ficiency; heat, cold; light, darkness; strength, weakness. The same
antagonism exists in the psychic nature, as in love, hate; hope,
despair; courage, cowardice; pride, humility, etc.; and equally in the
physiological, as we see in the action of flexor and extensor muscles,
their antagonism being a necessity. If we had only flexor muscles, one
motion would exhaust the muscular capacity; when the limb is flexed it
can do nothing more; but when the extensor muscle moves it back,
flexion can be again performed. Thus all vital voluntary action is a
play of opposing forces,--the existence of one force rendering
possible the existence of its opposite. The coronal organs, carrying
the soul above the body, would bring the end of terrestrial life, and
the basilar organs exhausting the brain would bring to a more
disastrous end; but the joint action of the two, like that of flexor
and extensor muscles, produces the infinite variety of life, which
moves on like pendulums, in continual alternation.

Man would be utterly unfit for the sphere that he occupies, if he had
not the opposite capacities required by innumerable opposite
conditions. Physiologically, he requires calorific powers to fit him
for cold climates, and cooling capacities to fit him for the torrid
zone. Morally, he requires warlike powers to meet enemies and dangers,
as well as affections for the sphere of domestic love. He requires the
conscious intellect to call forth and guide his powers in exertion,
and a faculty for repose and recuperation in sleep. He requires self
respect to sustain him in elevated positions, and humility to fit him
for humble duties and positions. We can conceive no faculty which has
not its opposite,--no faculty which would not terminate its own
operation, like a flexor muscle, if there were no antagonist.
Benevolence would exhaust the purse and be unable to give, if
Acquisitiveness did not replenish it; and Avarice unrestrained would
lose all financial capacity in the sordid stupidity of the miser. Each
faculty alone, without its antagonist, carries us to a helpless
extreme.

The antagonism of faculties is so self evident a law of nature that if
Dr. Gall had pre-arranged a psychic philosophy in his mind, instead of
being a simple observer of facts, he might have given a very different
aspect to the science. But he arranged no psychic philosophy, and he
did not carry his observations far enough to lead him into the law of
antagonism, and h