itself; and the consciousness of man, determining itself from itself; is an impassable gulf. Individuality is the peculiarity of the individual man, whereby he is distinguished from other beings of his kind. Individual is opposed to species, and person to nature. The Hottentot, Australian, the black fellow, and "swinked hedger," have common personality say—with the members of the British Association; but, individually, they are as distinct and separate as is the President from the Queen of Ethiopia.

The true life of personality and individuality is in the spirit. The body is sensual, except as elevated by the spirit. Flesh and spirit are contraries: except as flesh, endowed with soul, receives spirit. Flesh, and spirit,

are in contrast (Gen. vi. 3; Isa. xxxi. 3; John vi. 63). Man, a body of earth, specially fashioned and breathed into ; was the synthesis of two distinct elements. The outward, more than a veil or covering, was perverted by the inner essence. The relation may be called sacramental-body being the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: the two form human individuality. Spirit was not a portion of Divinity, but related to the Eternal Spirit as effect to cause. It is customary, in Scripture and in conversation, to speak of man as body and soul (Gen. ii. 7; 1 Sam. i. 26; Job iii. 20, x. 1; Ps. lxii. 1; Prov. iii. 22; Matt x. 28); but the more comprehensive expression isbody, soul, spirit (1 Thess. v. 23; Heb. iv. 12). Soul and spirit are separable, yet there is no gulf between them-man has not three lives in one life; is not three individuals in one person; he is one individual in three natures, a trinity in unity.

"Soul, p, is applied to the beast; and means the person of the beast, not the beast as a person: and though we apply soul to man as person in the human body; the soul in beast and the soul in man are in essential diversity. The brute has soul person, or a living nature, by cosmical life which pervades Nature. The body of man receives soul-not by cosmical, but by Divine life (1 Cor. ii. 11). The spirit is the power of self-consciousness and freedom; the soul is the place; the whole man is object. The spirit is of God; the pneuma, or candle of the Lord; the power of progressive and improvable reason; the power of will in selecting good or evil, true or false, right or wrong. The tree of the

A Physician's Point of View.

319

knowledge of good and evil, not to tempt but to try our parents, is the criterion between man and beast. The probation of the spiritual faculty by obedience indicates that only by the tree of life-only by willing submission to Deity -can true knowledge be attained. Spirit enters the dark stuff of naturalness, and is preserved there in still concealment until able to realise itself in the light-flame of human self-consciousness."

Look at the fact naturally and experimentally.

Whole classes of products consist merely of carbon and hydrogen, yet every one has its own individuality. A chemist proves that a piece of graphite and a diamond are essentially the same, but we recognise their individuality by using the graphite to draw with, and the diamond as a jewel.

A Physician's point of view.

Individual peculiarities are special, frequent, distinct. We cannot tell why one has Addison's disease, and another suffers from ataxy: why this endures cancer, and that is plagued with writer's cramp; why ipecacuanha will make some sneeze, a grain of iodide of potassium iodise one person, a grain of grey powder salivate another, and opium produce colic in a third. Every stage and period of a man's life from infancy to old age has its special, distinctive, peculiar, characters; material and immaterial peculiarities are frequent and distinct as to light, heat, electricity, food, drugs. "We call these peculiarities, idiosyncrasies; we meet some of them two or three or more times in twenty years, but others are so rare that a long life of varied and wide experience may have witnessed but one example. Some people are most delicate electrometers and magnetometers; and I knew one such who became blind in a thunderstorm eight years ago, and whose physical frame before and since that time was always contorted by electrical and magnetical disturbances long before the former are recognised by ordinary people, and when the latter have only been displayed by perturbations of the machinery for electric telegraphy. . . . With regard to food:-One person cannot take egg, in any shape or form; to another tea and coffee are poisons; some cannot eat flat-fish; others are put

1 "Christian Doctrine of Sin,” vol. i. p. 81 : Dr. Julius Müller.

into cutaneous tortures by strawberries.” 1 Such facts compel the recognition of individuality, for pathological and therapeutical purposes.

Daily experience shows peculiar morbid tendencies. One man sings over ghastly toil, another weeps with the infant in trouble. We are alike yet unlike. In the innermost recesses of every life is something not seen by the most earnest gaze. Emotions and feelings are often counted hypochondriacal, hysterical, nervous, unreal: because thorax, abdomen, limbs, excretions, are nothing wrong. Having weighed the patient, electrically examined the limbs, looked at the retina, marked the beatings of the pulse, and not found him wanting; he is told to go in peace. A deep unrest; a failing power felt by him, not seen by the physician; a sense or dread of impending evil, weakness of intellectual grasp, averseness as to physical exertion; seem, when tested, to be delusive notions; for he can do all things well. He is urged to disregard these warnings, does disregard them; but they come from life's centre, and some terrible catastrophe, breaks down the mind; heart ceases to work; suicide pours contempt on auscultation and scientific diagnosis.

The suffering man may have mistaken notions; and the unwise physician, following them, loses clue; but even morbid sensations and wrong notions are part of the disease itself, to be studied as a whole; and proof to the scientific pathologist of more than mechanical mysteries in many a disordered life. This leads the physician, in his own sufferings, to consult some one who knows him well and has known him long; who knew his parents and their belongings; and would "hit out some common-sense line of treatment, the result of much experience and far-seeing; rather than commit himself to the care of the most highly trained graduate in medicine who could see his retina, trace his pulse, qualitatively and quantitatively examine his excreta, record his temperature, and bring to bear upon his case the last generalisation of the latest writer on his peculiar malady. While desiring all that the skill of the younger man might perform, he would prefer not to lose the wisdom and experience of the older friend." z

1 Sir J. Russell Reynolds, "The Address in Medicine to the British Medical Association at Norwich," 1874.

2 Ibid.

Essential Differences.

321

"With regard to many diseases, we are in a position that might be described as somewhat like that of the physiologist and the schoolboy in combination, when they have found two birds' nests. The one-the histologist-shall examine the contents of one of the eggs of each nest, and apply all his microscopic powers on the cells that he shall find; he may call the chemist to his aid, and yet fail to give, after the most searching gaze and chemical analysis, even a guess as to the nature of the bird that would be developed by the simple application of warmth to another egg which he has not broken. The other-the schoolboy-looks at the shell and decides in a moment that this will become a blackbird, and the other produce a lark. What the relation may be between the colour and marking of the shells and the wonderful constitution of their contents, that shall determine the development of this bird or of that, we do not know. What is the difference between those contents we do not know, but let us remember a quite specific and wide difference does exist between them, although it is far too fine for any of our processes of investigation to demonstrate its nature." 1

If there is a speciality, an individuality, in the egg which escapes every process of investigation; one egg growing into a blackbird, another into a lark, no man being able to say, without seeing the shell, which it shall be; may we not safely conclude that man-differing from man in ten thousand ways, and separated from the beast by a multiple many times more—has his own speciality, his own individuality? That his life, as all life, is one of the great facts in God's Creation ?

A few of us can pursue certain difficult complex speculations in peace, liable to no interior disturbance; others are exposed to gust and eddy from every ravine and temptation on the way of life. We know the aspect of idiocy, but who can tell why reason is unable to hold her seat? Less terrible is it to behold the body wasted and features sharpened by the great life struggle; than to look on the face whence mind

'Sir J. Russell Reynolds, "The Address in Medicine to the British Medical Association at Norwich," 1874.

Y

is gone. Such a sight is a startling shock to the materialist. We cannot express all our thoughts and emotions, they need many voices and instruments to pour forth the full meaning; but every good man confesses-The renovation of my nature when brought about, will bear upon my peculiar position as individually accountable.

The Speciality of Human Life.

"The peak is high and flush'd

At his highest with sunrise fire ;
The peak is high, and the stars are high,
And the thought of a man is higher.'

Lord Tennyson.

Human nature, in its present form, is the rudimentary stage of an extended and a more desirable existence. The future is involved in our bodily and mental organisation and we discern traces of it in our inner man. This makes us somewhat like those poets of grand and comprehensive genius who unite the ideal and practical. Our mental and moral history far surpasses whatever seems analogous in the natural instinct and material changes of the body; and exceeds everything that any combination of material forces can produce. A heathen could say—“Aperta simplexque mens, nullâ re adjunctâ quæ sentire possit, fugere intelligentiæ nostræ vim et notionem videtur." "There stir within us yearnings irrepressible, longings unutterable, a curiosity unsatisfied and insatiable by aught we see." These appetites, passions, and affections come, not as Socrates and Plato supposed, nor as our own poet, Wordsworth, sings, from the dim recollection of some former. state of our being

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar."

Intimations of Immortality.

"Still less do they come from the delusive inheritance of our progenitors. They are the indications of something within us, akin to something immeasurably beyond us; tokens of something attainable yet not hitherto attained, signs of a potential fellowship with spirits nobler and more glorious "De Nat. Deo," lib. x. c. II. 2 See Plato's "Meno."

1 Cicero,