Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/345

Rh grace in the mental system is that in which the human body is in a perfect state of health. That is a question which every man can best settle for himself. Some men under-sleep and some over-sleep; some eat too much, and some too little. Some men use stimulants who do not need them, while others avoid them who need them and would be better for their use. There is a vast amount of truth relative to the individual that is not studied by the minister, though it ought to be, as to the incoming and the outflow of force. Some clergymen prepare themselves to preach on Sunday by sitting up very late on Saturday night, and exhausting their vitality, thus compelling themselves to force their overtasked powers to extraordinary exertion to perform their Sabbath duties; which entails upon them the horrors of Blue Monday, the result of a spasmodic and drastic excitement. It is, and it ought to be, a purgatory to them. You must study yourselves as men. Is there no self-knowledge that can be acquired, so that a man shall know how to be merciful to his beast?

You see that whatever relates to the whole organization of the human body and its relations to health and to perfect symmetry must be studied, for all these relations are intimate, and concern both your own working powers and the material among men that you will have to work on.

In studying mental philosophy after this fashion, I would not have you ignore metaphysics. The perceptions of those subtle relations, near and remote, specific and generic, that obtain among spiritual facts of different kinds, I understand to be metaphysics; and that, I suppose, must be studied. I think it sharpens men and renders them familiar with the operations of the human mind, if not carried too far, and gives them a grasp and penetration that they would not get otherwise. It is favorable to moral insight, when developed in connection with the other sides of human nature. While I say that you ought to study mental philosophy with a strong physiological side to it, I do not wish it to be understood that I decry mental philosophy with a strong metaphysical side to it.

There is one question beyond that. While studying mental philosophy for the sake of religious education, and studying both sides of it, you are doing one thing; but when the question comes up how to study mental philosophy, I do not know any thing that can compare in facility of usableness with Phrenology. I do not suppose that phrenology is a perfect system of mental philosophy. It hits here and there. It needs revising, as in its present shape it is crude; but, nevertheless, when it becomes necessary to talk to people about themselves, I know of no other nomenclature which so nearly expresses what we need, and which is so facile in its use, as phrenology. Nothing can give you the formulated analysis of mind, as that can. Now let me say, particularly, a few things about this, and personally, too. I suppose I inherited from my father a tendency or intuition to read