," one would suppose it must have occurred to Bacon 

 that the justice of this idea could be very readily put to the 

 test. He had only to apply a skin of lard to some one's 

 warts, and then submit the skin to a variety of more acti\'e 

 processes than mere sun- drying, inquiring whether the warty 

 person found sudden relief, sudden pain, or any effect what- 

 ever, when the nature of such experiments was kept con- 

 cealed from the said patient. One can understand that 

 those who were not far from superstition might imagine the 

 experiment to be really rendered effective by charms, prayers, 

 and incantations, or by some mystical ceremonies or other 

 which were not disclosed to the patient. We know that in 

 Bacon's time, and to a far later date, the efficiency of such 

 magic devices was believed in by many who called themselves 

 philosophers. To this day there are many who are foolish 

 enough to indulge in such beliefs. But Bacon regarded the 

 process of cure as purely natui'al, though, as one would sup- 

 pose, the evidence against such a view should have appeared 

 insurmountable to a man of his reasoning power. We must, 

 however, remember that in his day it must have appeared 

 .almost, if not quite, as unreasonable to assume that the 



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