hearken to the conclusions of men
of science about universal matters. One runs a better chance of being
listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge. I almost feel myself this
moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
remainder of the hour. I will not ask whether there be not something
of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
enjoy just now. If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
favors.

I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
philosophical or universal.

This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not trace
some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
brain. This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
define it. In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
action means.

It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. Applied at
first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
reflex type. There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
There is no impression of sense which, unless inhi