A FINAL WORD 285 



centers are indifferently excited to produce images of 

 former like sensations. These latter images, fusing 

 with the immediate sensation, produce a new, and dif- 

 ferent image, which is the idea, the perception, the 

 conception, and abstraction, or the motor action. Of 

 course, there are idealists, who refuse to believe that 

 these psychic effects can be produced by the machinery 

 of the nerve structure. They say, the psychic phe- 

 nomena are accompanied by a nerve motion, but the 

 two are only parallel, and simultaneous, that the two 

 operations are independent. They say that a machine, 

 that turns out a piece of cloth different in pattern from 

 the material put in it, is not the maker of the pattern. 

 But a machine made by human hands is altogether dif- 

 ferent from the human brain. For convenience, we 

 call the brain a device, but it is a natural growth, not 

 made with hands. It is a self-acting organism. But 

 a machine is not self-acting, and has to be operated by 

 a human brain. Of course, then the human brain is 

 the maker of the pattern turned out by the machine. 

 But if the brain is the maker of both the machine and 

 the pattern, it can also make its own ideas. The eyes, 

 which see the making of the machine and the pattern, 

 do not see any hands making the brain and its ideas. 

 The evidence, in the one case, is not applicable to the 

 other. There is no parallel. 



The limitations of human knowledge are the results 

 of man's inefficient nervous structure, and its limited 

 correspondence with environment through only five 

 peripheral sense organs. These sense organs receive 

 impressions from phenomena only, and are limited to 

 them. The images resulting from these impressions 

 formed on the cortex of the brain centers, and fusing 

 into perception, conception, and reason, are not the 



