street, lane, and avenue, but they cannot tell what is going on inside the houses."

Absurd is likely to be the treatment of that physician who prescribes for "a crazy man" without knowing what is going on within the body. Because a man's body is not independent of himself, and cannot be compared to a house, which is foreign to those who occupy it--a wholly imcompatible and independent structure—while, on the other hand, in this life, a man's body is constantly a part of himself.

APPROXIMATIONS TO THE TRUTH.

Hippocrates, who was genealogically traced as the eighteenth lineal descendant from the great Greek miracle-worker, Esculapius, taught the approximately true doctrine, that not the solids, but the fluids of the body caused all the phenomena of disease. His most distinguished successor was the spiritually-illuminated Galen; who, however, while marvellously successful with the sick, did not advance human knowledge as to man's spiritual constitution.

The learned Celsus nominated man's immaterial, specific principle "nature," which was supposed to coöperate with medicines in overcoming disease, and

which process was very wisely called "an effort of nature."

Beyond this extremely vague generalization-which is essentially the whole truth in a nutshell-the medical and psychological world has not made much progress. But we are about to take up our line of march, and extend our researches far into the constitution of man's immortal interior.

THE SCHOOL OF VITALISTS.

Von Helmont imagined man's organization to be possessed and animated by an active and energetic principle absolutely independent of passive and inert matter; which principle he denominated "Archeus," the alleged cause of all diseases, and the inspirer and vitalizer of appropriate medicines. A school of “vitalists" was eventually developed from the archeus nuclei, and thenceforward we observe a palpable line of progressive development in mind, approaching a true comprehension of man's interior nature and glorious destiny.

The studious and illuminated Stahl, toward the close of the sixteenth century, investigated man's physical constitution, and found in its organs and economy what he called the "anima," a soul-principle, which presided

over the health of the individual, supplying losses, repairing injuries, and requiring a physician only to direct its operations among the nerves and organs of the body during insanity and general sickness.

This doctrine is another approach to-a beautiful foregleam of the philosophy which is promulgated in this volume, and also in many previous books of the Harmonial Series.

Human efforts toward a true knowledge of life and its laws are in reality just so many prophecies of the discoveries of truth, which will ultimately triumph, and crown humanity, and finally save the world. The proximate efforts are in this light intensely suggestive and worthy. The doctrines of Stahl prevailed until Haller ascribed the actions of vitality to a "stimula," which Whytt opposed and called it "sentient principle;" Cullen called it "vis medicatrix natura;" Brown called it “caloric," Darwin, "sensorial energy;" Rush, "occult cause," Culpepper, "vital spirits;" Broussais, “vital chemistry;" Chapman and Hunter, "vitality;" Combe, Good, Thatcher, and Thomas, call it "living principle," "living powers,” and "powers of life." Hooper, in his Medical Dictionary terms it the "vital principle." But suggestive as are these intimations and flickering foregleams of the immortal in man, they fail utterly to explain the

phenomena of insanity; these theories of "vitality do not, therefore, indicate that wise treatment, and that considerate and tender discipline, which "a mind diseased" is certain to need, and crave, and demand, at the hands of a superintending humanity. Nevertheless, I am impressed gratefully to value these efforts in the light of prophetic promptings, which

pointing conclusively toward a perfect scientific knowledge of the beginning of life not only, but to that, as yet, to many, mysterious border-land which, on one side, unfolds the beautiful dawn of all terrestrial existence, and on the other rolls up the cloud-curtain which, for a vast mountain of centuries, has hung between human eyes and the neighboring Summerland, with its infinite expansiveness and indescribable perfections— at once the home of angels, the revelation of essential Nature, the heaven of the whole humanity, and a manifestation of the principles of God.

CAUSES OF INSANITY UNKNOWN TO PHYSICIANS.

THE profound materialism, and consequent superficialness, of all present medical and phrenological knowledge, is openly manifested in the universal failure of both physicians and metaphysicians to give a satisfactory definition and solution to the mental condition called "insanity."

In the realm of immediate causes, our psychologists and pathological physiologists have made substantial progress. For example: Post-mortem examination to ascertain to the cause of the sudden death of the distinguished Professor Splanch develops the learned verdict, "Disease of the Heart," which is, in truth, nothing but a report of the immediate cause, leaving the world still "in the dark" as to the mediate and primative potencies which led to the sudden development of death.

The immediate causes of physical or mental perturbations are generally very obvious, and in such knowledge the world is most learned. But the lack of scientific knowledge of radical causes is sufficiently