BUCHANAN'S. JOURNAL OF MAN
Many Authors



BUCHANAN'S
             JOURNAL OF MAN.

VOL. I.        MARCH, 1887.       NO. 2.




CONTENTS OF JOURNAL OF MAN.


  Archtypal Literature for the future.
  Chapter 1. General Plan of Brain, Synopsis of Cerebral Science
  Superficial Criticisms, a reply to Miss Phelps
  Spiritual Phenomenon, Abram James, Eglinton, Spirit writing
  Mind reading Amusement and Temperance
  MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE--Pigmies in Africa; A Human
    Phenomenon; Surviving Superstition; Spiritual test of Death; A
    Jewish Theological Seminary; National Death Rates; Religious
    Mediжvalism in America; Craniology and Crime; Morphiomania in
    France; Montana Bachelors; Relief for Children; The Land and the
    People; Christianity in Japan; The Hell Fire Business; Sam Jones
    and Boston Theology; Psychometry; The American Psychical
    Society; Progress of Spiritualism; The Folly of Competition;
    Insanities of War; The Sinaloa Colony; Medical Despotism; Mind
    in Nature
  Physiological Discoveries in the College of Therapeutics
  Business Department, College of Therapeutics




THE ARCHETYPAL LITERATURE FOR THE FUTURE.


If the science of man, the being in whom the spiritual and material
worlds are fully represented, and in whom both can be studied in their
relations, has been fully (though not completely or finally) developed
by the revelation through experiments, of the functions of the brain,
then from the establishment of anthropology there necessarily begins a
literary revolution, which not only changes all philosophy, but
extends through all the realms of literature. There is no realm which
can escape the modifying influence of ideas which are at the basis of
all conceptions of man, of society, of duty, of religion, of art, of
social institutions, of the healing art, education, and government,
and the new light which psychometric illumination throws upon all
sciences.

The literature of the future will therefore differ widely from the
literature of the past, and millions of volumes which still hold their
places on the shelves of libraries will in the next century take their
proper place in the mouldering mass which interests the antiquarian
alone,--the mouldering mass which universities still cherish, and
which helps to deaden the rising intelligence of the western world.
Let us, as Tennyson says,

  "Hope the best, but hold the Present
  Fatal daughter of the Past."

It is self-evident that the farther back we go for intelligence the
deeper we plunge in the darkness of ignorance; and even though
intuitional and moral truths may be found in the old writings, they
belong to a literature imbedded in an ignorance which necessarily
darkens all that comes down from such periods.

The benumbing influence of antiquity--or rather of that extended
period which may be called the Aristotelian age, the age in which all
philosophic thought was utterly benumbed by the Greek literature--has
not yet passed away. American writers are just beginning to get rid of
their absolute subserviency to foreign models in all things, and in
this partial independence they are still subservient to the
fundamental philosophic and ethical ideas of the past. The change that
is taking place is only in minor matters.

Even so graceful and able a writer as Longfellow illustrates fully the
truth of these suggestions. Mr. Charles F. Johnson, in a well-written
essay on Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, says:

"Most people feel that national temper is of slow evolution; that many
heterogeneous elements must be fused and blended here; that we too
must have a past, and that the spirit of our past must be taken up and
transmitted before a new type is realized in a new art and a new
literature. We can see that Longfellow was essentially a scholar--a
receiver of impressions from books; that he was like an Жolian harp,
blown upon by many winds, so that his music was in many regards
necessarily a melodious echo of what was 'whispered by world-wandering
winds.' And we can see, too, that he came into American literary life
just as it was passing from the germ to the plant, and that every year
he became more distinctive."

There is nothing profound in this view, but it expresses well the
average thought of the period,--that Americanism in literature must be
the very gradual growth of new circumstances, experience, and
associations, which may superficially modify the unbroken mass of
thought which has been transplanted from Europe, just as vines and
flowers take on their modifications in a new soil and climate.

Far different from this is the view that anthropology gives us. The
foreign plant, it is true, will gradually change, but a native plant
will ultimately take its place by the law of the "survival of the
fittest." The exotic must die out, for it was but a hothouse plant,
reared in universities and cathedrals.

The thought, the science, the philosophy, and even the forms of
literary expression, for this continent, will be those which spring
from the bosom of nature, fresh and strong, imbued with the spiritual
element of immortality, the element of luminous originality.

How and whence is this to come? It will come by the complete
emancipation of the American mind from the thraldom of the false
philosophies, the false theologies, and the debasingly narrow
conceptions of science which have been transplanted into American
colleges. When the strong American intellect shall realize that in the
science of man and in the cultivation of psychometry there is more of
enlightenment, of wisdom, and of actual knowledge than in all that
colleges cherish to-day, we shall have such a flood of original
thought and immensely valuable knowledge as would seem impossible to
the literati who now have the public ear.

Even the narrowest dogmatists of science are beginning to have a
glimpse of the nobler knowledge of the future. Prof. Huxley, the most
dogmatic of British sceptics, has recently said:

"The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all
science, means the demonstration of order and natural causation among
phenomena which had not previously been brought under those
conceptions. Nobody who is acquainted with the progress of scientific
thinking in every department of human knowledge, in the course of the
last two centuries, will be disposed to deny that immense provinces
have been added to the realm of science, or to doubt that the next two
centuries will be witnesses of a vastly greater annexation. More
particularly in the region of the physiology of the nervous system is
it justifiable to conclude from the progress that has been made in
analyzing the relations between material and psychical phenomena that
vast further advances will be made, and that sooner or later all the
so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will have, not only their
relations to one another, but their relations to physical phenomena,
connected in natural series of causes and effects, strictly defined.
In other words, while at present we know only the nearer moiety of the
chain of causes and effects by which the phenomena we call material
give rise to those which we call mental, hereafter we shall get to the
further end of the series."

The "further end of the series," however, is vastly different from
anything within the mental range of the distinguished professor, whose
ultra materialism led him to revamp the old Cartesian doctrine that
animals were only machines, like clocks or mills, running
automatically, and destitute of sensation, and intelligence.

The science and philosophy of the future will be distinguished by
their mastery of the realm of mind, and the closer approximation of
the human to the Divine, not only in intelligence, but in ethics.

The JOURNAL OF MAN, as the first periodical organ of the new
philosophy, will attempt gradually to initiate the archetypal forms of
thought of the coming period, in which the disappearance of old
philosophy and ethics shall leave room for growth.

Not that all ethics shall be changed among the civilized races, for
there are simple primary and true conceptions which are universally
recognized, and are embalmed in all religions. Yet these few universal
ideas are but the rudiments of ethics, and no more constitute an
ethical system worthy of the name, than the four primary processes of
arithmetic constitute a system of mathematical science. The future is
to evolve the true ethics, and therewith the educational system that
will bring the true ethics into all spheres of human life.

In all past time there has been no ethical system competent to
establish a perfectly harmonious social state, and no system of
education competent to lift society to a _higher_ life. Education as
it has been brightens life with literature and art, but does not
_elevate_ it. The same old element of poverty, misery, disease, crime,
and insanity marches on, hand in hand with the college and the church,
as it formerly went hand in hand with the hunting and warring
barbarians of the forest. And the dull, blunted conscience of the
time, lulled by the softly solemn platitudes of the pulpit and the
soulless system of education, rebels not against the old social order.
In full view of the past twenty-five centuries, may we not exclaim
with Shakespeare's Macbeth:

  "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
  Creeps on this petty pace from day to day,
  To the last syllable of recorded time;
  And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
  The dusty way to death."

But not to the end of time shall it be. The nineteenth century has
seen the glimmering dawn of the true civilization. How it came, what
it is, and what it is destined to realize, the JOURNAL OF MAN will
attempt to show.




SYNOPSIS OF CEREBRAL SCIENCE.[1]

    [1] Copyrighted, 1887, by Joseph Rodes Buchanan.


CHAPTER I.

GENERAL PLAN OF THE BRAIN.

    The brain the centre of life--Its organs not distinctly
    separated--Its double functions and degrees of
    energy--Difficulty of nomenclature, chiefly basilar--The
    pathognomic law--Its application to the brain--The four
    cardinal directions and four divisions, the coronal, basilar,
    anterior, and occipital--Their effects on the character and
    constitution--The method of locating organs--The four
    groups--The law of antagonism--Its certainty and
    necessity--Difficulty of expressing it--Correspondence of the
    English language and the brain--Its limits--Radiating groups
    of organs--Contrasts of development.


The details of cerebral science will be much more easily understood if
we begin with a comprehensive view of the entire plan of the functions
and structure.

The brain is distinguished from all other organs by being the source
of commands which all other organs obey, and being the immediate seat
of the soul, which has no knowledge of anything occurring in the body,
until a message or impression has reached it through nervous channels.
The compression of all the nerves before they enter the cranium and
connect with the brain would deprive us of all knowledge of the body,
and of all sensations or perceptions; and the compression of the brain
itself would render us totally unconscious, as if dead,--incapable of
either thought or action. Manifestly, therefore, all the powers of the
soul are lodged in and exercised through the brain; and as all
distinct nerve structures have essentially different functions, and
every different function requires a different structure, it is obvious
that the vast variety of our psychic faculties, intellectual,
emotional, sensitive, passional, and physiological, requires a
corresponding multiplicity in the nervous apparatus; and this
incalculably great multiplicity we find in the brain.

The crude, mechanical idea that all the organs of the brain should be
distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes
of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which
is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the
widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve
fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of
pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course
of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are
indistinguishable from the sensitive.

Moreover, the functions of the brain are not like those of the spinal
cord, of a widely distinct and opposite character in adjacent fibres,
but exhibit a gradual variation, like the blending colors of the
rainbow. The sensitive or psychic individual who touches any part of
the head and feels an impression of the emotional, intellectual, or
impulsive function in the subjacent convolution of the brain, will
find the impression gradually changing as he moves his finger along
the surface, until, after passing half around the cerebrum, he will
feel an influence exactly opposite to that with which he started.

As there are many millions of sensitive persons