spirit that is within, and the body is built up by the soul.

Many people think of the soul as if it were a little" spark" carried about by the body, and stowed away in some obscure recess; but it would be more true to say that it is the soul which carries the body about. The body is fashioned and directed by the same soul as a boat may be made, occupied, and sailed by the same man, subject to the waves of his environment and the winds that come from above him.

Man, we are learning, is not a body possessing a soul, but a soul possessing a body, and the manner of it we will discuss in the next chapter. Here let it be only remembered that the Christian does not think less of his body because it is the organ of his soul and the temple of the Holy Ghost, but the more highly because it is a holy shrine. This conviction of the body's worth and its infinite possibilities will surely never wane in Christendom; for every birth is a microcosm of the Incarnation, and every baby born a little word of God made flesh.

So, when the Spirit of Christ has been long at work, men have become humane, with a great reverence for the human body, a horror of all violence done to it by cruelty, intemperance, or lust, and a growing comprehension of its wonders. And there has clung to Christendom a belief that, in spite of its obvious decay, this body cannot finally perish. For the Christian creed declares the belief that the body as well as the spirit is immortal. The spirit cannot rise again, for it never dies: but, says the

Church, your body, that mysterious thing which is the same to-day as it was years ago, though every particle of it has been renewed, your body, that strange persistent something which is the expression of yourself, will exist in eternity. For there is an essence in the body itself which is vital, central, permanent, and having identity. Such a body we are told that Christ showed to his disciples in the last great forty days. Such a body the spirit will win to itself, as it weaves another kind of body now. For there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. But the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.

CHAPTER III

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NERVES

If we leave the realm of Christian belief, and consider the human body merely as a physical mechanism, we are confronted with the same profound interdependence of matter and spirit. For the purpose of our argument in this chapter it is of little importance which comes first, or whether mind and body are identical: as Christians we hold that matter is the manifestation of spirit, and that they are not identical in any sense but this; and the present trend of scientific thought makes us pretty confident that this belief will hold the future. But those who think otherwise will admit equally with us that, while life lasts, mind and body are inseparably bound up together in the human frame.

For what does anatomy tell us? The human body is pervaded with the mental agency of the nerves. The body is a beautifully-contrived and almost infinitely intricate mechanism which has the power of taking certain materials from the outside world, breaking them up, and conveying such portions as it needs into its own innermost recesses by means of an amazing network of tiny channels, so that these necessary materials may be built up into its own substance; a mechanism which also has the power of moving certain of its parts, such as

hands, and legs, and tongue, so as to attain a considerable mastery over the world.

For the simplest of these actions the very elaborate and strange apparatus is necessary, to which we give the name of the Nervous System. Upon this system the body, in its present stage of evolution, depends utterly for its life and its activity1; not only does the cutting of a particular afferent nerve, for instance, prevent the action of the muscle to which it is attached, but after a short time the muscle dies and shrivels up.2 Now the nervous system extends all over the body; there are nerves in every organ, however obscure, and there are nerves in almost every tissue.

This enormous ramification of microscopic fibres which, when united in bundles we call nerves, is ultimately centred in the brain. Some actions of the nerves are performed with our knowledge, and some without; but whether they are thus voluntary or involuntary, they are alike caused by nervous energy.

What is this energy? Though we may use metaphors from electricity for convenience sake, the

1 See pp. 108-12.

2 August Forel, Hygiene der Nerven und des Geistes, 1905; Eng. transl., 1907, p. 85.

3 For the benefit of the general reader, who may not realise the extraordinary fineness of this apparatus, and is apt to think of nerves only as the white cords which are really bundles of fibrils are barely 5000 of an inch in diameter, and that the separate fibres, it may be well to state that the finest nerve very largest ganglion cells are scarcely visible to a good eye. But here let me say once for all that I have deliberately left out as much technical matter as I could. The physiologist who may read these pages knows it already: the general reader would only be confused if I attempted to repeat it.

nervous energy, or neurokym, is not electricity 1; it is mind in some form or other.2 Let us consider this statement.

Both the voluntary and the involuntary muscles, both the organs which can appreciate a poem or paint a picture and those which secrete bile or manufacture the corpuscles of the blood, are worked by nervous energy which is alike in kind. It may be true that one system is centred in the brain and its continuation down the spinal cord, while the other has its roots in the sympathetic system; but the energy of these two systems must be identical, for the two systems are interlaced so that nervous impulses can be sent from one to the other. The ganglia of the sympathetic are themselves little brainsone may indeed speak of them as colonies of living things that inhabit the body and direct the movements of the blood-vessels and viscera. But none of them is independent: the ganglionic neurons are now known to send out collateral fibres to the spinal cord, and from the brain pass branches of communication to the sympathetic. This has been estab

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1 Forty years ago Huxley said that the forces exerted by living beings are either identical with those which exist in the inorganic world, or they are convertible into them," and instanced the nervous energy as the most recondite of all and yet as being in some way or other associated with the electrical processes. Nervous energy does, it is true, produce electrical and many other disturbances, but it is none the less as distinct from electricity as it is from heat. It is worth while to quote a living materialistic writer on this: "The neurokym cannot be a simple physical wave, such as electricity, light or sound. If it were, its exceedingly fine, weak waves would soon exhaust themselves without causing the tremendous discharges which they actually call forth in the brain A. Forel, Hygiene der Nerven, 2nd ed., 1905: Eng.

transl., 1907, p. 86.

2 See also Chapters V and VI.