|BF 141 
 
 .P2 
 
 1886 
 Copy 1 
 
 A STUDY 
 
 IN 
 
 HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 CHAUTAUQUA PRESS, 
 
 C. L. S. C. DEPARTMENT. 
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 A STUDY 
 
 ^jLf^-i.:^ 
 
 //-/fc. 
 
 IN 
 
 HUMAN NATURE, 
 
 LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 CHAUTAUQUA PRESS, 
 
 C. L. S. C. Department. 
 
 1886. 
 
The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recommended by 
 fi Council of six. It must, however, be understood that reeom- 
 rnendation does not involve an approval by the Council, or by 
 any member of it, of every pri . iple or doctrine contained in the 
 book recommended. 
 
 
 t(J»on 
 DEC 8- 1938 
 
 I 
 
 Copyright 1885, by Phillips & Hunt, 805 Broadway, New York. 
 
^ PREFACE. 
 
 3^ 
 
 The object of this little book is purely practical. It is 
 written to aid parents, teachers, and pastors, in their work 
 of character-building ; incidentally, too, to aid each indi- 
 vidual to build himself. It grew out of a practical need, 
 and was written wholly with a practical end in view. 
 
 Some years ago Dr. J. H. Vincent designed, as a part of 
 his Chautauqua University, a Chautauqua School of The- 
 ology. Its object was not to supersede the thorough 
 courses of biblical and theological study pursued in the 
 seminaries, but to supplement them ; to aid pastors in 
 pursuing their studies after they had already entered on 
 their parish work, and to enable laymen and others, who 
 were engaged in ministerial or quasi ministerial labor, to 
 equip themselves more thoroughly for their work. He 
 proposed to incorporate in the curriculum of this Chau- 
 tauqua School of Theology a " Department of Human 
 Nature," the object of which should be to aid the stu- 
 dent in studying man, individually and socially ; human 
 nature in history, in fiction, in the parish, and in society, 
 thus enabling him to deal more wisely, because more 
 truly scientifically, with the problems of individual and 
 social life. Dr. Vincent asked me to take charge of 
 this department, to create and to cultivate it. With 
 much misgiving, I undertook the task ; moved thereto 
 partly by a warm personal affection and esteem for 
 Dr. Vincent, partly by a great respect for the work 
 which he is doing, and partly by a special interest in 
 this particular department. 
 
 But no sooner had correspondence been opened with 
 the students who desired to enter on this study, than 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 we found ourselves confronted with an unexpected diffi- 
 culty. There was no analysis of Human Nature which 
 c ;uld be prescribed as a basis for our proposed course. The 
 experiment of recommending several treatises, and leaving 
 the students to make their own analysis, was not success- 
 ful, and I was thus compelled to prepare an introduction to 
 our study before we could prosecute it. Hence this treat- 
 ise, the product of studies pursued as recreation for many 
 years, but of composition completed in a few months. 
 
 Having once undertaken to write at all, I have endeav- 
 ored to prepare this Study in Human Nature, in a form 
 so practical, so simple, and so broad, that it might be a 
 help to every mother who desires to study the nature of 
 her child, every teacher who wishes to study the nature 
 of his pupil, every pastor who aims to study the character 
 either of his parish, or of a single parishioner. All scholastic 
 subtleties, all doubtful disputations between different 
 schools, all technical terms, I have carefully avoided. My 
 aim is not to expound a system of philosophy, but to in- 
 cite the reader to a study of Human Nature, and to help 
 him in pursuing it. 
 
 Mental science has fallen under a popular ban. It is 
 thought to be a hopeless plowing of a barren soil. But the 
 sublimest work of God is man, and there can be no wor- 
 thier object of devout study than him whom God has 
 made after his own image ; and surely no object about 
 which we are more concerned to know, whether we regard 
 our own welfare or the well-being of our fellow-men. To 
 all who love their fellow-men, and desire to know and 
 serve them better, this Httle attempt to aid them in that 
 knowledge and service is dedicated by 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 CoRNWALL-ON- Hudson, N. Y. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE 
 
 I. The Necessity of the Study 7 
 
 II. A Preliminary Question 12 
 
 III. True and False Materialism 16 
 
 IV. The Temperaments 27 
 
 v. Analysis of Human Nature 31 
 
 VI. The Animal Impulses 36 
 
 VII. The Social and Industrial Impulses 42 
 
 VIII. The Spiritual Impulses 49 
 
 IX. The Acquisitive Powers. — i. The Senses and the Supersen- 
 
 suous 58 
 
 X. The Acquisitive Powers. — 2. The Reflective Faculties 66 
 
 XI. Attention, Memory, Will 71 
 
A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE NECESSITY OF THE STUDY. 
 
 "Know thyself" was an ancient Greek apothegm. Lord 
 Beaconsfield, in his famous address before the University of 
 Edinburgh, declared that the fundamental conditions of suc- 
 cess in life were two — knowing one's self, and knowing the 
 needs of one's age or epoch. But of all knowledge, self- 
 knowledge is the rarest ; perhaps, also, the most difficult to 
 attain. It is only recently that physiology has become a 
 study in our schools. Until within a few years all knowledge 
 of the body was thought to be a specialty belonging only 
 to the doctors. Even to-day mental science — the organism 
 and operation of the mind — is not studied in our schools. 
 This is left to the higher classes in our colleges, and studied 
 there as an abstract, not as a practical, science. Every man 
 ought to know his own nature ; his bodily strength and weak- 
 ness ; his mental strength and weakness ; his moral strength 
 and weakness. A knowledge, concrete, not abstract, practical, 
 not theoretical, of human nature, is essential to the best and 
 truest success in life — to health, to development, to useful- 
 ness. 
 
 I. No man can keep either mind or body in health unless 
 he knows what his mind and body are. He cannot keep 
 himself in order unless he knows how he is constituted. The 
 body is a wonderfully delicate machine. It is placed in a 
 world where there are many influences at work destructive 
 of it. There is poison in food, in water, in air; there is 
 
A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 "death in the pot." There is evil in excess; there is evil 
 in scant measure. Men suffer from too much air and from too 
 little ; from over-feeding and from under-feeding; from excess- 
 ive sleep and from too little sleep ; from too violent exercise 
 and from too little exercise. We must know not only what, 
 but also how much, our bodies need. The specialists aver 
 that most men have a streak of insanity in them. A thor- 
 oughly sane mind is as rare as a thoroughly healthy body. 
 To keep the mind well balanced, to preserve it in good order, 
 to enable it to work clearly, quickly, efficiently, regularly, 
 requires a knowledge of the mind and of the conditions of 
 mental health. The ministers assure us that all men are 
 diseased morally. Life abundantly bears out their assertion. 
 No man is perfectly healthy, morally; for perfect health is 
 a perfect balance of all the moral powers. Every faculty has 
 its own disease. The conscience may become cruel — witness 
 the Inquisition. Religion may become superstition — witness 
 the history of all pagan and some forms of the Christian relig- 
 ion. Love may become sentiment — witness the story of 
 many a child ruined by the false love of a doting mother. 
 And observe that every man's body, mind, and spirit is dis- 
 tinct from every other man's. Its conditions of health are 
 peculiar. What is one man's meat is another man's p%son. 
 One man needs cereals, another meat ; one man needs to 
 read more fiction, another needs to abandon it altogether. 
 One man needs to cultivate his reverence, another his con- 
 science, a third his sympathy. To produce, to cultivate, to 
 maintain health of body, mind, and spirit, every man has 
 need to know his own nature, the laws of his own being, the 
 condition of his own health. 
 
 2. Self-knowledge is equally indispensable to growth, edu- 
 cation, development. Some of the Hebrew scholars tell us 
 that the familiar text in Proverbs about child-training should 
 read : Train up a child in his own way, that is, according to 
 the bent of his natural genius, and when he is old he will not 
 
THE NECESSITY OF THE STUDY. 
 
 depart from it. Whether this is sound exegesis or not, it 
 is certainly sound philosophy. We must know the nature of 
 what we would develop. We must understand what it is be- 
 fore we begin to shape and fashion it for its future. Self- 
 knowledge is the condition of self-culture. Are you deficient 
 in imagination } You must both know that fact, and what 
 are the methods of developing imagination, or you cannot 
 grow symmetrically. Has God endowed your boy with quali- 
 ties which fit him for the merchant ? you only waste your 
 time, and destroy his usefulness, by trying to make a minister 
 of him. If Martin Luther's father could have had his way 
 we should have had no Reformation, or a very different one ; 
 for he wanted to make a lawyer of Martin. History is full 
 of instances of men who knew their own nature better than 
 their parents did, and so came to something in spite of 
 parental blunders ; and still fuller of instances of men who 
 neither knew themselves nor were understood by their 
 parents, and so came to nothing. The best seed will pro- 
 duce fruit only in the hands of one who knows what it is, and 
 therefore what soil and cultivation it requires. Moral devel- 
 opment requires moral self-knowledge. There is not one 
 specific for all sins. Christ is not the world's medicine, but 
 the world's physician ; and his prescriptions are various for 
 various disorders. To grow in holiness is to grow in health- 
 iness ; and this requires a knowledge of your own nature, 
 that you may know what needs feeding and what needs 
 pruning. Some men are weak through lack of self-esteem, 
 and some men through too much. Some men pay too much 
 attention to other people's opinion, and some men too little. 
 Some men pay a blind reverence too easily, and some scarcely 
 know what reverence means. Each nature requires its own 
 education. The training which will help the man of undue 
 self-esteem, will hurt the man who has too little. A chief 
 end of life is to grow aright ; and no man can grow aright 
 
 unless he understands the principles of his own nature. 
 1* 
 
A STUD V IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 3. For the same reasons a knowledge of the principles of 
 human nature is essential to the highest and best usefulness. 
 A knowledge of human nature is the first condition of the 
 successful conduct of life. Every business man, lawyer, 
 doctor, statesman, needs it. If a man should attempt to 
 farm without any knowledge of seeds and soils, or to mine 
 without any knowledge of metals, he would be sure to fail; 
 how can he succeed in dealing with men if he knows nothing 
 about human nature. The merchant needs this knowledge 
 to select his salesmen; the salesman to sell his goods; the 
 doctor to secure and retain the confidence of his patients; 
 the statesman to adapt his laws and policies to men as they 
 are ; the editor to provide intellectual food that actual 
 readers will read and profit by. All successful men have a 
 knowledge of human nature. Sometimes they have acquired 
 it empirically, not scientifically; that is, they have picked it 
 up by their dealings among men, not by a careful study of 
 principles ; but in one way or the other they have got it. 
 
 4. This knowledge is essential to the well-being of the 
 family. Every girl ought to be taught the general principles 
 of human nature, for it is probable that she will be a mother, 
 and she needs this knowledge to know how to care for and 
 to train her children. One of the great causes of domestic 
 ir felicities, quarrels, and divorces is ignorance of human nat- 
 ure. The husband and wife do not know either themselves 
 or each other ; they do not know how to correct their own 
 faults or the faults they see in each other. If they did, they 
 would have hope of curing the present evil ; and hope would 
 give patience; and patience would prevent bickerings, and 
 strife, and separation. 
 
 5. Especially is this knowledge of human nature necessary 
 to all men whose professional duty it is to train or instruct 
 others. The teacher needs it. It is more necessary to him 
 than a knowledge of Greek, or Latin, or mathematics. He 
 must know the minds which he is to mold and the laws by 
 
THE NECESSITY OF THE STUDY. VL 
 
 which they are to be molded. There have been many- 
 scholars greater than Thomas Arnold, of Rugby, but never a 
 greater teacher, because he knew so thoroughly well boy- 
 nature and its laws. The minister needs it. It is more 
 necessary to him than a knowledge of Hebrew or theology. 
 He must know the natures he is to cure, and how to cure 
 them. He must know the pathology of pride, vanity, covet- 
 ousness, ambition, passion, if he would either mend the man- 
 ners or change the lives of his congregation. 
 
 The object of this little treatise is to afford some help to 
 ministers, teachers, parents, and men and women generally, 
 who wish to understand the general principles of human 
 nature, and to aid them in a study of men, and women, and 
 children, for the purpose of protecting them from temptation, 
 developing them, and building them up into a Christian 
 manhood and womanhood — perfect men in Christ Jesus. Its 
 object is wholly practical ; its style will be as simple and 
 plain as I can make it. 
 
IS A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 A PRELIMINARY QUESTION. 
 
 It has been greatly discussed among philosophers whether 
 the mind is simple or complex ; whether it is one and indi- 
 vidual, or made up of various distinct powers and faculties ; 
 whether one and the same power imagines, reasons, remem- 
 bers, feels, or whether there are distinct powers, of which one 
 imagines, another reasons, a third remembers, a fourth feels. 
 Let me first get this question clearly before the reader's mind. 
 
 Man is equipped with various senses, each of which has 
 its own peculiar function. It can perform that function, and 
 no other. The ear can hear, but it cannot see ; the eye can 
 see, but it cannot taste ; the palate can taste, but it cannot 
 smell. The body is composite. It is made up of different 
 organs or faculties. The whole man is an orchestra ; each 
 organ is a single instrument. If that is bioken, or gets out 
 of tune, no other can take its place. Now some persons 
 suppose that the mind is similarly a composite ; that it is 
 made up of a variety of faculties and powers ; that there is 
 one power or faculty which reasons, another which compares, 
 a third which remembers or recalls, a fourth which imagines, 
 etc. Those who hold this opinion, however, are not agreed 
 as to how many mental faculties or powers there are. Some 
 suppose there are very few, others that there are very many. 
 A very common classification or division of the mind is into 
 three powers or classes of powers : the reason, the sensibili- 
 ties or feelings, and the will. Others divide these generic 
 classes again into a great variety of reasoning and feeling 
 powers, each confined to its own exercise or function, as the 
 ear to hearing and the eye to seeing. 
 
A PRELIMINAR V Q UESTION. 13 
 
 Other thinkers suppose that there is no such division ; that 
 the mind is not made up of a variety of organs at all, that it 
 is simple and indivisible. The mouth is so formed that it 
 can perform two very different functions — it can eat and it 
 can speak. There are not two organs, one an eating and 
 the other a speaking organ, but one organ which now eats, 
 now speaks. So some scholars suppose that there is one 
 mind or soul which is absolutely indivisible, but which exerts 
 itself in different ways at different times : it sometimes re- 
 members, sometimes imagines, sometimes loves, sometimes 
 hates, sometimes reasons, sometimes chooses ; but it is always 
 the same power which remembers, imagines, hates, loves, 
 reasons, and chooses. 
 
 Now, this is a question on which no absolute conclusion 
 can be reached. We cannot analyze the mind as we can 
 analyze a substance in a laboratory, and see what are its con- 
 stituent parts, and determine whether it has any parts, or is 
 a simple substance. We have only two methods of judging 
 about the mind, and neither of these methods gives us any con- 
 clusive answer to the question whether the mind is simple or 
 complex. We can observe the operation of other men's 
 minds by studying its results in action, or in speech which is 
 a kind of action; and we can study the action of our own 
 minds by looking within and seeing what our own thoughts 
 and feelings are. But, in both these cases, we study only the 
 operations, not the mind itself; and neither a study of the 
 results of mental operations in the actions of men and 
 women about us, nor a study of our own mental operations 
 by looking within and trying to ascertain of our self-con- 
 sciousness how we think and feel, throw any important light 
 on the question whether the mind itself is simple or complex. 
 All that we know about the mind is its operation ; all else is 
 theory. 
 
 There are some metaphysical and abstract arguments for the 
 opinion that the mind, the I within, that controls the body, what 
 
14 A STUDY ly HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 the Germans call the ego — which is Latin for I — is simple, 
 not complex; that is, one power operating in different ways 
 and doing different things. I am myself inclined to think 
 that the better opinion ; but it is not necessary here to go 
 into this question at all, for what we are going to study is not 
 the mind itself, but human nature, that is, the operations of 
 the mind. And there is no doubt that the operations of the 
 mind are complex. There may be, I am inclined to think 
 there is, but one power, which perceives and thinks and feels 
 and wills ; but perceiving and thinking and feeling and will- 
 ing are very different actions, and it is only with the actions 
 that we have to do. 
 
 In this book, then, I speak habitually of the different 
 faculties or powers of the mind. The reader must under- 
 stand that I do not mean by this phraseology to imply that 
 the mind itself is divided into different powers, each with its 
 own peculiar function. But in order to study mental 
 phenomena we must form some classification of them, and 
 must analyze them under different divisions and sub- 
 divisions. When, for example, we speak of the faculty of 
 comparison, we do not mean that the mind has one power 
 which compares and observes the relation of things, and 
 can do this and nothing else; but we mean that the mind 
 has a power of observing the relations of things, and this 
 power we call the faculty of comparison. In the same way 
 we might say that the mouth has a faculty of eating and a 
 faculty of speaking and a faculty of singing, without mean- 
 ing that there are in the mouth three sets of organs, of 
 which one eats, another speaks, and a third sings. 
 
 I do not wish to leave the impression that the question 
 whether the mind is simple or complex is one of no special 
 consequence ; only that it is not necessary for us to deter- 
 mine it in order to our present plan of study. It has an 
 important, though perhaps rather indirect, moral bearing. 
 That bearing may be briefly mentioned here. If a man has 
 
A PRELIMINARY QUESTION. 15 
 
 a good ear, but poor eye-sight, we cannot say that his facul' 
 ties are either good or bad ; one faculty is good, the other is 
 bad. Now, if man is made up of a bundle of faculties, some 
 of which are good and the others bad ; if, for example, his 
 conscience is strong, but his love and sympathy are weak, we 
 cannot say of him that he is either good or bad ; part of him 
 is good and part of him is bad. If, on the other hand, he is 
 a unit, and conscience is simply the man acting in one direc- 
 tion and love is the man acting in another, then we cannot 
 truly say of him that he is good until all his actions are con- 
 formed to the divine standard. If, for example, a carpenter 
 has a box of tools containing a chisel of soft iron and very 
 dull, and a plane of finely tempered steel, very sharp, and we 
 ask him what sort of a set of tools he has, he would reply, 
 some of the tools are good and some are poor. But if an 
 apprentice has learned to drive a nail without splitting the 
 wood, but he cannot yet saw a straight line, there is no sense 
 in which we can say he is a good carpenter. He is not a 
 good carpenter until he has learned to do all carpentering 
 operations at least reasonably well. This illustration will 
 give a hint of the argument for the simplicity of the mind, 
 of which I spoke above. When I yield to my anger and 
 speak a bitter word, I am conscious that I have done wrong: 
 not that some thing in me has done wrong, but that the whole 
 I has sinned; and this, perhaps, is what James means when 
 he says that he who has kept the whole law and yet offends 
 in one point is guilty of all. It is the soul that sins, not a 
 faculty in the soul. Thus there is a reason in our conscious- 
 ness of sin for believing that the soul or mind — the ego^ the 
 I — is a unit, not complex or composite. In this book, however, 
 in speaking of mental and moral action, I shall, for convenience' 
 sake, speak of mental faculties, meaning thereby not separate 
 powers, but separate activities of the same power working in 
 different ways. 
 
i6 A STUD Y IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. 
 
 It is cotT/mon, even in the pulpit, to hear the phrase, "Man 
 has a soul ; " and it is scarcely possible to avoid embodying 
 this same thought sometimes in the phrase ''man's soul," which 
 is only an abbreviation. This phrase, however, expresses a 
 falsehood. It is not true that man has a soul. Man is a 
 soul. It would be more accurate to say that man has a 
 body. We may say that the body has a soul, or that the soul 
 has a body ; as we may say that the ship has a captain, or 
 the captain has a ship ; but we ought never to forget that the 
 true man is the mental and spiritual ; the body is only the 
 instrument which the mental and the spiritual uses. 
 
 Still more accurately, however, man, as we see him and 
 have to do with him in this life, is composed, in Paul's lan- 
 guage, of body, soul, and spirit. The distinction between 
 these three we must consider hereafter. Here it must be 
 enough to say : i. That the body is purely physical, as much 
 so as a tree ; that it is composed of certain well-known 
 physical elements, and subject to physical laws. 2. That the 
 mind or soul (in Latin the anima^ in Greek the pseuche) is 
 that which sees, feels, thinks, and that it is analogous to that 
 which controls the body in the animals, though in man pos- 
 sessing powers vastly superior to those observed in any mere 
 animal. 3. That the spirit (in Latin spiritiis^ in Greek 
 pjieumd) is that which deals with the invisible, believes, rev- 
 erences, distinguishes between right and wrong, and that 
 there is nothing analogous to it in the animal creation. The 
 body links us to the earth, the mind to the animal creation, 
 the spirit to God. 
 
TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. if 
 
 To understand human nature we must understand the 
 relation which the mind and spirit, that is, the invisible 
 part of man, has to the body, that is, to the physical or ma- 
 terial part. 
 
 I. It is now well established as a scientific fact that every 
 mental and moral act employs some physical agency and 
 makes a draft upon the physical organization. In fact, every 
 mental action is also partly a material and physical action. 
 We know, for instance, that we see by means of a physical 
 organ, the eye ; we hear by means of a physical organ, the 
 ear. The eye does not, however, see ; for if the nerve which 
 connects the eye with the brain be cut, though the picture is 
 perfectly painted on the retina of the eye, the person sees 
 nothing. So the ear does not hear; for if the nerve which 
 connects the drum of the ear with the brain be cut, the per- 
 son hears nothing. The seeing and the hearing take place 
 within us, and the eye and the ear are only the physical in- 
 struments by which they are facilitated. The eye no more 
 sees than the telescope ; the ear no more hears than the ear 
 trumpet. But both are necessary instruments to seeing and 
 hearing. For aught we know, however, both eye and ear 
 may be destroyed as they are at death, and the power of 
 seeing and hearing possessed by the soul may be improved, 
 not impaired, by the loss of the instruments. 
 
 Now as the eye is the instrument of seeing, and the ear of 
 hearing, so the brain is the instrument of thinking and feel- 
 ing and imagining. Every mental and moral action em- 
 ploys some portion of the brain, as every act of seeing 
 employs the eye, and every act of hearing employs the ear. 
 Not only that, but every such action destroys a part of the 
 brain, and a new brain tissue must be formed to take its 
 place. Every action of the man, physical, mental, or moral, 
 wastes some tissue. The principal physical function of life 
 appears to be carrying off this wasted and exhausted and 
 now useless tissue by various methods of drainage, and sup- 
 
A STUD V IX HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 plying new tissue to take its place by various methods of 
 food supply. 
 
 In all ages of the world the use of physical organs by the 
 mind and spirit has been recognized, not only by the philos- 
 ophers, but also by the common people. The ancient He- 
 brews put the seat of the emotions in the bowels ; hence the 
 phrase, *' bowels of mercies," as used in Scripture. This was 
 probably because strong emotion affects the bowels. Later, 
 for an analogous reason, because of the effect of strong feel- 
 ing on the heart and circulating system, common language 
 fixed upon the heart as the seat of the emotions. This notion 
 still lingers in such phrases as " a warm-hearted friend," "a 
 good-hearted fellow." But it is now well established that the 
 real seat of both the affections and the intellect is in the 
 brain. By this is not meant that they are located in the 
 brain. They have no location; they are omnipresent in 
 the body, as God is omnipresent in the universe, equally con- 
 trolling all its parts. It is more accurate, therefore, to say- 
 that it is now well established that the material or physical 
 organ of all thought and feeling is in the brain; that every 
 mental and emotional activity employs some part of the 
 brain ; that every such activity uses up some brain tissue, 
 requiring, therefore, a new supply; and that, therefore, the 
 healthful action of the mind requires a good brain, and 
 the best action of the mind requires good digestion and 
 good circulation, since on these depend the renewal and re- 
 plenishing of the brain. 
 
 There are various grounds for this now well-established 
 conviction. They are all summed up in the general statement 
 that any disease of the brain produces mental and moral 
 disease, while, on the other hand, no disease which does not 
 directly or indirectly affect the brain, has any power to affect 
 the mental and moral sanity of the patient. Thus a blow 
 on the knee which will produce excruciating pain will leave 
 the mind clear, while a blow on the brain will produce un- 
 
TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. 19 
 
 consciousness. A gastric fever does not materially alter the 
 apparent moral condition of the sick man, at least not more 
 than might be expected from the effect on the brain of so seri- 
 ous a disease in the organ on which it depends for its supply. 
 But a brain fever makes the patient delirious, and sometimes 
 changes entirely his apparent intelligent and moral character. 
 Thus I have known of the case of a young man, of most ex- 
 emplary character, who was almost morbidly sensitive to any 
 word or phrase of an indelicate or coarse description, who, 
 being taken with brain fever, was so blasphemous and ob- 
 scene that it was impossible for any female attendant to 
 remain in the room with him. It was clear that the disease 
 was physical, not moral ; it was a disease, not in the mind or 
 spirit, but in the organ which they employed. The difference 
 may be compared to that which would occur if a Rubin- 
 stein should sit down to play upon an old and out-of-tune 
 piano. The discords would be due to the instrument not to 
 the player. 
 
 If the brain is impaired the mind is invariably affected ; if, 
 on the other hand, the brain is uninjured, the mental and 
 moral povvers will remain unaffected, though the rest of the 
 body may be to all intents and purposes well-nigh dead. It 
 is true that the brain is so closely connected with the nervous 
 system, which pervades the whole body, that any thing which 
 impairs the nerves of the body impairs the brain, and there- 
 fore affects the mind ; but the general principle, that every 
 other part of the body may be weakened and the mind be 
 left comparatively unimpaired, provided the brain is uninjured, 
 has had many striking illustrations in the history of great 
 mental work achieved by chronic invalids. A very striking 
 illustration of this is afforded by the extraordinary story of 
 John Carter. At the age of twenty-one he fell from the 
 branch of a tree, forty feet in height, and was taken up un- 
 conscious. Examination showed a severe injury to the spinal 
 column, effectually disconnecting the brain from the rest of 
 
20 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 the nervous system, and depriving the body of all power of 
 motion from the neck downward. He soon recovered con- 
 sciousness, but never moved a limb again. But his brain, 
 and with it the powers of his mind and spirit, were unim- 
 paired. From being ungodly and ignorant, he became both 
 devout and intelligent, a great reader, and soon learned to 
 write, to draw, and even to paint, holding the pencil or the 
 camel's hair brush between his teeth, enlarging or reducing 
 the copies before him with great artistic skill and perfect 
 success. He lived in this condition for fourteen years, his 
 whole body from the neck downward being paralyzed and 
 helpless, while his mind and spirit were not only uninjured, 
 but grew brighter and clearer to the end. It was evident 
 that the accident which had left only the head uninjured had 
 left all the organs of thought and feeling uninjured.* 
 
 It is now, then, well established as an undoubted scientific 
 fact that the mind or soul acts through organs; thit these 
 organs are in and form a part of the brain ; that their healthy 
 action depends upon the healthy condition of the organ, that 
 is, of the brain ; that any thing which impairs the health of the 
 brain impairs the healthful action of the mind or soul, though 
 how it affects the mind or soul itself we cannot say ; that what 
 we call mental diseases are often diseases of the organ ; that 
 the remedy for what appears to be an imperfect or evil ac- 
 tion of the mind or soul must sometimes be applied to the 
 organ, that is, it must be physical rather than mental or 
 moral ; and that whoever has to do with the training, educa- 
 tion, or development of men, has a need to study the relations 
 of the mind to its organs, and to ascertain, as far as possible, 
 what diseases and what hinderances to development are 
 mental and moral, and what are material or physical ; and, 
 finally, that he who would attain the highest degree of man- 
 hood must study, not only to improve his soul and spirit by 
 
 * See an interesting monograph, " The Life of John Carter," by F. J. Milb. Hurd St 
 
 Houghton, i86S. 
 
TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. ai 
 
 intellectual and spiritual processes, but also to care for and 
 nourish properly his brain, that is, the organ of his mind, 
 soul, and spirit. A healthy man is sana mens in sana corpore, 
 a healthy mind in a healthy body. Well-being requires 
 healthy organs as well as a healthy mind to use them. The 
 physician needs often to inquire into the condition of the 
 mind in order to prescribe intelligently for the body. The 
 minister needs often to inquire into the condition of the 
 body in order to prescribe intelligently for the mind and the 
 spirit. A sleepy congregation is oftener the sexton's fault 
 than the preacher's. Depression of spirits may be due to 
 remorse ; it may be due to a poor digestion or a diseased 
 liver. Remedy for apparent sin maybe Bible and prayer; 
 it may be less food and a run in the open air. The teacher, 
 the parent, the preacher, needs to study with care the condi- 
 tion of the body in order to deal wisely and well with the 
 intellectual and the moral condition of those intrusted to 
 their charge. Moral reformation and material reformation 
 must go together. It is almost hopeless to promote temper- 
 ance and godliness in our great cities so long as the popula- 
 tion live in some wards with more persons to the square foot 
 than are allowed in the average cemetery. The best preven- 
 tion of crime is often a change of air, food, and other physical 
 conditions. The great majority of street boys, if left in New 
 York city, grow up to swell the number of the criminal 
 classes. But last year the " Christian Union " sent out to 
 Minnesota, through the Children's Aid Society, some one 
 hundred an'd twenty-five children. Of these, all but five are 
 doing well ; that is, they are making good, industrious citi- 
 zens. Much is due to a change in moral and intellectual 
 circumstances, but something is also due to a change in 
 physical circumstances. 
 
 Modern science has gone further in its investigation. It 
 is beginning to learn that different parts of the brain perform 
 different functions. It is now well settled that the organs of 
 
22 A STUD V IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 sense, of intellect, of feeling or emotion, and of will, are not 
 the same. But these investigations are not yet completed, 
 and it is not necessary for our purpose in this little treatise 
 to enter upon this branch of the subject. 
 
 It is necessary, however, before closing this chapter, to note 
 the difference between the doctrine that the mind acts 
 through organs, and is therefore dependent for its practical 
 results upon the health of the organ, and the doctrine that 
 there is no mind, but that which we call mental and moral 
 action — thought, feeling, and will — are the effects of material 
 changes taking place within the body. This doctrine goes 
 by the name of materialism. Among the ancients there was 
 a class of philosophers who taught that God did not create 
 the world, but the world created God ; that is, they held 
 that matter is eternal, and that spirit was evolved out of mat- 
 ter. Analogous to this is the doctrine of modern material- 
 ism ; the doctrine that the body is not the instrument which 
 the mind or soul uses, but the machine whose action pro- 
 duces the mind or soul, somewhat as the friction between the 
 grindstone and the scythe produces sparks. It is unquestion- 
 ably true that every mental and moral action is accompanied 
 with a change in the brain. The materialist, observing this, 
 has jumped to the conclusion that the change in the brain 
 produces the mental and moral activity. This is a long 
 jump. 
 
 1. In the first place there is no evidence whatever to war- 
 rant this conclusion. It is as if a boy seeing an organist 
 playing on an organ should conclude that the keys of the 
 organ moved the fingers of the player. We do know that 
 the mental and the brain actions are contemporaneous and 
 concomitant ; but this gives us no reason to suppose that the 
 brain action produces the mental action, or that the mental 
 action produces the brain action. Which is the cause and 
 which the effect we must learn in another way. 
 
 2. If the organist were an automaton, the boy would be left 
 
TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. 23 
 
 in doubt whether the machinery which moved the organ was 
 in the organ or in the man. Unless he could take one or 
 the other to pieces, he could not tell which was the agent 
 and which the instrument ; which acted, and which was acted 
 upon. Now we cannot look within our neighbor to see 
 whether the brain moves the mind or the mind the brain ; 
 but we can look inside ourselves and see which moves first. 
 We do this by self-consciousness. And this assures us that 
 the mind operates first, and the brain and nervous system 
 afterward. The artist is conscious that he forms in his mind 
 a picture before his hand begins to put it upon canvas. We 
 know that we will to reach out our hand or stretch forth our 
 foot before we move the organ. Walking does not make us 
 desire to go ; the desire to go makes us walk. So far as we can 
 trace mental and moral action at all within ourselves, it is 
 clear that first comes the desire, then the will, then the action. 
 It is very evident that the visible organs, that is, the eye and 
 hand and ear, are the servants, not the masters ; there is no 
 reason whatever to suppose that the invisible organs, that is, 
 the brain organs, are the masters, not the servants. 
 
 3. If the organ produces the activity, if the brain secrets 
 thought and feeling as the liver secrets bile, as has been 
 claimed by the materialist, there is no such thing as right 
 and wrong. Man is a mere physical machine. His thought 
 and feeling and will have no more moral character than the 
 sparks of an electrical machine. Garfield was simply a good 
 and useful machine ; Guiteau was simply a bad and danger- 
 ous machine. It is true that even on this theory we might 
 still continue to put the good machine where it would do the 
 most good, and destroy the bad one; we might elect a Gar- 
 field to the presidency much as we would put a good time- 
 keeper on the mantle-piece, and destroy a Guiteau, much as 
 we would knock to pieces an infernal machine. But we 
 could no longer approve the one and condemn the other; and 
 >n fact materialists do either actually deny that there is any 
 
24 AS TUD Y IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 such thing as virtue and vice, or make very little of the dis- 
 tinction between the two. But no philosophy of man can be 
 true which denies the most fundamental fact in human ex- 
 perience, the fact of oughtness, a distinction between right 
 and wrong, the sense inherent in all men that some things' 
 are right, honorable, praiseworthy, and that other things are 
 wrong, dishonorable, worthy of condemnation and punish- 
 ment. The family, society, citizenship, are all built on the 
 recognition of this fundamental fact which materialists either 
 deny or ignore. 
 
 4. If the organ produces the action there is no reason to 
 suppose that the action will survive the organ ; if the brain 
 feels, thinks, reasons, wills, when the brain crumbles into 
 dust the thinking, reasoning, feeling, willing, will cease. 
 When the fuel is burned out the fire will cease ; when the 
 battery is exhausted the electrical current will cease. Ac- 
 cording to materialism the brain is a fire, and all mental and 
 moral phenomena are only the heat it gives out; the brain is 
 a galvanic battery, and all thought and feeling are only the 
 electric current which it produces. Now we have nothing to 
 do here with the morality of this doctrine; we are not con- 
 sidering its moral effect, but its reasonableness. A doctrine 
 which has nothing whatever to support it, and has against it 
 the almost universal instincts of mankind, is not reasonable. 
 And the instinct of immortality is the almost universal in- 
 stinct of mankind. We feel our immortality before we pass 
 from the body, much as the bird feels conscious of the power 
 of flight before it is fledged, or has attempted to leave the 
 nest. We are conscious of something within which is imper- 
 ishable. But if the organ produces the action, there is no 
 such imperishable power within ; the pains of remorse do not 
 differ from the pains of dyspepsia, nor the joys of love from 
 those of appetite. No one can really believe this ; no one 
 acts as though he did, not even those philosophers who im- 
 agine that they believe it. 
 
TRUE AND FALSE MATERIALISM. 25 
 
 5. Finally, if the organ produces the action, then there is 
 no personality. There is no I that thinks, reasons, feels, 
 acts ; there is only a succession of nerve phenomena which 
 we call thinking, reasoning, feeling, acting. If the brain is 
 a kind of galvanic battery, and feeling and thinking are the 
 sparks, then I am only the succession of sparks. This has 
 been seen and acknowledged by the materialists themselves. 
 Thus Hume, declaring that there is no such principle as self 
 in one, goes on to affirm of mankind that "they are nothing 
 but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which 
 succeed one another with inconceivable rapidity, and are in 
 a perpetual flux and movement." This is the logical conclu- 
 sion of materialism, or the doctrine that the organ moves the 
 organist, not the organist the organ ; and it arouses against 
 itself the instant testimony of our own consciousness. If 
 there is any thing that we knoWy absolutely and positively, it 
 is that we exist ; that there is an I which perceives, feels, 
 reasons, wills, and that is as separate and distinct from the 
 mere succession of perceiving, feeling, reasoning, and willing? 
 is the player is from the succession of notes which he pro- 
 duces on the organ. That there is both an I and a not I is 
 perfectly clear to every one of us. The doctrine that there 
 is no I, no self, no personal identity, can never make any 
 greater progress among mankind as a practical doctrine than 
 the doctrine of Berkley, that there is no external world, and 
 that instead of real objects which we think we see, hear, 
 touch, taste, and smell, there is only a succession of impres- 
 sions, a seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling; that we 
 are all living in a dream, some in a delightful one, others in 
 a nightmare ; that life is only a kind of phantasmagoria. The 
 one pnilosopher denies that there is any thing not I ; I is all 
 there is. The other denies that there is any I ; what seems 
 to be so is only a succession of physical forces. It is doubt- 
 ful whether any man really believes either of these notions. 
 And it has been necessary to point out the absurdities in- 
 2 
 
26 A STUDY m HUMAN NATURE, 
 
 volved in the doctrine of materialism only in order to make 
 perfectly clear to the reader the distinction between true and 
 false materialism. The true materialism teaches that the mind 
 and spirit act always in this life through organs, and that 
 healthy mental and moral action depends upon healthy 
 organs. This is established by a variety of physical experi- 
 ments, and is now undisputed. The false materialism teaches 
 that the material organism produces all mental and moral 
 phenomena; and it is without any evidence whatever to sup- 
 port it, is a purely abstract notion, and is contradicted by our 
 consciousness of our own actions, by our inward sense of the 
 distinction between right and wrong, by our instinct of im- 
 mortality, and by our certainty of personal existence and 
 identity. 
 
THE TEMPERAMENTS. 27 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE TEMPERAMENTS. 
 
 From a very early age physiologists have recognized a 
 characteristic difference between persons possessing the same 
 organs, and yet manifestly possessing different qualities. 
 These characteristic differences have been called tempera- 
 ments. How far they are physical, how far mental, is a ques- 
 tion not necessary here to discuss ; certainly it has not been 
 determined. But that they are partly physical is unquestion- 
 able. Various classifications have been suggested of these 
 temperaments, no one of which is altogether satisfactory ; but 
 there is, perhaps, none better than the one which is at once 
 the simplest, the most common, and very ancient, into the 
 nervous, the sanguine, the bilious, and the lymphatic. In 
 the person of nervous temperament the nervous organism is 
 the predominant one ; usually the head is large and finely 
 formed, the skin fair, the complexion light, the hair fine and 
 generally dark. Any one of these signs, however, nay be 
 wanting, and the person still possess a highly organized and 
 delicate nervous system. A more certain indication of it is 
 sensitiveness to impressions, both physical and mental, subtle 
 and readily responsive sympathy, and quickness and alert- 
 ness of action both in mind and body. The person of ner- 
 vous organization is also often able to sustain an amount of 
 labor or suffering far beyond what would be anticipated of 
 him from his general physical condition, but always at the 
 hazard of a sudden and sometimes an irretrievable collapse, 
 following the expenditure of nervous force, not adequately 
 kept up by other organs. Such a person is also liable to 
 great fluctuation of feeling — both exaltation and depression, 
 
28 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 dependent on the condition of the nervous system, and some- 
 times upon slight external circumstances acting upon it, as 
 the weather, food, or drink, or even social sympathy, or the 
 lack of it. In the person of sanguine temperament the blood 
 currents are rich and strong ; the whole nature is therefore 
 well fed ; the nervous system, whatever its capacity, is habit- 
 ually at its best. Such a person has usually a rich color, often 
 red or reddish hair, generally a light eye, and a bounding 
 motion. A surer indication is vigor in action and hopefulness 
 in feeling. To act is a pleasure to the sanguine ; idleness is 
 a vice which he cannot understand ; weariness a weakness 
 with which he has not easily any sympathy. And as it is a 
 delight to cope with difficulties, they have no terror for 
 him, and he carries into every exigency a hopeful spirit. He 
 scarcely knows the meaning of despair. The reader will 
 find a fuller description of this temperament in Campbell's 
 immortal verse, which may serve a better purpose than 
 a more scientific description would do. The bilious tem- 
 perament is the reverse of the sanguine, and is, indeed, 
 rather the product of a disease than of the predominant ac- 
 tivity of a healthy organ. Physiologists are not agreed among 
 themselves as to the function of the liver or the effect or 
 object of bile, but unquestionably one of the chief functions 
 of the Uver is to eliminate from the system the waste, that is, 
 the dead tissues after they have served their purpose, and 
 bile is at least in part an excretion of materials which are 
 decomposing and ready to be removed from the system. 
 When the liver fails to do its work properly, and these mate- 
 rials are not removed, but remain in the blood to circulate 
 again through the system, which they cannot feed any more 
 than the ashes of a burnt coal can feed the fire, the man is 
 said to be bilious; when they exist in the system to a large 
 degree he is poisoned, and if the poison cannot be removed 
 he is certain to die. When as a habit of the body, very apt 
 to be produced by sedentary habits, or excessive or unwise 
 
THE TEMPERAMENTS. 2g 
 
 food, the liver thus fails to eliminate from the circulation 
 matter which should be removed, the power of activity of 
 every kind becomes impaired, exertion is difficult, thought is 
 slow, the head is dull and stupid, small difficulties grow seri- 
 ous to the imagination, and the whole mood becomes both 
 inert and melancholy. A person of this temperament is or- 
 dinarily of a sallow complexion, of dark hair, sluggish in 
 action, and depressed in spirits. The lymphatics also share 
 in the work of removing the effete tissues from the system. 
 When they fail to fulfill this function, the waste material re- 
 mains in the system, not, however, in the blood, but in the 
 tissues. These add nothing to the real vigor of the man, 
 because they are an addition of valueless and really dead 
 tissue. Such a man is loaded down like a locomotive which 
 should be compelled to carry in the tender its own ashes. 
 He is likely to be obese, though not necessarily offensively 
 so ; he is certain to be sluggish and good-natured ; not quick 
 to take offense, because not quick to action of any kind; 
 habitually content ; rarely or never giving himself to work 
 spontaneously, but only under the pressure of some motive, 
 and always glad to relax his work and drop into idleness 
 again. In fiction, the fat boy in Dickens's " Pickwick Papers" 
 is a travesty on the lymphatic temperament. Mr. Bain has 
 suggested that to this ancient classification of temperaments 
 should be added the muscular temperament, in which the 
 muscular system predominates, in which physical action is 
 enjoyed for its own sake, which creates a love for field sports 
 and athletics of all kinds, and of which probably the Roman 
 and Grecian gladiator might be regarded as extreme types. 
 
 I have necessarily spoken of each of these temperaments 
 as distinct from every other ; in fact, all temperaments are a 
 combination. In every man something is contributed by the 
 nerves, the blood, the liver, the lymphatics, and the muscles ; 
 no two men were ever composed in the same way ; the vari- 
 ations are endless. Frequent combinations are the nervous- 
 
30 A STUDY ly HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 sanguine, the nervous-bilious, the nervous-muscular, the 
 lymphatic-sanguine, the lymphatic-bilious, and the muscular- 
 sanguine. As active exercise is the best method of keeping 
 the body free from its own degenerate and wasted tissues, 
 and assuring their elimination from the system, the muscular 
 is rarely found in combination with either the lymphatic or 
 the bilious, and for the same reason the bilious is rarely 
 found in combination with the sanguine, since the life cur- 
 rents can never be vigorous and healthy when the body is 
 choked with its own waste. It is, however, certain that in 
 any estimate of human nature, and in any study of the indi- 
 vidual, the student must bear in mind the effect which the 
 predominance of these temperaments or their combination— 
 the nervous, the sanguine, the bilious, the lymphatic, and the 
 muscular — may have upon mental and moral activity. 
 
ANAL YSIS OF HUMAN NA TURE. 31 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 ANALYSIS OF HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 We are now prepared to enter upon an analysis of human 
 nature. In doing so, however, I must first again remind my 
 readers of the object of this treatise, and of the fundamental 
 principles already laid down. 
 
 1. The object of this treatise is not to afford an anatomical 
 chart of the human mind. It is not to explain what are the 
 powers or faculties of which the human soul is composed. 
 Whether the mind is simple or compound is not the question 
 here ; for myself, I regard it as simple ; not as, in strictness 
 of speech, composed of different faculties at all, but only as 
 acting in different modes, and to a greater or less extent 
 through different organs. The analysis here suggested is 
 not even a description of the constituent parts of the mind. 
 It is not asserted, nor even assumed, that the mind has differ- 
 ent parts. It is simply an analysis for the convenience of 
 classifying the various mental phenomena. The same mind 
 hears and sees ; but hearing and seeing are not the same. 
 So the same mind reasons, imagines, remembers ; but reason- 
 ing, imagining, and remembering are not the same. Though 
 for convenience I use the term faculty in this classification, 
 the classification is simply suggested for the better and more 
 orderly arrangement, and more satisfactory study of mental 
 activities as actually seen in real life and living characters. 
 
 2. It is not, therefore, necessary for us to consider whether 
 the powers or faculties here mentioned are original and sim- 
 ple powers of the mind or not. They are not suggested as 
 original and simple powers of the mind. In some instances 
 they clearly are not. Mr. Bain has shown, I think, very 
 
32 A STUD V IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 clearly, that combativeness and destructiveness may be traced 
 to a love of power; that they are mainly, if not wholly, man- 
 ifestations of a love of power. " The feeling of power essen- 
 tially implies comparison, and no comparison is so effective 
 and so startling as that between victor and vanquished. The 
 chuckle and glee of satisfaction at discomfiting an opponent, 
 no matter by what weapons, are understood wherever the 
 human race has spread, and are not wanting to the superior 
 animals." This is true. Nevertheless, the manifestations of 
 the love of power are so various, that for purposes of classi- 
 fication it is convenient to put by themselves those which are 
 exhibited in combat and destruction. Something of the 
 same fundamental motives may underlie the constructive 
 work of Stevenson and the destructive work of Von Moltke, 
 but in the study of human nature these different man- 
 ifestations need to be classified under different titles. So 
 again, it may be true, that acquisitiveness is not an original 
 instinct, but is simply the rational endeavor of man to obtain 
 the advantages supposed to be conferred by wealth, and to 
 avoid the evils produced by poverty ; though this theory 
 hardly accounts for the blindness of covetousness and the 
 self-imposed wretchedness of the miser. But whether it is 
 true or not, it aids in the study of life to recognize acquisi- 
 tiveness as though it was an original and simple instinct, and 
 to place under it certain common phenomena of modern 
 commercial life. 
 
 3. For the same reason this classification is not, and no 
 such classification can be, perfect. It is like an index to a 
 book; there must be some cross references. It is like a set 
 of pigeon-holes or envelopes in which the student places his 
 memoranda and his scraps ; some of them he is puzzled where 
 to put, for they belong in two or three separate compart- 
 ments, and might go with about equal propriety in either one. 
 The student, therefore, must not take this classification as 
 though it were a topographical map of the human mind ; a 
 
ANAL YSIS OF HUMAN NA TURE. 33 
 
 picture of what the mind is, though possibly to be improved 
 and corrected by future explorations and surveys. He must 
 take it as a suggested Index Reruin^ for the better arrangement 
 of mental and moral phenomena. If he observes mental and 
 moral phenomena, which he cannot find a place for in the 
 tabular view here suggested, he must enlarge it ; or, if he 
 finds it easier to arrange phenomena here divided into two or 
 three compartments under one, he is at liberty to omit whatever 
 seem to him superfluous titles. The main thing for every 
 reader of this little treatise is to study human nature — in life, 
 in fiction, in history — for himself, and use this analysis just in 
 so far as it aids him in that independent and original study, 
 and no further. 
 
 4. It is further to be remembered that even if the mental 
 and moral powers be regarded as real and separable powers 
 of the mind, they certainly do not act independently of each 
 other. We sometimes hear it said of a man, in criticism of 
 him, that he acted from mixed motives. Every man always 
 acts from mixed motives. His clashing desires act upon each 
 other, and his action is the result not of any one impulse, but 
 of several impulses of unequal force combining together. 
 Man may be compared to a croquet ball upon the lawn ; the 
 principal motive to the mallet which gives him a first direc- 
 tion ; but the unevenness of the ground and the other balls 
 give new and different directions to his activity, and the final 
 direction which he takes is the sum of all their influences. 
 Only the more confirmed and inveterate miser acts under the 
 impulse of acquisitiveness alone. In nearly all men it is 
 variously modified by self-esteem, approbativeness, conscien- 
 tiousness, combativeness and destructiveness, benevolence ; 
 and the conduct of life is in no two men exactly the same, 
 because in no two men is the sum of their various impulses 
 the same. In unriddling man the student must take account 
 of all these various and often antagonistic forces within him. 
 
 Thus, for example, when Adam Bede saw Hetty and Captain 
 2* 
 
34 A STUD V IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 Dormithorne kiss and part in the woods, he is described as 
 being in a tumult of contending emotions. If we may turn 
 the drama into cold analytical psychology, we might say that 
 his amativeness or love for Hetty, and his self-esteem or 
 wounded self-love, both of which were strong passions in 
 him, impelled him to punish Hetty's unconscious enemy and 
 his own, while reverence for one socially so much his supe- 
 rior held him in check, and conscience bade him rebuke 
 but not revenge. When at last he gave way, and struck the 
 blow which stretched Captain Dormithorne senseless, it was 
 because for the moment amativeness and self-esteem proved 
 too strong for reverence and conscience ; when he stopped to 
 lift up his prostrate foe, restore him to consciousness, and 
 bring him to his home, it was because conscience, rever- 
 ence, and benevolence — the latter aroused to pity by the 
 helplessness of his enemy — re-asserted their sovereignty once 
 more. Thus no action in life can be attributed to any one 
 faculty. Nearly every action is the result of composite 
 forces. 
 
 5. Especially is it important to bear in mind that the 
 lower faculties are affected and often revolutionized in their 
 activities by the higher faculties. No faculty is sinful, and 
 no faculty is free from the possibility of sin; it is the office 
 of religion to make the spiritual dominate the animal and the 
 social nature ; such domination changes radically every activ- 
 ity. Thus the animal appetites, if left unregulated, lead to 
 the grossest gluttony; to excesses so bestial that we shudder 
 at the mere recital of them. But those same appetites, re- 
 strained by conscience and guided by reason, become the 
 instruments for building up the body in physical health and 
 strength, and making all its organs fit instruments for the 
 mind and soul. The sexual instinct left to itself runs riot in 
 all horrible forms of sensuality and lust. But purified by 
 faith, regulated by conscience and reason, and mated to love, 
 it becomes the most sacred of all earthly ties, and the foun- 
 
ANAL YSIS OF HUMAN NA TURE. 35 
 
 dation of the most sacred and essential of all earthly institu- 
 tions — -the family. Whether acquisitiveness becomes an 
 mcentive to plundering greed, or productive industry; 
 whether combativeness and destructiveness become incen- 
 tives to pillage and war, or simply the supports to a great 
 Protestant Reformation or a great war of Emancipation ; 
 whether caution makes its possessor a coward and an apos- 
 tate, or the wise and courageous defender of sacred interests 
 intrusted to him ; whether his self-esteem makes him a 
 haughty Gregory the Great, or an unbendable William the 
 Silent, depends upon the presence or absence, the power or 
 weakness of the spiritual faculties, and the consequent influ- 
 ence they exert in transforming the lower nature, and giving 
 its powers a new activity and crowning them with a new life. 
 
 With these preliminary explanations I proceed to our 
 analysis. 
 
 The most natural division of the powers of the soul is into 
 two great classes : the Motive Powers and the Acquisitive 
 Powers. By the Motive Powers, I mean those which supply 
 motive, force, impulse, power; by the Acquisitive Powers, 
 those which furnish information, knowledge, truth. The 
 Motive Powers again are divided into the Animal Impulses, 
 which are necessary to the support and protection of life ; 
 the Social and Industrial Impulses, which make man a social 
 being and underlie his social existence ; and the Spiritual 
 Impulses, which are peculiar to him, and distinguish him 
 from the mere animal creation. The Acquisitive Powers 
 again are divided into the Sensuous, the Supersensuous, and 
 the Reflective. This classification, with the suggested facul- 
 ties under each division, will be found at the end of the book 
 in a tabular form. 
 
36 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ANIMAL IMPULSES. 
 
 I. There are certain motive powers which are essential to 
 the support of animal existence. These are the appetites 
 necessary to the support of the individual, and the sexual 
 passion necessary to the support of the race. There still 
 lingers in the Church and in religious teachers a remnant of 
 the old Gnostic philosophy which made all sin to consist in 
 the body, and therefore treated all fleshly appetites and de- 
 sires as sinful. Men still regard appetite and the sexual 
 desire as sinful, because they lead to so much and so palpa- 
 ble evil, and it must be conceded that there are phrases in 
 the New Testament, especially in Paul's Epistles, which, if 
 taken out of their due order and connection, give some color 
 to this view. But the teaching of the New Testament, includ- 
 ing that of Paul, if taken in its entirety, gives no warrant to this 
 false philosophy of human life. On the contrary, Paul explic- 
 itly warns the Colossians not to be subject to the rule of this 
 ascetic philosophy of life, " Touch not, taste not, handle 
 not ; " and to the Philippians he declares that he knows how- 
 to abound as well as how to suffer want. What the Bible 
 condemns is the supremacy of these animal appetites and 
 desires over the intellectual and spiritual nature. They are 
 the lowest of all the impulses, and should be subordinate. 
 When they demand control they are in revolt ; when they 
 obtain control the soul is in anarchy. Then the mob has 
 mastery of the palace, and destruction is inevitable. The 
 appetite has for its principal function to induce the individ- 
 ual to take such food and fluid as is necessary to supply the 
 waste of the body and keep it in a good physical condition. 
 
THE ANIMAL IMPULSES. 37 
 
 Connected with it is a palate which accepts some articles of 
 diet and rejects others. Both the palate and the appetite 
 may become diseased ; their action is rarely absolutely 
 healthy, and never infallible ; but a desire for a particular 
 article of food is generally a sign — though often a misleading 
 one — that the body needs that particular article, or at least 
 the material which that article supplies. In the case of two 
 boys, brothers, one of whom is very fond of sweets, the other 
 of acids, the desire in each case is an indication of the needs 
 of the two organizations. So a craving for meat in one, and 
 a distaste for it in another, is an indication that the one re- 
 quires and the other does not require it. If the body were 
 perfectly healthy, and in a perfectly natural environment, the 
 appetite would be a reasonably, possibly an entirely, safe 
 guide. This is not, however, the case. Diseased appetites, 
 unnatural and unhealthy desires, have been handed down 
 from generation to generation. Civilization has brought 
 many influences to bear upon man which produce unnatural 
 desires. A fever produces an intense craving for water, 
 which is due, not to a real want of more liquid in the system, 
 but to an unusual heat which craves cooling. So overwork 
 and overexcitement produce a demand for stimulants ; bad 
 air and bad food a demand for too much nutriment, or 
 perhaps a distaste for all. The ill-educated palate requires 
 sweets or spices. The dyspeptic's hunger is no indication 
 of a need of food, and his sense of overfullness is no indica- 
 tion that he has nutriment enough. In a word, the instincts 
 are very far from being a safe and trustworthy guide to be 
 undeviatingly followed. They are symptoms whose real sig- 
 nificance the reason must consider and interpret before they 
 can be followed with safety. 
 
 2. In a similar manner the sexual passion is essential to 
 the perfection of the race. It repeats and emphasizes the 
 divine command given by God to our first parents : " Be 
 fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." Without it 
 
3S A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE, 
 
 the family would be impossible. Our children ought to be 
 early taught by their parents its sacred significance and its 
 value. They ought not to be left to learn about it from often 
 immoral and always ignorant companions. They ought not 
 to be punished for falling into a habit of self-indulgence 
 against which they have never been warned. This strange, 
 mysterious desire, which always accompanies health and 
 vigor, and which prompts both to the purest love and the 
 most bestial excesses, cannot be eradicated, for God has 
 planted it in man ; it should be early directed by the child's 
 natural guardian and teacher. As with the individual, so 
 with society ; the social evils which grow out of the sexual 
 appetite are various and deadly. They are often fostered 
 directly by unscrupulous men for purposes of gain, from mo- 
 tives of avarice. They can be checked somewhat bylaw; 
 but so long as appetite exists, so long the sins of appetite 
 will continue to poison society ; and the only real and radical 
 remedy is that education and that spiritual development 
 which brings the appetites themselves into subordination to 
 the law of God as revealed to and written in the higher 
 nature. Law can protect society from these evils in some 
 measure ; but no law can eradicate them. Nothing can do 
 that but the subjection of the appetite and the supremacy of 
 the spirit. 
 
 3. Next to the appetites and passions come the impulses 
 of combativeness and destructiveness. The former were 
 necessary to the support of life ; these are necessary to its 
 protection. Man is surrounded by enemies ; enemies to his 
 existence and to his progress ; enemies to his physical and to 
 his spiritual well-being. He needs, therefore, to be endowed 
 with certain powers of combativeness and destructiveness ; 
 powers which enable him to stand up strongly, contend 
 bravely, and destroy utterly. The exercise of these faculties 
 of combativeness and destructiveness is commanded also to 
 our first parents in the Garden in the law, " Subdue it [the 
 
THE ANIMAL IMPULSES. 39 
 
 earth] and have dominion." This man could not do unless 
 he were fitted to be a combatant ; without both the powers 
 and the instinct of combat, he could not conquer nature, 
 subdue the wilderness, battle with the wild beasts, and so 
 tame the world to be his dwelling-place. For this he must 
 have the moral as well as the material force ; the impulse as 
 well as the nerve and the muscle. The possession of these 
 qualities give force, energy, courage, pluck, push. They are 
 seen in every pioneer, in every great captain, in every man 
 of large success. Without this power Luther could never 
 have burned the Pope's bull in the court-yard at Wittenberg; 
 nor could Paul have faced the mob from the stairs of the 
 Tower of Antonia ; nor could Christ have driven the traders 
 from the temple courts. It is this which made him the Lion of 
 the tribe of Judah. A single individual may be an estima- 
 ble member of society without it; for others about him, 
 stronger and more courageous than himself, will do his bat- 
 tling for him, and he will compensate by other and gentler 
 services. But the human race could not survive its loss. It 
 would be overborne and perish from its own weakness and 
 imbecility. This gives pov/er of punishment to all govern- 
 ments. It is at the root of every form of wrath and indigna- 
 tion. It enables the parent to punish his child ; the govern- 
 ment to punish crime. It breaks out in lynch law against the 
 desperado. It may become the instrument of any other 
 faculty. Serving acquisitiveness, it becomes predatory, and 
 makes its possessor a robber and a plunderer; serving con- 
 science, it becomes an honorable courage, and makes its 
 possessor a guardian of the interests of his home or his 
 state from the robber or the anarchist. The lack of it 
 begets irresolution, effeminacy, weakness, co.wardice ; its 
 excess, or ill-direction, or ill-control, begets quarrelsome- 
 ness, a disputatious spirit, the gladiator, whether with 
 muscle or brain, cruelty, rapine, murder. It is indispen- 
 isable to the existence of mankind, but it is also one of the 
 
40 A STUD V IX HUMAN- A\4 TURE. 
 
 prolific sources of all that is inhuman in history and in 
 life.* 
 
 4. Akin in its object, but contrasted by its nature with 
 combativeness and destructiveness, is cautiousness. The 
 one protects by fight, the other by flight. The one is the lion 
 in man, the other is the hare. The commingling of the two 
 constitutes true courage ; for there is no true courage with- 
 out a perception of danger and a desire to avoid it. Caution 
 is one of the restraining impulses, holding men back from 
 too sudden, too aggressive, and too heedless action. It com- 
 pels them to pause, to reflect, to consider. It is a rein ; 
 combativeness and destructiveness are spurs. It is strongest 
 in women ; is seen in its worst aspects in eff'eminate men. It 
 is the cause of all cowardice ; leads to concealments ; is man- 
 ifested in ordinary social life in the sensitive disposition of 
 the timid; often underlies a vacillating disposition; is the 
 most common cause of deception and falsehood ; and should 
 be counteracted always by hope, courage, conscience, love; 
 almost never by severe punishment. It is invaluable as a 
 restraining and counteracting faculty ; when it becomes the 
 dominant motive, it is fatal to forcefulness and efficiency of 
 character. 
 
 5. Among the impulses whose object is a preservation of 
 existence must also be put the love of offspring. So much 
 has been said and written about parental love, about mothers' 
 love especially, that it may seem to the reader doubtful 
 whether this impulse belongs here among the lower animal 
 impulses. But a moment's reflection will convince him that 
 the love of off'spring is in its lowest forms a purely animal 
 instinct ; seen in the cat's care for her kitten, the hen's for 
 her chickens, the cow's for her calf in every farm-yard ; seen 
 also, alas ! as a mere blind semi-sensual instinct, in many a 
 
 * The phrenologist generally distinguishes between combativeness and destnictiveness. 
 But they are so nearly akin, that I think any discrimination between them is rather con- 
 fusing than helpful in analysis. 
 
THE ANIMAL IMPULSES. 41 
 
 home, where the father or mother cannot bear to inflict pain, 
 or thwart a desire, or permit a disappointment, or allow a 
 burden, and so the child grows up, coddled and tended, to 
 be weak and wayward and willful, and often worse. This 
 parental instinct, guided and inspired by the higher nature, 
 is the child's guardian from present evil, and guide into future 
 manhood; but unguided and uninspired, it protects only from 
 pain, which is God's method of discipline, and seeking only 
 happiness, guides often into destruction and misery. It is, 
 too, quite evident that it is necessary for the protection of 
 existence ; for the infant, whether of man or animal, is rarely 
 able at first to protect himself; the higher his rank in the 
 scale of being the greater the necessity for protection ; and 
 if there were no parental instinct, if there was nothing but a 
 general and distributed sentiment of pity, he would certainly 
 suffer greatly, and would generally die for want of the power 
 in himself of self-protection. The parental instinct endows 
 him with all the faculties and powers of his parent, especially 
 with those of his mother — for in both brutes and men this in- 
 stinct is almost invariably the strongest in the female — until 
 his own powers have attained sufficient growth to make him 
 able to protect himself. 
 
42 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL IMPULSES. 
 
 1. At the foundation of the social organization in all its 
 various manifestations is the social instinct. The phrenolo- 
 gists call it adhesiveness. Some animals are gregarious, 
 others are solitary. Man is gregarious. The recluse is an 
 exception. There is but one Thoreau. Solitary imprison- 
 ment is the most dreaded of all penalties. Men are impelled 
 to associate together in political, industrial, and social enter- 
 prises. Their intercourse in these associations is regulated 
 in a large measure by the spiritual impulses, of which we 
 shall have something to say in the next chapter. But the as- 
 sociation itself is a necessity of human nature irrespective of 
 the ulterior advantages to be gained from it. 
 
 Bain attempts, but not very successfully, to account for 
 the social instinct by the fact that it is a means to an end. 
 We associate, according to him, to gratify our benevolent 
 impulses ; to get aid from others in our life and its undertak- 
 ings; to gratify our love of power or of applause, and the 
 like. These most certainly intensify the social instinct; but 
 the social instinct exists independent of them. A man may 
 be very social and yet supremely selfish ; he may dread iso- 
 lation and yet be cynicaL Sociality is a primary fact of hu- 
 man nature. There is a molecular attraction which draws 
 men together. Humanity instinctively coalesces as drops of 
 water in a stream. 
 
 2. Doubtless one of the chief promoters and regulators of 
 this social instinct is approbativeness, or the love of praise. 
 Mr. Darwin regards it, I think wholly without good ground, 
 as constituting the basis of conscience. But unquestionably 
 
THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL IMPULSES. 43 
 
 it re-enforces conscience in some cases, and serves as a very- 
 poor substitute for it in others. It promotes, if it does not 
 produce, what we commonly call good nature. This is very 
 different from benevolence. The good-natured man does 
 not live to produce the greatest amount of good to the great- 
 est number, nor even to his immediate neighbor. He tries 
 to please him not to build him up, and is often as ready to 
 do him a real injury as a real benefit, if it will win the reward 
 of approbation at the time. He that is governed by appro- 
 bativeness is a prey to many and sometimes seemingly diverse 
 faults. He is easily discouraged, and not easily satisfied. 
 The more he is praised the more praise he demands. He is 
 guided and often governed by the opinions of others. He is 
 rarely strong unless his approbativeness is more than balanced 
 by some other motive, self-esteem, for example, or conscien- 
 tiousness. This is the secret source of the human passion 
 for " glory ; " for it, as expressed by a medal, the scholar 
 toils and the soldier fights. It is universal ; perhaps of all 
 the motive powers the most various in its activity and the 
 most pervasive though not the most powerful in its effects. 
 
 " The love of praise, howe'er concealed by art. 
 Reigns more or less and glows in every heart ; 
 The proud to gain it, toils on toils endure, 
 The modest shun it, but to make it sure." 
 
 When it is the foundation of character it lures on to in- 
 evitable moral ruin. The man who makes approbativeness 
 a substitute for conscience has no other standard of right and 
 wrong than the opinion of his own public, which is a far less 
 trustworthy standard even than public opinion. He becomes 
 a chameleon, changing his character and his opinions to suit 
 the company he is in, and doing it instinctively, unconscious- 
 ly, and in a sense honestly. When he loses the approbation 
 of his fellow-men he loses the last restraint and incentive. 
 The history of Aaron Burr is the history of a man of brilliant 
 
44 A STUD Y LV HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 parts, wrecked by the absence of a conscience and the sub 
 stitution as a moral mentor of approbativeness. On the 
 other hand, he who lacks approbativeness lacks tact, sympa- 
 thy, quick fellowship, readiness to appreciate, or willingness 
 to weigh, the feelings and opinions of others. He does not 
 assimilate with others, for he is indifferent to their sentiments. 
 He is disregardful not always of their real interests, but of 
 their wishes and feelings. He does not consider the effect of 
 his example on others, and so allows his good to be evil 
 spoken of. His self-esteem becomes an intolerable self-con- 
 ceit, and his conscience a tyrant over others. He becomes 
 pert, angular, rude, boorish. 
 
 3. Self-esteem is sometimes popularly confounded with 
 approbativeness; it is in actual experience more commonly 
 the antidote thereto. Approbativeness leads us to de- 
 sire the approbation of others; self-esteem leads us to de- 
 sire our own. Approbativeness asks what will others think 
 of us ; self-esteem, what shall we think of ourselves. Self-es- 
 teem tends to give its possessor independence of thought, 
 individuality of action ; to make him forceful and vigorous. 
 It is to be found in nearly all born leaders, whether of 
 thought or of action. Its normal and natural exercise pro- 
 duces self-reliance and enforces courage. If it is not excess- 
 ive, it is a consciousness of power and adds to real strength 
 of character. If it is excessive, it is an imaginary conscious- 
 ness of power which has no real existence, and is a fatal 
 weakness. The divine law of self-esteem is expressed by the 
 apostle Paul in the direction to every man, " not to think of 
 himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think 
 soberly." A wise, right, and true estimate of one's own 
 powers is necessary to their highest and best use. The gen- 
 eral who overestimates his forces leads them to defeat ; he 
 who underestimates them does not lead them at all. Self- 
 esteem in excess leads to pride, censoriousness, arrogance ; 
 it makes its possessor impervious to criticism, and even to 
 
THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL IMPULSES. 45 
 
 the lessons of bitter experience. Whatever his failures, he 
 always attributes them to other causes than his own mis- 
 takes. He is always too wise to learn. It is the exact op- 
 posite of that poverty of spirit which Christ said was the first 
 condition of entering the kingdom of heaven. " Seest thou 
 a man wise in his own conceit; there is more hope of a fool 
 than of him." On the other hand, the lack of a due and 
 proper self-esteem is almost invariably accompanied with an 
 excess of approbativeness. The result is a weak and vacil- 
 lating character. A man who has no confidence in the wis- 
 dom of his judgments or in his power to execute them is 
 timid, irresolute, uncertain, dependent upon others, a fol- 
 lower of stronger natures, never a leader. Approbativeness 
 is the most common weakness of women, self-esteem of men. 
 The one neutralizes the other. Both cannot well be in ex- 
 cess. ' He who has an excessive confidence in his own powers 
 will be indifferent to the commendation and criticism of his 
 fellow-men; he who has a supreme regard to the opinions of 
 his fellow-men will be distrustful of his own. Neither appro- 
 bativeness nor self-esteem are necessarily a fault. An illustra- 
 tion of a divine form of approbativeness is afforded by Christ's 
 parting request to his disciples to preserve his memory 
 through all coming ages by a memorial supper. An illustra- 
 tion of a divine form of self-esteem is afforded by his decla- 
 ration to the Pharisees, " Ye are from beneath, I am from 
 above," and by his declaration to his disciples, " Ye call me 
 Master and Lord : and ye say well ; for so I am." 
 
 4. The love of acquisition appears to be a primary and in- 
 stinctive impulse of the human soul. It is, indeed, seen in 
 some of the higher animals, especially in the bee and the 
 ant; but it belongs to the social rather than to the animal 
 nature; it is pre-eminently human. Unquestionably this de- 
 sire is stimulated by the advantages conferred by acquisition; 
 it is a means to an end ; and from the boy struggling for a 
 toy, to the man struggling for a larger bank account, some 
 
46 A STUD V IN- HUMAN XA TURE. 
 
 real or imaginary pleasure derived from the possession is 
 generally and perhaps always in view. But there appears to 
 be a pleasure in new possessions apart from the uses and enjoy- 
 ments which they afford. At all events, whether acquisitive- 
 ness be regarded as a primary and fundamental motive power, 
 or only the working out of other motive powers of the mind, it 
 enters so largely into human life that it may well be regarded 
 as a distinct impulse. It is the mainspring of industry ; the 
 secret power of material civilization. It is the love of acqui- 
 sition which has opened a highway for commerce across be- 
 fore untrodden seas, bridged the continents with iron high- 
 ways, opened the hidden wealth in gold and silver and iron 
 mines, brought lumber from the forests and coal from the 
 hills, plowed the prairies and harvested the plain where the 
 bison once roamed, founded cities on the site of the wigwam. 
 It has been a greater motive power than conscience; it has 
 achieved more for mankind than benevolence. It has 
 sheathed the sword and forged the plowshare; has con- 
 quered combativeness ; has turned man from a wild beast 
 into a domestic animal, from a destroyer into a producer. 
 But this is all. It is without a moral character or a moral 
 purpose. Guided by reason it avoids criminal dishonesties, 
 because reason sees that wealth acquired by methods which 
 arouse the indignation of mankind is never permanent. But 
 it is the secret of covetousness and avarice. It is the parent 
 of the gambling-house and the liquor-saloon. It is embodied 
 in all speculative operations. Unrestrained by conscience it 
 is dishonest, untempered by benevolence it is cruel. It is a 
 root of all evil. They that are controlled by it, that will be 
 rich, fall into a snare. It is at once the most useful and the 
 most despicable of the social motives. 
 
 5. Closely allied to it is the constructive instinct; the in- 
 clination to build, to put together; prominently manifested 
 in all engineers, engravers, and mechanics. Employed in 
 the intellectual realm its work appears in more subtle forms. 
 
THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL IMPULSES. 47 
 
 The writer who possesses it constructs his work with skill, 
 though it may be barren of ornament or fancy; the preacher 
 endowed with it makes a good skeleton though he may utter- 
 ly fail to infuse it with the life of human sympathy and feel- 
 ing. It is the secret of all modern mechanics, and of very 
 much of modern practical science. It is the opposite of 
 destructiveness ; is witnessed in any eminent degree only in 
 the higher stages of civilization ; and is, perhaps, the highest 
 of all the social instincts. Its manifestations are witnessed 
 in lower forms in the animal creation, as in the bee and the 
 beaver; but it is essentially a human and social instinct. 
 
 6. The tendency to imitate, of which in the animal crea- 
 tion illustrations are seen in the parrot, the mocking-bird, 
 and the ape, is also a human instinct. It is seen in all forms 
 of mimicry; enters largely into every phase of dramatic 
 representation, from that of dramatic oratory, like that of John 
 B. Gough, to that of the stage ; underlies much of the power 
 and beauty of art in its less exalted forms ; and is the basis of 
 much of our educational system. It is this inclination on the 
 part of humanity, especially of the young, to imitate the ac- 
 tions of others, which gives such power both for good and 
 for evil to example. It is this which makes leadership pos- 
 sible ; for there can be no leadership without an inclination 
 to follow the leader. It induces men to take their opinions 
 from others; to copy the actions of others; to model their 
 characters after others. It is strongest in the young, or in 
 the crude and uneducated. John Chinaman given a plate as 
 a model, in which there happens to be a crack, makes each 
 of the dozen with a corresponding crack. The boy smokes, 
 not because he likes the cigar, which sickens him on a first 
 and even a second or third trial, but because he sees his 
 elders smoke. Approbativeness and imitativeness work to- 
 gether. They are harnessed as in a span. Without the in- 
 stinct of imitation, society would tend to lapse into a mere 
 congeries of individuals ; it would learn from the experience 
 
4S A STUD V LV HUMAN- NA TURE. 
 
 of the past very slowly, if at all. On the other hand, excess- 
 ive imitativeness destroys all individuality and independence 
 of character, and reduces the man to an automaton, who 
 moves only in drill, and does nothing except in blind imita- 
 tion of a supposed superior. 
 
 7. To these social instincts should probably be added also 
 the instinct of local attachment. It is certain that some per- 
 sons become very strongly attached to places ; others have 
 no such attachment. It is said that the cat is attached to 
 the house, the dog to the master. The one pines for the 
 house, the other for the man. A like difference is seen in 
 men. Generally women have stronger local attachments than 
 men. A rude violation of this instinct is one of the chief 
 causes of home-sickness. A principal value of it is a certain 
 kind of local stability. Without it all men would be, as are 
 the Bedouin Arabs, nomadic. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL IMPULSES. 49 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SPIRITUAL IMPULSES. 
 
 Man is distinguished from the rest of the animal creation 
 by his moral and spiritual nature. The distinction recog- 
 nized in the earlier books of mental science between reason 
 and instinct is now largely abandoned. There are instinctive 
 and almost automatic actions, as there are intelligent and 
 thoughtful ones ; but the distinction between the brute and 
 the man is not in the possession of mere instinct by the one 
 and of reason by the other. Man sometimes acts from in- 
 stinct; he does so whensoever he follows blindly one of the 
 impulses which we have described above, without stopping to 
 submit the proposed action to the questions and directions of 
 his reasoning powers. On the other hand, there are abundant 
 evidences of the possession and use of reasoning power by 
 the brute creation, though in very crude forms and within 
 very narrow limitations. The dog, the horse, the elephant, 
 consider, reflect, reason. They exercise the faculty of caus- 
 ality and comparison, of which we shall have something to 
 say in a subsequent chapter. But there is no indication what- 
 ever of the possession or exercise by them of any moral dis- 
 crimination, or of any spiritual power. It is the moral and 
 spiritual powers of which we are now about to speak which 
 distinguish man from the brute. Brutes reason as truly as 
 men; but every man is a law unto himself, while the brutes 
 are subject to law only as they are brought under it by a su- 
 perior force. They do not rule themselves by recognized 
 laws of right and wrong. The only law recognized is the 
 law of the strongest. All men worship ; the exceptions, if 
 there are any, are so few as to be insignificant. Every nation 
 3 
 
50 A STUD Y IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 has its religion or its superstition, its god or its demon, its 
 temple or its fetish. There is no indication of any thing 
 analogous to worship among the brutes; they have houses, 
 but no temple; social organization, but no revealed law; 
 domestic instincts, but no spirit of universal benevolence. 
 
 1. Conscience is the factor which recognizes the inherent 
 and essential distinction between right and wrong, and which 
 impels to the right and dissuades from the wrong. It does 
 not come within the province of this book to discuss either 
 the basis of ethics or its laws ; to consider either why some 
 things are wrong and others are right, nor to point out what 
 is wrong and what is right. That belongs to moral science, 
 not to mental science. It must suffice here to say that the 
 distinction between right and wrong is recognized in all 
 peoples, and is one of the first objects of perception in child- 
 hood. Standards differ in different races and in different 
 ages. The power of moral discrimination is subject to edu- 
 cation both for good and for evil. But the sense of ought is 
 as universal as the sense of beauty. That there is a right and 
 a wrong is as evident to every mind as that there is a wise 
 and a foolish, a beautiful and an ugly, a pleasant and a dis- 
 agreeable. There are things pleasant and things repulsive 
 to the moral sense, as there are things pleasant and things 
 repulsive to the eye and to the palate; there is a sense of 
 right and wrong as there is a sense of beauty and a sense of 
 taste. It has been a matter of great debate among philoso- 
 phers what is the ground of right and wrong. We cannot 
 here enter into this debate. I shall assume, what is by no 
 means universally conceded, that it is a primary fact in life ; 
 that the right is right and the wrong is wrong, irrespective 
 both of commands and consequences; that the right is right 
 not because God commanded, but God commands it because 
 it is right; and it is right not because it produces happiness, 
 but it produces happiness because it is right. That it would 
 still be right though it produced misery instead of happiness, 
 
THE SPIRITUAL IMPULSES. 51 
 
 and was forbidden, not commanded ; that it is as truly the 
 law of God's nature as of man's nature ; and that if we could 
 conceive his commanding any of his children to do what is 
 not right it would change, not the character of the action, but 
 his own character. I assume, too, that as right and wrong 
 are primary facts of human life, so the faculty which recog- 
 nizes that fact, and which impels men to do right and to 
 eschew wrong, is a primary faculty. Men are to be guided 
 by their judgment in determining what is right and what is 
 wrong; but the judgment does not determine that there is a 
 right and a wrong. Their sense of right and wrong is clari- 
 fied or obscured, their impulse to the right and away from 
 the wrong is strengthened or weakened, by other faculties ; 
 but it is not dependent upon them. Approbativeness may 
 lead them to do what other people think to be right ; but 
 desire for the approbation of others is not conscience, nor 
 the ground nor basis of conscience.* Self-esteem may 
 strengthen their purpose to do right, and so win their own 
 approval ; but self-esteem is not conscience, and self-esteem 
 and conscience may come into direct conflict. Benevolence 
 may add its persuasions to the impulse of conscience, and 
 the man may be impelled to do right because doing right 
 will also do good to others. But this is not the ground of 
 his conviction that there is a right ; and the right may even 
 seem to be fraught with irreparable injury and no compensa- 
 tory good to others, and so benevolence and conscience come 
 in conflict. The recognition of right and wrong and the im- 
 pulse to right and away from wrong is original, primary, 
 causeless, one of the simple and indivisible powers of the 
 soul of man. I cannot better state this truth — I have no 
 space here to argue it — than in the words of Professor Hux- 
 ley, who will certainly not be accused of any undue orthodox 
 proclivities : 
 
 * As Darwin makes it. See his " Emotions in Animals and Man." 
 
52 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. , 
 
 «M 
 
 "Justice is founded on the love of one's neighbor; and 
 goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the laws 
 of physical nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive in- 
 tuitions, and is neither more nor less innate and necessary 
 than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got 
 to understand the first book of Euclid ; but the truths of 
 mathematics are no less necessary and binding on the great 
 mass of mankind. Some there are who cannot feel the dif- 
 ference between the Sonata Apassionata and Cherry Ripe; or 
 between a grave-stone cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belve- 
 dere ; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged. 
 While some there may be who, devoid of sympathy, are 
 incapable of a sense of duty ; but neither does their existence 
 affect the foundations of morality. Such pathological devia- 
 tions from true manhood are merely the halt, the lame, the 
 blind of the world of consciousness; and the anatomist of the 
 mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body would 
 ignore abnormal specimens."* 
 
 It is hardly necessary to point out the function or dwell 
 upon the necessity of conscience in human life. It is funda- 
 mental to all that is human in life. Without it men would be 
 brutes ; society would be wholly predatory ; the only law 
 recognized would be the law of the strongest ; the only re- 
 straint on cupidity would be self-interest. There could be 
 neither justice nor freedom. Trade would be a perpetual 
 attempt at the spoliation of one's neighbor. Law could be 
 enforced only by fear, and government would be of necessity 
 a despotism. The higher faculties uninfluenced by con- 
 science would rapidly degenerate. Reverence would no 
 longer be paid to the good and the true, but only to the 
 strong and the terrible ; religion would become a supersti- 
 tion ; God a demon ruling by fear, not by law ; punishment 
 a torment inflicted by hate and wrath, not a penalty sanc- 
 
 * "English Men of Letters : Hume," by Prof. Huxley. Harper & Brothers, p. ao6. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL IMPULSES. 53 
 
 tloned by conscience for disregard of its just and necessary- 
 laws ; and benevolence itself, unregulated by a sense of right 
 and wrong, would become a mere sentiment, following with 
 its tears the robber as readily as the Messiah to his crucifix- 
 ion, and strewing its flowers as lavishly on the grave of the 
 felon as on that of the martyr. In history have been seen 
 all these exhibitions, not of the absolute elimination of con- 
 science from human life, for conscience has never been 
 wholly wanting in the most degraded epoch of the most 
 degraded nation, but of its obscuration and its effeminacy. 
 
 It is, perhaps, more needful to remark that the evils of a 
 character whose conscience is not controlled by other and 
 still higher faculties are quite as great. Conscience combined 
 with self-esteem, uninstructed by faith and unrestrained by 
 benevolence, is the most remorseless and cruel of impulses. 
 The ingenious persecutions which it invented and inflicted in 
 the Middle Ages on the Protestants of Italy, Spain, France, 
 and the Netherlands, far exceeded those which mere brutal 
 combativeness and destructiveness inflicted on the Jews in 
 the reign of Nero. It is not enough that a man be con- 
 scientious. He may be conscientious and self-conceited ; in 
 that case he will be exacting and despotic, making his own 
 conscience a law for all his neighbors. He may be con- 
 scientious and approbative; in that case he will be weak, 
 afraid, and always tormented lest he has. not done what to 
 his neighbors will seem to be right. He may be conscien- 
 tious without faith ; in that case he will be constantly led 
 into false judgments by a tendency to measure the moral 
 quality of every act by its immediate effect. He may have a 
 merely retroactive conscience ; in that case he will fail to 
 look forward and prepare for what he is to do by measuring 
 proposed action by the standard of right and wrong; he will 
 be habitually looking back and tormenting himself, and per- 
 haps others as well, by perpetually trying himself for actions 
 past and beyond recall. He may use his conscience not as 
 
54 A STUDY IN- HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 the restraining motive of his life, but as the impelling motive, 
 not as the governor, but as the steam ; in that case he will 
 have nothing of the joy of the perfect love which casteth out 
 fear, but will always act under the spur of necessity, never in 
 the freedom of those who through faith and love have entered 
 into the liberty of the sons of God. It is not enough to have 
 a conscience, and a masterful conscience ; it must be a good 
 conscience ; a conscience that forecasts ; that acts in restrain- 
 ing rather than in impelling ; that is instructed by faith, not 
 by sight; that is united to benevolence rather than to appro- 
 bativeness and self-esteem. 
 
 2. Reverence. There is in man an instinct inclined to 
 look up, to admire, to reverence. Something akin to it, 
 something certainly illustrative of it, is seen in the apparent 
 mental attraction of the best and most intelligent dogs toward 
 their masters. But in the brute it is apparently dependent 
 largely on physical services rendered and on fear. It is seen 
 in man in various forms in the social organism, and is in one 
 sense a social instinct, as also is conscience. But in its higher 
 manifestations it is essentially both human and spiritual. It 
 is the basis of all wonder, admiration, awe, reverence.* It is 
 the foundation of that awe which we feel in the presence of 
 the great and sublime in nature : the vast wilderness, the 
 towering mountain, the starry heavens. Fear sometimes, but 
 by no means always, enters into its existence ; the two 
 emotions are indeed often in absolute contrast, so that one 
 hardly knows whether to fear or to rejoice. It enters into 
 our experience of admiration of human handiwork, in art, 
 mechanics, architecture. It is the basis of social distinctions, 
 especially as they are seen in countries where hereditary 
 classes exist, and the lower class is habituated to looking up 
 to the class above it, where looking 7tp is as easy and as natural 
 
 ♦ The phrenologists recognize two faculties, one of reverence, the other of marvel- 
 ousncss. This seems to me a needless and doubtful distinction. Essentially and at root 
 they are the same. 
 
THE SPIRITUAL IMPULSES. 55 
 
 as for an American to look off. It is the instinct of the child 
 toward the parent, making it easy for the one to obey and 
 the other to enforce the command, " Honor thy father and 
 thy mother," a command often read as though it were, what 
 it is not, Obey thy father and mother. It is seen in every 
 form and phase of worship. It impels men every- where to a 
 belief in some superior Being, known or unknown, imagined 
 or unimagined, but deserving and demanding and receiving 
 reverence. It exhibits itself alike in the devotee bowing be- 
 fore his hideous image in his magnificent Hindu temple, in 
 the Friend lifting up his heart in silent adoration to the in- 
 visible Spirit, and in the spirit of wonder and of awe with 
 which the seemingly undevout scientist approaches the con- 
 fines of the visible world and looks off and seeks to fathom 
 the beyond, and returns shaking his head in intellectual de- 
 spair, saying it is the Unknown and the Unknowable. It is 
 ignored by atheists, and therefore atheism has never made 
 many converts, and never can. It is an essential and inde- 
 structible principle of human nature. 
 
 But this faculty is no more free from dangerous propensities 
 than the lower social and industrial impulses. It is as dan- 
 gerous when ill-educated and misdirected as acquisitiveness 
 or self-esteem. If for lack of it men grow skeptical, infidel, 
 atheistic Godward and cynical manward, inclined to take 
 low views of man and none at all of God, its excess leads to 
 idolatry and every form of superstition, to worshiping the 
 unworshipful and reverencing that which is not venerable. 
 Mated to conscience and self-esteem it produces bigotry ; 
 uninstructed by faith it begets idolatry or the worship of the 
 visible, and therefore the unreal ; combined with fear it 
 begets superstition, the worship not of what is to be vener- 
 ated, but of what is to be dreaded. 
 
 3. Benevolence. By benevolence is meant the impulse 
 which leads its possessor to wish well to all other beings. It 
 is an innate, not an acquired, quality of the mind. It exists 
 
56 A STUD V IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 in all men, though in many buried and almost destroyed by 
 the pre-eminence of other faculties. It has its weak side 
 and its defects. Uninstructed by faith it desires merely the 
 happiness, not the welfare of men, and sacrifices without hes- 
 itation their real and permanent good for their apparent and 
 present pleasure. Mated to approbativeness it becomes a 
 mere instinct or impulse of good nature. Unregulated by 
 conscience it is indiscriminating, a mawkish and morbid sen- 
 timentality. But it is of all the impulses the one whose 
 vices are the least dangerous, and whose virtues are the most 
 beneficent to mankind. Coupled with veneration, and look- 
 ing up to a superior, especially to God, it redeems worship 
 from fear, and makes it ennobling, elevating, purifying. 
 Looking upon suffering, it is pity ; looking upon sin, it is 
 mercy; looking upon the well-being of the whole community 
 needing protection from sin, it is justice. As an emotion, it 
 is sympathy; it weeps with those that weep, it rejoices with 
 those that rejoice. As a principle of action, it seeks the 
 greatest good of the greatest number. It combines with the 
 social instinct to make the family of man more than the nest 
 of birds, society more than an ant-hill or a bee-hive. It is 
 the secret of patriotism in the State, and is that love which is 
 the bond of perfectness in the Church. It is the queen of 
 the soul, and he only is truly healthy whose whole nature is 
 obedient to love — whose acquisitiveness gathers for it, whose 
 combativeness and destructiveness battle for it, whose cau- 
 tion fears for its wounding, whose conscience is made tender 
 and sympathetic by it, and whose reverence is made fearless 
 and filial and joyous by it. It is incapable of analysis ; and 
 no description which has ever been penned of "it can com- 
 pare for intelligent comprehensiveness and spiritual beauty 
 to Paul's psalm of praise to it in the thirteenth chapter of 
 I Corinthians : " Love suffereth long, and is kind ; love 
 envieth not ; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth 
 not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not pro- 
 
THE SPIRITUAL IMPULSES. 57 
 
 voked, taketh not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unright- 
 eousness but rejoiceth with the truth ; beareth all things, be- 
 lieveth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." 
 
 4. Phrenologists add to the impulses thus far given several 
 others, the two most important being hope and firmness. 
 These seem to me to be rather qualities than faculties ; not 
 so much impulses to do particular things as a spirit or habit 
 which modifies the method of doing all things. Hope gives 
 vigor of plan, firmness gives continuity of purpose ; the one 
 makes radiant, the other makes strong. Neither are simple 
 or primary passions. Both are capable of analysis. Hope 
 is desire and expectation commingled. What a man desires 
 but does not expect, he does not hope for ; what he expects 
 but does not desire, he does not hope for ; what he both 
 desires and expects, he hopes for. His expectation may be 
 rational or irrational ; his hope is accordingly well or ill 
 grounded. Firmness is vigor and persistency combined. It 
 is persistence of force. Vigor without persistence produces 
 dash and impetuosity ; persistence without vigor produces 
 inertia. Health of body has much to do with both qualities. 
 Certain diseases invariably produce despondency. Certain 
 physical weaknesses invariably produce more or less vacilla- 
 tion of purpose. Consciousness of power has much to do 
 with both qualities. The man who is' conscious of his own 
 resources will be hopeful of results when all around him are 
 in despair; he will be persistent in his purpose when all 
 about him are discouraged and ready to retreat. He may 
 be hopeful and firm in certain directions, despondent and 
 vacillating in others ; firm where conscience is concerned, 
 and weak where self-interest is concerned; firm in protect- 
 ing the interests of others, and weak inprotecting his own, 
 or vice versa. Whether, however, hope and firmness be re- 
 garded as impulses, or as temperamental conditions affecting 
 all the impulses, they must certainly be taken into account 
 in any study of human nature. 
 3=^ 
 
50 A STUDY IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS. 
 I. The Senses and the Supersensiious. 
 
 What are very generally called the Intellectual Powers 
 I call the Acquisitive Powers, because among them is a 
 power which is more and higher than the Intellect ; which 
 at all events it is wise for us to distinguish from the Intel- 
 lectual, as that phrase is ordinarily used. 
 
 1. The Senses. There are five of these: sight, hearing, 
 smell, taste, and touch. Some philosophers have, indeed, 
 undertaken to show that all the senses are only refined and 
 subtle forms of the sense of touch: invisible ether striking 
 the eye, waves of air striking the tympanum of the ear, fra- 
 grant emissions touching the delicate nerve of the nose, and 
 subtle qualities in the food coming in contact with the nerves 
 of the palate. But for all practical purposes the old distinc- 
 tion between the five senses may be accepted as satisfactory. 
 Nor do these five senses require any explanation. We are 
 all measurably familiar with them and their exercise. 
 
 2. The Sensuous Faculties. With these senses are con- 
 nected sensuous faculties which receive and appropriate and 
 appreciate the various facts brought to the knowledge of 
 the mind by the senses. We not only perceive the outer 
 world, we appreciate qualities in it which the senses them- 
 selves know nothing of. Thus a man on horseback emerges 
 from a forest upon the top of a high hill, and both look off 
 upon the prospect of the valley below. The same picture is 
 impressed on the retina of both beast and man, but the same 
 emotion and intellectual life is not awakened in both. There 
 are in the rider faculties which perceive in the beauty of the 
 
THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS, 59 
 
 view that which is unperceived and unperceivable by the 
 horse. Men are said to have or to lack an ear for music; 
 the ear itself is struck by the same sound waves, and the 
 same impression is made on the auditory nerve of both, but 
 the one receives what the other does not and cannot receive. 
 So two men may look at the same picture, and see it with 
 equal distinctness, but the one who has an eye for art will 
 perceive in it much which the other, who has no eye for art, 
 fails to perceive. I shall not enter into any elaborate anal- 
 ysis of the sensuous faculties, nor into the discussion which 
 has been waged concerning them. It is enough for my pur- 
 pose in this treatise to point out the more evident ones. 
 These are time, space, weight, color, and tune. The pow- 
 ers which recognize these qualities or realities are pecul- 
 iarly human. Their recognition is very dim, if it exists at 
 all, in the brute creation ; it is very clear and absolutely 
 necessary in man. We are compelled to think of all events 
 as occurring in time, and having a certain time relation to 
 each other, as being past, present, or future, as occurring 
 before or after. We are compelled, too, to think of them as 
 occurring in space, and as having certain relations of locality 
 to each other, as being above or below, on this side or that, 
 in this locality or another locality. Whether time and space 
 are intuitive perceptions, or laws of thought binding upon us 
 which compel us to think of things in these relations, or re- 
 sults of observation and experience, it is not necessary for us 
 here to inquire. In point of fact the recognition of both 
 time and space are absolutely universal ; the power of recog- 
 nizing them exists, however its existence may be explained. 
 The same thing must be said of weight, number, color, and 
 time. We have the power of aiscrimmating substances not 
 merely by their form, that is, the space they occupy, but also 
 by their weight or tendency to fall toward the center of the 
 earth. We have a power of recognizing numbers, of per- 
 ceiving the difference between one and more, of knowing the 
 
6o A STUD Y IN- HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 relations between these various numbers, and of working out 
 of that power of perception the whole science of numbers in 
 all its branches. We have the power of distinguishing 
 colors, and appreciating what we call beauty of color, that is, 
 the combinations of color which tend to produce pleasure 
 through the eye on the mind. We perceive in certain com- 
 binations of sounds an effect which we call musical. More- 
 over, these powers differ very greatly in different men, and 
 seem capable of still further analysis. In tune there are a 
 variety of effects which seem to differ in kind as well as in 
 degree, and the capability to produce or to enjoy these differ- 
 ent effects, respectively produce different schools in music, 
 each having its own peculiar and characteristic appreciation. 
 To these should be added the faculty of language, a faculty 
 quite peculiar to man, and differing very widely in different 
 races and in different individuals of the same race. 
 
 3. The Supersensiious Faculty. We have arrived at a part- 
 ing of the ways. That there is any supersensuous faculty 
 much of modern philosophy positively denies ; the existence 
 of such a faculty still more of modern philosophy ignores. 
 All forms of modern skepticism have a common philosoph- 
 ical foundation. Their philosophy denies that we can know 
 any thing except that which we learn through the senses di- 
 rectly, or through conclusions deduced from the senses. We 
 know that there is a sun because we see it ; we know ap- 
 proximately its weight and its distance from the earth, be- 
 cause by long processes of reasoning we reach conclusions 
 on those subjects from phenomena which we do see. What 
 we do not thus see, or hear, or touch, or taste, or smell, or 
 thus conclude from what we have seen, or heard, or touched, 
 or tasted, or smelled, is said to belong to the unknown and 
 unknowable. This is the basis of modern skepticism. It is 
 the basis, too, of much of modern theology. It is the secret 
 of the " scientific method." By this method we conclude the 
 existence of an invisible God from the phenomena of life ex- 
 
THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS. 6i 
 
 actly as we conclude the existence of an invisible ether from 
 the phenomena of light. But the God thus deduced is like 
 the ether, only an hypothesis. It is quite legitimate to offer 
 a new hypothesis ; and the scientist will be as ready to accept 
 one hypothesis as another, provided it accounts for the phe- 
 nomena. This philosophy, pursued to its legitimate and log- 
 ical conclusion, issues in the denial that man is a religious 
 being; or possesses a spiritual nature ; or is any thing more 
 than a highly organized and developed animal. 
 
 Over against this philosophy of human nature I set here 
 the doctrine that man possesses a supersensuous faculty.* 
 By a supersensuous faculty I mean a power to see the in- 
 visible and hear the inaudible ; a sixth sense ; a spiritual 
 perception ; a capacity to take direct and immediate cogni- 
 tion of a world lying wholly without the dominion of the 
 senses. A man hopelessly blind might well conclude that 
 there is such a phenomenon as color from the testimony of 
 his friends. A man wholly deaf might well conclude that 
 there was a phenomenon of sound from merely observing its 
 effects on others. But the phenomena of sight are directly 
 and immediately perceived by the eye ; they are not ordina- 
 rily derived from observation made only by the ear. So I 
 suppose the facts or phenomena of the spiritual life are 
 directly and immediately perceived by the spiritual sense ; 
 they are not derived from observation made by the other 
 senses. 'The spirit has its eye and its ear. This power 
 in art and literature is called the imagination, fancy, ideality ; 
 its productions are called creations. In religion it is called 
 faith. There is no better definition of it than that afforded 
 by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews : " Faith is the 
 substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not 
 seen." f That is, it is the faculty or power which gives us 
 
 ♦ Not as though it were in any sense a new doctrine ; it is older than Plato, and has 
 never been without its representatives and advocates in philosophical thought. 
 t Hebrews xi, i. 
 
62 A STUD Y IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 knowledge of the ipvisible realities of life. Religion does not 
 depend upon a " scientific method." God is not an hypothe- 
 sis. He is known directly and immediately by spiritual con- 
 tact, spiritual perception. 
 
 This power of direct perception of a world beyond the 
 senses is seen in all great inventors. It is the prophetic 
 faculty, and the secret of all progress. Morse sees the tele- 
 graph wires carrying his messages over a continent before 
 a pole has been set in the ground. Stephenson sees England 
 covered with a net-work of railway before a rail has been 
 laid. The architect sees his cathedral in the mind before a 
 stone is put to rest in its bed of mortar. In all these and 
 kindred cases the invisible is seen before it becomes visible ; 
 the supersensuous sense perceives it before it can be made 
 apparent to the slower appreciation of the senses. It is the 
 power which underlies all art, literature, oratory. To imitate 
 whether a greensward or a silk dress is not art ; as to declaim 
 whether Marco Bozzaris or Hamlet is not oratory. Art is essen- 
 tially creative. It brings out of the invisible world invisible 
 realities, and so presents them that the dull eyes and ears of 
 the unspiritual can perceive them. The artist sees his pict- 
 ure before he paints it, and if he be a true artist always sees 
 a nobler picture than he paints. He copies from an invisible 
 canvas. The author sees the truth which he endeavors, al- 
 ways with imperfection, to express; and beneath his dead 
 body of a book there beats a living soul which looks out 
 through its pages as the soul looks out through the eyes into 
 the windows of another soul. This living soul he sees and 
 knows just as clearly before as after he has given it a body. 
 The orator, more dimly but as truly, sees the truth which he 
 endeavors to carry away captive from its shadowy land, and 
 his power over his audience lies in his power to interpret to 
 their senses and through their senses what he had before 
 seen and grasped by his supersensuous faculty, his spiritual 
 perception, his faith-power. These invisible realities thus 
 
THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS. 63 
 
 seen by the soul's sense are not mere copies of something 
 which the eye has seen before ; they are not memories, nor 
 mere new combinations of objects familiar to the senses. 
 They belong to another world. The artist, the author, the 
 orator is a true translator into sensuous forms of supersensu- 
 ous realities, and always views his best work with a sense 0/ 
 dissatisfaction, knowing that no sensuous forces are adequate 
 to expound to men who live in the senses what he has seen 
 and known. He is ready to exclaim with Jesus : " We speak 
 that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye re 
 ceive not our witness." In still higher forms evidence of 
 this supersensuous faculty is seen in all our social and do- 
 mestic life. Our business, our government, our society, our 
 homes, are all built upon it. Without it they must dissolve 
 and humanity go back to barbarism and anarchy. All mod- 
 ern commerce is dependent on the reality and the incalcu- 
 lable value of honor, humanity, integrity ; qualities not seen, 
 not easily demonstrable by a ''scientific method," but recog- 
 nized by all men who possess them and imitated by many 
 who do not. Justice, truth, honor, fidelity, courage, patriot- 
 ism, are all intangible, invisible qualities. They are not 
 seen ; they are not deduced from the seen ; they are instant- 
 ly and immediately recognized as realities by the supersen- 
 suous sense. Their value is depreciated or ignored by sen- 
 sual men. They are qualities unrecognized by the brute. 
 This faith-power is the recognized life of the home circle, 
 and of all friendships and fellowships. The love of a mother 
 for her child is different from the love of a bird for its young, 
 or a cow for its calf. The love of husband and wife for each 
 other is more than an animal instinct. The tie which binds 
 friends together is not sensuous. Identity is not in the feat- 
 ures. What we love is the inward, the soul, the mental and 
 moral qualities, the patience, gentleness, forbearance, long- 
 suffering love, the invisible manhood and womanhood within, 
 which the eye does not see, which the reason does not dem- 
 
64 A STUD Y IN HUMAN NA TURE. 
 
 onstrate, which are not hypothetical, which are not ascer- 
 tained by any "scientific method," but which are instantly 
 and directly and immediately perceived by the power of 
 spiritual perception which resides in every spirit. 
 
 But in its highest manifestations this supersensuous faculty 
 is seen in the religious life. It is the power which the Bible 
 calls faith. Faith is not an intellectual activity deducing con- 
 clusions from premises; 'it is not an act of the will or an im- 
 pulse of the affections, though it inspires both. It is a spiritual 
 perception, " the substance of things hoped for, the evidence 
 of things not seen." By this we perceive the Spirit of God 
 behind all nature and immanent in all nature, as we perceive 
 the spirit of a man- behind the body and immanent in the 
 body. Neither are hypotheses to account for phenomena ; 
 both 2iXQ facts instantly and immediately perceived. This is 
 the power of which Paul writes when he says, " We look not 
 at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not 
 seen." This is what he generally means by the word know : 
 " we know that the law is spiritual ; " " we k7ioiu that all things 
 work together for good to them that love God ; " "I know 
 whom I have believed." In these and kindred passages he 
 speaks not of conclusions reached by a " scientific method," 
 but of facts realized by a spiritual experience. It is to the 
 contrast between the sensuous and the supersensuous, be- 
 tween faith and sight, that Chri^st refers when he promises to 
 his disciples another Comforter whom the world cannot re- 
 ceive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth (hath experi- 
 ence of) him; "but ye know him, because he dwelleth with 
 you, a7id shall be in you.'' It is to this spiritual sense, dormant 
 in even the most unspiritual natures, that Paul refers when in 
 Athens he classes himself sympathetically with his pagan 
 audience, saying, " In him we live, and move, and have our 
 being." This faith-power is the illuminating and transform- 
 ing power of the soul. It is that whereby God enters it and 
 makes it his own. It is that whereby each faculty is lifted 
 
THE A CQ UISITIVE PO WERS. 65 
 
 up from a mere earthly and sensuous activity. By faith love 
 is converted from a mere wish for happiness into a wish for 
 true welfare ; reverence is changed from image worship 
 to spiritual worship; conscience is able to measure the 
 issues of right and wrong by their intrinsic and spiritual 
 nature, not by the anticipated consequences of action ; the 
 parental instinct is lifted above a mere animal propensity, 
 and is made to become a guide to God and a guardian for 
 eternity; and the very appetites and passions are made to 
 minister to the higher, the internal, the spiritual nature. 
 
66 A STUDY nv HUMAN NATUJiE. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS. 
 
 II. The Reflective Faculties. 
 
 Man possesses not merely the power to gather both from 
 the outer and visible and from the inner and invisible world, 
 a power both of sensuous and supersensuous observation ; he 
 possesses also a power of classifying and arranging the results 
 of his observation, of observing resemblances and contrasts, 
 and of drawing conclusions from them. This he does by the 
 reflective faculties, or what is in popular language called the 
 reason. Formerly it was supposed that the animals did not 
 possess this power. A more careful and candid observation 
 has brought scientific men to the conclusion that the higher 
 animals — notably the dog, the horse, and the elephant — also 
 reflect, consider, weigh, judge, compare; in a word, reason, 
 though to a very limited extent and within very narrow 
 bounds. The contrast between the animals and man is not 
 that man possesses reflective faculties and the animals do 
 not, but that man possesses apparently an unlimited capacity 
 of developing both these and other faculties, while the limits 
 are very soon reached in the animal ; and man possesses the 
 spiritual faculties — the supersensuous faculty of faith and the 
 spiritual impulses of conscience, reverence, and love — in a 
 high degree, while they are either entirely wanting in the 
 brute, or exist only in the most rudimentary forms. For 
 convenience of analysis the reflective faculties may be di- 
 vided into two, the Logical faculty and the Comparative fac- 
 ulty, or causality and comparison. 
 
 I. It does not make much practical diff"erence whether we 
 say that man possesses a faculty by which he perceives the 
 
THE A CQ UISITIVE PO WERS. 67 
 
 relation of cause and effect, or that he is under a mental law 
 which compels him to think of all phenomena as in the rela- 
 tion of cause and effect, or that the truth that every effect* 
 must have a cause and every cause an effect is intuitively 
 and immediately perceived by him, or that the relation of 
 cause and effect has been perceived by observation and ex- 
 perience through so many generations that he has come to 
 expect an effect from every cause and a cause for every 
 effect as the result of generations of experience. He not 
 only possesses the power, he is laid under a necessity of per- 
 ceiving this relation, a relation perceived but dimly if at all 
 by the mere animal. This is the power which leads the child 
 to ask why^ and the man to say therefore. It is the power 
 which frames syllogisms, and is compelled to accept the 
 conclusion if the premises be granted. It is the power 
 which leads the farmer when he sees a pile of upheaved 
 earth in his garden to conclude that a mole has burrowed 
 there ; which induces the explorer when he discovers the 
 earth-mounds in Ohio or the cliff-dwellings in Colorado to 
 conclude that man has been there before him; which compels 
 men every-where, seeing the marvelous mechanism of nature 
 by which he is surrounded and in which he dwells, to be 
 sure that some First Great Cause has called it forth. This is 
 the power which guides man in his search, whether it be the 
 search of the farmer for the hiding mole, the antiquarian for 
 the lost race, or the philosopher for an unknown God. It is 
 this power which enables us to trace sequence in nature, in 
 history, in human experience ; which enables us to see that 
 phenomena are not isolated and accidental, but every fact is 
 a link in an endless chain. The exercise of this faculty upon 
 numbers gives us the higher mathematics, exercised upon 
 visible phenomena it produces science, upon mental experi- 
 ence it creates history, political economy, mental and moral 
 philosophy. Every mechanic relies upon it when he builds 
 his engine or constructs his dam, sure that the same cause 
 
68 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 will always produce the same effect; every artist depends 
 upon it when he mixes his colors, certain that the same mix- 
 ture will produce the same shade, and the same touch of the 
 brush on the canvas will cause the same effect ; every orator 
 assumes it, consciously or unconsciously, when by the utter- 
 ance of his own emotions he strives to awaken the emotions 
 of his hearers, or by the process of reasoning he expects to 
 win the assent of their judgment to his own conclusions. It 
 is, indeed, one of the master powers of man's mind, but it is 
 not the master power; and when men attempt to make it do 
 the work of the supersensuous faculty, when they ignore the 
 power given them to perceive directly and immediately the 
 invisible world, and attempt in lieu of exercising that faith- 
 power with which they are endowed to arrive at the truth 
 respecting the invisible world by employing the logical fac- 
 ulty upon observed phenomena, the result is always a ration- 
 alism, which, whether its conclusions be orthodox or hetero- 
 dox, those of a Bishop Butler or those of a John Stuart Mill, is 
 far removed from that spiritual religion which is founded on 
 experience, not on deduction, and which says not, I conclude, 
 I think, or I believe, but I know. 
 
 2. But while the relation of cause and effect is the relation 
 which binds phenomena together, there are other relations 
 than those of cause and effect which the mind must perceive 
 in order that it may classify phenomena, and truly apprehend 
 their meaning and value. The phrenologist calls this faculty 
 comparison, a name which seems to give to it too limited a 
 scope ; and yet it is not easy to suggest for popular use a bet- 
 ter title. By this power, called by whatever name, man per- 
 ceives both differences and resemblances. He perceives the 
 vital difference between a whale and other citizens of the 
 ocean, and discovers that a whale is not a fish ; he perceives 
 the resemblance between the spark of electricity and the 
 thunder-bolt, and out of this perception grows all electrical 
 science; he perceives the resemblance between the fall of 
 
THE ACQUISITIVE POWERS. 6g 
 
 an apple and the movement of the earth, and out of this 
 perception grows the whole science of modern astronomy ; 
 he perceives the resemblance between man and the animal, 
 and out of this perception grows comparative physiology. 
 All science is based on this power; all eminent scientists 
 possess it in an eminent degree, and employ it continuously, 
 and often almost unconsciously. 
 
 But this is by no means its only, perhaps not even its chief, 
 scope. It traces resemblances between the outer and the 
 inner world, the visible and the invisible. It is the poet's 
 brush and the orator's, whereby they cast upon their canvas 
 a thousand tropes and figures and metaphors. All language 
 of the inward life employs unconsciously this subtle power of 
 perceiving analogies. " He is frozen with horror ; " " he is 
 full of wrath ; " " he is struck with an idea : " these and 
 kindred phrases in our daily conversation are all based upon 
 the possession of a power in man to see the subtle analogies 
 between spiritual experience and external phenomena. These 
 analogies make all life a parable ; this power makes every 
 man in some measure a poet and a prophet. It enters largely 
 into all imagination, which is sometimes indeed the direct 
 perception of invisible realities, but which is sometimes also 
 the construction of new images by the power which perceives 
 relations before unperceived, and brings together objects 
 familar in forms and combinations before unknown. The 
 ancient centaur may be fairly taken to illustrate both types 
 of imagination. By his supersensuous faculty, his faith-power, 
 the poet saw in the soul of man the strange amalgam between 
 the bestial and the divine ; this was no visible disclosure, 
 no logical deduction ; it was a spiritual perception. To em- 
 body it to the senses of others, he combined the head and 
 breast of a man with the body of a horse, an unreal combina- 
 tion of real things, to illustrate a real but invisible combina- 
 tion. The faculty which perceived the invisible amalgam 
 was one, the faith faculty. The faculty which framed the 
 
70 A STUDY IN HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 visible combination was another, the faculty of comparison. 
 The product of the two we call the product of the imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 This same faculty lies at the basis of all wit and humor. 
 Two of the most difficult problems of mental science are : 
 What is the secret of the beautiful ? What is the secret of 
 the humorous ? I shall not enter here into these old problems, 
 still less attempt to solve them. It is enough to say that by 
 a general, if not universal, consent the foundation of both 
 wit and humor is a sudden and unexpected discovery of 
 either a disparity or a resemblance. Other elements enter 
 into it. Not every such unexpected and sudden discovery 
 produces a tendency to laugh. But it may safely be said that 
 the faculty of comparison is always called into play in every 
 ebullition of wit and humor, and that those whose faculty of 
 comparison is either feeble or slow to act are never quick to 
 take a joke, and rarely greatly enjoy it. 
 
ATTENTION, MEMORY, WILL. 71 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 ATTENTION, MEMORY, WILL. 
 
 Teere are three other mental powers which are sometimes 
 treated as separate faculties, attention^ memory^ and will. I 
 do not so treat them here for the same reason that I have not 
 treated hope and firmness as separate motive powers. Atten- 
 tion and memory are rather mental habits than mental facul- 
 ties, and will is the power which reigns over all the faculties; 
 it is the personality, the individuality, which, so to speak, ad- 
 ministers the whole kingdom. 
 
 I. Attention is a habit or power of concentration, which 
 may characterize one faculty or another, or all combined. It 
 is, however, usually a concentration for the time of all the soul's 
 powers upon a single faculty, and is generally proportioned to 
 earnestness of desire. The merchant finds no difficulty in con- 
 centrating attention upon the business of his counting-room ; 
 he does it without conscious effort ; but when he has returned 
 home in the evening, it is with the greatest difficulty that he 
 concentrates it upon a book, and sometimes reads a page be- 
 fore he discovers that his mind has been upon the business of 
 the day, not upon the Shakespeare in his hand. So a college 
 boy easily puts his whole mind upon a ball game, but requires 
 a vigorous act of the will to fasten it upon his Cicero oT' his 
 Homer. The secret of attention is interest, and when the: 
 faculty is aroused by a strong motive all the power of the- 
 soul is concentrated on the problem before it instantly and in- 
 stinctively and without an effort. The mother who is pray- 
 ing for the recovery of her sick child does not find herself 
 troubled by the wandering thoughts in prayer which have 
 been the bane of her public worship so frequently in church. 
 
72 A STUDY IN" HUMAN- NATURE. 
 
 2. As attention is the concentration of the faculties upon a 
 subject, induced by strong interest in it, so memory is the 
 retroactive action of each faculty. It is not a separate fac- 
 ulty, as though the powers of the mind gathered truth and 
 the memory received and stored it. It is generally propor- 
 tioned both to the strength of the particular faculty and ihe 
 interest in the particular subject. A man who has a veil- 
 developed faculty of numbers will remember dates ; a man 
 who has a well-developed faculty of color will remember the 
 picture which another has forgotten. One mind will remem- 
 ber facts and principles, another words and localities. Mr. 
 Maurice mentions as extraordinary the memory of his sister 
 for the fragrance of a particular flower inhaled in her child- 
 hood ; but his memory for principles is evident on every page 
 of his published works. Joseph Cook will repeat with almost 
 verbal accuracy a paragraph read months, perhaps years, be- 
 fore. It is said of Henry Ward Beecher that, during the 
 revival of 1856-7, at a prayer-meeting in Burton's Old The- 
 ater, he declined to lead the congregation in the Lord's 
 Prayer, because he dared not trust himself to repeat it with- 
 out the book. For myself, I am never able to cite an author, 
 or quote a text of Scripture, or a verse of a familiar poem, 
 with any assurance of accuracy ; but I can go to my library, 
 take down the book where I have seen or read the sentence 
 I wish to quote, and turn to it, generally at once, though 
 years have elapsed since I saw it. In another edition, differ- 
 ently paged, I might search for it in vain. This simple illus- 
 tration may suffice to make clear my meaning, if not to 
 demonstrate its accuracy, that memory is simply the powei 
 of a faculty to retain what it has once acquired, or repeat 
 what it has once done ; a power which depends usually, if not 
 always, upon the degree of interest which attached to the 
 first acquisition, or upon the force which attached to the 
 first action. 
 
 3. Into the question, the most hotly debated of all ques* 
 
ATTENTION, MEMORY, WILL. 73 
 
 tions in mental science, of the freedom of the will, neither the 
 limits of this little treatise, nor my object in writing it, allow 
 me to enter. But certainly any study of human nature would 
 be fatally defective which failed to afford any philosophical 
 statement concerning the will ; nor can such a statement be 
 made and the question at issue between the two great schools, 
 both in philosophy and theology, be ignored. I must content 
 myself with very briefly stating the difference and my own 
 conviction, without entering into any argument in support of 
 the one position, or into any criticism of the other. 
 
 One school of philosophy holds that the motive powers 
 heretofore described are the ultimate facts of human nature ; 
 that man is made up of these powers ; that he is and neces- 
 sarily must be governed by the strongest of these motives. 
 The argument is very simple and not easy to answer. Man 
 must be governed by the strongest motive ; for if not, then 
 he would be governed by some other motive, which would, 
 therefore, be stronger than the strongest, which is absurd. 
 This is the philosophy, psychologically stated, of what is 
 known as the Calvinistic school of theology, though repudi- 
 ated now by many, perhaps by a majority of modern Calvin- 
 ists. It is the theory also of a large school of modern 
 scientists, who hold that mental phenomena are as truly sub- 
 ject to undeviating law as physical phenomena, and that 
 every thought and emotion, no less than every force and 
 phase of nature, is one link in an endless and never-to-be- 
 broken or ended chain. In this view the will is only the 
 balance of the faculties and the preponderance of the strong- 
 est. Philosophically it leaves man the creature of an inscru- 
 table fate. Religiously this condition is escaped, because 
 religion points to a God who is able, by a direct and super- 
 natural intervention, to make strong the conscience and the 
 love, which are by nature weak ; a God who will always thus 
 interpose to save the lost from his own undoing, whenever, 
 overpowered by a sense of his hopelessness, he appeals to 
 
74 A STUDY I?7 HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 his Creator and Redeemer for that divine help without 
 which he never can choose the good or turn away from the 
 evii. 
 
 The other school of philosophy holds that man himself is 
 more than all the motive powers within him ; that he possesses 
 what has been called a self-originating power of the will ; 
 that his will, that is, he himself, his personality, the ego 
 which makes him a free moral agent, has power not only over 
 things external to him, but over his own appetites, desires, in- 
 clinations, and is able to curb the one, and directly or indi- 
 rectly to quicken and strengthen the other ; that he domi- 
 nates himself; that he is not like a chip, the prey of every 
 wind or wave, nor like a steam-ship, controlled by its own 
 sails and its own engines ; but like the same steam-ship when 
 sails and engines are controlled by a master, who uses them 
 to accomplish successfully his predetermined voyage. 
 
 Which of these views of human nature will be taken by the 
 student of life and character will be determined largely by the 
 question whether he looks upon human nature from the outside 
 or the inside. If he observes what it appears to do when 
 studied by the " scientific method," or determines what it must 
 be presumed to do from considerations derived from the- 
 ories of man's nature, God's nature, and the divine govern- 
 ment, he will tend toward the Necessarian theory of life. If, 
 on the other hand, he looks within, takes the testimony of 
 his own consciousness and that of others, and believes 
 the witness which men bear to their own interior con- 
 viction of freedom, he will tend toward the other view. 
 Samuel Johnson expressed this contrast by his saying, " All 
 argument is against the freedom of the will ; we know we're 
 free, and that's the end on 't." All mere external observa- 
 tion and all a priori reasoning respecting human nature I 
 regard as not worthy to be compared with the testimony of 
 consciousness. It is the universal testimony of consciousness 
 that there is a freedom of will, a power superior to the mo- 
 
 I 
 
ATTENTION, MEMORY, WILL, 
 
 75 
 
 tive powers, a real self control, an ego which is not controlled 
 by, but itself controls, every inward impulse and every intel- 
 lectual power of the soul and spirit. This ego^ this master 
 of the moral mechanism, is the will ; and in its last analysis 
 all moral action and all moral character depends on the 
 action and on the character of this ego^ this master of the 
 whole nature, this captain of the ship, liiis lord of the intel- 
 lectual and mental domain. 
 
76 
 
 A STUDY IX HUMAN NATURE. 
 
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