234 PSYCHOLOGY. 



Eestful than ever is the work, the work ; aiul fuller aud 

 deeper the import of coinniou duties aud of couiuiou goods. 



But what here strikes us so forcibly cu the Hagraut 

 scale exists ou every scale, down to the imperceptible 

 transition from one hour's outlook to that of the next. Ex- 

 perience is remoulding us every moment, aud our mental 

 reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our 

 experience of the whole world up to that date. The analo- 

 gies of brain-physiology must again be appealed to to 

 corroborate our view. 



Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that, 

 whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the auro- 

 ra borealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every 

 pulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at a 

 given moment is a product of many factors. The acciden- 

 tal state of local nutrition or blood-supply may be among 

 them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of 

 outward objects ou the sense-organs during the moment, 

 so is another certainly the very special susceptibility in 

 which the organ has been left at that moment b}^ all it 

 has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly 

 determined by the nature of this entire past succession. 

 Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be 

 somewhat different. Each present brain-state is a record 

 in which the eye of Omniscience might read all the fore- 

 gone history of its OAvner. It is out of the question, then, 

 that any total brain-state should identically recur. Some- 

 thing like it may recur ; but to suppose it to recur would 

 be equivalent to the absurd admission that all the states 

 that had intervened between its two appearances had been 

 pure nonentities, and that the organ after their passage 

 was exactly as it was before. And (to consider shorter 

 periods) just as, in the senses, an impression feels very dif- 

 ferently according to what has preceded it ; as one color 

 succeeding another is modified by the contrast, silence 

 sounds delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale is 

 sung up, sounds unlike itself when the scale is sung down ; 

 as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the ap- 

 parent form of the other lines, and as in music the whole 

 aesthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of 



