rth, return and become our
inseparable companions. That is to say, all thought and all work--all
effort--are for the doer primarily, and as a man thinketh in his heart,
so is he. This sounds like the language of metaphysics, which Kant said
was the science of disordered moonshine. But Herbert Spencer's work was
all a matter of analytical demonstration. And while the word
"materialist" was everywhere applied to him, and he did not resent it,
yet he was one of the most spiritual of men. A meta-physician is one who
proves ten times as much as he believes; a scientist is one who believes
ten times as much as he can prove. Science speaks with lowered voice.
Before Spencer's time, German scientists had discovered that the cell
was the anatomical unit of life, but it was for Spencer to show that it
was also the psychologic or spiritual unit. New thoughts mean new
brain-cells, and every new experience or emotion is building and
strengthening a certain area of brain-tissue. We grow only through
exercise, and all expression is exercise. The faculties we use grow
strong, and those not used, atrophy and wither away. This is no less
true, said Spencer, in the material brain than in the material muscle. A
new thought causes a new structural enregistration. If it is the
repetition of thought, the cells holding that thought are exercised and
trained, and finally they act automatically, and repeated thought
becomes habit, and exercised habit becomes character--and character is
the man. It thus is plain that no man can afford to entertain the
thought of fear, hate and revenge--and their concomitants, devils and
hell--because he is enregistering these things physically in his being.
These physical cells, as science has shown, are transmitted to
offspring; and thus through continued mind-activity and consequent
brain-cell building, a race with fixed characteristics is evolved.
Pleasant memories and good thoughts must be exercised, and these in time
will replace evil memories, so that the cells containing negative
characteristics will atrophy and die. And when Herbert Spencer says that
the process of doing away with evil is not through punishment, threat or
injunction, but simply through a change of activities--thus allowing the
bad to die through disuse--he states a truth that is even now coloring
our whole fabric of pedagogics and penology. I couple these two words
advisedly, for fifty years ago, pedagogics was a form of penology--the
boar