Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/297

Rh success, are attempting to make faith, emotion, hallucination do work which, so far as it is within the range of possibility, belongs to a well-devised system of physical, or combined physical and mental, treatment. It looks sometimes as if, according to the well-known Latin adage, the people really did wish to be deceived; and the upholders of sound doctrine and sane methods are doubtless tempted at times to be discouraged. The thing to do in such a case is to look away from the causes of discouragement and renew the battle against delusion and imposture with more energy than before, knowing that some good must come of every manifestation of the true nature of things.

We have no quarrel, as may already have been gathered, with those who maintain that some use may be made of a wise direction of thought and a healthy stimulation of mental interest in combating various forms of physical ailment. Every competent physician does what he can to "keep up the spirits" of his patient; and the common wisdom of mankind has recognized that mental conditions have in many cases much to do with questions of health and disease. A "mens Sana" is, we have not the least doubt, a powerful aid toward the maintenance of a "corpus sanum"; but, when this has been to the fullest extent admitted, it remains none the less true that the body is subject to the laws of matter, and that a given affection of our bodily organization will modify in the most important manner the action of our mind. In this respect man has no superiority over the brute: the physical causes which affect the latter affect man equally, and sometimes in greater measure, the equilibrium of the human constitution being perhaps, on the whole, less stable than that of the lower creatures. We may say of man and the lower animals what Shylock says of Jew and Christian that they are "fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer." That man has the higher mentality does not in the slightest degree exempt him from the operation of physical laws, though it does enable him to surround his life with safeguards, and in a general way pursue and secure his well-being by methods which no other species can understand or imitate.

All this may seem to most of our readers very commonplace and obvious, but nevertheless there is need to repeat even such truths as these when we find some pages of a scientific periodical devoted to the advocacy of contrary doctrines. "Man," we read, "is a soul which, through an inherent tendency toward articulate manifestation, has picked up a little plastic material and erected it into an animated statue. This same dust has been, and will be, used over and over again to express other and different grades and qualities of life; and therefore it can have no distinctive character or identity of its own." It seems a great pity that man being "a soul" should require the help of a little characterless "dust" in order to arrive at "articulate manifestation." How is it, we feel inclined to ask, that so poor a quality of dust should be able to render so mighty a service to a soul? It is also a question what kind of existence a soul enjoys, when, for want of what the dust can supply, "pulveris exiqui munera," as Horace hath it, it as yet possesses no power of "articulate manifestation." But perhaps, before we trouble ourselves with such