The Archetypal Literature for the Future.
If the science of man, the being in whom the spiritual and material worlds are fully represented, and in whom both can be studied in their relations, has been fully (though not completely or finally) developed by the revelation through experiments, of the functions of the brain, then from the establishment of anthropology there necessarily begins a literary revolution, which not only changes all philosophy, but extends through all the realms of literature. There is no realm which can escape the modifying influence of ideas which are at the basis of all conceptions of man, of society, of duty, of religion, of art, of social institutions, of the healing art, education, and government, and the new light which psychometric illumination throws upon all sciences.
The literature of the future will therefore differ widely from the literature of the past, and millions of volumes which still hold their places on the shelves of libraries will in the next century take their proper place in the mouldering mass which interests the antiquarian alone,—the mouldering mass which universities still cherish, and which helps to deaden the rising intelligence of the western world. Let us, as Tennyson says,
“Hope the best, but hold the Present
Fatal daughter of the Past.”
It is self-evident that the farther back we go for intelligence the deeper we plunge in the darkness of ignorance; and even though intuitional and moral truths may be found in the old writings, they belong to a literature imbedded in an ignorance which necessarily darkens all that comes down from such periods.
The benumbing influence of antiquity—or rather of that extended period which may be called the Aristotelian age, the age in which all philosophic thought was utterly benumbed by the Greek literature—has not yet passed away. American writers are just beginning to get rid of their absolute subserviency to foreign models in all things, and in this partial independence they are still subservient to the fundamental philosophic and ethical ideas of the past. The change that is taking place is only in minor matters.
Even so graceful and able a writer as Longfellow illustrates fully the truth of these suggestions. Mr. Charles F. Johnson, in a well-written essay on Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, says:
“Most people feel that national temper is of slow evolution; that many heterogeneous elements must be fused and blended here; that we too must have a past, and that the spirit of our past must be taken up and transmitted before a new type is realized in a new art and a new literature. We can see that Longfellow was essentially a scholar—a receiver of impressions from books; that he was like an Æolian harp, blown upon by many winds, so that his music was in many regards necessarily a melodious echo of what was ‘whispered by world-wandering winds.’ And we can see, too, that he came into American literary life just as it was passing from the germ to the plant, and that every year he became more distinctive.”
There is nothing profound in this view, but it expresses well the average thought of the period,—that Americanism in literature must be the very gradual growth of new circumstances, experience, and associations, which may superficially modify the unbroken mass of thought which has been transplanted from Europe, just as vines and flowers take on their modifications in a new soil and climate.
Far different from this is the view that anthropology gives us. The foreign plant, it is true, will gradually change, but a native plant will ultimately take its place by the law of the “survival of the fittest.” The exotic must die out, for it was but a hothouse plant, reared in universities and cathedrals.
The thought, the science, the philosophy, and even the forms of literary expression, for this continent, will be those which spring from the bosom of nature, fresh and strong, imbued with the spiritual element of immortality, the element of luminous originality.
How and whence is this to come? It will come by the complete emancipation of the American mind from the thraldom of the false philosophies, the false theologies, and the debasingly narrow conceptions of science which have been transplanted into American colleges. When the strong American intellect shall realize that in the science of man and in the cultivation of psychometry there is more of enlightenment, of wisdom, and of actual knowledge than in all that colleges cherish to-day, we shall have such a flood of original thought and immensely valuable knowledge as would seem impossible to the literati who now have the public ear.
Even the narrowest dogmatists of science are beginning to have a glimpse of the nobler knowledge of the future. Prof. Huxley, the most dogmatic of British sceptics, has recently said:
“The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all science, means the demonstration of order and natural causation among phenomena which had not previously been brought under those conceptions. Nobody who is acquainted with the progress of scientific thinking in every department of human knowledge, in the course of the last two centuries, will be disposed to deny that immense provinces have been added to the realm of science, or to doubt that the next two centuries will be witnesses of a vastly greater annexation. More particularly in the region of the physiology of the nervous system is it justifiable to conclude from the progress that has been made in analyzing the relations between material and psychical phenomena that vast further advances will be made, and that sooner or later all the so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will have, not only their relations to one another, but their relations to physical phenomena, connected in natural series of causes and effects, strictly defined. In other words, while at present we know only the nearer moiety of the chain of causes and effects by which the phenomena we call material give rise to those which we call mental, hereafter we shall get to the further end of the series.”
The “further end of the series,” however, is vastly different from anything within the mental range of the distinguished professor, whose ultra materialism led him to revamp the old Cartesian doctrine that animals were only machines, like clocks or mills, running automatically, and destitute of sensation, and intelligence.
The science and philosophy of the future will be distinguished by their mastery of the realm of mind, and the closer approximation of the human to the Divine, not only in intelligence, but in ethics.
The Journal of Man, as the first periodical organ of the new philosophy, will attempt gradually to initiate the archetypal forms of thought of the coming period, in which the disappearance of old philosophy and ethics shall leave room for growth.
Not that all ethics shall be changed among the civilized races, for there are simple primary and true conceptions which are universally recognized, and are embalmed in all religions. Yet these few universal ideas are but the rudiments of ethics, and no more constitute an ethical system worthy of the name, than the four primary processes of arithmetic constitute a system of mathematical science. The future is to evolve the true ethics, and therewith the educational system that will bring the true ethics into all spheres of human life.
In all past time there has been no ethical system competent to establish a perfectly harmonious social state, and no system of education competent to lift society to a higher life. Education as it has been brightens life with literature and art, but does not elevate it. The same old element of poverty, misery, disease, crime, and insanity marches on, hand in hand with the college and the church, as it formerly went hand in hand with the hunting and warring barbarians of the forest. And the dull, blunted conscience of the time, lulled by the softly solemn platitudes of the pulpit and the soulless system of education, rebels not against the old social order. In full view of the past twenty-five centuries, may we not exclaim with Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps on this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The dusty way to death.”
But not to the end of time shall it be. The nineteenth century has seen the glimmering dawn of the true civilization. How it came, what it is, and what it is destined to realize, the Journal of Man will attempt to show.
Synopsis of Cerebral Science.* * Copyrighted, 1887, by Joseph Rodes Buchanan.
CHAPTER I.
GENERAL PLAN OF THE BRAIN.
The brain the centre of life—Its organs not distinctly separated—Its double functions and degrees of energy—Difficulty of nomenclature, chiefly basilar—The pathognomic law—Its application to the brain—The four cardinal directions and four divisions, the coronal, basilar, anterior, and occipital—Their effects on the character and constitution—The method of locating organs—The four groups—The law of antagonism—Its certainty and necessity—Difficulty of expressing it—Correspondence of the English language and the brain—Its limits—Radiating groups of organs—Contrasts of development.
The details of cerebral science will be much more easily understood if we begin with a comprehensive view of the entire plan of the functions and structure.
The brain is distinguished from all other organs by being the source of commands which all other organs obey, and being the immediate seat of the soul, which has no knowledge of anything occurring in the body, until a message or impression has reached it through nervous channels. The compression of all the nerves before they enter the cranium and connect with the brain would deprive us of all knowledge of the body, and of all sensations or perceptions; and the compression of the brain itself would render us totally unconscious, as if dead,—incapable of either thought or action. Manifestly, therefore, all the powers of the soul are lodged in and exercised through the brain; and as all distinct nerve structures have essentially different functions, and every different function requires a different structure, it is obvious that the vast variety of our psychic faculties, intellectual, emotional, sensitive, passional, and physiological, requires a corresponding multiplicity in the nervous apparatus; and this incalculably great multiplicity we find in the brain.
The crude, mechanical idea that all the organs of the brain should be distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are indistinguishable from the sensitive.
Moreover, the functions of the brain are not like those of the spinal cord, of a widely distinct and opposite character in adjacent fibres, but exhibit a gradual variation, like the blending colors of the rainbow. The sensitive or psychic individual who touches any part of the head and feels an impression of the emotional, intellectual, or impulsive function in the subjacent convolution of the brain, will find the impression gradually changing as he moves his finger along the surface, until, after passing half around the cerebrum, he will feel an influence exactly opposite to that with which he started.
As there are many millions of sensitive persons who are capable of receiving these impressions from the brain, we cannot but wonder at the unanimous indifference (which some may hereafter call stupidity) which hinders the medical profession and scientists generally from becoming acquainted with such facts, which I have proclaimed and demonstrated until I have grown weary of attempting to instruct wilful ignorance. Not only does the nervaura, direct from the brain convey such impressions of organic action, but almost any substance held for a few moments in contact with any part of the head will absorb enough of the local nervaura to convey a distinct impression to a sensitive, similar to that derived directly from the head.
Although the organs of the brain are thus distinct, they are not distinct like the spokes of a wheel, each totally independent of the other and fixed or invariable in its own simple character; for all organs have double functions, and a great variety in their degree of manifestation.
The double function is psychic and physiological, or physical. When the action of the brain is confined within the cranium, its action is purely psychic; but when its influence passes into the body, it produces physiological effects. As the brain is the seat of the soul, its action is essentially and primarily psychic; but as it is the commander of the body, and the source of its spiritual vitality, all its conditions or actions affect the body; and hence every organ has its dual action, psychic and physiological. Cerebral physiology and sarcognomy explain in detail how the brain and the mental conditions affect the body; cerebral psychology shows how the brain and soul are correlated. The purpose of this treatise is to show how the brain is correlated with both soul and body, giving the principal attention to the former.
If cerebral organs all have this double function, it is manifestly exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to find any words competent to express the double functions, and it will be necessary to adapt our nomenclature to expressing the psychic function, leaving the physiological to be expressed otherwise. As the basilar organs act more directly upon the body, their nomenclature will be more suggestive of physiological effects. The organ, for example, of alimentiveness or appetite will suggest by its name its relation to the stomach.
The difficulty of arranging a satisfactory nomenclature for a certain portion of the brain, in consequence of the varying energy of organic action, is very great, and must be met by using the word which will express in a general manner the organic tendency, leaving to the intelligence of the reader to imagine the variations of intensity. In the greatest energy of organic action the opposite faculty is entirely overcome, and the conduct becomes abnormal, for normal action implies the harmonious co-operation of all parts of the brain. Nevertheless, it is in this abnormal or excessive action that we get the true, isolated tendency or function in its naked expression.
For example, if we refer to that portion of the brain near the mastoid process, which in its excessive action produces murder, we perceive that as murder is an abnormal action, such a term is not a suitable name for an organ, as it would convey the impression that every human being has a constant murderous impulse, and that the faculty is kept inactive when murder is not committed; from which we might infer that the human constitution is badly planned.
Still, it is not to be concealed that murderous violence is the ultimate result of this organ when unrestrained,—that it is the most conspicuous faculty in carnivorous animals, and alas! that it has a terrible and at times predominant action in the masculine portion of the human race. Throughout the greater part of ancient history the murderous violence of this faculty has been as conspicuous in the human race as in the wild beasts. Even to-day, after centuries of so-called civilization and religion, no man’s life would be safe if not protected by policemen; and the civilized nations, with a skilful ferocity, devote the major part of their governmental revenues to preparations for international homicide as a defence against the murderous impulse in their neighbors, and to watching or controlling the murderers within their own limits; whose homicidal propensities, however, are not restrained from mutual homicide, by agreement, in the warlike form of the duel, which is considered a proper institution to cultivate a martial spirit and promote the efficiency of the army,—ay, and even tolerated in the German system of education, provided that life is not actually sacrificed.
Murder is therefore not an improper term to express the consummate energy of this basilar organ, if we at the same time understand its gentler manifestations; and Dr. Gall was a faithful student of nature when he called this faculty the “carnivorous instinct, or disposition to murder,” for that is the way that it exhibits in animals, and, unfortunately, in mankind also.
Yet as an element of character, and an organ in the brain, this faculty needs a more general and comprehensive term than murder to express its ordinary action. It operates as an impelling and modifying influence in our daily life, giving a certain kind of energy to physical and mental action, as our fruits have a certain degree of sweetness in their juices which is not due to crystals of sugar, though if the sweetening element were extracted it would appear in that solid form. Thus the violent impulsive energy which appears in our vigorous language, emphatic gestures, ultra sentiments, and threatening expressions, if it could be isolated from its psychic combination, would appear in its isolated purity as an impulse to the destruction of life and everything else that stands before us.
Hence the term Destructiveness has been very properly applied to this organ by Spurzheim. Yet even this term expresses too much for its average daily action, and Violence, Impulsiveness, or Vehemence would come nearer to expressing its ordinary manifestation.
The reader will now perceive that the psychic functions of certain organs can seldom be adequately expressed by one word, and that three words are required to express fully the moderate, the active, and the abnormal manifestations. Fortunately, however, this difficulty of nomenclature applies only to that portion of the brain which tends to the abnormal. Man’s nobler faculties belonging to the upper region of the brain are essentially good and normal. The abnormal difficulty does not come into their description.
Its operation is limited to the region lying around the ears, the basilar region, the tendency of which is to exhaust the spiritual vitality of the brain in ministering to the body. This will be clearly understood when we understand the fundamental law of all cerebral action, the law of direction, or