Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/114

102 gods and good omens, and the left with the north, demons, shadows, &c., and was left to perform all the unclean acts of life. The right is the hand of greeting, blessing, oath-taking, writing, throwing, fighting with sword or spear, &c., while the left is the naughty hand, to follow which leads to the bad, the Cinderella, held to often hard but ignoble service. Even superstition has added its weight to the influence of so many occupations, and leads to lying, sitting, seeing, &c., one-sidedly, making the average modern male body, to those who are used to seeing it unclad, as lop-sided as that of the Greek was symmetrical. There may be great selective advantage in the capacity of locating some functions mainly in the left and others in the right hemisphere, and it is not impossible that there is some mysterious advantage to self-consciousness or double-dealing with ourselves in the predominance of one side over another, e.g., possibly the oft-cited asymmetry of Kant and others, or even in the fact of somatic duality; but such possibility must not blind us to the danger of ill-balanced work, so often falsely called overwork. [sic]

Finally, there is a mystic side of this problem, which has attracted or repelled many, and been referred to in many ways. Why are p and q so often confounded by children and others, p and b never; or why must we so often stop and think which is left and right, but never which is up and down? Ulach has hardly given an explanation in saying that the first form of letters are halves of a horizontal, the last of a vertical symmetry, and that the latter requires a repetition of the same sensation, the former not. Again, when the function, of reflex action was first established, it was argued by metaphysicians that so slight and accidental a distinction as that between anterior and posterior, could not make so profound a difference as that between the active and passive life of the soul, which was a simple spaceless entity. So, more recently, it has been said that, so far as the brain represents it, the soul must be double. To this it has been replied that an extended seat of the soul must now be admitted, that even the corpus callosum may fail without annihilating soul-life, that a monadic Ego may occur twice, and that the soul is a solidarity and not a functional or non-extended unity. Why the nervous system was so formed that a frontal, medial, and horizontal plane through it should represent functions so distinct as the sensory and motor arm of a reflex arc, the right and left "function" and the direction of gravity respectively, is a question to our mind quite without sense. Not so, however, the question, what influence upon the psychic development of animals and man is due to the power to bring two symmetrical parts of the body into contact, which a fish, e.g., does not possesss. If we bring the two hands together, the one being hot and the other cold, we experience two sensations and not an intermediate temperature. So too if we could do as Socrates is said to have boasted himself able to do, viz., rotate both eyes inward till, over a low nasal bridge, each could look