We know by experience that a spark of fire will start the principles of powder into motion, which, were it not stimulated by the positive principle of father nature, which finds this germ lying quietly in the womb of space, would be silently inactive for all ages, without being able to move or help itself, save for the motor principle of life given by the father of all motion.
HOW IS ACTION PRODUCED.
Right here we could and should ask the question: Is this action produced by electricity put in motion, or is it the active principle that comes as a spiritual man? If so, it is useless to try, or hope to know what life is in its minutia. But we do know that life can only display its natural forces by the visible action of the forms it produces.
If we inspect man as a machine, we find a complete building, a machine that courts inspection and criticism. It demands a full exploration of all its parts with their uses. Then the mind is asked to see or find the connection between the physical, and the spiritual. By nature you can reason on the roads that the powers of life are arranged to suit its system of motion.
If life is an individualized personage, as we might express that mysterious something, and it must have definite arrangements by which it can be united and act with matter; then we are admonished to acquaint ourselves with the arrangements of those natural connections, the one or many, as they are connected to all parts of the completed being.
As motion is the first and only evidence of life, by this thought we are conducted to the machinery through which life works to accomplish these results.
ACQUAINT YOURSELF WITH THE MACHINERY.
If the brain be that division in which force is generated or stored, you must at all hazards acquaint yourself with that structure of this machine; trace the connection from brain to heart, from heart to lungs, and other organs that can be acted upon by the brain, whose duty may be to construct the fleshy and bony parts of the body. Trace from the brain to the chemical laboratories, and note their action as they unite and prepare blood and other fluids, that are used in the economy of this vital, self-constructing and self-moving wonder, commonly known as man; wherein life and matter do unite, and express their friendly relation one with the other; and while this relation exists we have the living man only, expressing and proving the relation that can exist between life and matter, from the lowest living atom, to the greatest worlds. They can only express form and action by this law. Harmony only dwells where obstructions do not exist.
DUTY OF THE OSTEOPATH.
The Osteopath finds here the field in which he can dwell forever. His duties as a philosopher admonish him, that life and matter can be united, and that union cannot continue with any hindrance to the free and absolute motion. Therefore his duty is to keep away from the track all that will hinder the complete passage of the forces of the nervous system, that by that power the blood may be delivered and adjusted, to keep the system in normal condition. Here is your duty; do it well, if you wish to succeed.