Common Sense Science. BY GRANT ALLEN, ▲UTHOB OF " PHTSIOLOOICAL JISTHETICS," " FLOWEB8 AND TUEIR rEDIU&BXS," KTC. BOSTON: D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY, Fbanklin a»d Hawley Stbbets. Copyright^ iSSb, by D. LOTHROP AND COMPANY. 542 ic E1.KCTROTYPHD BY C. J. Pbters & Son, Boston. PREFACE. These little essays, now specially addressed to an American public, are mostly endeavors to place before American readers some of the latest results of modern science, in simple, clear, and intelligible language. M^'self born in America, I am glad thus on a return visit to my native land to contri- , bute somewhat to the formation of that great mass of thought which must ultimately quicken and inform the whole world of civilization. Dat- ing as I do from Thoreaii's town, I trust I may have caught some slight echo of Thoreau's inspi- ration. Concord, Mass., June, 1886. COKTEKTS. Cbaptbb Pagb I. Second Nature 7 II. Memory 19 III. Self-Consciousness 30 IV. Attainable Ideals 41 V. Instinct and Reason ........ 54 VI. Sleep 65 VII. Holly and Mistletoe 76 VIII. Knowledge and Opinion 90 IX. The Winter Rest 101 X. Mountains 1:^2 XI. Home-Life 122 XII. The Balance of Nature 133 XIII. The Horse and his Pedigree .... 144 XIV. The Best Policy 155 XV. The English People 1G6 XVI. Big and Little 177 XVII. The Origin of Bowing 189 XVIII. English Chalk Downs 201 6 f CONTENTS. XIX. Spring Blossoms 212 XX. TuK Eaktu's Interior 223 XXI. Nuts and Nutting 233 XXII. Amusements 243 XXIII. TuE Pride of Ignorance 252 XXIV. Inhabited Worlds 265 XXV. Brick and Stone 276 XXVI. Evening Flowers 286 XXVII. Beauty 297 XXVIII. Genius and Talent 308 COMMON SENSE SCIENCE. I. SECOND NATURE. We have all said a hundred times over that habit is a second nature — repeating thoughtlessly the acute remark of some nameless and forgotten popular philosopher, some Peckham Socrates or some Bloomsbury Aristotle, who first invented, no doubt, that now historical phrase ; but very few of us, in all probability, have ever reflected how profoundly true and brilliantly luminous is the idea wrapped up in that simple and familiar commonplace of the present generation. It is often so with current platitudes ; beginning as the wise and wittj' sayings of some pregnant and pithy local character, they are picked up and re- peated carelessly by other people who never even dream themselves of realizing their full meaning or true import, and they pass at last into the posi- tion of proverbs, bandied about daily in common conversation, with scarcely a relic of their original savor and fresh cleverness remaining in them. And yet the unknown thinker, whoever he may 7 8 SECOND NATURE. have been, who first struck out the lucid concep- tion of liabit as a second nature, must have pos- sessed philosophical and psychological powers of no mean order. For he touched at once, as if with the needle-point of fine criticism, the very core and heart of the matter ; he summed up in a single short and easy epigrammatic sentence a whole condensed scientific theory of habit and repetition. Habit is that which by use has be- come natural to us ; nature is habit handed down from our ancestors, and ingrained bodily in the very structure of our brains and muscles and ner- vous systems. Let us look first at a few of the more extended manifestations of habit, where it assumes heredi- tarily the very guise and form of nature. It is well known that the children of jugglers, rope-dancers, tumblers, and acrobats can be much more easily trained and taught their fathers' profession than any casual ordinary members of the general public. They are born, in fact, with quicker fingers, more supple limbs, nimbler toes, easier muscles, than the vast mass of their fellow-citizens. The con- stant practice of hand or foot has made a real dif- ference at last in the very structure and fibres of their bodies ; and this difference is transmitted to their children, so that the conjurer, like the poet, is to some extent born, not made. It is just the same with many other arts and handicrafts. Chil- SECOND NATURE. 9 dren descended from musical families are nnisicil almost from their very birth — those born of parents both of whom have constantly played the Iiarp or the piano exhibit a suppleness and ease of movement in the arms and fingers entirely wanting to the sons and daughters of agricultural laborers or unskilled mechanics. So, too, mountaineers of many generations' standing have limbs specially adapted to mountain climbing — for example, the Indians of the Andes differ immensely in the pro- portions of their bones, and particularly of their thighs, from all other individuals of the human race ; and from babyhood upward this originally acquired difference makes itself evidently seen in the children of such Indians. In these and num- berless other like cjises we recognize at once that habit has at last produced a positive physical dif- ference in the individuals of the particular profes- sion or tribe concerned, and that the difference so begotten is handed down, as a matter of original nature, to the second generation. Our nature, in short, depends upon the structure with which we are at birth endowed ; and this structure itself in turn depends, in part at least, upon the acquired haoits and functional practices of our parents and our remoter ancestors. But habit itself, within a single person's own lifetime, also tends to acquire the fixity and rigidity of nature — becomes in time almost irresistible 10 SECOXD NATURE. and, as it were, autonriatic. Look, for instance, at the smallest matters connected with the way we dress ourselves, cut up our food, or perform our most ordinary every-day actions. Everybody has a fixed order for putting on his socks; either he puts on the right foot before the left, or vice versa^ and any attempt to reverse the accustomed order seems to him not only awkward but almost un- natural. So, again, in buttoning liis collar, he either buttons the right half over the left, or the left over the right ; cand, whichever he does, he does it regularly, he doesn't fluctuate casually from morning to morning, doing it now one way and now the other. A ver}* curious difference exists in this respect betwec i men's dress and women's ; tailors always pu', the buttons on the right side and the buttonholes on the left; while dressmakers adopt the contrary course, putting the buttons left and the buttonholes right. Now, if a man, by any accident, has the buttons sewn on any garment the unfamiliar way, he finds Inm- self as awkward as a baby in the attempt to fasten them ; while if a woman, on the other hand, puts on a man's coat, she is struck at once by what seems to her the clumsy wa^ the thing has to be fastened wrong side on. In each case the habit of buttoning on one side has become absolutely automatic ; the muscles and nerves of the fingers have adapted themselves to the accustomed move- SECOND NATURE. 11 meiits, and are incapable of performing any alter- native motion with equal facility. If any person watches himself for a single day in this manner, he will find there are thousands of similar little actions he performs almost unconsciously, by mere organic routine, each step in the process being followed, without the necessity for thinking, by the next in order, exactly as the words and rhymes of any familiar piece of poetry help to call up one another in memory, without the slightest conscious effort. As the French proverb quaintly puts it, he who says A must say B also. A very good example of this automatic power of habit is seen in the way we almost all wind up our watches every evening. At a certain fixed stage in the process of going to bed, one hand seeks automatically the waistcoat pocket and pulls the watch out; the other dives without sense of effort into the recesses of the purse in search of the watch-key which is oftenest recognized not by siglit but by mere feeling. Then the watch is opened as if by clockwork, the key is turned round automatically a certain familiar number of times, and duly replaced in the proper pocket; the face is shut down again without ever thinking about it; and finally the watch itself is hung up on its peg or laid down upon the table by the bed- side, as the case may be, while all the time perhaps we have been steadily reflecting or talking about 12 SECOND NATURE. something else, and liardly even been aware at all of what it was we were nmscularly engaged upon. So purely mechanical is the process, indeed, that people who do not habitually dress for dinner generally find themselves winding up their watches whenever they take off their waistcoats to assume the civilized swallow-tail and white tie of modern society. The action has become stereotyped in the nervous sj'stem, and when once the first step of the series is taken by unbuttoning tlie coat, all the rest follows as a matter of course, without tlie necessity for deliberation or voluntary effort. Sometimes, indeed, even the will itself is not strong enough to beat such chains of habit; Dr. Hughlings Jackson mentions a curious case where an omni- bus horse in the streets of London obstinately refused for several minutes to move on at the combined commands of his driver and a policeman. Shouts and whipping were all in vain ; the creature declined to budge an inch to please anybody. At last a passenger inside suggested mildly, "Shut the door, conductor ! " The conductor slammed the door with a bang, and, as he did so, rang the bell. That familiar sign was too much for the obdurate horse's nervous system. Within all his experience, when a new passenger got in, and the omnibus was ready to start again, the door was slammed and the bell rung. He could not resist the force of habit. He set off at once at a round SECOND NATURE. 13 pace, as if acted upon magically by some powerful spell, and forgot at once all about his sulky temper. Much the same sort of routine practice is appar- ent in the lives of every one of us. An immense number of little acts and phrases every day are performed and repeated by pure force of habit. We do ten thousand habitual things, as it were, instinctively. "How do you do?" we ask a friend twenty times running, if we meet him again ; not because we want to assure ourselves as to the state of his constitution so very frequently, but because the mere act of meeting him calls up the words mechanically to our lips. "Quite well, thank you," we answer thoughtlessly to casual inquiries about the health of our families, even though we may at that very moment be anxiously running to get the doctor on the sudden outbreak of scarlet fever in the bosom of the household. In the same way, when we have once got into the habit of addressing letters to a particular person at a particular place, the mere act of writing his name upon an envelope is followed almost irresis- tibly by the familiar number of the house and direction of the street in which he lives. We may have been accustomed for twenty years to send all our notes for Jeremiah Tompkins to 37 East Fourteenth Street, New York City ; if in- creasing means and fashionable desires induce our friend to remove to the more select neighborhood 14 SECOND NATURE. of Fifth Avenue, we still find that, whenever we have got as far with his address as "Jeremiah Tompkins, Esq.," the pen seems of itself to run on into 37 East Fourteenth Street, and it is only with an effort that we substitute in its place the new address in the more dignified up-town district. Everybody lias had abundant examples of the same sort within the range of his own experience. We change our banker, let us say ; but as soon as we write on an envelope the words, " The Manager," in a trice the name of the old bank writes itself down against our will in the place of the new one. We go away from home on a holiday; but at the head of our letters we still tend to begin by dating from the old familiar domestic address. At the commencement of each new year, how hard we find it to alter from the old date to the new, though the practice has run but for a single twelvemonth ; while every married lady must well remember with what difficulty she altered her maiden signa- ture to the one forced upon her by the not wholly distasteful necessities of marriage. After one has written {ill one's lifetime, up to date, "Very affec- tionately yours, Ethel Smith," it must be with a sudden pull-up of the i)en and hand that one alters it at last by an effort of will into " Ethel Montgomery." What is the rational and underlying cause of this force of habit? Clearly, the nerves and brain SECOND NATURE. 15 elements become altered by iis.ige, so that the directive action runs more easily along a certain channel than along any other. Very few acts of our lives are isolated ; most of tlieni move in trains or sequences so associated that one immediately summons up another, each act being, so to speak, the cue or call-word for the next in order. The nervous energy flows most easily along the most accustomed channels; set up the first step in the sequence, and all the other steps follow regularly, exactly as in repeating any well known and famil- iar formula. Habit, in short, becomes a second nature because it modifies to some extent our original minute bodily structure, and makes nerves and muscles act together constantly in certain almost indissoluble chains of co-ordinated action. The oftener we do a thing, the easier it thus be- comes ; and when we have done certain things one after another, over and over again for many years, the tendency of the first to call up the others in due succession becomes at last all but irresistible. There is some reason, indeed, to believe that nature itself or personal idiosyncrasy depends ultimately upon mere habit — not, of course, the habit of the individual himself who possesses it, but of liis earlier ancestors, paternal and maternal. It is now fairly well proved that the character with which every one of us is endowed at birth must 16 SECOND NATURE. be regarded as a direct inheritatice from our fathers and. motliers, our grandfathers and grandmothers, in varying degrees of compounded qualities. Hence, while habit is a second nature, it may also be said that nature in turn is a secondary habit. What we are by nature we largely or even entirely derive from the various acquired habits of our ancestors ; what we make ourselves, on the other hand, by habit we largely pass on to the natures of our children and our remoter descendants. And this consideration renders the awful respon- sibility of the formation of habits even more pain- fully evident than ever. It is a serious enough thought that ever}'^ wrong act indulged in, every weakness gratified, every temptation yielded to, helps to stereotype the evil practice itself in the very fibres and tissues of our bodies. But it is more serious still to consider that every habit thus thoughtlessly or wickedly formed is liable to be transmitted to our children after us. Drunk- enness, for example, as we all know, tends to show itself as a hereditary vice. Well, then, every act of culpable yielding to the temptation to drink to excess is not only a step to the formation of an ingrained habit in the person himself, but also a step towards the setting up of a hereditary ten- dency to drunkenness in his children and descen- dants. On the other hand, the more strongly any such besetting sin assails us by nature — the more SECOND NATURE. 17 deeply implanted it may be in the very form and structure of our nervous system — the greater is the necessity for constant watchfulness against its insidious attacks, and the deeper the importance of guarding against it by every means that lies in our power. To form a bad habit is of all things most dangerous when we find ourselves already prone to the habit by very nature. By way of compensation, however, we may reflect with pleas- ure that every temptation resisted, every weakness thwarted, every active exercise of self-control en- sured, helps to build up a habit of resistance, and makes victory over the evil more easy in future. Exactly as by frequently writing the new address of the friend who has moved we learn at last to forget the old one, so by frequently and constantly taking the better course of action we learn at last, almost without an effort, to avoid the worse. The right habit becomes, as it were, a second nature ; as in the case of the most upright of modern phil- osophers, about whom Sir Henry Taj'lor has acutely observed that he hardly seemed to be even consci- entious— it appeared as though he acted right under all circumstances quite automatically and without the possibility of doing otherwise. There are people, indeed, descended from exceptionally fine stocks on either side, of whom it has been well said that they are almost born *' organically moral " : the impulse to act right seems in their inherited 18 SECOND NATURE. natures to have completely outweighed the im- pulse to act wrong ; and what many of the rest of us do with a voluntary effort these happily consti- tuted and beautiful characters seem to do, so to speak, mechanically and unconsciously. II. MEMORY. Of all the wonderful miracles of nature, an- imate and inanimate, there is perhaps none so perfectly and inscrutably marvellous as the hu- man memory. We do not now refer to the specially cultivated and trained memories of ex- ceptional geniuses, the Mezzofantis who can speak two hundred languages, or the Macaulays who can repeat by heart whole pages and volumes of prose or poetry; we are thinking merely of the common average human being, the Tom, Dick, and Harry that we meet at every turn, and whose simple native power of recollection and remi- niscence seems to us almost the very greatest marvel in the whole vast museum of the physical universe. For even the humblest and most or- dinary memory is stored and stocked in all its innumerable cells and pigeon-holes with such an endless collection of facts and ideas as might well appall the stout heart of the most ardent statis- tician. Indeed it is probable that most people, for want of analytical habits, immensely under- estimate the extraordinary storehouse of their 19 to MEMORY. own memories. We believe the merest child or the most ignorant peasant knows and remembers a number and variety of things which, when all put together, ought easily to surprise the most learned and thouglitful of men. Where the room can be found "in one small brain" to stow away 80 many facts and fancies is a real puzzle of no email magnitude. Look first, for example, at the mere wealth and copiousness of language. Every one of us is fully acquainted with his mother-tongue to the extent of at least three or four thousand words, every one of these words answering to an idea, and calling up in his mind the picture of an object or action with which it is associated. Think of the number of visible things alone of which we know and remember the names. Let us take a single small group of objects only — say fruits — and consider of how many such we know the names, and can immediately conjure up a mental picture. To begin with, there are strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, and all the similar com- mon garden favorites. Then there are black- berries, whortleberries, haws, sloes, and an endless succession of wild kinds. Next, the orchard sup- plies us with apples, pears, peaches, plums, apri- cots, nectarines, quinces, and medlars. Once more, there are the imported exotic kinds, oranges and lemons, pine-apples and dates, figs and cocoa- MEMORY. a nuts. And so on through an almost endless cata- logue. Tlie bare names of tlie fruits alone per- fectly well known to every reader would probably fill the entire length usually devoted to these essays. For have we not entirely omitted the whole great family of melons and gourds, veg- etable marrows and cucumbers, the mulberry and the tomato, the grape and the cherry, and so on in infinite variety ? WliJitever group of things we begin to think of, we shall find that just the same wealth and variety of common every-day knowledge occurs to us; each of us knows liun- dreds of animals and birds and fish and insects ; each of us is acquainted with the names of so vast a number of diverse objects as would fill a whole volume of close-packed type, or exhaust the re- sources of a considerable dictionary. Then again consider the fact that, besides the mere names Miemselves, we are all acquainteJ. with innumerable points in the appearance or habits of all the objects thus mentally enumerated. Take a single example out of all the number thus quoted — say the first, a strawberry, and reflect for a moment how many facts about its structure or growth the merest child or ignoramus can im- mediately remember. Almost all of us know, of course, that the strawberry grows upon a low plant or vine, that all its leaves are arranged in sets of three leaflets each, that its flower is white and of 22 MEMORY. a particular shape and appearance, that the berry is produced from the centre of the blossom, that it begins by being hard, green, and sour, and grows soft, red, sweet, and luscious as it gradually ripens. Most of us can readily recall at once the look and taste of the strawberry, its size and shape, its color without and within, the little green " hull," or " hank," formed by the calyx, and the tiny brown seeds dotted in pits over its whole rosy surface. Here is a vast collection of facts, easily remembered by almost everybody, about a single small English fruit. If we take a bigger object, such as an elephant, the range of memory in the same way is still more marvellous. At once we have conjured up before our mind's e3'^e the i)icture of that vast, unwieldy animal, of his head and trunk, his huge lopping ears, his mouth and tusks, his big legs and crushing feet, his thick skin, his sleepy eyes, his stumpy tail, his queer gait, his cunning manners. If we try to think of all the facts we know about him other- wise, his native home, the mode in which he is hunted, the importance of his ivory, the objects made from it, his use as a beast of burden, the " castles " or howdahs which he carries on his back, his appearance at the Zoo or in the travel- ling wild-beast show, and so forth throughout a hundred like particulars, it is fairly astonishing how wide a range of facts every child or fool pos- MEMORY. sessea about tlie history and habits of that one great Asiatic and African animal. Once more, not only do we know the names of 80 many distinct objects or creatures, z the attributes or qualities at once summoned up in our minds by the names themselves, but we also know and remember endless groups and colloca- tions of words, current phrases, or stock sayings, all of which we can employ in conversation when- ever they are needed, with the same ease and cer- tainty as we employ the separate words them- selves of which they are compounded. Yet each of these common formulas of speech has had to be unconsciously learnt and remembered quite as truly, though not with so much difficulty, as the multiplication-table or the names and dates of the kings of England. We do not merely mean such invariable and frequent phrases as " How do you do ? " or " If you please," but rather those more subtle proverbial elements of conversation of which each one of us possesses, without even knowing it, an immense assortment. P^or in- stance, we say "as black as a crow," or " as black as ink," or " black as my hat," or " as black as a negro." "As white as snow," "as green as grass," " as blue as the sky," " as red as a rose," are all real compound elements of everybody's every-day vocabulary. "As old as the hills" comes naturally to our lips in speaking of age ; 24 MEMORY. " as dark as pitch " in speaking of a moonless evening. " As drunk as a lord " is answered and balanced by " as sober as a judge " ; " as merry as a grig " finds its true counterpart in " as jolly as a sandboy." Sometimes we have half a dozen alternative forms for expressing the same degree of comparison ; " as dead as a door-nail," "as dead as a stone," "as dead as mutton," and " as dead as Julius Caesar," are all alike familiar to every one of us. " As soft as silk " immedi- ately suggests as " hard as a stone," and " as cold as ice " is contradicted at once bv " as hot as blazes." Probably a single person's ordinary speech, if carefully watched for a whole twelve- month, would yield several hundreds or thousands of stock phrases framed on this comparative model alone ; and there are dozens more sets of phrases equally common, running in the same way in big batches. For example, we might look at the stock phrases connected with sleep alone, such as " to take forty winks," " to go to the land of Nod," "to be in the arms of Morpheus," "to have a I'ttle SLOoze," "to go to Bedfordshire," and so forth, till the reader's patience is fairly tired. Or, again, we might instance the common sentences used about death, " to go to his last home," " to be gathered to his fathers," " to shuffle off this mortal coil," " to go the way of all flesh," *' to fall asleep,' " to join the majority," " to end his days," MEMORY. 25 " to go to Davy Jones' locker." There is hardly an act or an idea in life about which we have not all of us unconsciously gathered a whole vast col- lection of proverbial phrases which we trot out and bring into use from time to time as occasion offers. Then, again, there is the extraordinary variety of faces and features that we all remember, both those personally known to us and those merely recognized and remembered as belonging to neigh- bors or fellow-townsmen. It is probable that almost every human being recollects more or less distinctly, by name or face, not less than seven or eight thousand separate i)ersons. This seems, indeed, at first sight, an excessive estimate, es- pecially for the inhabitants of small villages and out-of-the-way places, where the whole population is small and fixed ; but it has been arrived at by careful calculation and observation of cases, and on the average of instances it is probably true. For one has to remember not only all the mem- bers of one's own family and one's personal ac- quaintance, but also hundreds and hundreds of other people, with whom our intercourse has been but very slight, yet quite suflicient to make one recollect them. Think only of all the servants, landladies, tradesmen, assistants, policemen, cab- men, errand-boys, and hangers-on generally of whom one has a distinct and recognizable mental 26 MEMORY. picture. Think of the numberless people with whom one has travelled by rail or sea, and whose personality one can still more or less faintly re- produce to one's self. An excellent test for the enormous mass of human beings one can thus readily remember is to take a single summer holi- day, spent in an unfamiliar town or village, and recall mentally all the people of whom one has still a definite recollection. There was the boy who lielped down the luggage from the cab ; and there was Mrs. Smith, the obliging hostess ; and, there was the bent old man who sat in the bar; and there was the fat landlord wlio discussed [)oli- tics over his glass of toddy; there was Sullivan, the boatman, who had once been a coast guard ; and there was the rosy-faced rector, wlio preached on Sunday; and there were the rector's five pretty daughters; and there was the pale curate who was so much snubbed by the youngest and pretti- est of tliem. Why, it isn't difiicult (we speak by book) to remember a hundred and fifty distinct persons all connected with those short three days at a seaside watering-place ! And, when we come to multiply such instances by tlie hundred or the thousand, we see at once how vast and varied is the number of individual human beings held in memory by ever}"" ordinary modern man. Equally astonishing, when one comes to look at the matter closely, is the immense variety of MEMORY. 27 Scripture texts and phrases, fragmei *s of poetry, stock quotations, bits of hymns, and other frag- mentary portions of literature firmly held in everybody's memory. Who does not know thou- sands and thousands of familiar tags, such as "To be or not to be," "Man wants but little liere below," " All flesh is grass," " Let dogs deliglit to bark and bite," and so forth, ad infinitum? Add to these the general stock of common proveibs, "A bird in the liand," "A rolling stone," "Two of a trade," "The early bird," and all the rest of it, and then consider how vast is the accumulation to which they each separately bear witness. Or consider once more our acquaintance with the names, places, and facts of Scripture history, and then of history and geography generally. Try, for example, to recall to one's self all that every child knows and recollects about the Chinese Empire. Think first of the individual Chinaman, with his yellow skin, his oblique almond eyes, his twisted pig-tail, his queer dress, his clumsy shoes, his solenni demeanor; think then of his numda- rins, his emperor, his small-footed wife, his quaint little children. Recollect his porcelain, his wil- low-pattern plates, his curious drawing, his aerial perspective. Recall his strange writing, as seen on china or tea-chests, and let that in turn bring up to memory his tea, his silk, his ojjium, his lacquer-ware. Then remember his religion, his 28 MEMOli Y. temples, his pagodfis, his joss-paper ; and so con- tinue till all one knows about himself, his coun- try, his manufactures, and his customs is fairly exhausted, down even to his rice and his chop- sticks, his ivory carvings, and his children's toys. Why, it is not too much to say that, if one were to write down deliberately in black and white all that an average schoolgirl of ten years old knows about China and Chinamen, it would run to a list of several hundred facts, of which we have here briefly enumerated in passing but twenty-eight! If anybody doubts it, let him take a pencil and paper for himself, and, after rigorous self-examina- tion, allowing one point to lead up to another, write down in the form of a numbered catalogue every distinct and separate item he can possibly remember about the Chinese, their land, and their habits. He will probably be astonished him- self at the result of the experiment. For, recol- lect that we have said nothing at all here about Peking and Cauton, Shanghai and Hon Kong, the Summer Palace and the great rivers, the square- holed money and the vermilion pencil, the roast rats and the floating rafts, or a thousand other familiar commonplaces of undigested popular knowledge. The truth is that every individual human being carries about with him in his own head, without ever suspecting it, a vast collection of jjigeon-holed facts and fancies, a store of mem- MEMORY. 29 ory such as may fairly surprise its owner liimself as soon as he begins really to examine the marvel- lous wealth and variety of its contents. Cell after cell and fibre after fibre in the numberless minute elements of the brain have been indissolu- bly connected by channels of nervous communica- tion, impressed and modified by acts and ideas, till the whole has become a supreme register of past experiences, ready to be called up at a moment's notice by the wonderful power of association. III. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. If we were asked to state in a single word what purely personal cliaracteristic has probably caused most misery to its innocent victims all the world over in tliis sublunary life of ours, we are inclined to think we should answer at once, not avarice, or jealous}^ or temper, or love, but quite simply that commonplace feeling, self-consciousness. To be sure, love, we will admit — at the risk of being considered horribly cynical — runs it a neck-aud- neck ]'ace for that bad pre-eminence; for who does not remember that half the tragedies and terrors in this earthly life of ours have bad their ultimate basis and groundwork of being in the tender passion? We know at once that our girls have reached tlie age of love-making when we see their eyes pretty constantly red with crying in the early morning. Nevertheless, even in spite of this most serious competitor for the post of honor as a general misery-monger, we are still disposed to place self-consciousness in the very first and fore- most rank as a common cause of human distress. To every one person who suffers from the pangs 30 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 81 of jealousy, of fear, or of unrequited affection, tliere are a hundred who suffer from the terrible, pressing, and ever-present demon of mere self-con- sciousness. It is not a vice, or, at least, only a very small one ; it is not even a failing, or a weakness, or a ])eccadillo ; it is, after all, a pure misfortune. It injures nobody but the person himself who feels it — or perhaps one ought rather to say the {)erson lierself who is its subject ; for, tliough men and women alike suffer in secret from this horrible scourge, it chooses its victims most particularly among the young, the timid, the modest, and the beautiful of the fairer sex. A phiLanthropist who had it in his power to abolish, if he chose, with a single wave of his hand either small-pox or self- consciousness, would probably do more in the end to diminish human suffering and to increase hu- man hap[)iness if he elected to get rid by a heroic choice of the less obtrusive but more insidious and all-pervading disease. For small-pox, at the worst, attacks only a very insignificant fraction of the whole community ; while every second person that one meets in society, especially below the age of fifty years, is a confirmed sufferer from the pangs of self-consciousness. Of course, to be self-conscious is a very different thing indeed from being conceited or egotistic, and still more different from being absolutely and 32 SFLF-CONSCIOUSNESS. utterly selfish. Selfishness is a real vice — or, to / speak more correctly, it is all the vices rolled into one. The purely selfish man is incapable of almost any form of active virtue, except, perhaps, truth- fulness ; he is the meanest and smallest and most despicable of created beings. Egotism, again, is a far less serious though a more ridiculous failing than selfishness ; the egotist, though not perhaps unkindly or ungenerous, thinks perpetually of himself as the centre and focus of all other peo- ple's thoughts, the happy cynosure of neighboring eyes. He makes himself absurd by the over- strained importance he attaches to his own dignity and position ; he considers himself the handsomest man in the whole room ; he admires the cleverness of his own conversation ; he laughs the loudest at his own poor jokes. His complacency, however, ridiculous as it really is, gives immense pleasure to himself, and is, after all, only a source of inno- cent amusement to other people. If he gets laughed at, it is behind his back; and the light shafts of other men's ridicule never pierce the thick hide of his pachydermatous personality. So far as his own feelings alone are concerned, the egotist is a man rather to be envied than to be pitied, a subject for laughing congratulation rather than for sympathetic condolence and brotherly regret. It is far otherwise with the miserable victim of the self-conscious torturing-rack. He or she has SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 33 no snch profound conviction of immense superior- ity to the common herd of ordinary people. Your nervous young man may reallj' liave brains, com- mon-sense, fair talking powers, and agreeable manners; but the moment he finds himself in the society of his fellow-creatures he becomes a prey at once to this hideous form of introspective anal- ysis, this inability to divest himself for a moment of his own abiding and obtrusive personality. Let the talk turn on politics or literature, on art or on gossip, he is not thinking of the presidential cam- l)aign or the state legislature, of Mr. Gladstone or the Redistribution Bill, of Tenn3'son's new poem or Howells' new novel, of the fashionable picture at the Academy or the remarkable sensation at the Lyceum, of j\L-s. Smith's nice little dinner or of what a bad match Ethel Jones is going to make with that young fellow in the Hundred and Fifti- eth ; all these subjects, which are being discussed with so much animation and verve all around him, fall absolutely flat upon his inattentive ear ; what he is really thinking of is simply himself, and whether other people are or are not tliinking about him. If he ventures a critical remark as to the conduct of the hero in the latest romance, or en. deavors to defend Ethel Jones against the charge of imprudence in marrying a young man without a penny, he cares really in his own heart less than nothing about either hero or young lady ; what he 84 SELF'COySCIOUHNESS. cares for is in the lust resort merelv the effect his reimirk may be siipposeil to liave upon the sin- loundiiig listeners. Not that lie is striving after effect, poor fellow! lie is far too nervous un