Every one knows in fine, that it is enough to set certain loquacious individuals going at a favourite sub ject, to make them immediately unfold all their ideas upon the theme, repeat the same things and recite the same adventures, and this in a manner as monotonous as automatic. Of this class, old soldiers, huntsmen, and travellers, are accomplished specimens, and each of us may recall similar examples in the circle of his acquaintances.
The automatic activity of the cerebral elements, when it has been too strongly over-excited, may reveal itself in certain circumstances in a more intense manner, with more vivid colours ; thus assuming a special character without there being, properly speaking, delirium, since the conscious personality still looks on at its morbid condition, like an involuntary spectator.
Thus I may here cite a few fragments of a letter written by a young man, who after too prolonged work, gives a frank account of his impressions and the auto matic determination of his mind to work, in spite of him.
This young man had been for several days engaged in making calculations of compound interest, which had caused a great tension of his mind. One evening, after dinner, he was about to go to sleep, when, as he says, " Without the slightest encouragement on my part, in a state between sleeping and waking, waking I may well say, for my mind having worked beyond its powers all day, struggled obstinately against the corporeal fatigue which strongly incited me to sleep. On which side was the victory ? On that of the mind. For without intending it, and having need of the greatest calm and repose to which I could attain, I began, without the smallest volition on my pan`, to calculate and go over again exactly the same problems as when in my office. The cerebral machine had been set in motion too violently to be stopped, and this involun tary work went on in spite of me, and in spite of and against all the means I endeavoured to employ to cause its cessation—that is to say, from about three-quarters of an hour to an hour and a quarter." common Sense.*—These phenomena of automatic activity are not only developed in the living being, con sidered as an individual, in a completely unconscious manner, but besides, by a species of diffuse generalization, they are repeated in similar individuals in an identical manner, and throughout space and time provoke in all human brains associations of ideas, and acts connected according to a general and common rule, as similar as though they emerged from a central region which gave them a single impulse.
It is, in fact, very curious to observe that there are among all human beings, modes of feeling, of judging of things, and of reacting in consequence, which are everywhere the same. Moral phenomena, in fact, occur in a manner as necessary as if we had to do with purely physical acts.
Thus, just as over all the surface of the globe, since men have existed, they move their forearm in the direction of the articular surfaces, in proration and supination, and bend the articulations of the knee and the leg, and the head, in an unchangable manner, and in a predestined direction—so in the circle of ideas, in the gamut of sentiment, in the mode of reacting of the human sensorizim, there are universal consonances, which throughout time and space present characters of eternal immutabLity.
The history of ancient literature shows us that in the same situations human beings have always felt, and always acted in an identical manner. In every page of their tragic or comic works, we find that common fund of immortal truth and judicious reflexion, which will be eternally current and applicable at every epoch. Simi larly, if we consider humanity throughout space, we find that the civilized nations of the extreme East, the Chinese and Japanese, have of themselves in their long social evolution automatically invented the same processes of government and administration which have been for centuries contemporaneously employed in our old Europe.
Human brains, therefore, everywhere and always react in a common and identical manner in presence of the external excitations which impress their soz sorium. Each, more or less, represents a prism of the same composition, exposed at the same angle to the same incident rays of light which traverse them. Each undergoes the action of the same rays, receives them through its substance in an identical manner, according to a common proces refracts them in a similar manner, and disperses them, after they have produced in each identical phenomena of elementary decomposition.