Mental Diseases and Their Modern Treatment | Page 8

wisest are too feeble to express it, the explorations of the ages have failed to discover or explain in full the unfathomable phenomena of mental action. Materialistic theorists find no satisfactory conclusions from their varied and persistent investigations of the human brain and its marvelous workings. From action to inaction, from life to death, the search for the truth has been and is being most carefully made. The brain is the sheltering home of mentality, of immortal being, too, but you might as well count the rafters of a church, and from the enumeration thereof declare the character of the congregation therein assembled, as to attempt to educe from an examination of the brain after death a conclusive theory as to the nature of man. And yet the investigation goes on, and the problem of human life will by-and-by he solved. Gradually the cause and effect of perception, impression, and ratiocination, will be surely evolved.
The practical uses to which our brains are adapted are those of self- preservation and self-improvement. With what critical care, then, should we begin and continue the exercise of that organ upon whose proper development and growth depend the life, the happiness, the prosperity, and progress of the individual possessor of so rare a gift! The young should be taught to regard the brain in their possession as the pearl of great price. Brain culture of the right kind should begin at the earliest possible period in life, and should be continued without undue interruption, until man bends his head low to escape the rafters in the western horizon. This does not mean hard study, but proper training in childhood. Our brains should always be used with mode, ration and steadiness, but with unswerving persistence. Upon this care and culture depends not only the growth of the individual, but, by such means are fortifications erected to repel the assaults of man's greatest enemy-- insanity.
The best uses of the brain are those in which all the forces of that organ are bent to the service of right, and are forever arrayed against the hordes of wrong.
The worst abuse of the brain is a prostitution of its powers before the juggernaut of sin and error. It is a mournful fact that great powers and great abuses are often found in close company. The exercise of these powers, and the exemplification of wrong use are often manifest in the life and career of a single individual, and sometimes they are manifest in the acts of a community, or a nation.
While we recognize the powers and achievements of the human mind, yet we can never see that mind at work. The wisest thought of the philosopher, or the finest conception of the poet, may produce no observable action of the brain. The school boy's determination to run away from school may produce as much effect upon his brain as was produced upon Caesar's or Napoleon's when one decided to cross the Rubicon, and the other to scale the heights of Saint Bernard. But while we cannot see the actual workings of the human mind, we are yet able to trace in history the effects of those workings. To attempt to measure the work of the brain in civilization would be but an attempt to measure civilization itself. A greater range of mental and moral perceptions, and a superior fineness of mental and moral culture, are really all that have been gained in the centuries of human life. I am speaking, of course, of the permanent possessions of the human mind. What is preserved in the intellectual life of the past in books, pictures, architecture, and sculpture, is an available aid of great value. But apart from this, something has been preserved of the strength and culture which habits of thinking produce, and this is all that man can definitely claim as his own; all else is outside of himself and may be destroyed. But while we all understand, abstractly, that the brain is the seat of intellectual life, and that it impels all human action and shapes all human destiny, yet there are few so well instructed that they would not be filled with surprise and wonder at what one man may do. In mingling with the masses of human beings, the thought impressed most forcibly upon us is the littleness, the insignificance, of an individual life. Count a hundred of those you will first meet on your way tomorrow morning, and the chances are that the world would not feel the slightest loss if they were to be instantly swept out of existence; nor would it lack anything of its intellectual acquisitions if they had never been. What more painful, humiliating illustration of man's littleness! But you can count a hundred names whose loss, if they should be taken