relationship. Immateriality, in its various phases of force, life, intellect, so far as human consciousness can grasp it, is inseparable from materiality. The body is but part of the soil on which it treads, and the mind can receive no impressions except through the organs of the body. The brain is the seat of thought and the organ of thought; neither can exist in a normal state apart from the other. As a rule, the power of the intellect is in proportion to the size and quality of the brain. Among animals, those of lowest order have the least brains; man, the most intellectual of animals, has relatively, if not absolutely, the largest brain. True, in some of the largest animals the cerebral mass is larger than in man, but, in its chemical composition, its convolutions, shape, and quality, that in man is superior; and it is in the quality, rather than in the quantity of the nervous tissues, that their superiority consists. Intelligence enters the brain by the organs of the senses, and through the nervous system its subtle influence radiates to every part of the body. All human activities are either mental or mechanical; nor will it be denied that mental activity is produced by mechanical means, or, that mechanical activity is the result of mental force. Corporeal motion is mental force distributed to the various parts of the body.

The action of immaterial forces on the material substances of the human body manifestly accords with the action of immaterial forces elsewhere. All the physical and mechanical actions of the human body accord with the physical and mechanical forces elsewhere displayed. Man, we are told, was the last of all created things, but in the making of man no new matter was employed; nor in setting the body in motion can we discover that any new force was invented. Thus the heart beats upon mechanical principles; the eye sees, and the voice speaks in accordance with the general laws of optics and acoustics.

To the observer, organic activity is but the product of combined inorganic forces. The same processes are at work, and in the same manner, in living and in so-called dead matter. Life, to all appearance, is but the result of combined chemical and mechanical processes. Assimilation, digestion, secretion, are explainable by chemistry, and by chemistry alone. The stomach is a chemical retort, the body a chemical laboratory. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, combine and separate in the body as out of the body. The blood circulates upon purely mechanical principles; all muscular action is mechanical. In the phenomena of life, the only perceptible difference is in the combinations of fundamental elements; yet chemistry and mechanics cannot produce a live body.

With the foregoing well-recognized principles before us, let us now notice some few parallelisms between mechanical and social energetics.

Man, like every other natural substance, is a compound of force and matter. "Respiration," says Liebig, "is the falling weight, the bent spring, which keeps the clock in motion; the inspirations and respirations are the strokes of the pendulum which regulates." Atoms of matter, through the instrumentality of living force, cohere and coalesce under endless complex conditions into endless varieties of form and substance; so also the activities of man, corporeal and intellectual, result in vast accumulations of experiences, which accumulations become the property of the whole society. Society, like matter, is composed of units, each possessing certain forces, attractive and repulsive; societies act upon each other, like celestial bodies, in proportion to their volume and proximity, and the power of the unit increases with the increase of the mass. In association there is a force as silent and as subtle as that which governs atoms and holds worlds in equipoise; its grosser forms are known as government, worship, fashion, and the like; its finer essence is more delicate than thought. It is this social force, attractive and repulsive, that binds men together, tears them asunder, kneads, and knits, and shapes, and evolves; it is the origin of every birth, the ultimate of every activity. Mechanical forces are manifest in machines, as the lever, the wheel, the inclined plane; professional force is manifest in intellectual ingenuity, literature, art, science, which are the machines of human progress.

MATERIALITY ACTING ON THE MIND.

How many of all our joys and sorrows, our loves and hates, our good and evil actions, spring from physical causes only? Even material substances display moods and affections, as when heated, electrified, decomposed, or set in motion; the sea at rest presents a different mood from the sea raging. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that the soul might be governed for its good by material things working through the media of the senses, is not so extravagant after all. "The gospel according to Jean-Jacques," as Carlyle puts it, runs as follows on this point—and, indeed, the great Genevan evangelist at one time intended to devote a book to the subject under the title of La Morale Sensitive:—"The striking and numerous observations that I had collected were beyond all dispute; and, in their physical origin, they appeared to me proper for furnishing an exterior regimen, which, varied according to circumstances, should be able to place or maintain the soul in the state most favorable to virtue. How many wanderings one might save the reason, how many vices might be hindered birth, if one could but force the animal economy to favor the moral order that it troubles so often. Climates, seasons, sounds, colors, darkness, light, the elements, food, noise, silence, movement, repose, all act on our bodily frame, and, by consequence, on our soul; all offer us a thousand firm holds to govern, in their origin, those sentiments by which we allow ourselves to be dominated."

In contemplating the numerous activities by which we are surrounded, again and again we are called upon to wonder at the marvelous regularity which characterizes all their movements. So regular are these movements, so sure are certain conditions to accompany certain results, that in physics, in chemistry, in physiology, and even in society, facts are collected and classified, and from them laws are discovered as fixed and irrevocable as the facts themselves, which laws, indeed, are themselves facts, no less than the facts from which they are deduced.

Highly cultivated nations frame laws that provide for many contingencies, but the code of nature has yet finer provisions. There are conditions that neither political nor social laws reach, there are none not reached by physical law; in society, criminals sometimes evade the law; in nature, never. So subtle are the laws of nature, that even thought cannot follow them; when we see that every molecule, by virtue of its own hidden force, attracts every other molecule, up to a certain point, and then from the same inherent influence every atom repels every other atom; when by experiments of physicists it has been proved that in polarization, crystallization, and chemical action, there is not the slightest deviation from an almost startling regularity, with many other facts of like import, how many natural laws do we feel to be yet unrevealed and, from the exquisite delicacy of their nature, unrevealable to our present coarse understanding.

It would be indeed strange, if, when all the universe is under the governance of fixed laws—laws which regulate the motion of every molecule, no less than the revolutions of suns—laws of such subtle import, as for instance, regulate the transformations of heat, the convertibility and correlation of force; it would be strange, I say, if such laws as these, when they reached the domain of human affairs should pause and leave the world of man alone in purposeless wanderings.