146 
but simply traced the de facto residence of the higher conscious- 
ness, and the instrument of its action. 
21. In reply to certain physiologists who wished to resolve 
intelligence itself into animal heat, Fernard Papillon, if we may 
And the trust the writer in the Revue des Deux Mondes , 
generaSy ystem ^ en * es fh a f there is any such assimilation of the 
nervous and muscular system as this w r ould imply. 
He urges that the nerve has a kind of self-action, almost spon- 
taneity, which the muscle has not. The muscular fibre never 
contracts of itself, — it needs to be stirred. The nervous cellule, 
on the contrary, has an active power of its own. Thus the 
muscular action may be calculated; and not so the nervous. We 
seem to be here on the very borders of something beyond deter- 
minate, mechanical materialism. At times, indeed, the nervous 
vitality rules the whole animal power, interrupts, suspends, or 
otherwise influences changes of heat and motion, and seems 
to defy all attempt to reduce cerebral life to mechanism. With- 
out supposing this diagnosis to be final; we cannot help feeling 
that it suggests enough of the unknown to restrain the theories 
of a hard, all-comprehending materialism, such as Dr. Tyndall 
needs (p. 92). 
22. Thus much, then, is abundantly clear ; that in the great 
kosmos, as well as in the microcosm of the human organization, 
The doctrine there are countless points where other and unseen 
even ra have m 5s a S enc i es are work, and that we know of nothing 
true place in to hinder the calling into new action those invisible 
powers to the existence of which, in some form, science 
itself bears witness almost as a necessity of reason. It discovers 
but a superficial view of facts, then, to reason from the uniformity 
of certain natural laws against the spontaneity of the genesis, 
not of one, but even of countless beginnings of action. And 
this suffices for the whole “ theory of prayer.” Of course 
prayer implies a moral world acting on the physical, under the 
rule of a Moral Governor, and that no doubt is at the bottom of 
the objections raised. But prayer does not necessarily imply the 
least change in the elements or the laws of the kosmos, but only 
the change of primary direction by the Ruler of all, or by the 
manifold powers or forms of originate life ordered by Him.* It 
contradicts, then, no law, it absolutely requires the intervention 
of no miracle, to affirm in the universe a place for prayer, so 
that it need be no fanaticism to assert that even universally <l the 
eye of the Lord is over the righteous, and His ear is open to 
their prayer.” 
* See the address on Darwinism, delivered to this Institute in May last, 
Sections xvi. to xx., &c. 
