of mental experience. They are reproduced in consciousness in the forms of sensation, thought, and volition; which are flashed into existence by some stimulus brought to bear upon the latent nerve-force accumulated in the ganglionic centres. The real material, then, actually metamorphosed into mind, seems to be, so far as it can be expressed in words, the nerveforce generated from the waste of nerve-tissues, and stored up in the brain and its tributaries. In the production of every mental state, some portion of the nerve-force is struck by a stimulus, and liberated in discharges of consciousness which, when healthy, are psychical equivalents of realities and phenomena in the universe. The quality, intensity, persistency, and other relations of that product or mental action depend on the character of the internal force and the external stimulus in whose meeting it is born. Accordingly, the psychical metamorphosis which follows the collision of the stimulus and the force may be harmonious or discordant, healthy or diseased, accordingly as the factors and their union are normal or abnormal.

The mental life of man is twofold,-real and ideal; or, as the metaphysicians say, presentative and re-presentative. It is real when the assimilation of conscious states is determined by stimuli received directly from external objects; ideal when those determining stimuli are derived from the mind itself, being an interior revival of foregone states, or a construction. of new ones independently of the outward world. The real is a direct mental mastication; the ideal is mental rumination, or a spiritual chewing of the cud. The external stimulus is sensational; the internal is intellectual. The latter is the cumulative result of the former, modified by the proclivities of hereditary transmission. The reports of all sorts of natu ral phenomena, the qualities of objects, the forces and relations of things, are carried over the conducting nerves of the organs of sense to the gray matter of the brain, where, in some inexplicable manner, they deposit the equivalents, or paint the pictures, of themselves. The brain is the terminal hall of natural tidings, where the telegraphic porters pile up their messages; or the focus of representative images, where

all kinds of objective realities photograph themselves. The sensational images thus conveyed, however, are not mind: they are but the stimulus which determines and gives form to the production of mind, or that metamorphosis of latent force into active consciousness which is the essence of psychical life. There is no mind associated with the sensational images depicted on the nerves of the eyeball when the brain is dead and the soul has gone. The images of objects shown in a mirror are not seen by the mirror, and do not see themselves. So the representations of facts and relations in the brain are not known by the brain, and do not know themselves; but they are the condition of the metamorphosis into self-consciousness of their immaterial equivalents in nerveforce. A conscious state whose sustaining stimulus is furnished by external realities - sensation is distinguished from one whose support is derived from internal reproduction of departed states, - intellection, by the pronounced vigor, clearness, and pertinacity of the former, in contrast to the comparative feebleness, dimness, and evanescence of the latter: also by the fact that the former is modified by collateral movements, while the latter remains unaffected by such movements. It is a fact of universal experience, that the degree of force, the intensity of emotion, awakened in us by the direct perception of an actual object is normally much greater than that awakened by the mere intellection of an object. It is equally a fact of universal experience, that while sensational images, the effects of outward objects, shift with our bodily motions, enlarge and diminish as we approach or recede, are shut out as we turn away, and restored as we return; ideal images, the effects of reflective resuscitation, remain the same whatever our bodily postures, but vary and succeed of themselves when we are motionless. Deprived of these two tests, we should be unable to discriminate between perception and meditation, the objects and influences of nature, and the pictures or reviviscences of the imagination. An imagination would be indistinguishable from a real action. Accordingly, as we all know by experience, when sensations are wholly withdrawn, the outer senses being laid asleep, as

in a deep dream, we have no means of distinguishing ideas from them; and we are forced to suppose all that happens or appears, to be objectively real. The same thing also occurs, we are unable to distinguish subjective from objective experiences, whenever the ganglia spontaneously discharge their nervous loads with as much vigor as if they were touched off by sensations. This is the key to the whole world of hallucinations.

But, as we are constituted, the two elements, sensational or actual, and intellectual or ideal, are constantly alternating and blending in the succession of our conscious states. By their duly proportioned mixture they constitute a healthy life. One in whom the former much preponderates, is described as having an objective character and experience: he in whom the latter rules, is called subjective. In the former case, the dies which strike the psychical matter into the forms of consciousness are the direct phenomena and relations of the environing universe; in the latter case, the reproduced correspondences or mental reverberations of those phenomena and relations. The metamorphosis of life, as the instinct of mankind expressed in literature has accurately divined, is more likely to be discordant and diseased in the later instance than in the earlier; because in the subjective realm each element of experience is exposed to atrophy, hypertrophy, inflammation, degeneration, from the defective, exaggerated, or perverted influence of the rest; the heterogeneous multitude of elements and acts being so vast and mobile that the steady preservation of their normal balance can hardly be expected in the present condition of mankind. When the contents of sensation and intellection, the fresh importations and the revived reminiscences poured into consciousness, are expressions of truth and harmony, equivalents of the order of nature and the will of God, the resulting life is healthy; but when they are jangled, disarranged, falsely colored, mere equivalents of fiction and violence, the life produced is morbid, charged with the forces of disease and madness.

The soul not only draws its supplies directly from the ob jects and events of nature; it also lives largely on the indi

rect supplies furnished from those objects and events through the assimilated representations of them in the experiences of other souls. To express the thought a little differently: the mind feeds not only on the signs of the forces of nature, but also on the signs of the states of other minds. The stimulative symbols of the relations and phenomena of natural objects, conveyed in sensations, first nourish the mind; uniting with its dynamic substratum, are metamorphosed into its conscious states. And, secondly, the stimulative symbols of those conscious states as expressed through the human form in motions, colors, and sounds, produce the same results again. That is to say, the phenomena of nature brought into relation with a man produce psychical states in him, and the revealing indications of psychical states in a man produce corresponding psychical states in other men. Literature is the permanent embodiment of the signs of psychical states at the second remove. The first signs are natural variations of the features, muscular motions, and vocal inflections. Written language is a system of conventional signs afterwards devised. The literature of the world is the great storehouse of the signs of the past experience of our race. Language is the painted carriage in which the experience of mankind travels down the ages. Some persons, like Wordsworth, live mostly on the fresh phenomena of nature; they take their mental food at first hand. Some, like Balzac, live mostly on the experiences of society; they take their mental food at second hand, either sympathetically, as it is expressed by their companions, or reflectively, as it is garnered in books.

These two sources of nutritive supply are to the soul what a vegetable and an animal diet are to the body. Social action and literary art are, to most persons, more concentrated and stimulative in their effects. They present to the assimilative powers of the soul psychical food, not in its elemental condition, but as already metamorphosed in other organisms. Undoubtedly, in some proportion to the complex elaboration the food of experience has previously undergone, is the danger that it has suffered perversion from the normal wholesomeness of truth. More diseases are pro

cured or provoked by the highly stimulative complexity of meats than by the simple fruits of the earth. A soul fed on the revulsive passion of the verse of Byron, the syren volup tuousness of the strain of Moore, and the overcharged plotting of the patriotism of Mazzini, will be less likely to attain a healthy experience than one fed directly on the ambition of the social sphere, the loveliness of passing maidens, and the impersonated idea of his country. The principal reason why psychical disturbances and diseases are so much more rife among the moderns than they were among the ancients, why calmness, balance, and content are so much more rarely known with us, may be, that we live so much more than they did on the preserved experiences of other souls, and so much less on immediate natural phenomena. Unlike us, they cheerfully received things as they were, not holding them under a morbid speculative analysis, and reflecting over them a pale and sickly cast of thought.

"And since they Nature's fearful wound

Sought not to probe and bare,

Therefore their spirits never swooned,
Watching the misery there."

We should not use books or the meditations of other people as preferential substitutes for nature. They may usefully be accompaniments, keys, supplements, but not excluding substitutes for the original realities. The reverse is often actually the case. The quiddities of the Schoolmen occupied the best. brains of Europe for many generations. The dreams of Buddha have tinctured the daily lives of nearly one-half the population of the globe for two thousand years. When a splendidly endowed or inspired man realizes a mental state which is beyond the unaided reach of ordinary men, and organizes the true and noble experience in an institution, or deposits the permanent sign of it in literature, where the common multitude may appropriate and reproduce it, it is the highest service an individual can confer on the race. Such are the beatitudes of Christ; such are the great discoveries in science; such are the ecstatic emotions of the most