De quibus / discourses and essays by William H. Taylor.

  • Taylor, William Henry, 1835-1917.
Date:
[1908], ©1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: De quibus / discourses and essays by William H. Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    28/388 (page 24)
    hibited by man are immensely more exalted than those which are exhibited by any extant ape, or which could be exhibited by any ape we can readily imagine, and hence it might be conjectured that, in his case, there is some kind of transcendental quality putting him above and beyond ordinary physical restrictions. Yet it is with almost insuperable difficulty that we can conceive of this exhibition unless there was present some of the substance of the cerebral cortex as a material apparatus for the production of the display. Having found, as it appears to us, a most intimate relation between the soul and the phenomena of life, it is but natural that we should continue our inquiry into these phenomena also. If the soul is to be considered as the product of life, of what is life itself the product? That the body is a kind of machine is an idea we accept as soon as it is presented to us. Certain bodily opera- tions are as plainly mechanical as any mechanical ope- rations that we witness in daily experience, and much of the bodily apparatus we see duplicated in the com- monest machinery—the long bones of the extremities, for instance, are as truly levers as are the rods and beams of an engine, and the heart and blood vessels have their counterparts in the pumps and pipes of a water-works. Every machine, before it can perform, must be supplied with power, and this must come from an external source. No machine can create its own power, and this incapacity is as inexorable for the hu- man machine as it is for all others. There are many and various sources of power, but the one which par- ticularly concerns us now is chemical action. This ranks with the most important; the steam engine, the most generally useful of all our engines, derives its