Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892. Excerpt:... CHAPTER XI. THE HIGHER CRITICISM. It is not pleasant to any one to have his personal habits interfered with. Our feelings are bound up with our habits. Whatever we have been in the habit of doing for any length of time, that does not only come easy to us, but it also becomes more or less a pleasure. Our muscles and nerves have grown into a certain fixed condition and attitude for doing just that thing, and the frequent exercise has produced in us a certain amount of nervous force and latent energy, which seeks an outlet through the established channel of our acquired or innate habits. If this exercise of our habits and accustomed actions is interfered with, or changed more or less suddenly, a source of our pleasure and happiness is destroyed, and we feel pained by the stored-up energy which seeks for utterance and has lost its accustomed channel and instrument. So we see in every person certain peculiarities of outward attitudes, motions and actions, which set him apart from every other person, and which, at the same time, are the source of a great deal of his personal comfort and ease. Long established habits and customs, that for generations have become the common property of a whole nation, will mark every man more or less as an Englishman, Frenchman, German or American, etc.; and these peculiarities have become so firmly established, that with the utmost exertion they can not be laid entirely aside; and a harsh and sudden interference with them will make life utterly wretched, until years of newly established modes of life will gradually establish a less painful and a more easy and satisfactory channel in which the life energies may again flow. As with the body, so it is with the mind. The cells, with their filaments and nerve-threads of the brain, th...