Individual through the Nervous System. 103 



and that each of these states should be perceived, discerned, and 

 named. But have the brutes the consciousness of their im- 

 pressions and movements ? The commonly received opinion 

 is that they have, but this arises from the error which makes 

 the phenomena of human life intervene in the appreciation 

 of functional operations in the life of brutes. When our 

 activity remains foreign to the facts of impressionability and 

 innervation, which produce them in our organism, we do not 

 preserve the remembrance. Now, the remembrance here gives 

 the measure of the consciousness that we have of our impressions 

 and our movements. Take, for example, the instrumental 

 musician who has become perfect in his art. Note the rapidity 

 and precision of his movements, which at first were always 

 accompanied with consciousness because produced with effort 

 and close attention. Now there is speed and perfection without 

 conscious effort, because they spring from a habit created in his 

 organism. The same may be said of the skilled and rapid 

 writer. The more the organism has been adapted by persistent 

 application to perform certain acts, the less consciousness have 

 we in executing them. Add to habit the fruit of previous 

 teaching, the permanence of this knowledge by all the means 

 employed in society and in the family ; add, again, the notions 

 representing the memory present in the mind ; finally, add 

 the physiological conditions created in preceding generations, 

 received and transmitted hereditarily by the present, and you 

 have abundant material to establish this position. In acts of 

 the understanding, in acts of the will, in acts of muscular con- 

 tractilit}-, in acts of organic sensibility as influenced by the 

 signs of language, if carefully considered and analysed, which 

 unfortunately want of time prevents us from doing, we should 

 find the same general result — viz., that the character of the man 

 depends to a great extent upon the influence of language upon 

 his nervous system. 



The third and last division to which I have to ask your 

 brief attention is the influence of environment, in one or two 

 of its phases, upon the individual through the nerves. By 



