Yet as an element of character, and an organ in the brain, this faculty needs a more general and comprehensive term than murder to express its ordinary action. It operates as an impelling and modifying influence in our daily life, giving a certain kind of energy to physical and mental action, as our fruits have a certain degree of sweetness in their juices which is not due to crystals of sugar, though if the sweetening element were extracted it would appear in that solid form. Thus the violent impulsive energy which appears in our vigorous language, emphatic gestures, ultra sentiments, and threatening expressions, if it could be isolated from its psychic combination, would appear in its isolated purity as an impulse to the destruction of life and everything else that stands before us. Hence the term Destructiveness has been very properly applied to this organ by Spurzheim. Yet even this term expresses too much for its average daily action, and Violence, Impulsiveness, or Vehemence would come nearer to expressing its ordinary manifestation. The reader will now perceive that the psychic functions of certain organs can seldom be adequately expressed by one word, and that three words are required to express fully the moderate, the active, and the abnormal manifestations. Fortunately, however, this difficulty of nomenclature applies only to that portion of the brain which tends to the abnormal. Man's nobler faculties belonging to the upper region of the brain are essentially good and normal. The abnormal difficulty does not come into their description. [Illustration] Its operation is limited to the region lying around the ears, the basilar region, the tendency of which is to exhaust the spiritual vitality of the brain in ministering to the body. This will be clearly understood when we understand the fundamental law of all cerebral action, the law of direction, or PATHOGNOMIC LAW. This law is the grandest generalization of science that was ever conceived. It is the fundamental law of the relations of the two worlds, the psychic and the physical. The spiritual and material worlds unite in man, in whom the eternal spirit is combined with a transitory material body, and the law of their interaction is _the law of the universe_. In its application to man, the law is simply this, that all organs of the brain act in accordance with their position,--in accordance with their _pathognomic line_, or line of action, which is the line of their central fibres, the tendency of which is toward the surface of the brain, where they reach the interior of the cranium. It will be a sufficient approximation to the mathematical truth if for the present we say that the pathognomic line may be indicated by a perpendicular to the surface of the cranium where the organ is located.