MEDICINE IN MODEBN TIMES. 727 



and hope always to remain, to regret or deprecate change as such. 

 For there is a philosophy of both subjects, and a science also in 

 both; and I would hope that both the one and the other mio-ht 

 still retain a lien on the two words and the two things, nor suffer 

 its rival to establish a claim for sole possession by its own default 

 in exercising a right of usage. 



Advocates of the dignity of man are wont to regard, or to profess 

 to regard, with something like horror, doctrines which would hint 

 that either his bodily structures or his mental faculties, his ' more 

 pure and nobler pare,' may have attained their perfection in the 

 way of gradational evolution. But it is not clear to me that the 

 horror expressed for these conclusions is much more legitimate 

 than the arguments with which they have been assailed by Prime 

 Ministers and others, in the Sheldonian Theatre close by, and else- 

 where within our precincts. For dignity rests upon responsibility 

 — a man is worthy or unworthy, accordingly as he can or cannot 

 make a good answer when called upon by a voice, either from 

 within or without, to account for his conduct or for his charactei*. 

 And just as a man is responsible for the employment of the wealth 

 he possesses to the Government under which he is suffered to enjoy 

 that wealth, no matter in what way he may have become possessed 

 of it, whether by the hereditary transmission of a family estate, or 

 in any other of several feasible and conceivable ways, so is a man 

 responsible for the employment of his corporeal and mental facul- 

 ties, howsoever he may have been allowed to become seized of them, 

 to that larger and largest Government under which he has his 

 being. I believe, however, that, if men would take as much and 

 the same care in these psychological questions as the physiologist 

 does in his experiments and ol^servations, to overlook none of the 

 conditions and circumstances of the entire complex of phaenomena 

 upon which they undertake to decide, they would come to see that 

 above, and often behind, but always beside and beyond. the whirl 

 of his emotions and the smoothly fitting and rapidly playing 

 machinery of his ratiocinative and other mental faculties, there 

 stands for each man a single undecomposable something — to wit, 

 himself. This something lives in his consciousness, moves in his 

 will, and knows that for the employment and working of the entire 

 apparatus of feelings and reasoning it is individually and indivisibly 

 responsible. Its utterances have but a still small voice, and the 



