RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I take my place
behind this desk, and face this learned audience. To us
Americans, the experience of receiving instruction from the
living voice, as well as from the books, of European scholars, is
very familiar. At my own University of Harvard, not a winter
passes without its harvest, large or small, of lectures from
Scottish, English, French, or German representatives of the
science or literature of their respective countries whom we have
either induced to cross the ocean to address us, or captured on
the wing as they were visiting our land. It seems the natural
thing for us to listen whilst the Europeans talk. The contrary
habit, of talking whilst the Europeans listen, we have not yet
acquired; and in him who first makes the adventure it begets a
certain sense of apology being due for so presumptuous an act.
Particularly must this be the case on a soil as sacred to the
American imagination as that of Edinburgh. The glories of the
philosophic chair of this university were deeply impressed on my
imagination in boyhood. Professor Fraser's Essays in Philosophy,
then just published, was the first philosophic book I ever looked
into, and I well remember the awestruck feeling I received from
the account of Sir William Hamilton's classroom therein
contained. Hamilton's own lectures were the first philosophic
writings I ever forced myself to study, and after that I was
immersed in Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Such juvenile
emotions of reverence never get outgrown; and I confess that to
find my humble self promoted from my native wilderness to be
actually for the time an official here, and transmuted into a