_The Mechanical Action of Mind._—The Germans have a saying, framed first by their writer, Lichtenstein, known as “the Magician of the North,” that “_we_ do not think. Thinking merely goes on within us”; just as our stomachs digest and our glands excrete. Another one of their authors originated the once-celebrated apothegm, “Without phosphorus there is no thought.”
The aim of both expressions is to put pointedly the principle that the intellectual process is of a mechanico-chemical character, a mere bodily function, to be classed with digestion or circulation. This opinion has of late years been warmly espoused in the United States.
That intellectual actions are governed by fixed laws was long ago said and demonstrated by Quetelet in his remarkable studies of vital statistics. That the development of thought proceeds “under the rule of an iron necessity” is the ripened conviction of that profound student of man, Bastian. We must accept it as the verdict of science.
What, then, becomes of individuality, personality, free-will? Must we, as the great dramatist said, “confess ourselves the slaves of chance, the flies of every wind that blows?”
Not yet. That we are subject to our surroundings and our history; that our forefathers, though dead, have not relaxed their parental grasp; that time, clime, and spot master thought and deed, is all true. But above all is Volition, Will, a final, insoluble, personal power, the one irrefragable proof of separate existence, not itself translatable into Force, but the director, initiator, of all vital forces.
_The “Psychic Cells.”_—Mind brings man into kinship with all organic life. Long ago Aristotle said if one would explain the human soul, he must accomplish it through learning the souls of all other beings.
The physiologist explains mental phenomena as the function of specialised cell-life. He points out the cells, strange triangular masses in the cortex of the brain, with long processes and spiny branches, touching but never uniting. In the lower animals the network is simple, the branches short; as mental capacity advances, they become more complex and longer.
These are the “psychic cells” in whose microscopic laboratory is worked the magic of mind, transforming waves of impact, some into sweet music, others into colour and light and all the glory of the landscape; changing sights and sounds into emotions of joy or dread; transmitting them into passions or lusts; assorting the gathered stores of comparison, and from them building ideas base or noble, and awakening the Will to direct the use of all.