Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/659

Rh persistently. Anatomists and physiologists, as they study the body, may be so engrossed in the object of their investigations that they forget that it is not the whole of man. They may forget that this dead body which they study does not offer any explanation of the deepest and most conspicuous phenomena of human life and experience. The cadaver on the dissecting-table is not a man. Neither the anatomist's scalpel nor the histologist's microscope can ever discover what it was in that body which made it a man, distinct from other men.

The lips, tongue, vocal cords, are all there, but it was by these, not from them, that came the words of love or hate, entreaty or command, which the man spake during his life. The brain is there, it is or was the organ of the mind, but the thought—where is that? Evidently we have not here all that made this man a man, and we must see more than the body if we are to know man; we must see that in that body there was an essence—a something which we can not define, but which is as real as if most definite, and that this something, this soul, is far more important than any other part of man. When he stands over his dissecting-table, the anatomist may think of man as only an aggregation of organs and tissues, and these of differently arranged and modified cells; but when he sends his thought into the recesses of his own heart, when he calls before him the experiences of his inmost life, when he looks around him and sees men—their activities, struggles, defeats, triumphs, courage, even their meanness and knavery, and still more when he knows of their thoughts of the hereafter, their longings for something better and higher than this world can afford them—when, in short, he stands face to face with the phenomena of human life in its varied phases, is he not compelled to believe that it all must have some other source than the molecular and chemical forces which he finds in the body?

It is in this fact—in the existence of a soul in man—that the physician of the future must rest his hope of success. That man has in himself capacity for growth, that progress is and always must be possible to him—these are truths that must sustain the sanitary reformer in the midst of greatest discouragement. If it be true that man may live not only for the present, but as well for the future; if he can be made to see that he may not only make his present life better and nobler, but that in doing this he is affecting his future life; if he can be brought to understand that what he is in this life must necessarily determine largely what he is to be in the life beyond the grave; that, though the body is not the soul, yet, as the medium by which the soul manifests itself, its condition affects the soul—will he not be ready to listen to the teachings of any who can help him to a better physical and so to a better spiritual life? Only as the physician holds before his mind the whole of man can he reach the full development of his own life; only thus can he raise man to that height of, sanitary