PREFACE.
The design of the following treatise is to explain the nature
and laws of the inner life of man, and to contribute some light
on the subject of Mental Hygiene, which is beginning to
assume importance in the treatment of disease, and to attract
the attention of physiologists. We have aimed to illustrate
the correspondence of the soul and body, their mutual action
and reaction, and to demonstrate the causal relation of
disordered mental states to diseased physiological action, and the
importance and mode of regulating the intellectual and
affectional nature of the invalid under any system of medical treatment.
We have also endeavoured to demonstrate the value,
as remedial agencies, of those subtle forces, both material and
spiritual, which the improved science of the age is beginning
to recognise, and to explain the laws of our interior being
which render the so-called magnetic treatment so efficient in
the cure of diseased conditions of the organism, and which bids
fair to supplant the current and longer established therapeutic
systems. We have pointed out the laws that govern the action
of mind upon mind, and the transmission of vital force from
one person to another, and the potent influence of our inward
states in the generation of pathological conditions of the body,
and in its restoration to health. While it does not profess to
be a work on mental philosophy, some discussion of the nature
and laws of the mind seemed to be necessary to a proper
understanding of the general subject of the volume. We have
endeavoured to prove the essential spirituality of human nature
