i THI % 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 
 
THE HUMAN BODY 
 
 AND ITS 
 
 CONNECTION WITH MAN, 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY THE PRINCIPAL ORGANS. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON. 
 
 MEMBER OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 "He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came 
 forth, bound hand and foot with grave-clothes : and his face was bound about with 
 a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go." 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO AND CO., 
 
 SUCCESSORS TO GRIGG, ELLIOT AND CO. 
 
 1851. 
 

 M**.JEbjr 
 
 PHILADELPHIA \ 
 T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS. 
 
CJ 
 
 ^ 
 ^i 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 Dedication, vii 
 
 Preface, ix 
 
 The Human Brain, 25 
 
 The Human Lungs, 83 
 
 Assimilation and its Organs, 132 
 
 The Human Heart, 169 
 
 The Human Skin, 252 
 
 The Human Form, 289 
 
 Health, 343 
 
 Appendix, 407 
 
 1* 
 
TO 
 
 HENRY JAMES, Esq., of New York. 
 
 My Dear James — 
 
 This book is indebted to you for its appearance ; for, 
 without you, it would neither have been conceived nor exe- 
 cuted. I dedicate it to you as a feeble tribute of friendship 
 and gratitude that would gladly seek a better mode of 
 expressing themselves. It may remind you of happy hours 
 that we have spent together, and seem to continue some of 
 the tones of our long correspondence. Valeat quantum ! 
 It could not lay its head upon the shelf without a last 
 thought of affection directed to its foster parent. That 
 prosperity may live with you and yours, and your great 
 Commonwealth, is the prayer of, 
 
 My dear James, 
 
 Your faithful friend, 
 JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON. 
 
 St. John's Wood, London, 
 • May 25, 1851. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 At the end of a work, an author writes the preface or beginning, 
 unable to neglect the law which urges that extremes shall meet. 
 Prefaces need no apology, and a reader intending to study a book, 
 does not do himself justice unless he peruses them. A preface gives 
 the author's last conception of his aim — the most comprehensive 
 eye with which he see it. And unless the reader looks through this 
 eye, he cannot enter into the author's mind. The study of a book 
 is the temporary putting on of the faculties and insights of another ; 
 and the sooner the assumption takes place, the sooner the reader be- 
 gins to read aright. 
 
 To assist this we have a few remarks to make that may prepare 
 in some measure for the following pages. 
 
 We labor under difficulty in procuring the right audience for the 
 present discourse. The subject of which it treats has been so much 
 narrowed to a class, that on the one hand that class, the medical 
 profession, claims it as an exclusive knowledge; and on the other 
 hand, the public mind is in abeyance with regard to it, and looks 
 upon it as a property for ever alienated from its possession. We 
 therefore run the risk of finding no readers, unless we can persuade 
 the public that the knowledge of the human body belongs to every 
 man, woman and child, and has no more necessary connection with 
 physic, than with art, industry, philosophy, divinity, or any of the 
 other occupations that we do in the body, and by the body. To 
 write a treatise on the subject through which this persuasion shall 
 run with vigorous consequences, has been a leading motive with us 
 in the present work. 
 
 Persons for the most part have no idea that the sciences belong to 
 the great world in the first place, and that the classes who are active- 
 ly cultivating them, are but little bands of pioneers, that are con- 
 
X PEEFACE. 
 
 tending with difficulties at the out posts, and slowly winning a new 
 magnitude of knowledge, which as soon as it is settled, belongs 
 afresh to the large country of popular common sense. On the con- 
 trary, they allow each party of settlers to hoist the flag of a petty 
 kingdom of their own, without insisting, as ought to be done, that 
 the adventurers shall at once become the colonies of the mother 
 /state. Thus it is that professors of all kinds have kidnapped the 
 sciences, and the people fear to take so much as a walk under the 
 walls of these bristling strongholds. But scientific feudalism is evi- 
 dently about to pass away. 
 
 This desirable result will be accomplished by the growth of large 
 towns, that is to say, popular doctrines, of the sciences, which will 
 belong to the broad industry and insights of mankind, and will not 
 contest, but swallow up, the castles of the present chiefs, and reverse 
 the feodal direction of duties and fines. Already we have seen the 
 process going on in the history of civilization, and we are about to 
 witness the same thing in the progress of science and of thought. 
 
 It may take place somewhat as follows. The masters of science 
 will pursue their own way, warm in their little senates, and cheered 
 by their subjacent schools; satisfied with perfectionating the chairs 
 into which they have been inducted. They will gather useful facts, 
 and more and more comprehensive formulas, and appealing to rarer 
 and rarer qualities in their scholars, be most out of sight when they 
 are most at home, until at length, by extremity of cleverness, th&y 
 will become invisible to all but adepts. Lords of the last ether of 
 things, they will only exist as influences, and not as appreciable 
 substances. In the mean time the people, happily unconscious, will 
 listen to flesh and blood, which seems to talk to them about them- 
 selves. Abstractions will have sailed away to the flying island of 
 the professors, who will exert a strong attraction upon the whole 
 wealth of the world's inanitions. A clear stage and sward of com- 
 mon sense will then be at the popular disposal, and the problem of 
 universal education may be conceived upon new grounds. The 
 safeguard of the people will be this — that when the learned have 
 done their best, it is no matter to them; their hearts will be unse- 
 duced, and their brows unterrified, by the lordliest and most capti- 
 vating formulas. One or two plain Johnsonian stampings on the 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 ground, will be sufficient to convince them that their ignorance and 
 carelessness on these scores is most invulnerable and sublime. 
 
 But here comes a knot claiming Deus inter sit. Nor can the 
 difficulties of man be without a response from the mercy-seat : new 
 thoughts and new persons will come speeding to make new things 
 possible. Already we see that the whole of the sciences may reap- 
 pear on the popular side. The waning moon of the schools gives 
 place to the full-orbed Dian of a more generous light. All the 
 common truths that have been neglected since the foundation of 
 philosophy; the stones that the builders have rejected; that great 
 orthodoxy that has bided its time while ages of conceit were cuffing 
 against its serene face, will rise out of land and sea, and out of 
 the graves of the hearts of many generations, and come in hosts 
 such as no man can number to the people in their hour of need. 
 The doctrine of final causes, which is G-od in the sciences, and 
 which atheism hates, will ramble over the pleasant fields, and teach 
 them to childhood as a book ; and out of its mouth will come 
 lessons of order and fitness, which will make the world as familiar 
 as a father's and a mother's house. 
 
 We find it to be a law, when a branch of knowledge has been 
 cultivated for ages, and still remains inaccessible to the world at 
 large, that its principles are not high or broad enough, and that some- 
 thing radically deeper is demanded. If it does not interest uni- 
 versal man, that is sufficient to prove the point. This law is illus- 
 trated by many things, and particularly by the history of the arts. 
 
 Once upon a time all books were perpetuated by copying with 
 the hand; whoever would possess a volume, must undergo the toil 
 of transcribing it, or pay the price of that to another. This was 
 the narrowness of the circle of the learned. The perfection of the 
 copyist's art was soon attained, but the utmost rapidity and cheap- 
 ness in this mode of multiplying books, could not render them to 
 the mass of the public. How was the seeming impossibility to be 
 surmounted? By some meaner process, which should deteriorate 
 the appearance of books to a degree commensurate with the humble 
 fortunes of the poor; so that if the rich man's Bible cost him £30, 
 a copy of but one sixtieth the excellence should be produced for one 
 sixtieth the sum ? Far from it indeed ! The means of making the 
 
Xll PREFACE. 
 
 poor man a proprietor of books, lay in a glorious new art that 
 clothed all literature in a bodily frame of surpassing beauty and 
 usefulness, and placed it in the hands of the common people in a 
 form that before the invention of printing the greatest kings would 
 have envied; and which even Virgil or Cicero would not have dis- 
 dained as the material pedestal of their immortality. This art, 
 simpler and more universal than writing, was not lower but im- 
 measurably higher than its predecessor, whose services were for the 
 noble and the learned. 
 
 Another illustration : The means of locomotion or material pro- 
 gress — what is their history ? Up to a recent date the coaches and 
 high-roads furnished nearly the only mode of land traveling. Jour- 
 neys by them were restricted to a small portion of the community. 
 The more the coaches were perfected, and the better horsed, the 
 more expensive and select they became. How shall we popularize 
 traveling ? By a viler expedient — of canals, carts, and the like ? 
 This too existed, but it was used merely for necessity, and did not 
 attract, or tend to make all men into travelers. To effect the latter 
 result, an invention grander and cheaper than had then traversed 
 space was required. To move the rich needed only a four-horse 
 coach running in an agony of ten miles an hour ; but to move the 
 poor required cars before which those of the triumphing Caesars must 
 pale their ineffectual competition. Thus though the problem was 
 the enfranchisement of the meaner classes from the fetters of pedes- 
 trianism, yet the only solution of it lay in the increased convenience 
 of all ranks from the noble to the peasant, and not in the degrada- 
 tion, but the elevation of the locomotive art. 
 
 And so it must be, as we apprehend, with human knowledge ; the 
 arts of education that will summon the people to learn, are toto coelo 
 different from, and greater than, those which have been sufficient 
 for the schools. A petty magnet is sufficient to take up a few hun- 
 dreds of isolated persons ; but when the nations are to be attracted, 
 there is nothing less than the earth that will draw their feet. 
 
 Here we touch the gist of the matter; for it is in fact powers of 
 attraction in knowledge that are demanded for the new education. 
 There are three heads to this, which form one. In the first place, 
 attractive knowledge gains the learner and keeps him. In the 
 
PREFACE. Xlll 
 
 second place, it enlarges his genius, and out of that, his memory; 
 whereas dry knowledge cultivates his memory at the expense of his 
 mind. In the third place (or in the first again), such knowledge is 
 coherent with itself, and tends to be all known whenever a part of 
 it is known, giving the learner a constant sensation that he is devel- 
 oping it for himself, which lets him into the legitimate delight of 
 mental power. 
 
 But only that is attractive which is allied to our business and 
 bosoms, and seems to have a life that understands our life, and vice 
 versa. On the other hand, repulsion is the effect of death and un- 
 kindness. Hence, to limit ourselves now to the human body, no 
 popular science of it can exist, but one that fills it with at least as 
 much life as its pupils feel throbbing in their bodies. Knowledge 
 draws them never until they are forced to cry out: "Ah! I see 
 myself more than myself in that wonderful glass!" If to their 
 curiosity about themselves any dead body near them mutters " germ- 
 cells,"* they feel dusty, degraded, and abhorrent. They must be 
 rendered better, bigger, and worthier for every look they give, or 
 their eyes will be averted from their books. 
 
 Knowledge, however, is progressive, or its cars are of different 
 sizes. It will only be by slow degrees that we can accommodate the 
 world with seats in the trains of science. New inventions will be 
 requisite for each new population that is to be drawn. In the 
 meantime it is good to see this, and to place as an end the education 
 .of the universal people, because that education will require the 
 largest and noblest principles of common sense. To educate a 
 Mechanic's Institute demands far greater principles and more pro- 
 lific love, than to do the like for a Royal Society : you have to bring 
 things down and to incarnate them, to connect them with material 
 and substantial uses, and to give them both souls and bodies, for 
 the former ', whereas in teaching them to the learned, you escape 
 into laws and formulas, and shirk the problem of realizing the sub- 
 
 * The intellectual correspondence of the doctrine of cell-germs and converti- 
 bility of forces, is found in the doctrine of subjectivity, which implies in the first 
 place that you are shut into yourself; and in the second, that whatever comes 
 to you, puts on your state, and is nothing but your own walls vibrating. This is 
 the philosophical, as the other view is the physical, jail. The way out of it is 
 by walking through the walls, which look granite, but are ;impudent mist. 
 2 
 
XIV PREFACE. 
 
 ject to the audience, by insisting that it is the fault of the audience 
 where it does not comprehend. This is according to a vice common 
 in schools, of neglecting the dullards, and petting the clever pupils. 
 On the other hand, public education is for the publicans and sinners 
 of the brain — the stupid and the quick alike, both of whom are 
 constructed for the largeness of a common understanding. 
 
 But if to inform the Mechanic's Institutions be already so much 
 vaster a task than to propagate learning to the learned (who are the 
 people that can take it easiest), what a much ampler knowledge 
 still is required for the educations of clowns and sempstresses, and 
 those great classes of society who have almost no organs but hearts 
 and hands. Knowledge must be like music and nursery songs be- 
 fore these clodhoppers can dance to it. 
 
 We have attempted, but most imperfectly, to begin a discoursing 
 on the human body which goes somewhat in the direction of this 
 great outlying population ; being convinced that to win them to 
 the truths of the creation is a mission enjoined upon the future time. 
 In doing this, we have felt that there was no condescension implied, 
 but the strain of all our faculties into the most universal sphere. 
 And although, by the law of things, there is more to be done than 
 when we commenced to do, yet shall we be satisfied if we have struck 
 a single cord of that instrument whose earliest notes portend to us the 
 grand Hallelujah choruses and symphonies that are to be. 
 
 The matter of universal education may well claim the serious 
 regard of all classes of society. It is indeed a panacea, though not # 
 as it is at present conceived. To teach superior artisans and savans 
 a few sciences, and by all means to stimulate the love of property, 
 may keep things together by giving a large army of " specials" an 
 interest in what is called order j but the great mass is not touched 
 by such motives or informations. The facts prove that it cannot 
 learn these lessons, or care for these objects \ because, like the old 
 coaches, they are not big enough to carry it on its voyage through 
 time. There is nothing for it but a new method and kind of know- 
 ledge; an Orpheus who can thrill into dance not the present 
 nimble figurantes, who can dance to any tune, but stocks, stones, 
 birds, beasts, and fishes, who had no fantasy in them before. That 
 method must take the best common sense of all these people, and 
 
PREFACE. XV 
 
 sbow them that just that, when carried to its highest stages, is the 
 very truth of all the arts and sciences. As soon as this can be 
 done, all stories will move one degree higher; the kitchens will be 
 parlors, and a new drawing room will flower out of every house for 
 the great reception days. The order which will then conserve all 
 things, will not be solely that of the policeman, but it will be like 
 the order of creation, or like that of the notes in a good harmony, 
 where each keeps the rest to their posts. 
 
 We have selected the human body to make a trial of the above 
 method, on account of its central importance and significance, and 
 because it is already the theatre of our common sense : neverthe- 
 less, any other object of science might have been chosen, and with 
 the same results. For wherever we go, we find that common sense 
 comes first; and when the subject is completed, again comes last. 
 First glances are always charged with it, in a more or less latent 
 form : the business of investigation is simply to eliminate it as pure 
 as possible from its accidents. 
 
 In no science does the present state of knowledge appear so 
 manifestly as in physiology: in none is the handwriting on the 
 wall so plain. Great is the feast of professors here; but 3Iene, 
 Mene, Tekel, Uphdrsin, is brighter than their chandeliers. Chemistry 
 and cell-germs are the walls on which the lightning writes. Well 
 may we call them walls ; for it is impossible to conceive anything 
 more liuritaneous : prison stares us in the face while we are in that 
 company. Who of woman born can go further than to distil him- 
 self into gas, or to pound himself into cells? Annihilation, which 
 God forbids, must be the next stage of smallness. These respective 
 doctrines are the last solid points which are possible, and by nature 
 itself there is no passage beyond them. After these, the scientific 
 men themselves must evanesce ; for already their watchword to each 
 other is, "Hail, Bubble Brother! Hail, Nucleated Cell !" 
 
 Before it came to this chaos, there was everything to show that 
 physiology, studied with the present objects, had completed its rule. 
 Its great outlines had long been traced, and its general problems 
 had ceased to occupy attention. It Lad become more and more 
 complicated and microscopic, and leaving the human frame, it was 
 gradually slipping down into the brute creation. Meanwhile the 
 
XVI PREFACE. 
 
 leading questions that a child would ask respecting structure or 
 function, were forgotten, or postponed indefinitely. The connection 
 of the science with our living sympathies, which was never strong, 
 had ceased altogether. The function of its hierophants, to enlighten 
 the ignorant, had become impracticable, for want of vitality and 
 attractiveness in their knowledge. These were signs that its king- 
 dom was moved from the midst of it, and was about to be given to 
 another. Be it observed, however, that we do not blame the exist- 
 ing sciences for what they are not; our task lies only in recording 
 that they have had their three sufficient warnings. Their state is 
 like that of us all — birth, growth, and decline ; and like us in due 
 time they are to be supplanted by their sons, when the world's 
 business requires further workmen. For the sciences become im- 
 mortal in their generations; solid in the general subordination of 
 the past to the present ; and living in the perpetual aspiration and 
 appeal from the present to the future. 
 
 I know that even the chemistry is all right in its own way ; and 
 I cannot help admiring the thoroughness of the Liebigs, who after 
 having analyzed the rest of things, put men and women into the 
 retorts, and with pen and ink ready, write down so much dirty 
 water and foetid oil, and so many ounces of scientific dust, as the 
 future state which comes over. This is positive fact, if not for the 
 physiologists, at least for the candle makers. I ask nothing more 
 than that it shall be in its place. 
 
 And who can quarrel with the jnicroscopists ? When Leeuwen- 
 hoek, in the seventeenth century, determined that everything that 
 was too little to be seen, was his empire, he really laid his hands 
 upon the whole of things, in a certain small sense. And whenever 
 our great duties and rights are tolerably well fulfilled, little things 
 will be intellectually and morally magnified into a new importance. 
 Ultimate structure will then coincide with primary structure. But 
 until then, the microscope is before its time in physiology, and 
 must wait upon lower callings. While the reasons of minute forms 
 are so totally unseen, it is their prettiness chiefly, their scenic 
 charm and glow, which is of use to human eyes. I have often 
 wondered why, in the difficulties of the artists who make patterns, 
 they have not resorted to Mr. Queckett and the Microscopical 
 
PREFACE. Xvii 
 
 Society, for the exquisite traces which they can show, Solomon was 
 not arrayed like the lilies of the field. The Manchester manu- 
 facturers would do well to dress out the ladies of this generation 
 in the spoils of the colors and forms of these brilliant creatures. 
 There would be something new as well as charming in rhinoceros- 
 kidney mousseline-de-laines ; in shawls according to the inner 
 splendors of the burnished beetle's wing; in veils worked to repre- 
 sent the many-eyedness of the blue -bottle; or in a mantilla on the 
 back of a professor's wife glorious with mimic cell-germs. Here 
 would be a mission for the microscope, and a final cause for the 
 corporation which represents it, which would then take rank as a 
 sub-committee of Drapers' Hall. It would be good to be small, 
 when it enabled you to dive into little cracks and holes whence real 
 beauty could be fetched. And by gaining this practical object, of 
 ornamenting outsides, the Lilliputian people would cease to infest 
 physiology, and leave Gulliver's inside alone. 
 
 Such, we believe in our hearts, would be the art corresponding to 
 the present state of this science. For we notice that every little 
 discovery is so straitly held and claimed by the finder, and the label 
 of "My Truth" is so decisively pinned to each fresh zig-zag of cell 
 work — as though the man had not only seen that special quirk, but 
 made it — that we cannot help thinking that Show is the fire which 
 is heaving under this uneasy stratum of the Small Seers. Our 
 proposition, which we hope to see adopted long before the next 
 "World's Exhibition" in London, exactly jumps with this passion 
 for display, but by carrying it over to our ladies renders it both 
 beautiful and harmless. Let " my" family wear the blazon of " my 
 truth" as they walk before me to church. 
 
 There is one part of our work which we think it right to mention, 
 but for which we do not apologize. Throughout the following pages, 
 we have taken for granted the Divinity of Christ and the truth of 
 Christianity, and with this tacit assumption we have labored to con- 
 nect the whole of our general views. There is no escape from some 
 step of this kind : the atheist takes for granted his atheism, and 
 works in its darkness; he sees no God because he looks from none, 
 and for none : and in every sect, that most comprehensive aspect of 
 
 2* 
 
XV111 PREFACE. 
 
 nature which is its dependence upon Deity, colors and shapes the 
 whole of the sciences which that sect elicits. We would undertake 
 in many instances to assign to particular Christian denominations, 
 the scientific views which have been contributed by each, and to pin 
 their insights into matter, space, time and history to their prayer- 
 books and hymn-books. In short, science is always impregnated 
 with either religious, or irreligious life. By virtue of this it is, that 
 the coldest treatises end in some kind of sermons, and the nodus of 
 every theory of the world is a corresponding god. 
 
 In presence of this necessity, it occurred to us long ago, to assume 
 openly our own creed as the supreme key of knowledge to which we 
 could arrive, and to peril our faith so far as our readers are concern- 
 ed upon the success of the experiment. And here we seemed to be 
 truly scientific according to the common rule. For after some facts 
 are found, the method of science consists in assuming a hypothesis 
 to account for them j and if that hypothesis serves the purpose, it 
 passes over to a theory, and in time is received as the truth of the 
 case. And though the hypothesis might seem unlikely, and be liable 
 to many ugly reasonings against it, yet if it answered to the facts, 
 it was justified, and all ratiocinations to the contrary died. By 
 pursuing this method, we have convinced ourselves, that our Lord is 
 written down in the pages of nature herself as the truth of her 
 whole creation. 
 
 This is the method of tolerance. For while we work from this 
 point of view, it is our own fault if we meddle with others who are 
 trying to settle the same problem from different grounds. There 
 is a prize to be won by the religions of the earth : they are so many 
 accounts of God: the order and laws of creation and spirit are the 
 check which adopts or rejects these accounts at some certain point. 
 The book is closed, and who shall open the seals and read it ? 
 
 The same is the method of scientific persistence and unity of aim. 
 For no one lifetime can be expected to measure the adjustments of 
 the problem. To all argumentation we can scientifically reply, that 
 we have not yet concluded our experiments. In so great a cause, 
 ages of ages are allowable times for operation. Religions are a vast 
 social matter ; no man has a right to declare the trial done, until 
 the success of creation-reading warrants him. Thus we gain in- 
 
PREFACE. XIX 
 
 definite time against the skeptics, allowing them also their own time 
 for doubting. If God permits them leisure, why should we feel hound 
 to hurry them ? But then they must be equally patient with us. 
 
 The same also is the justification of causes and missions. For 
 these are to action what theories and hypotheses are to science. 
 And every man is not only justified, but bound, to plead his reli- 
 gion; and if it contains that force, to send it forth over the world. 
 He is trying this scientific problem on the practical side. 
 
 The same again is a criticism upon criticism. For in a working 
 science, we do not desire to know what a priori probabilities or im- 
 probabilities may attach to our hypothesis, excepting in so far as 
 they determine our choice of it at first; after this we have simply to 
 apply it, and to test it in all convenient ways. There is only one 
 objection which not only slays but buries principles; which is, that 
 they break down in fair practice, and are disowned by the nature of 
 things : other objections are impertinences, which may, or may not, 
 be true. For this reason, the modern criticisms upon Scripture 
 have nothing to do with the question : whether miracles are likely 
 or unlikely, possible or impossible; whether God would have dic- 
 tated a Book which contradicts itself; whether the attribution 
 of human passions to Deity is consistent; whether Christ as God 
 could have died upon the cross ; whether the Gospels were written 
 in the first century or the third ; whether Christendom be not a 
 wide mistake of which Chapmandom is the correction : — all these 
 are matters which we postpone, from our extreme inability to do 
 two things at once. If it be found that Christianity is the theory of 
 the world; that the Divine Man is Lord of the sciences; that the 
 biblical Revelation is the truth of truths, which opens a Shekinah 
 of light to the later races more than to the first ; that the Gospel alone 
 can rule the nations with a rod of iron; then the finding of this from 
 age to age will sufficiently conserve the text against the stings of the 
 Straussian school. The more so, because if their principle of criticism 
 first, and faith afterwards, were admitted, the result must be athe- 
 istic confusion. For if, on account of what contradicts our notions 
 of convenience in Scripture, the Bible be untrue, then for the same 
 reason, nature, being full of contradictory essences, tigers and lambs, 
 men and vermin, is no work of God ; but a single flea is enough to 
 
XX PEEFACB. 
 
 trip over the nature-textuary into the abysses of denial. The ar- 
 mor of these greatest truths is, however, not so ill-jointed as to let 
 in such lances. It demands that the critic shall try his criticism by 
 not only accounting for, but ruling the world. If he cannot do these 
 two things, his rack of texts proves as good as nothing. 
 
 This method also is a defence against hooks. For were we not 
 entitled, as children of science, to take for granted our Revelation, 
 and to make our lives, and if need be, our eternity, into its trial, 
 we should be bound on a quest over the whole universe, to listen 
 to what everybody said. The sandals of this terrible flight would 
 soon reverse us, and take the place of our heads. By nature how- 
 ever we make up our minds very soon, malyre the possibility of 
 meeting some one who shall one day upset us : there is a quick hour 
 when every man burns his Alexandrian Library as heartily as the 
 Kalif Omar. And thus we limit ourselves to a particular walk, and 
 like cobblers, u stick to our last." The atheists do this just as much 
 as other people ; the vacancy of the air of their studies, suffices them 
 for the induction that "God is nowhere." Why should not the 
 Christian professionally accept this necessity of not roaming through 
 all books, but work from the Best to his vocation ? 
 
 We were forced upon this track of thought, by noticing that the 
 nationalists had got to nothing as punctually as if nothing had been 
 their aim ; and that their inductions were of no consequence, sup- 
 posing them to be true ; which however concluded against their 
 truth. We found also that they were like the fellow who claimed 
 Virgil's " Sic vos non vobis" to himself, but could not complete the 
 line which the great poet had left half finished. In the whole 
 company of them, and in all their promise of offspring, there was 
 not a spark of revelation ; though to hear them talk one might have 
 imagined, that they knew the way of making myths, and that 
 writing Bibles was their forte. For these and a thousand other rea- 
 sons, we left them on one side, and took another tack. 
 
 Here also we quitted those two little parties who think that they 
 are the only two, namely, the contenders for the principle of au- 
 thority on the one side, and for that of reasoning on the other ; and 
 taking some gold and silver from both, we determined to choose the 
 party of science, as that to which the Lord of science was about to 
 
PREFACE. XXI 
 
 commit the kingdoms of the earth. And as eyes are the great facul- 
 ties of sciences, we determined thenceforth to pray for eyes above 
 all other powers of that kind ; that we might not have to appeal 
 to either of those effete parties, authority, or criticism, but might 
 terminate some of our perplexities by sight. The more we have 
 proceeded, the more convinced we are, that this ground of science 
 is the coming earth of a new and more glorious time, and that He 
 whose feet burned like fine brass in a furnace, will pour His love 
 through it, and give to it to conquer and to heal. 
 
 At the same time we have no faith in the present state of the 
 sciences, excepting as the ministers of some industrial arts. For 
 educational purposes they are almost worthless, because they termi- 
 nate the first plain questions with unsatisfactory replies. For spi- 
 ritual purposes they are equally negative. And hence we regard 
 them, with all their seemingly large retinue of facts and colleges, as 
 only provisional occupants of the mind. Indeed they are in so 
 rapid a flux, that it is hard to say what they are from one year to 
 another. 
 
 But when science becomes Christian, we may have some natural 
 theology upon the face of the earth. And here again our views 
 depart from those of many good men. If Christ be the God of 
 the Christian, then natural Christology is the only theology of this 
 kind which is possible in a Christian state. In Mohammedan coun- 
 tries, natural theology, or the culmination of the science of nature 
 in Deism, or what is the same thing, Theism, must be permitted as 
 an inevitable growth j but this is plainly not the case where Christ 
 is worshiped. We feel it necessary to insist upon this, because 
 even those who accept Christ's Godhead, strangely pass Him by 
 when they are attempting to trace up all nature to their God. The 
 consequence is, that it is only the tfuths of mere development and 
 creation that occur in the sciences, and not those of love and re- 
 demption; whence moral and spiritual life is banished from the book 
 of nature. The church must look to this J and bishops and clergy 
 whose place it is to give prizes for natural theology, must consider 
 whether as at present taught, it is not an active branch of Deism. 
 We venture to express a hope, that in the distribution of laurels to 
 the successful candidates for the great Glasgow prize, this Christian 
 
XX11 PREFACE. 
 
 exigency will be remembered ; and the award be made not to those 
 treatises that so easily trace the parallelism between certain views of 
 science and the God of fancy, but between the integral sciences 
 themselves and the God of Revelation. 
 
 If the judges upon the important occasion referred to, adopt the 
 standard which we suggest, the end of natural theology will be al- 
 tered, and the effects upon science may be of the most considerable 
 kind. At present, natural theology has undertaken the impossible 
 task of "finding out God," Who can only be found in so far as He 
 has been pleased to reveal Himself. The Deity thus elicited, or as 
 Fichte rightly says, " constructed," is a scientific abstraction an- 
 swering to the concrete figure of the Vulcan of the Greeks — that is 
 to say, a universal Smith. The course of the natural theologians is 
 as follows : they see in the human body and the world the principles 
 and applications of the arts in a surpassing degree : the skull dis- 
 plays the virtues of the arch, and the hand embodies wondrous 
 pulleys and levers; whence they infer that God is acquainted with 
 mechanics. And from all the other parts of man, the clay patron- 
 izes the Potter in the same way, and the Deity which arises out of 
 the whole is at best an infinite handicraftsman. This is anthro- 
 pomorphism, or the distillation of God out of our own limits and 
 thoughts, our own space and time. The Paleys, Broughams, and 
 the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises, seem to have been satisfied 
 with this vulgarity of heathenism. 
 
 We hold, on the other hand, that a scientific natural theology is 
 different, and that it accepts the living Lord of Revelation, and 
 consists in tracing the correspondency of His revealed attributes in 
 the sciences; being in effect the synthesis of the knowledge of the 
 real God with the sciences of real nature. In this case it leads the 
 waters of life into science, ancPis the most indispensable of all the 
 single studies of the natural world. As for the evidences which it 
 affords of God's existence, these do not consist in demonstrations 
 of artistry and carpentry, but in symbols of spirit and love pervad- 
 ing creation, and reconstructing the natural mind of man upon 
 spiritual models. The proof that nature is full of Deity, lies in 
 its power, when rightly seen, to soften the heart and moisten the 
 eyes of the unbelieving world, and without a controversy to send 
 
PREFACE. XXlll 
 
 the scoffer to his knees. In that affecting moment, genius and 
 devotion are twin-born. But no demonstration of Vulcan, even 
 though approved by bishops and clergy, has any effect of this kind. 
 
 Many of the thoughts in the present work may seem new : yet 
 the larger portion of them is not our own. We believe implicitly 
 that " the stone which the builders rejected" will be " the head of 
 the corner." It has become therefore a scientific canon with us, to 
 look out for this stone in all quarters. Hence we have been led to 
 many discredited sources of information; and if borrowing good 
 things be plagiarism, we are guilty of it to the utmost of our 
 powers. Wherever it can be shown that we are not original, so 
 much the better : we desire for ourselves and others to enter the 
 circle of the great dependence of things, secure that there is no in- 
 dependence of heart or mind upon any other terms. 
 
 And now our task is done. The style of it differs somewhat from 
 the common, because our creed differs ; and we disbelieve for the 
 most part in what is called the severity, strictness and dryness of 
 science. We hold that nature is the drapery of spirit, and that 
 analogy is the cement of things, and the high-road of influences. 
 We are therefore afraid of nothing, however fanciful, on this ground : 
 nature is more fanciful than any of her children. Besides which, 
 we have found practically that metaphor is a sword of the spirit, and 
 that whenever a great truth is fixed, it is by some happy metaphor 
 that it is willing to inhabit for a time : and again, that whenever a 
 long controversy is ended, it is by one of the parties getting hand on 
 a metaphor whose blade burns with the runes of truth. For these 
 reasons we dare speak in parables. 
 
 Yet is it fearful to disagree so widely with our friends and fellows. 
 We love them, but crave space to breathe where they are not. 
 Difference makes the world larger ; and without a quarrel with the 
 old modes, we have emigrated to another country, where we hope for 
 peace ; particularly as we trust not again to come forth with the 
 pen. 
 
THE HUMAN BODY 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 Our first conception of the human body is that of a living sub- 
 ject; life is the dim personality which animates it, as well as the 
 atmosphere in which it moves and breathes. Upon this lowest 
 floor of our existence there rises an edifice of many stories ; upon 
 simple life, which is the vegetable in the animal, there is founded 
 a life of life, which is mind. The mind is many-chambered and 
 many-storied. Life dwells in the body, but the mind, or superior 
 life, inhabits the head, or according to anatomy, the brain. The 
 brain, then, is presumably the body of the mind, and whatever is 
 wisdom or faculty in the mind, is furniture or machinery answering 
 to faculty, in the brain. And as the mind is the man, the brain is 
 his representative, or the man in another degree. 
 
 This is the solid voice of the head, or the most general truth of 
 consciousness, which lies in the head, and speaks from the head. 
 And our plan is, to accept as oracles, these gifts of our instinctive 
 sense : to regard them as the elements of knowledge : and not to 
 question until we have accepted them. It is then the conscious- 
 ness, or instinctive natural history of the organs, from which we 
 commence : not what man says of the brain, but what the brain 
 says of itself in man. Thus we shall first endeavor to gain the 
 impressions which the organ under discussion makes upon the mind, 
 or begin from natural experience. We shall then briefly consider 
 its anatomy, or pass to scientific experience. Next we shall attempt 
 to give life to the part by considering it in motion and emotion, 
 3 
 
26 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 Lastly, we shall pursue the analogical method, where it is riot too 
 difficult; and assuming that every principle runs quite through the 
 world, we shall endeavor to show that each organ has kindred in 
 every sphere; and thus, out of the consanguinity of things, we 
 shall try to deduce the fact of a native coherence in the world, whose 
 links are a real logic, and which, when transplanted into know- 
 ledge, will spontaneously constitute the association and unity of the 
 sciences. 
 
 But this will be better understood in the sequel. We now pro- 
 ceed to the facts of the present case, to visit the mind which we 
 have found, in its proper mansion, the brain. 
 
 At the outset, we would guard the general reader against an error 
 which requires to be removed. It is commonly supposed, because 
 anatomy has been cultivated by a class, that it is difficult to learn. 
 On the contrary, any one with a common understanding, and of 
 course industry and attention, may possess himself of the leading 
 parts of anatomy. Ladies may learn them as well and as harm- 
 lessly as the other sex. Plates moreover are satisfactory means of 
 acquiring a view of the human frame which is enough for public 
 education; for although insufficient for the surgeon, the knowledge 
 derived from plates will enable the public to enter upon the study 
 of organization, both with cleaner hands and clearer heads than if 
 they busied themselves with the ever-varying detail of dissections. 
 It has indeed been usual with practical anatomists to decry ana- 
 tomical plates ; and yet they are a degree better and truer than the 
 dead body ; for they contain the mind of the artist, and are superior 
 to any single subject, being not mere copies, but carefully collected 
 from many subjects; and as they are generalizations, they are 
 adapted to be vehicles of general knowledge.* They may be re- 
 garded as translations of the body, available for those who cannot 
 read the original. And indeed those who can only see and not 
 touch anatomy, as they have all power of destruction removed, are 
 favorably situated for constructive truths — for the theories of bodily 
 
 * Many of the current anatomical plates have descended through books for 
 centuries, improving on the way, and may be traced from the masters of the 
 Italian and Dutch schools of anatomy to the present manuals : a plain sign of 
 their truth and serviceableness. 
 
DESCRIPTION. 27 
 
 motion, proportion and gravitation; just as the astronomers are 
 indebted to the distance of their view, and the superficiality of their 
 objects. Good science then, we repeat, will not refuse to attend 
 upon anatomical plates, though not the science of the surgeon. 
 
 The brain is an oval mass, filling and fitting the interior of the 
 skull, and consisting of two substances, a gray, ash-colored or cine- 
 ritious portion, and a white, fibrous or medullary portion. These 
 substances occupy different positions in different parts of the brain. 
 The gray portion constitutes the circumference of the large and 
 front division which is called the cerebrum ; it also enters into the 
 interior of the same in various parts, and forms both the centre and 
 circumference of the cerebellum and the centre of the spinal mar- 
 row. The white portion makes up the greater share of the brain. 
 Besides these divisions of substance the brain also presents divisions 
 of form. It is parted into two great masses, viz., the cerebrum and 
 cerebellum, and at its base there are two other portions, named the 
 annular protuberance and medulla oblongata. These are the four 
 primary divisions on the surface of the organ. The spinal marrow, 
 which runs down through the vertebrae or back bones, is the con- 
 tinuation of the medulla oblongata. The above parts collectively 
 are the bed and trunk of what is called the nervous system. From 
 all those already mentioned there arise certain white cords, the 
 nerves, which come out through holes in the skull, and through 
 notches between the back bones, and run to all parts of the body, 
 gradually splitting into filaments, which at length become invisible 
 by reason of their fineness. There are generally reckoned to be 
 eleven pairs of nerves arising from the brain, and thirty-one pairs 
 from the spinal marrow. Besides this great nervous plant which 
 continues the life of the head and its appendages, there is also 
 another proper to the body, as it were a creeping or parasitical 
 system, which weaves its meshes among the branches of the former : 
 this is the system of the sympathetic nerves. It is not obviously 
 referable to a centre, like the system just described, but it' has 
 many small centres scattered throughout the body, but especially 
 near the important organs, the heart, the stomach, &c. These cen- 
 tres are called ganglions, and are said to consist principally of gray 
 matter. Innumerable fine nerves radiate from them to the viscera, 
 
28 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 and to the great blood-vessels ; and also fibres pass to communicate 
 with the capital nervous system. 
 
 From the general tenor of these two systems it appears that the 
 cerebral is the engine and representative of the mind, and of the 
 body as constituted in the hierarchy of the mind, while the sym- 
 pathetic system is the nervous engine and representative of the body 
 considered independently, as possessing a life or mind in itself so 
 far as this system can arouse it. Consciousness does not here come 
 in question. Many of our impressions are unconscious, nay perhaps 
 all through the longer part of their course, though travelling along 
 the cerebral lines. And again, the bodily organs, as the liver or 
 the kidneys, require to exercise processes of selection, and acts of 
 composition and elimination, to which nothing less than a stupen- 
 dous bodily judgment is adequate. Mental judgment would not be 
 fine enough for the work; and it is only mental judgment and 
 faculty which are conscious. 
 
 The brain and its parts, including the spinal marrow, are clothed 
 with three membranes or skins. That next the brain is the pia 
 mater, which not only encloses the brain, but dips down into its 
 folds, and probably ramifies more and more finely through its minute 
 divisions, acting as a framework to the nervous substance : it is full 
 of delicate vessels which supply the brain with blood. The next 
 membrane is the arachnoid, which is said to form a shut bag like a 
 double nightcap, in the inside of which a lubricating fluid is given 
 out, the whole constituting a kind of " water bed"* on which the 
 brain may undulate. The next membrane is the dura mater, lining 
 the movable arachnoid on the side towards the brain, and lining the 
 bony skull on the other side, and being separable into two layers to 
 suit these two situations or offices. It is the strongest of the mem- 
 branes of the brain, and gives off membranous pipes which receive 
 and envelop the nerves at their exit from the skull and spine : it also 
 sends down tight sheets or processes between the two halves of the 
 cerebrum, and between the cerebrum and cerebellum, whereby it 
 
 * Water beds of this kind, i. c, serous membranes, are prepared for all the 
 viscera; and bursse or water cushions are frequently apposed in the joints; 
 where these are met with they are the means and evidences of some motion 
 performed. 
 
DESCRIPTION. 29 
 
 supports the larger divisions of this soft and tender organism : and 
 between its layers it contains the great channels of venous blood 
 known as the sinuses of the brain. 
 
 We see then that the consciousness is physically nourished from 
 without, as the brain is nourished by the blood of the pia mater; that 
 it is physically movable, or can assume varieties of shape and state, 
 as the floating brain can move its person upon its fluids, and speci- 
 fically upon the arachnoid bed : we also observe that the conscious- 
 ness, like the brain, is limited, the dura mater and the skull being 
 the emblems of that limitation. 
 
 The brain is supplied with blood by the carotid and vertebral arte- 
 ries. The carotids are the first great vessels which issue from the 
 stem of the arterial tree, and they supply the cerebrum with the first 
 blood of the heart. The vertebrals are the first streams from the 
 subclavians, which supply the arms with blood. Thus the first blood 
 of the body and the limbs is alienated to the brain. Its veins, which 
 bring back towards the heart the blood that has passed through the 
 before-mentioned arteries to the pia mater and substance of the brain, 
 empty themselves into certain peculiar channels contained in the lay- 
 ers of the dura mater, and termed the sinuses of the brain ; which 
 sinuses communicate with each other at last, and pass out of the skull 
 by a bend or curve where the carotid enters; there constituting the 
 internal jugular vein, which carries the first considerable stream that 
 is returned to the heart. 
 
 The cerebral globe is divided into two halves, and each of these 
 into lobes; the lobes again being subdivided into convolutions, which 
 have furrows between them that dip down into the brain, and are 
 covered by the pia mater. By means of these foldings, the surface 
 of the cerebrum is much increased, and space is economized ; this 
 folding of surfaces into solids being one of the principles of the body, 
 whereby distances are brought together, and association or organiza- 
 tion is promoted. In proportion to the number of these twists or 
 convolutions is the power of the brain. The mind's revolvings are 
 here represented in moving spirals, and the subtle insinuation of 
 thought, whose path lies through all things, issues with power from 
 the form of the cerebral screws. They print their shape and make 
 
30 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 themselves room on the hard inside of the skull, and are the most 
 irresistible agents in the human world. 
 
 At a considerable depth the two hemispheres unite together, and 
 below their union, if the cerebrum be opened, we come to certain 
 cavities termed the ventricles of the brain. Of these there are four, 
 all communicating with each other ; and a fifth is enumerated, but 
 of small size, and disconnected from the rest. The four cavities form 
 a continuous chamber, and always contain more or less fluid. Thus 
 the brain, far from being prepared for rest, is constituted internally 
 upon the movable pivot of this fluid cushion of the ventricles. 
 
 The cerebellum lies behind and underneath the cerebrum, of which 
 it is said to be one-eighth the size, and it is divided into lobes and 
 lobules. It consists of gray and white substance, not disposed in 
 convolutions but in thin plates. There is said to be no direct com- 
 munication between the cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum. 
 The latter is evidently not a revolving, thinking, or spiral organ, but 
 a battery of determination and power : thoughtful consciousness does 
 not connect itself with the back of the head, or with the cerebellum. 
 Its form too, double fisted, does not answer to the cerebral functions. 
 Its visceral or hidden situation also brings it into analogy with the 
 other viscera, in which there is no freedom of thought, but fixed ac- 
 ceptation and permanent action. 
 
 The nervous system, though apparently homogeneous, is con- 
 structed of distinct pieces, which are extraordinarily united, and ex- 
 traordinarily capable of separation in their functions. The first piece 
 is the proper spinal marrow, with all the nerves of the limbs, trunk 
 and head which issue from it. This lowest pillar of the cerebral 
 system is in a manner complete in itself, and receives impressions, 
 and executes actions, on its own account. It consists of a running 
 axis of gray matter of a peculiar form, and in front gives off the nerves 
 that convey bodily motions, at the back receives those which carry 
 bodily sensations. The circle of its operations is therefore as follows. 
 When an impression appeals to it from the body through its quasi- 
 sentient nerves, this mounts to the gray centre to which the nerve 
 carrying the impression belongs : an instant organic determination 
 then occurs in the centre, a decision takes place, and a motion is 
 sent down through the corresponding motor nerve to the parts which 
 
THE SPINAL BRAIN. 31 
 
 the latter supplies. For example, a pinch applied to the leg lodges 
 its complaint at the gray centre, which at once by its nerves sets the 
 muscles and the limb in that motion which enables the part to escape 
 the distress. This is now termed, reflex action, which means that 
 an impression is communicated to a nervous centre by a set of quasi- 
 sentient nerves, and a motion reflected from that centre by a set 
 of motor nerves. It does not necessarily involve consciousness. A 
 paralytic man, with no feeling in his legs, if the soles of his feet be 
 tickled will move them away from the irritation, just as though he 
 perceived it. In short, the spinal brain is unconscious, or let us 
 rather say, we are unconscious of its feelings. We term its nerves 
 therefore, not sentient, but quasi-sentient. 
 
 We come now to a second and distinct piece of nervous system, of 
 whose operations we may still be unconscious, viz., the medulla ob- 
 longata, whose nerves are connected with the organs of respiration 
 and the ingestion of food — with the functions of breathing and of 
 eating, which although they may be permeated by sensation, and 
 controlled by the will, may also occur independently of either; as 
 during sleep, when breathing still proceeds, and in various cases 
 when the movements of eating and deglutition are performed without 
 cognizance. All that is necessary for continuing the actions of the 
 parts of the body supplied from these centres, is, that a quasi-sensa- 
 tion be communicated to them, which the centres act upon through 
 the motor apparatus of nerves. The conception of so mere a ma- 
 chine in man, is perhaps difficult to realize ; the spinal brain, how- 
 ever, with its dependencies, represents an automaton man as the 
 basement of the nervous system. It is the organization of routine 
 or insect progress. By it we walk, work and eat when we are not 
 thinking of those operations; and thus the inherent properties of this 
 routine system save us from much expenditure of attention, and allow 
 the brain and the senses to be emancipated as necessity requires from 
 the lowest wants. Had we to perform our animal functions by direct 
 volitions, we should have no time for anything better : if each breath 
 were a distinct voluntary act, breathing alone would fill our lives : 
 nor in this case would walking or an} 7 other external function be 
 possible, for the will does but one thing at once. As it is, however, 
 a number of bodily acts are momentaneously and harmonically per- 
 
32 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 formed, each through the separate vigilance of its own agent in the 
 recesses of the spinal brains. 
 
 We have alluded already to the act of walking, which affords a 
 good example of automatic function. When we are walking with- 
 out attending to our steps, the foot coming down to the ground con- 
 veys the quasi-sensation of its contact to the spinal centres; these 
 are roused to a corresponding motion ; in other words, they command 
 the muscles of the other leg to put it into a forward movement. No 
 sooner is this executed, than at the end of the movement, another 
 manifest quasi-sensation is afforded by the fresh contact with the 
 earth, which contact reaching the centres, engenders a second 
 motion : and so forth, throughout the walk. This is a simple circle, 
 in which quasi-sensation excites motion at the centre, and motion 
 produces quasi-sensation at its extremes. Thus the foot on the 
 ground represents sensation, and that in progress, motion, and the 
 two contemplated together represent the links in a chain of nervous 
 fate. 
 
 The next piece of the nervous system consists of the nerves of 
 the special senses, and of certain central parts at the base of the 
 brain, to which those nerves run. The latter are the sensual* brain, 
 from which fibres emanate that ultimately become the olfactory, 
 optic, auditory nerves, &c, which run respectively to the nose, the 
 eye, the ear, the mouth and the skin. The central endowment of 
 this nervous piece is sensation. In itself it provides a simple circle 
 from sensations to motions. Impressions which are perceived by the 
 senses mount to the sensual centres, which dictate suitable actions. 
 The instincts of some animals low down in the scale, are to be re- 
 ferred to this class of mobilized sensations. 
 
 Instances of purely sensual actions are comparatively rare in man, 
 so rapid is the transit of feeling into desire, which is not a faculty 
 of mere sense, but the gift of a mind in direct communication with 
 
 * We prefer the term sensual to sensory, which seems coming into use. The 
 word sensory, if applied so low down, would exclude from sensation all above 
 it, and the cerebral operations would fall into abstract forms : whereas by allo- 
 cating the term sensual to the nervous centres of the external senses, we leave 
 the term sensory for the inner senses, to which it has been appropriated from old 
 times. 
 
THE SENSUAL BRAIN. 33 
 
 the senses. The instinctive laying out of the body for pleasures, 
 and its spontaneous avoidance of pains, are however cases of this 
 order. Moreover we feel that a strong vein of these actions runs 
 through many of our habits, and executes them for us, contempo- 
 raneously with our desires. Habitual vices, in proportion as they 
 become fixed, seem to roll upon this fatal wheel, by which low plea- 
 sure runs incontinently into motion. The bottle is hung round 
 the neck of the drunkard by a simple sensual circle of the kind, as 
 well as by a longer thong of which perverse desire is the neck- 
 piece. By a similar yoke, of seeing and leering, is the voluptuary 
 led by his objects. In short, whatever we do, good or bad, without 
 being able to control it, appears to contain a sensual kernel. Sen- 
 suality, however, is a passive faculty, and we shall have to distinguish 
 presently an active part belonging to it, and playing upon it, and 
 which for the present we term animality. This then is the third of 
 the nervous stones which construct us — sensation, which set a-moving 
 is sensuality. It leads us to dance pleasantly but involuntarily to 
 the music of the senses. Its seat is in the base of the brain. 
 
 The fourth and remaining piece of the nervous system comprises 
 the cerebral hemispheres, which reasoning by the method of exclu- 
 sion we regard as the seat of the mind, or the properly human facul- 
 ties; and not only of these, but of all those powers which belong to 
 consciousness, and are over and above the senses. These hemi- 
 spheres are predominant in place and size in man, as well as in the 
 higher animals. 
 
 We have now chronicled three divisions of the nervous system,* 
 
 * The nervous system, or its functions, are sometimes dissected for us by 
 diseases, as well as by narcotic agents, which benumb one part and leave the 
 others free. For instance, during the administration of chloroform, first thought 
 and will, and the fixity of sense which depends upon attention, become confused 
 and waver : and shortly afterwards active consciousness is abolished. The 
 cerebrum is detached from the train, and life goes on at slackened pace without 
 its traction. The sense of pain however still continues. By degrees this too is 
 lost : the second and feebler engine of sensation, the sensual brain, is also de- 
 tached, and nothing but breathing is prefixed to the cars. This now becomes 
 slower and more slow, and if the experiment be continued, ceases. Life is then 
 generally irrecallable. In natural and artificial trance the process of disconnec- 
 tion may proceed two steps further ; and the nervous function may be detached 
 
34 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 which may be grouped into two, an animal and an automatic; the 
 lowest of these is a nerve machine, the higher in its twofold aspect 
 is a nerve animal, with senses. We know nothing that expresses so 
 physiologically the case between the automatic and the other part of 
 this system as the ratio of the living creatures to the wheels in 
 Ezekiel. "And when the living creatures went, the wheels went 
 by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the 
 earth, the wheels were lifted up. Whithersoever the spirit was to 
 go, they went, thither was their spirit to go ; and the wheels were 
 lifted up over against them : for the spirit of the living creature was 
 in the wheels. When those went, these went; and when those 
 stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, 
 the wheels were lifted up over against them : for the spirit of the 
 living creature was in the wheels/'* 
 
 On arriving in our upward course at the cerebral hemispheres, 
 we have come to a group of functions which represent the powers of 
 the mind : consequently here we have no longer a simple centre to 
 consider, but an organ with various essences. For the mind is evi- 
 dently twofold ; at the first analysis it is a rational spring on the 
 one hand, and an animal spring on the other. It may be devoted 
 to the truth of things, and proceed from thought to judgment, and 
 from judgment to will, and so give the dictates of reasonable actions. 
 Or it may be spent upon gratifications, and run from imagination 
 
 to a certain distance from the organism, and yet be capable of reassuming its 
 place. 
 
 In the case of narcotism the separation takes place from above downwards : 
 the mind is first taken away, then the senses, and lastly the breath : but some- 
 times the reverse process occurs, as at the hour of death, and first impressibility, 
 and second sensibility are lost ; whilst the mind retains its clearness, or even 
 enjoys additional powers of circumvision and forethought. These states are 
 opposite, although the beholder may mistake them for each other. 
 
 And not only disease, but the ordinary state, shows the separateness of the 
 nervous pieces. Through the greater portion of life, thought and will are dor- 
 mant, or the tops of the hemispheres are not in action, though the man is con- 
 scious. Many times also imagination and desire are completely at rest, although 
 feeling is left ; the eye immits rivers of objects without stirring any motions but 
 its own as it rolls magnetically after the pictures. And then again we experience 
 numerous twitches and convulsive movements for which we cannot account, or 
 in other words, which are originated in the circle below the sensual brain. 
 
 * Chap. i. verses 19—21. 
 
THE CEREBRUM OR ANIMAL BRAIN. 35 
 
 to choice, and from choice to desire, and thus stimulate animal 
 actions. In short, there are two minds in man ; the one which he 
 possesses in common with animals; the other which is properly 
 human. But where do we find these two in the cerebral hemi- 
 spheres ? 
 
 To this we reply that the whole cerebrum is the general sensori- 
 um; that is to say, the residence of the animal mind, or the mind 
 of the senses. For the fibres coming up from beneath diverge to 
 the entire cerebrum, and terminate in its cortex. This brain, then, 
 as related to the incitements of sensation, comprises the various 
 powers which sensation stimulates, and into which it passes ; that 
 is to say, it includes memory, imagination, desire, and again the 
 corresponding series of animal determinations which give birth to 
 their proper actions. To this general sensory and motory head we 
 also refer many faculties which go under the name of instinct; its 
 great tides of change are emotions, joy and sorrow, and the like ; 
 and its general states we term moods. The passions are the lords 
 of this worldly brain, by which man sympathizes with all nature in 
 its own way, being governed by the moon and the weather, the 
 circumstances of his society and his age, and whatever influences 
 come from without. The absence of moral freedom characterizes 
 its actions, when these proceed from itself alone. Its faculties are 
 vague and general, and move altogether in their mass. It gives the 
 pervading temperament and tone to the animal body, and being the 
 highest expression of animal life, and bulky and forcible with our 
 whole nature, its actions animate the frame with prodigious vigor 
 and universality, as we see in the case of the various passions and 
 emotions. Contrivance, cunning, and a number of conjointly 
 human and animal qualities belong to this general sensory, and put 
 on the appearance of wisdom or reason, not only in animals but in 
 men : so that whether such or such actions argue reason is an equal 
 problem in both creatures. 
 
 On the other hand the human mind, as distinct from its own 
 animal mind, appears to reside in the cortical circumferences alone, 
 and to play upon none but the very centres of nervous power, and 
 not upon these in the gross, but with skill and discrimination. 
 Thus it does not consist in new materials, or fresh parts, but in 
 
36 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 a fresh use of parts, and a new architecture of materials. The 
 supreme superficiality of the cortex of the brain, its partition 
 into convolutions, the separate movableness of these, their brain- 
 embracing wholeness, show that a freedom is possible, and a univer- 
 sality conceded, to these parts, which neither the fibres per se, nor 
 the other groups of cineritious substances, can enjoy. These con- 
 ditions agree with the requirements of thought and will, both of 
 which are central and concentrative ; are seated at the top of the 
 mind j work by separation and decision, seizing upon main points 
 and governing provinces therefrom ; and both of which finally can 
 claim any portion of the domains of our animal nature, and control 
 it, until its animal essence is reduced to harmony with reason's will. 
 These cortical substances, in their distinct use, are the factories of men- 
 tal skill. It is their perfection to except neither temperaments, nor 
 weathers, nor the criminal influences of the stars, nor the imagina- 
 tions, sensations, or apparent relations of things, as their allotted 
 sphere ; but they shape and cultivate things and ideas afresh ; they 
 recast influences on their own principles, of truth or falsity : their 
 reception of outward nature is the philosophy of the man ; their 
 works are the creative arts of his mind; and their judgment is his 
 moral soul. All this, we remark, demands no second brain apart 
 from the general sensorium, but the command of this in its highest 
 parts, where it is free to obey, and the rcconstitution of those parts 
 by the usage and skill of the rational power. In this respect the 
 brain may be likened to the hand, which is a coarse, general and 
 animal tool in the savage, and for some operations, such as grub- 
 bing in the earth, disqualified by its division into fingers ; whilst in 
 the civilized man it is extemporized by his mind and education into 
 a running power of convolutions from which tools proceed and arts 
 radiate, until nature is subdued and home is built : the separate use 
 of the fingers being the sign and cause* of this new essence in the 
 hand. 
 
 It is therefore in the mind and not in the brain, and in the ration- 
 al mind and not in the animal mind, and not in mere ends but in 
 moral ends, nor in mere determinations but in. moral determinations, 
 that man is different from animals. Or to keep within our present 
 
THE MIND OR RATIONAL BRAIN. 37 
 
 subject, man is human or hyper-animal because he has a mind extra, 
 which uses, or can use, the top of his brains. 
 
 The separateness of the animal from the rational brain is fanc- 
 tlonidly more distinct than the separateness between the other parts 
 of the nervous system. Do we not all perform vivisection upon our- 
 selves every day in cutting reason off, and thinking and acting from 
 animal motives ; in keeping the mind under, while vague imagina- 
 tion, desire and pleasure over-ride it ? in merging it in a sea of na- 
 tural emotions and commotions, which allow reason no beginning, 
 and will, none of its distinctness ? But as for the structural sepa- 
 rateness, the rational brain is no other than the mind itself as a 
 distinct organization, whose existence is demonstrated by its play 
 upon the cortical organs. This mind terminates the brain, and begins 
 a new subject with new expressions ; we cannot see it unless in its 
 own way of intellectual sight ; nor can we now pursue it, because its 
 attributes hold no commerce with anatomical terms. 
 
 The nerves or brain form a representative system, which does not 
 itself come in contact with objects on the one hand, or with actions 
 on the other, but deals in the one case with the images of things, in 
 the other, with the commands of actions. It results from this, that 
 whatever will produce the central impression, sensation, imagination, 
 or intellectual vision, will cause the appearance of the object, whether 
 it be present or not. Thus if the brain can radiate down to the 
 spinal cord a vibration like that which the cord receives from any 
 object as an impression from without, the same motions will be en- 
 gendered as flow from the apposition of a real circumstance or object. 
 So again, if the brain can shake the optical centres as light shakes 
 them, or can extemporize the part of light within them, the man 
 will have the sensation of light as though it were present from the 
 sun or a candle. And so too if the soul or spirit, or any other spirit 
 or influence, can make the imaginations or the thought-movements in 
 the cerebral substance, these will seem as much our own thoughts 
 as though no such influence had been exerted. But in both cases, 
 be it remembered, there is an object out of the faculty excited; 
 though in the one case the object is out of the organism externally, 
 in the other case out of it internally. 
 
 Each of the centres then, namely, the automatic, the animal, and 
 4 
 
38 -THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 the rational, are susceptible of a twofold excitement; first, from a 
 circumambient world, or from beneath, through their own proper 
 circle : secondly, from the organism, or organisms, above them, and 
 thus indirectly from a higher circumambient sphere. Each also has 
 its memory; which in the spine is habit; in the animal brain is pro- 
 per memory; in the distinct cortex is principles, which hold things 
 together in the bonds of ratio or reason, as memory combines them 
 in the bonds of a common sensation. Habit then is the spine of the 
 nerve-man; memory is his world of sense, or his senses; and reason 
 is his proper head. 
 
 Let us now pause for a moment to ask cursorily the use of the 
 brain to the mind, as illustrated by the foregoing observations. 
 Now, what is the use of the spinal cord to the senses and the brain ? 
 for this will give us a similitude of the answer to the previous ques- 
 tion. Its use is, to carry the general cerebral principles into an 
 automatic or mechanical sphere, and there to set them up in uncon- 
 scious operations. Thus, the spinal cord makes motions which look 
 as though they proceeded from emotions, when yet there is nothing 
 felt. This dramatic mechanics, is the marrow of the nervous sys- 
 tem, and consequently of the body. As a principle it reigns through- 
 out it. The whole system is a quasi thing; a mental theatre or 
 drama. The spinal cord moves as though it felt; the medulla ob- 
 longata breathes and eats, as if it were instinct with appetites : the 
 senses feel, as if they were conscious : and the brain understands, as 
 though it were a spirit. The cheek, too, blushes, as though it were 
 ashamed; and so forth. But all is quasi, and depends upon a real- 
 ity somewhere which is in none of the actors; and which reality, prox- 
 imately, lies in a spiritual organism, or in the human mind. Take 
 this away, and the mimicry is soon at an end. 
 
 Thus far, then, the use of the brain to the mind is, to enable the 
 latter to personate itself in a dead world, which it could not do with- 
 out a brain and body, really dead, and yet seemingly or dramatically 
 alive. 
 
 It is not long since it was believed that the actions of the spinal 
 marrow were evidences of consciousness, and that feeling was im- 
 plied in its habitual regular movements. And it is still thought by 
 many that sense or feeling is necessarily connected with conscious- 
 
ITS PERSONATION OF MIND AND LIFE. 39 
 
 ness : and by almost all, that consciousness is where it seems, namely, 
 in the head, and not in the mind. But strike away the lower falla- 
 cy, that muscular or convulsive action has any necessary connection 
 with feeling, and the other fallacies also totter. For if without feel- 
 ing or motive we can be impressed and act through the spinal cord, 
 we can, without an inherent mind, understand and will in the cere- 
 bral hemispheres. Or, in other words, as dead a structure in the 
 brain may be in apposition with the mind, for mental purposes, as 
 that which is added to the brain in the spine for impressional and 
 motor ends. The corollary is, that life is not in the body at all, in 
 the brain any more than in the nails; but that the body is essen- 
 tially dramatic; can feel, as itivere } think, as it icere, and will, as it 
 were : which, indeed, is the reason why the soul, desirous of doing 
 all these things in a world which likewise is dramatic, adheres to a 
 frame which is so perfect a medium of representations or mundane 
 actions. 
 
 But let us also consider for a moment the relation of the mind to 
 the brain, by an inverse analogy, namely, the relation of the brain 
 to the spinal marrow. What, then, is the latter? The difference 
 of place between the two, and the difference of calibre, are too ob- 
 vious to mention. The one is the head of which the other is the 
 foot, the one is the luminous globe of which the other is the ray.* 
 Now, the brain performs or instigates on new grounds, with new 
 efficacy, and in a thousand thousand new forms, the general auto- 
 matic actions of the spinal marrow; for it extracts the secret and 
 meaning from sensible impressions, and produces actions correspond- 
 ent with the circumstances which that meaning shows to exist. All 
 the actions of man are proximately brain-work; so also are all his 
 perceptions : whereas a few automatic movements and convulsions 
 are the whole of the actions that can be assigned to the spinal mar- 
 row. We have here a glimpse of the transcendent nature of the 
 next higher term of the series ; and if by the rule of three we may 
 say, as the spinal cord is to the brain, so is the brain to the mind, 
 
 * Here we may remark that we agree with the ancients, that the spinal cord is 
 a continuation of the brain ; although it is also, as the moderns say, an axis of in- 
 dependent centres; but its dependence is a longer truth than its independence. 
 
40 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 we shall admit that perfections, amplitude, and newness of function 
 will occur in the latter which it baffles words to describe. 
 
 The same truth is presented by comparison of the parts of the 
 brain within itself. Thus from the great cortical surface of the ce- 
 rebral globes the white fibres radiate downwards and inwards, the ca- 
 libre of the radiant mass becoming smaller as it travels. Presently 
 the rays are arrested by a new bed of cortical substance, that in its turn 
 sends down radiating fibres, which similarly converge and decrease. 
 The same process, of encountering the cortical part, starting afresh, and 
 always diminishing, is repeated, until both the cerebellum and the ce- 
 rebrum terminate in the small medulla oblongata, and in the narrow 
 spinal cord. Thus powers are stopped off and arrested as the brain 
 descends; or reasoning backwards, as Gall has done, they are added 
 ( on as the medulla oblongata ascends. What must be the addition 
 I that takes place in the mind ? what the new breadth in its cortical 
 ( spheres? what the acres of the sheaves and, bundles of its intellect- 
 ( ual light? and what, on the other hand, the gulf of loss and de- 
 , gradation that lies between it and even the highest portions of the 
 brain ? 
 
 Thus far we have attempted a slight sketch of what may be said 
 with some certainty of the functions of the nervous system. We 
 have found that it consists firstly of an automatic apparatus, the 
 spinal brain, by which contacts are apprehended, and motions ex- 
 ecuted, without the intervention of our consciousness: secondly, of 
 an animal brain, which is to all intents and purposes an animal, or 
 imagines, desires, lusts, contrives, plans and acts from animal mo- 
 tives, though very imperfectly, from defect of instinct, which is the 
 limiting perfection of the beasts ; and thirdly, of a rational and vo- 
 luntary function, playing in its revolving cortex, and evidencing the 
 presence of an invisible mind, whose action reveals the human brain. 
 Thus we have found that the brain per se is not human, but perpe- 
 tually humanized; and that in its openness to that which is next 
 above it, and its docility to the spirit, lies its grand endowment. In 
 thus proceeding from below upwards, we have been separating parts 
 whose perfection lies in their harmonious union. We must now 
 make amends by declaring, that the influence of reason, permeating 
 the animal brain, gives it powers super-eminent over instinct; and 
 
UNITY AND DISUNITY OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 41 
 
 as man domesticates the animals, or chooses those which suit his 
 purpose, and abolishes the rest, so does reason govern the moods of 
 the brain, feeds upon its tranquil emotions and compresses those 
 which are fierce, governs its imaginations, and, in a word, civilizes 
 the savage countries of the original head. All this is no work of 
 passion, or simple pleasure or pain, but of artist-like struggle and 
 contest, whereby reason, or the true ratio between the mind and the 
 brain, begins to be established, and the little spots already cultivated 
 are extended until the rest is won. In this high state of the brain 
 the human faculties permeate the cerebrum, and the animal faculties, 
 prodigiously cultivated beyond the wild state, are everywhere parallel 
 with the rational powers. And so, too, the mechanical faculties, all 
 the manufactures of thought, or the mere motions of the body : these 
 are surrounded by a consciousness which knows what they will be, 
 before they appear ; they are developed into mechanism after me- 
 chanism — all the inventions of reason and will in the mechanical 
 sphere. This is a condition of the nervous system which is seldom 
 witnessed, but we place it as a counterpart to the state of disunion 
 considered before : the ordinary state is a kind of composition be- 
 tween the two, and can easily be constructed out of these extremes. 
 
 I do not know that we can escape generalities in treating of the 
 functions of the brain. Certainly at present, when we go inwards, 
 whether into the head or the mind, a few powers present themselves, 
 very little colored, and with none but a general outline. The gray 
 and white shadows of metaphysics seem to answer to the cineritious 
 and medullary groups of the nervous system. But there is no doubt 
 that the truths of this class are valuable, as the pure science of the 
 body; and that they are the outlines of a multitude of moreinterest- 
 ing sciences. 
 
 There is indeed a branch -which it has been thought throws a 
 broader light on the nature of the brain : we allude to phrenology. 
 This office of phrenology we regard however as a misapprehension. 
 As we understand phrenolog} T , it is a science of independent obser- 
 vation, which is completed in tracing the correspondence between the 
 surface of the living head and the character of the individual. It 
 was as such that its edifice arose stone by stone in the hands of the 
 
 illustrious Gall. He noticed that portions of the surface of the head 
 
 4* 
 
42 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 stood out in those who were prominent in certain faculties, and put- 
 ting the bodily and mental prominences together (for which may he 
 be honored !), he arrived by repeated instances at the signs of the 
 character as they are written upon the head. He completed the 
 dark half of the globe of physiognomy, and letting his active observa- 
 tion shine upon it, he found the rest of the head representative of 
 the whole character, as the face is expressive of the mind. Expres- 
 sion, we may remark, is living representation, and representation is 
 dead expression. The representation of the man by his head had 
 always been vaguely felt, and the best sculptors and poets had imaged 
 their gods and heroes with phrenological truth. But Gall made their 
 high intuitions so current that all could buy them. Now this de- 
 partment of physiognomy surely night be carried to the perfection 
 peculiar to itself without the head being opened. Nay, it would be 
 best learned without breaking the surface ; for the beauty of expres- 
 sion and representation lies in their bringing what they signify to 
 the surface, and depositing it there. But for this purpose the surface 
 must be whole. There is no interval between life and its hiero- 
 glyphics, but the one is within the other, as a wheel within a wheel. 
 The thing signified by the organ of form is form, and not a piece of 
 cerebrum : love is meant by the protuberance of amativeness, and 
 not the cerebellum : and so forth. It is superficiality, and not depth, 
 that is excellence here. The deep ones had dug for ages in the 
 brain, and found nothing but abstract truth : Gall came out of the 
 cerebral well, and looking upon the surface found that it was a land- 
 scape, inhabited by human natures in a thousand tents, all dwelling 
 according to passions, faculties and powers. So much was gained by 
 the first man who came to the surface, where nature speaks by re- 
 presentations ; but it is lost again at the point where cerebral anatomy 
 begins. Gall himself was an instance of this, for he was one of the 
 greatest and most successful of the anatomists of the brain. But 
 when the skull is off, his phrenology deserts him, the human interest 
 ceases, and his descriptions of the fibres and the gray matter are as 
 purely physical as if they were of the ropes and pulleys of a ship. 
 
 It must however be supposed that the brain has a definite ratio to 
 the head, but what that ratio may be, is an undecided question. It 
 is difficult to prove that the risings and fallings of the skull corres- 
 
PHRENOLOGY. 43 
 
 pond exactly with those of the brain. This is of no consequence to 
 phrenology as a science of observation. And it does not follow that 
 the representation of faculties is equivalent to physical correspondence 
 or similar undulation of surface. The nose represents the sense of 
 smell, although the olfactory nerve does not lie under it in the form 
 of a nerve nose. And destructiveness may lie in its bony den with- 
 out exactly fitting the bone. On the contrary we might suppose that 
 where activity was involved, there would be room for exercise; and 
 that the inner table of the skull would represent something more 
 than the limits of the greatest exertions of the faculty — the arms- 
 length, spring and hatchet-play, for instance, of the destroying organ. 
 
 Moreover, looking at the instance of the face, it does not appear 
 certain that the ratio is between the surface and the parts immedi- 
 ately beneath it. Concealment and projection are elements of repre- 
 sentation. The eyes are put forth far away from those cerebral 
 origins which they signify, and with which they communicate. The 
 parts that functionally underlie the eyes are not the structures nearest 
 to them inwards. The superficial-making process is often slanting, 
 as is seen in the ducts of many organs, which carry the produce by 
 which they represent the organ to a spot remote from the surface 
 above it. 
 
 We are inclined however to believe that there is a fitness between 
 the parts of the phrenological head and the brain underneath them. 
 And we suspect also that the ratio is one of quantity. For when 
 we consider the whole frame as representative, the front half of the 
 body stands for expression, or that which represents the mind ac- 
 tively, and in the face intelligibly ; while the back half stands for 
 representation or reaction. The front impresses spiritually, the back 
 materially ; or in other words, the front acts, and the back reacts. 
 Now the reaction consists in the gross pushing of the frame, while 
 the action is skillfully supported upon this, and busy in the front. 
 This pushing for a rest necessarily is quantitative, and moulds to its 
 shape what it comes against, if the latter can take an impression. 
 The skill of action on the other hand similarly moulds, but at a dis- 
 tance from itself, and upon the models of quality or design, which 
 issue from its creative fingers. Now it seems as if the brain, con- 
 sidered as made of organs, and as determined to without, leans the 
 
44 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 backs of those organs against the skull, their fronts being turned to 
 the origins of the nerves of the face and body ; and thus gives upon 
 the skull the back or passive side of the character, and a portion of 
 the front or active side in the face. 
 
 But still the push of the organs against the skull and their pro- 
 trusion or apparent bulk, would not show that the protrusion upon 
 the head was primarily due to the subjacent organ. In a soft and 
 yielding mass like the brain, the strong and energetic parts would, 
 it seems, hold their places, displace the others, and cause the weak- 
 est to go to the wall. Thus a stout eminence on the head might 
 signify firmness, though the organ of firmness were far away, making 
 room for himself in all directions, and ousting the feeblest parts of 
 the brain into the poorest places, aside from the rest. In fact, power 
 is always felt physically at a distance from itself, where reaction and 
 resistance begin. Thus feeble races are pushed up into the moun- 
 tains before their conquerors, where their condition indeed signifies 
 power, but it is unfortunately the power of their enemies, and their 
 own weakness. We might then expect that in the reactive skull 
 the greatest prominences should have under them the most passive 
 portions of the brain. And if this be the case, the phrenology of 
 the brain would be the inverse of that of the head, and each depres- 
 sion or elevation on the skull would not be the result of a simple 
 pressure, but of the varying balance of two or more faculties or or- 
 gans, pressing each other up or down as the case may be. It does 
 not seem impossible that such a phrenology of the brain should be 
 constituted ; which if it were, it would signify the strength and weak- 
 ness of the character, both written on the surface. Undoubtedly 
 many of the exaggerations of character proceed from the imperfect 
 resistance offered by some of the faculties, and show their strength 
 in the direction of our greatest weaknesses. Thus their forcible na- 
 ture argues the compliance and not the active strength of the mind 
 which immediately executes them. If this hold good of the skull 
 also, then it contains no organs, but merely passive evidences of the 
 faculties, and we are brought again to the point, that phrenology is 
 more properly to be called cranioscopy, and to be regarded as the 
 mute complement of physiognomy. 
 
 Moreover the correspondence between insides and outsides can- 
 
PHRENOLOGY, 45 
 
 not be calculated upon with nicety. Circumstances not only environ 
 essentials, but alter their shapes and seemings. The skull, as a cir- 
 cumstance surrounding the brain, may represent it badly, as a poor 
 gift of language may choke the utterance of a rich heart. It by no 
 means follows that there is harmonious co-development of the parts, 
 but on the other hand, the instances of this perfection are rare. 
 Brains may be born into inconvenient cases, just as good human 
 minds, veritable immortal children, are born into idiot brains. 
 Difference of form, also, and consequent difference of distribution of 
 the constituent parts, may be expected between different races. If 
 the climate and the wants of life are various, the shape of the life 
 and its parts will be various also; the faculties will consent to the 
 circumstances and grow in their training. Ideality will not fight 
 with hope for any precise chair of bone, when the relations alter, 
 and another piece is naturally offered. A faculty squeezed in by 
 circumstances will rise up somewhere else, or cause the protrusion 
 of some other part. It seems clear, then, that the brain will con- 
 sent to be packed differently; that if its external world or climate, 
 viz., the skull and membranes, are of a new type, its resources will 
 not be overset, but developed in a new direction. But this does not 
 disprove phrenology, though it may perhaps cause us to hope that 
 there are phrenologies besides the European, and that this little 
 science also is of a spherical richness. 
 
 Perhaps we have been too much accustomed to regard the exterior 
 head as a mere wrappage of the brain, whereas, like other externals, 
 it is independent like the brain itself, and has its own centres of 
 structure and function. We have likened it to a country or climate 
 that the brain inhabits, and pursuing the analogy we may say, that 
 the inhabitant did not make his country, nor can he modify it, 
 excepting in so far as he is modified by it. True, he is destined to 
 mould it to his wants; but then the wants themselves draw their 
 forms from the climate. Hence we see that in the greatest shell or 
 skull which is built up around every man, namely, his vault of sky, 
 and what it contains, a typical difference exists which cannot be 
 reduced for different vaults to a single rule : the skull of heaven 
 has many shapes, and societies or brains fill them differently : 
 destructiveness in one wages itself upon lions and tigers, or is com- 
 
46 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 mitted to the arms and hands \ in another, it goes forth with the 
 powers of the mouth or the sword of the spirit. Phrenology, 
 following this order, must rather start from a type, and gradually 
 depart from that, than attempt to make the type universal in the 
 relations of shape and place. In short we must admit a compara- 
 tive phrenology in the human race itself. 
 
 Phrenology, however, is one of a group of sciences different from 
 anatomy, and its truths are of larger stature than those which we 
 are considering. It belongs to the doctrine, not of the human 
 body, but of man, and is one of the lesser departments of anthropo- 
 logy. It furnishes also a contribution to that which is the science 
 of sciences, namely, the significance of forms. Considered as a 
 branch of observation it has not been assailed successfully, because 
 no one has paid so much attention to its facts as the phrenological 
 student. We take his word for its truth, at least provisionally, 
 since the oppugners have formed no contrary induction, which in 
 destroying phrenology, might supplant it by a better practical 
 system. And if we are not mistaken, the world will give it a 
 long trial, were it only that it deals with the substances of character, 
 and seems to create a solid play-ground away from the abstractions 
 of the old metaphysics. Color and life, substance and shape, are 
 dear to mankind, as homes against the wind of cold speculation. 
 We cannot give them up for patches of sky a thousand miles from 
 the earth, or for anything, in short, but still more substantial houses. 
 
 An important set of problems concerning the brain and nervous 
 system remains to be noticed; namely, the doctrine on the one 
 hand, and the denial on the other, of a nervous spirit or fluid. On 
 this subject interest has ceased, in consequence partly of the use- 
 lessness of the controversy. Each party has wielded a sword to 
 which the other was invulnerable; a sign that Providence did not 
 intend the dispute to be settled upon the terms of either. Nor 
 perhaps can we ourselves command a decisive victory for our 
 opinions, which are affirmative of the existence of a nervous spirit. 
 Nevertheless we think that our side has been increasing in strength 
 of late, and that the contest must be renewed. 
 
 In the first place we remark, that no part of our frames is so 
 
THE NERVE SPIRIT. 47 
 
 little given up to sight -and sense as the live brain and nervous 
 system. No part is so much alarmed, or presumably so much 
 altered, by exposure. Nay, there is no part in which there is less 
 to see than in this supreme organization. Detail and structure and 
 the broad lines of design begin to be inappreciable, as a preparation 
 for the indwelling and shadowing forth of something which is abso- 
 lutely invisible to the senses. Per contra there is no part in which 
 there is so much left to fancy, to imagination, and to the inner eye 
 of reason. Tempered thoughts seem to be the only steel that can 
 open the viscera of thought. The method d priori appears to be as 
 much prescribed by nature for investigating organs that work & pri- 
 ori, or from life downwards, as, they say, it is proscribed from those 
 where the senses give immediate information. The truths that we 
 can see, we do not discern by reason ; but conversely reason must 
 discern those which the eye cannot see. If all truth is a posteriori, 
 then the physiologist can see the living brain in vision. But as he 
 has lost this faculty, reason in the meantime must have place. 
 
 Now neither of the parties in the above controversy has ever seen, 
 still less dissected, the living brain, meaning thereby the brain in 
 the exercise of its functions, thinking and reasoning in its peaceful 
 head. On both hands, then, imagination has been active in all that 
 has been said. The question therefore is, as in several other cases, 
 Which party has the best set of imaginations? measuring the ex- 
 cellence on cither side by the fruits that it produces in its department. 
 Which set of conceptions — the affirmative or the negative — comes 
 nearest to life, and to those attributes which will fit the highest organ 
 of man's body, and one which receives the influences of his mind? 
 For reasons of analogy, necessity and experience, we adhere to those 
 imaginations and thoughts that postulate a nervous spirit. 
 
 Be it observed, however, that we do not dogmatize respecting the 
 physical properties of this which we term a fluid. In reasoning by 
 analogy, we are forced to take with us the garb of the known sphere, 
 and to talk of a fluid, because the body furnishes the word. We 
 desire, however, to hold the term loosely, and no longer than until 
 a better analogy, or the real name, arises. 
 
 It is well known that influences mount from the body to the head 
 in sensation, and descend from the head to the body in voluntary 
 
48 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 motion; and anatomy demonstrates that the course of these influ- 
 ences is ; in sensation, from the skin and sensories through the nerves 
 to the brain ; and in action or motion, from the brain through the 
 nerves to the muscles, bones, skin : in short, to the body as set in 
 motion. Furthermore investigation shows, that the course of the 
 same is, from the nervous fibres and fibrils, through the medullary 
 fibres of the brain, to the cortical or gray substances at its surface 
 and in other parts. What do we deduce from this known transit 
 of influence? Or what is the meaning of the ambiguous term, 
 influence? 
 
 Two views have been current. On the one side it is maintained 
 that the fibres are solid, and that the influence is a vibration which 
 traverses the fibres in both directions. On the other hand, the in- 
 fluence is regarded as a real influxion, and the fibres are regarded as 
 conduits, permeated by a fluid. There is a third hypothesis, of a 
 gelatinous or other fluid in the nerves, which propagates forces by 
 waves or undulations, but does not itself move forward : but this is 
 only a subdivision of the doctrine of vibration. And there is a 
 fourth view — that we can. know anything about the matter. But 
 we do not yet know what can be known. In thus classifying opin- 
 ions we by no means intend to convey that they are held sharply by 
 any one at present: on this subject the state of most inquiring 
 minds is mixed; indeed the apathy felt of late respecting the con- 
 troversy is too profound to admit of distinctness of parties. 
 
 I. If the fibres were solid, and traversed, not by a fluid, but by a 
 vibration or undulation, such vibration would be dissipated into the 
 surrounding parts, especially in the brain, where the fibres lie close 
 together. The softness and non-elasticity of all parts of the nervous 
 system seem unadapted to mere vibration being communicated, for 
 vibration depends upon tension, and the only condition of tension in 
 such a system lies in a movable fluid distending the fibres. And 
 when a nerve is tied, the sensation or motion which is supplied be- 
 comes arrested at once, which would not be the case if these de- 
 pended upon vibration. Certainly nothing can be conceived less 
 adapted than the brain and nerves, to the ordinate propagation of 
 electricity or any other imponderable, unless limited to a fluid vehicle. 
 The hypothetical currents of vibration, however, must be ordinate 
 
THE NERVE SPIRIT. 49 
 
 and distinct beyond measure, for on the one hand they are the lines 
 of thought and will, sensation and action; and on the other, the 
 fibrillation of the brain is exquisitely minute and separate even to 
 the naked eye. We gather from these reasons, that if the nervous 
 current be in any analogy with electricity, galvanism, or other im- 
 ponderable, it must itself still be regarded as an incarnate imponder- 
 able; as might be anticipated from its domestication in the human 
 body. But an incarnate imponderable, preserving its velocity on 
 the one hand, and being embodied on the other, is only conceivable 
 as an animal fluid or a fluid animal, whose speed and other attributes 
 are life-like, thought-like, will-like, and sense-like. 
 
 II. The analogies of the grosser parts point to the tubular struc- 
 ture of the nerves. In the body, where there is an organ as a bed, 
 and trunks, branches and twigs proceed from it, the derivations are 
 hollow, and carry a fluid. This is the case with the heart, the lungs, 
 the stomach, the liver, the kidneys, the pancreas, &c. On this ground 
 we understand their functions; in their produce we recognize their 
 use in the economy. Again, what reason can we give for the quantity 
 of blood which is applied to the brain, and which is more in pro- 
 portion than is sent to other organs, if it be only required for its 
 nutrition, and not for supplying a large quantity of fluid. How also 
 can we account for the physical debility consequent upon certain 
 effects, unless by a waste and spending of a fluid? And recurring 
 to analogy, does it not seem to be in the order of things, that the 
 living principle should act through the fluid upon the solid, when we 
 find that the more living parts of the body, as the brain and nerves, 
 are the softest; and the less living, as the tendons, ligaments, and 
 bones, are the harder and the hardest : also that in the earliest stages 
 of formation all things are fluid, and at the very beginning, a fluid, 
 and that hardness grows up by degrees, and plasticity ceases; old 
 age consisting physically in stiffness, unyieldingness and ossification. 
 Further, that the change of pervious canals into solid ligaments, 
 fibres or threads, which takes place often in the body, is always a 
 change from vitality towards the contrary; showing that the solid 
 form is a degradation of the previous fluid, and not vice versa, It 
 seems then a prepared belief, that the nearest thing to life is the 
 most life-like, the most movable, the most quick, in short, the most 
 5 
 
50 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 fluid; in a word, that a nervous fluid is itself the first organ in the 
 body, and the physical handle of the spirit. 
 
 III. To come to experience, what are we to think of the pulpy, 
 semi-liquid texture of the brain itself, and of the immense propor- 
 tion in which fluid enters into its composition ? That there is a 
 cerebral fluid is past doubt, for the brain consists of almost nothing 
 else. And if three-fourths of the mind's organ are fluid, certainly 
 that portion is subject to mental arrangement, like the rest. When 
 the mind is gone, the arrangement is gone, and hence the dead brain 
 gives no response respecting the nature of the fluid. Nor indeed 
 would the sight of the living brain reveal the mystery, unless the 
 observer had some thoughts commensurate with the organization 
 which prevails in these provinces of the soul. A fibre of truth, 
 tubular from heaven downwards, and a fluid mind travelling in it — 
 in short open faculties — would be the only conditions of discernment, 
 even if the skull were a window through which the brain could be 
 seen. But at least we can conclude, that the so-called serum of the 
 dissecting-room is only the corpse of the cerebral spirit. It is true 
 the dead body retains its shape when life has gone, and is therefore 
 instructive still, but the animal fluids undergo alterations even in 
 form, when they fall out of their native shapes, the vessels, as wit- 
 nessed in the coagulation of the blood. And for this reason these 
 liquid corpses teach absolutely nothing of the properties of the living 
 fluids. 
 
 To illustrate these remarks, we will put an analogous case of a 
 larger order. Suppose that London were visible from one of the 
 stars, and were known to be a city of the living, but its inhabitants 
 were not within the power of vision. And suppose further that the 
 stellar people were of those who believe nothing but what they can 
 sec. It is clear that the outworks and great channels of London 
 life falling under their ken, would be mistaken for the living things. 
 And as life always brings motion to mind, the vibrations and shak- 
 ings of the houses and walls of our metropolis, would be postulated 
 as the life which was alleged. But suppose further, that on some 
 coronation day vast crowds of the inhabitants assembled, and formed 
 a dark mass before the eyes of the gazing star ; this would of course 
 be taken to be of the same substance and rank with the houses, and 
 
THE NERVE SPIRIT. 51 
 
 the identification of life with bricks and mortar would still stand. 
 In this case the truth, or the living multitudes, though seen, would 
 lend itself to the fallacy ; the only escape from which would be by 
 analogy, proclaiming that solid houses everywhere are dead, though 
 inhabited by fluid or freely movable living beings ; by imagination 
 or hypothesis, guessing that towns and streets are for men, and not 
 vice versa ; and by reason or theory, affirming mankind, and account- 
 ing for the appearances of the city upon the wants of its substantial, 
 though separately invisible inhabitants. 
 
 But IV. the existence of an animal spirit has great historical pro- 
 bability attached to it. For the course of knowledge has consisted, 
 not in confirming abstractions, but in merging them in some ade- 
 quate reality, such as we are now claiming for the life and spirit of 
 the brain. The concrete form of things, or the tracing them home, 
 is the final victory of knowledge touching mere existence. So long 
 as life is an indeterminate phrase, applied without distinction to the 
 whole system, the study of that life has not commenced, for its 
 presence has not been gained; but when its proper currents are 
 found, and the mind traverses them, then the separate knowledge of 
 their properties can begin, but not sooner. And, moreover, the 
 triumphs of this age are peculiarly due to the introduction of the 
 mind to the empire of the fluids. The steam engine and its nervous 
 spirit, steam ; the railway and its locomotive fluid, the train ; the 
 wire and its electric spirit, show the practical benefits of the subor- 
 dination of the solid to the fluid. And in human progress, it is the 
 fluid and the modifiable that give motion and impulse to the other- 
 wise fixed. What are quickness, conception and imagination, but 
 the fluids of the mind : regard them at work, and you can bring 
 them under no other analogy. They stir the old, hard world, and 
 permeate all things, and like nervous fluids are present in a moment 
 where their mission is, with the power of arranging and quickening 
 virtue that they have received in the fountains of thought. Indeed, 
 I see not that there is any known sphere of things, whose analogies 
 do not cry aloud for the existence of a fluid brain governing the 
 solid, and like it, organized, though on a more living plan. Thus 
 until a nerve-spirit be admitted, How can the science of the brain 
 be in fraternity with the other arts and sciences? 
 
bZ THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 V. If this fluid is quasi-\ik, or what is the same thing, physical 
 life, it may well be conceived that the nervous tubes will close 
 against it in the moment of dying; as the dying arteries contract, 
 and shed away the arterial blood. Death has no hold upon life, but 
 its chill grasp is its means of losing it. Hence, microscopic obser- 
 vations upon the nervous fibres never can give the negative to their 
 tubular form or fluid contents. The problem does not come within 
 the brains of necrology. Moreover, how if the tubes were spiral, 
 and not straight, which might be the case in a system where veloci- 
 ties are such, that distance forms no element in the calculation ? 
 In that case, even supposing the tubes were hollow, they might 
 never be seen as tubes, by reason of their insinuations and turnings. 
 For in the realms of mind and thought, the shortest distance between 
 any two points or ends, is that which leads through all the means, 
 no matter by what length of course. The zigzag of the lightning is 
 in the straight line of smiting. 
 
 VI. The doctrine of a nervous fluid seems further to arise out of 
 the construction of the system from successive pieces, each higher 
 and broader than that preceding it. For this ladder takes us up to 
 regard the mind itself as supremely nervous. Now each part has 
 its centre in itself; but also is traversed by the part above it, on its 
 way to the surface; whither all the pieces, the high and the low, 
 arrive alike immediately, or are represented. Thus the mind comes 
 down through everything and its spirit glitters in the face. And 
 thus all the actions of man — automatic, sensual and animal — may 
 be shot and pierced from the quiver of life, until they are nothing 
 but rational and spiritual actions. It is to be remarked, however, 
 that the visible solids terminate with the brain. If, then, the mind 
 has fibres representing it in the brain, as the brain has fibres repre- 
 senting it in the spinal cord, the former fibres must lie in the fluids, 
 for the solids belong to the brain itself. Thus, while the brain or 
 organism terminates in its own centres, the cortical substances, or 
 supreme solids, the mind enters into these by a series of correspond- 
 ing fluid organisms, which represent the living or active portion, as 
 ihc solids represent the recipient or passive. This is but imagina- 
 tion; yet imagination is the youthful eye of science, and provided 
 it owns to its name, it is an innocent as well as a suggestive power. 
 
THE NERVE SPIRIT. 53 
 
 Therefore, we proceed to imagine, that the mind broods above the 
 brain, as the cosmical ether sits above the planetary air, and further, 
 that the mind, or spiritual reservoir, fills all the interstices of the 
 brain, where, however, it is determined by suitable fluid envelops, 
 which accommodate, temper and envelop it, until it is brought into 
 ratio with the fixed mechanism of the cerebrum. Hence, its solar 
 vibrations are felt in the bodily organism, as light is felt on the 
 earth through the splendid shiver of a medium which the air in- 
 cludes between its parts. And hence, there are as many kinds of 
 nervous or cerebral spirit as there are nerves and brains ; for it is 
 the openness or intervalling of the latter, that admits and gives 
 quality or fibrillation to the former. The brain, doubtless, is made 
 with an express view to this recipiency : the fluids, which when en- 
 tered by the soul become nerve spirits, are also predetermined ; and 
 hence there is the same ratio again between the mind and the nerve 
 spirit, as between the brain and the spinal cord, in that the parts of 
 both are alike, but differing in breadth or degree. 
 
 But indeed, the doctrine of the nerve-spirit forms but one of 
 several problems, which have experienced the like treatment. The 
 reality of whatever is above the senses, is questioned by many, and 
 consequently the presence of the supernal in the sensual is denied; 
 and, if the supernal be visible, still it is degraded by some ordinary 
 name, and the spirit and message which it carries are sensualized 
 and set aside. The thing is killed by skepticism, and then its spirit 
 is easily called serum. It is so with Revelation. A divine mind 
 there may be, but then man, say some, is solid at the top, and lets 
 God in by a self-vibration : there is no open fibre between Him and 
 man. We, however, affirm a nerve spirit of the human race, which 
 is not man's, but God's in man — a genuine influx, a word, a revela- 
 tion. It is just as visible as other books, though often it is not 
 known what it is, because the mind is not known with which it com- 
 municates, nor consequently the peculiar animation of the book. 
 We see on this mighty scale, what is the use of a nerve spirit, 
 namely, to be immediately present with the directing mind through- 
 out the organism; to speak in messages unwarped by the finite 
 faculties; to be the First and the Last, instead of " sitting above the 
 creation, and seeing it go." Were it otherwise, the government of 
 
54 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 the world would be virtually committed to man's reaso n, which 
 would exclude that of God; for man would have no chart but his 
 own faculties. And so, were the brain a solid, and shut at top, the 
 government of the body must depend upon it, and not upon the 
 soul, or only upon the soul, in so far as the brain chose to coincide 
 with its messages. Government is incompatible with such an idea. 
 But on the other showing, the brain cannot exclude the next higher 
 series, which permeates it in its own right, and exercises a provi- 
 dential and healing virtue upon what is so apt to go wrong of itself. 
 The truth, however, is, that the doctrine we are combating, is not in 
 the sphere of the nervous or open system at all : it belongs to the 
 muscular department of truth, or that which has both ends closed, 
 and is a solid body. Its spiritual correspondent is " earnestness," 
 spasmodic vigor, upon which so many and such famous men rely for 
 the salvations of the time. We might collect other problems, be- 
 sides that of the presence of the divine light in the world or Reve- 
 lation ; and that of the presence of the soul in the body, or spiritual 
 existence, to show that the doctrine of the animal spirits suffer in 
 the company of great truths; but enough has been said to show that 
 deism has dependencies everywhere; and that besides the vast irre- 
 ligion of excluding God from the universe, there is a series of lesser 
 impieties and disloyalties of a similar kind, which rob the body of 
 the soul, clip the world close to the limits of air, make man and 
 nature truth-tight, and reduce all things to petty selves, which can 
 choose whether they will have a God above them, a world around 
 them, and a soul within them, or the contrary. 
 
 We postulate, then, that everything, according to its openness to 
 the sphere above it, has a spirit, or a quasi-spirit; and when the 
 organ is so constructed for opening as the brains — whose first great 
 faculty is openness — when it can take in so much, the capacious in- 
 flux or gift naturally takes the form of a nerve spirit, which is thence- 
 forth the tutelar genius of the system. Further, that everything, 
 whether a brain or a science, which is so roofed over that nothing 
 but itself can come into it — so thick-skulled and self-opinionated — 
 is dead at the top, however it may work reflexly or spasmodically, 
 according to the exigencies of the lower life. 
 
 So much for the spirit within the brain. There is a spirit be- 
 
FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVE SPIRIT. 55 
 
 yond it, of which wc do not treat in this place. Only we remark 
 that the spirit within is the physiological window to the spirit be- 
 yond, and that they who do not look through it, cannot admit the 
 soul of man as having any ratio with the sciences of the body. 
 Certainly, the soul is not their object; but woe to them if it have 
 not its witness within their field. Even granting what we have said, 
 the nerve spirit will be only on a level with the other fluids, unless 
 it be interpreted by those higher powers which it serves. But what 
 its function is can be told analogically, but not, as yet, otherwise. 
 Thus, we may say that it exercises q uasi- mind and influence in every 
 part of the frame : that it is an atomic intellect everywhere, capable 
 of representing tjie state of the body, and a will, capable of setting 
 the organism in imitative movement according to its decisions and 
 forms. By it alone can we account for the unity and coherence of 
 the system. For every point of it is a sense or intelligence that 
 shows the frame a model that commands instant imitation. And 
 thus it may be likened to the truths of society, which command 
 obedience by their bare showing, according to the health of the 
 social frame. Let it be borne in mind, however, that the nerve 
 spirit is different according to the divisions of the nervous system, 
 and according to the nerves of every organ, and indeed, every parti- 
 cle, because each is open to the wisdom that it needs. Thus, in the 
 nervous system proper, it is mind and will : in the liver, again, it is 
 the mirror and model of the hepatic truths and operations. And 
 so of the other organs. Dropped from above into their lives, re- 
 vealed to their blood and races, it sets them in the fermentation and 
 discussion of their problems, and on the Veritas prevaleh it principle, 
 health cannot fail to obey it. It is the posture-master of the solids, 
 and the charioteer of the fluids. We see, then, how full the body is 
 of eyes — how instinct with spirit-like forces, and by the analogies 
 of mental and social life, how irresistible are the causes of harmony, 
 design, and co-operation in the bodily fabric. But were there not 
 such a spirit, there would be no reason, but an immediate dictate of 
 God's will, for the stupendous system which the human machine 
 discloses; that is to say, there would be no wisdom in the body, 
 answering to that supreme wisdom which exists above it. 
 
 And here, to assist our conceptions, let us revert to the current 
 
50 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 views of the solid pieces of the nervous system. These, as we have 
 shown before, are all of them of spiritual machinery; in other words, 
 they have the power of dramatizing mental functions. Even the 
 spinal cord acts as if it were a sensible animal, guiding the fingers, 
 for example, to the seats of pain by its automatic endowments. 
 How much more must the supreme fluid, whose essence is motion 
 and plastic virtue, be capable of dramatizing or representing the 
 powers of the mind and soul, and their ever-varying relations to the 
 microcosm. A fortiori, it will act like wisdom and like will every- 
 where, when its mere channels, wherever they extend, have these 
 quasi-living properties. It is here to be remarked, that we are in 
 the strictest keeping with experience ; that we are simply postulat- 
 ing for the fluid brain the same thing, though in the fluid degree, 
 which physiology claims already for the solid brain. But there is 
 this difference, that the solid brain, or the nerves, are of course li- 
 mited to the nervous system, whereas the fluid brain, or the nerve 
 spirit, does not end with these conduits; but when it is shed from 
 the fingers' ends, heart's ends and viscus' ends of the nerves, it can 
 make use of every other structure as its vehicle, and thus import 
 the drama of life, in all its degrees, into the flesh and entrails of the 
 universal body. Agreeably to a common fact, that where a form 
 ceases, its essence, if of true virtue, still passes on, and applies itself 
 to utilities that it could not execute when confined to its bodily 
 sheath. 
 
 We may perchance be accused of materialism for demanding such 
 a physical wisdom. So an insect possessing only a spinal cord 
 might accuse of materialism a being possessing the sensual brain, 
 because the latter exhibited this as still a nervous system; and a 
 creature terminated by the sensual brain might reproach materialism 
 against a being who carried the nervous firmaments one step higher 
 in the cerebral hemispheres, because those hemispheres were still 
 nervous system. The insect conception of sense (if the phrase can 
 be pardoned) is doubtless null; and could the creature evolve it, the 
 nullity would appear in the want of body and structure, in the im- 
 pression that pure spirit or abstraction comes on at the top of the 
 spinal column. The brain, however, is a spirit pure enough to the 
 spinal column. And so the mind, organic and in ratio with the rest 
 
FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVE SPIRIT. 57 
 
 though it be, is, nevertheless, the pure spirit of the human brain. 
 The materialism lies with those who make the brain solid, the skull 
 thick, and the mind an abstraction. 
 
 VII. In conclusion, we may be allowed to say that the doctrine 
 of a nerve spirit is no new creed, nor ever was unorthodox until 
 now. The greatest names in physiology are its adherents. But 
 neither did these men see the tubes or the fluid, such as we have 
 conceived it, in the dead subject : a fact which, as Haller says, 
 " shows the weakness of the senses, but has no validity against 
 the existence of a juice or spirit in the nerves." This reason had 
 its proper effect with the great anatomists of the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries : it showed them the weakness of their senses, 
 and stimulated them the more to use their understandings. They 
 were the original geniuses who laid the foundation of a general 
 knowledge of anatomy that will not pass away, but to which' we 
 must recur when we desire to refresh our minds with the first vivid 
 impressions that the wonders of the body created upon the finest 
 intellects that ever studied organization. Would it were in our 
 power to bring before the reader the characteristics of these brave 
 pioneers of anatomical knowledge. Would we could reintroduce 
 him to the venerable Eustachius j to Malpighi, the father of vis- 
 ceral anatomy; to Ruysch and Morgagni, the purifiers of the ana- 
 tomy of the schools j to Leeuwenhoek, who first seized the micro- 
 scope as an exclusive field, and devoted himself to it for fifty years 
 with an eagerness which has not been surpassed; to Vieussens, 
 Lancisi and Baglivi, eminent alike for systematic knowledge and 
 philosophical genius ; to Bartholin, Verheyen, Heister and Wins- 
 low, whose methodical text-books kept their ground in the Euro- 
 pean schools for more than a hundred years, and who supplied their 
 successors with much of both the matter and the form that exists 
 in the manuals now in use ; to Boerhaave, " the common preceptor 
 of Europe" in the last century, and the consulting physician of the 
 world, who gathered up the experience and deductions of ages in 
 anatomy and physiology, and gave it a new and compact form in that 
 wonderful little book, the Institutiones Medicce : also to Boerhaave's 
 pupil, Haller, who stands as a mountain between the present and the 
 past, and reflects from his summit the departed learning of seventeen 
 
58 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 centuries. But their monuments are the living parts of their science. 
 And we must be content with alleging, that these men, with no ex- 
 ception, believed in the animal spirits, and the tubular construction 
 of the nerves; which, as the illustrious Glisson, our countryman, 
 remarks, was in his time " accredited by nearly all physicians ; and 
 by all philosophers." 
 
 We now therefore assume that the nerves are tubes, and that 
 there is a special fluid, cerebral, spinal, sympathetic, i. e., following 
 in its degrees and divisions the solid pieces of its nervous frame : 
 and the question occurs, Where is this fluid engendered? We 
 reply, that its matrix everywhere is the cineritious substance; 
 that as the vehicle of what comes down from above, it begins every- 
 where with the beginning of the bodily order, which lies in the 
 cineritious spheres. The latter show luxuriant provision for the 
 purpose in the arterial meshes which supply them. But to pursue 
 this subject would require a treatise on the life of the blood. We 
 shall, however, recur to it in the sequel. 
 
 But another question presents itself — Is there a circulation of this 
 living fluid? Do its centres impel it, as the heart propels the blood? 
 Is there a cerebral force or a motion of the nervous system ? Or is 
 the brain, besides being solid and exclusive, also stationary and 
 paralytic? Or on the other hand, if there be any natural force in 
 brains, what is it? 
 
 First for the facts. Two motions are already admitted to have 
 place in the head, one corresponding to the beating of the arte- 
 ries or heart; the other, to the breathing of the lungs. By laying 
 the fingers upon the open fontanelle of a young infant, the reader 
 will feel the first-named motion. It is the stroke of the heart com- 
 municated to the arteries of the dura mater. This is no cerebral 
 force, or proper motion of the brain. As for the second or lung 
 movement, it occurs as follows. When the lungs expand to draw 
 in the air, a tendency to vacuum is created in the chest, which 
 causes the fluids all over the body to rush or to incline thither, to 
 fill the threatened void. In short the lungs, besides breathing in the 
 air, quaff" down the venous blood from the brain, and suck up that 
 from the body. The consequence is, that in inspiration the skull is 
 more empty of blood than at other times. Hence when the 
 
CIRCULATION OF THE NERVE SPIRIT. 59 
 
 brain is exposed, it is seen to subside during inspiration. This is 
 the second movement observed, or the effect upon the brain of the 
 respiratory pulse. But neither is this a cerebral force, but a phy- 
 sical subsidence, just as the corresponding rise is merely physi- 
 cal, and results from the act of expiration, which retarding the re- 
 turn of blood to the chest, forces up the brain upon this fluid 
 cushion. This, however, is to be noticed, that when the blood 
 leaves the skull during inspiration, it creates a vacant space which 
 has a function, or which is not vacant in point of use : in short, it 
 leaves room for the brain to expand. And if its real expansion be 
 less in volume than its apparent subsidence, then the brain may be 
 automatically rising at the moment when it is physically falling, 
 in which case the latter movement will mask the former. When 
 the lungs expand, then, there is room for the brain also to expand, 
 and when the lungs contract, there is a physical reason why the 
 brain also must contract. 
 
 "We do not know that experience has gone further hitherto than 
 to show the possibility of the movement of the brain, in showing 
 that it has room or liberty to move. And indeed, if we consider the 
 problem, we shall perhaps find reason to think that this motion, like 
 the motions of other bodies from which we cannot separate ourselves, 
 but with which we ourselves move, must come as a theory whose 
 main case will lie in explaining all the facts. 
 
 Yet further as to the possibility of the movement, one of the 
 most important truths of physiology lies in the insulation of the 
 different systems that make up the body. In point of function, indeed, 
 we have seen that the nervous system itself consists of individual 
 pieces, which can act either separately or in combination. But in 
 structure the whole nervous system is isolated from the rest of the 
 body, though plunged or let down into it as into a well of flesh. 
 The nerves end in loops or otherwise, but are not solidly continuous 
 with the other tissues. In short, the nervous body floats in the 
 fleshly body as the central yelk of the microcosm. We may liken 
 it to a sword of lightning in an elastic scabbard, which scabbard is 
 perpetually elongating and gathering itself up, but is always full of 
 the subtle and separate fire. Movement is compatible with this state, 
 nay, is perpetually stimulated by it where the whole subject is mov- 
 
60 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 ing ; just as the non-continuity of the planets with each other, and 
 the interstice between these cosmical atoms, allows and necessitates 
 their courses and revolutions. It used to be thought that nerve 
 joined and became continuous with muscle and vessel, in which case 
 thorough motion of the nervous system would not have been possible. 
 We now find that it only rests upon these lower parts, of course 
 with an interval, which allows of thorough or loco-motion ; and we 
 know, therefore, that thanks to the breathing movements, the 
 nerve animal requires to plant its foot afresh with every inspiration, 
 or it would slip down, and to raise it up again with each expiration, 
 or the body would shock it in its ascent. 
 
 If the office of the brain lies in the distribution of the cerebral 
 fluids, then the orderly administration of these requires a regular 
 motion, or in other words, a rhythmical action. The heart and the 
 lungs are evidences of this in the lower compartment. Their action 
 is not an incorporeal vibration but a measured expansion and con- 
 traction. The blood cannot run to its destinations without the phy- 
 sical heart, nor the nerve spirit gain its ends without a propulsive 
 power in the brain and the other centres. And more than in the 
 case of the other organs must this motion belong to the brain itself, 
 or be automatic, or the supreme organ would have no function of 
 its own. It cannot, then, be derived from the heart or the lungs, 
 as we said before, although no doubt these organs, and all the rest, 
 are measured by its liberties, and concur to make its play and play- 
 ground secure. 
 
 In the body, moreover, we find that stated motion is a condition 
 and a sign of life. Does he breathe? or expand and contract, is sy- 
 nonymous with, Does he live ? Now, as we shall have occasion to 
 show in the next chapter, the universal movement of the body pro- 
 duced by the lungs, is the condition of all particular movements, 
 muscular and visceral. For a body already in constant motion is 
 easily guided about, deflected and managed for particular motions; 
 but a body at rest absorbs a large amount of force before it can be 
 moved. Thus if the whole body were not a perpetually-moving, 
 breathing or living thing, there would lie so much dead weight on 
 the feet of every action, and life would be clogged by matter. But 
 as it is, the incarnate iron is hot for the strokes of the volitions. 
 
THE MOTION OF THE BRAIN. 61 
 
 Nothing can be more familiar than this, that motion is easy, and 
 rest uneasy, to those who are already on the move. Now we may 
 reason by a great syllogism from the man to the body, from the body 
 to the lungs, and from the lungs to the brain : nay, and also from 
 the brain to the mind. For example, if the brain were stationary, 
 no thought could enter it without lifting it first : there would be no 
 preparedness for thought, which is essential motion. Whereas, by 
 a constant rhythm taking place in the whole mass, the mind requires 
 to create no motion, but simply to act as a modifying, directing, or 
 exemplary power, in order to produce all or any motions as states or 
 details of the general swell. Thus, the rapid admission of thoughts 
 requires a moving or active brain, just as does the distribution of the 
 nerve spirit, which is a river of bodily thoughts. 
 
 It is indeed admitted that the brain is an active organ, so for as 
 it undergoes the fleeting states of thought. These are the modifica- 
 tions of its activity, the ripples of consciousness. But what we are 
 contending for is nothing less than a tidal cerebral sea. For as the 
 thoughts, emotions and bodily actions fall upon the lungs, and pro- 
 duce the varieties of the breathing, because the breathing itself is 
 there first as an impressible atmosphere, so do the thoughts and 
 volitions produce the varieties of the animation upon the basis of 
 an already-moving or animating brain. The temporary waves of 
 thought, are but the surface which comes into our light : there is a 
 deeper heaving besides, organic as the body, which has its own cur- 
 rents and shores, and is constant like nature, obeying the progress 
 not of the moment, but of the lifetime. Its spirits are not transi- 
 tory like ours, but night and day they do not sleep until death over- 
 takes them. 
 
 The argument we are discussing is, however, theoretical; a con- 
 dition which is common to the truths of the exact sciences. The 
 solution of the problem in this light will depend upon whether the 
 brain or the mind is accepted as the central truth. If the mind be 
 taken as the fixed point, the principles of thought will have their 
 just power, and the brain will be seen to revolve around the mind, 
 and by its revolutions, or expansions and contractions, by its mov- 
 ing up to, or away from, the mind, to produce the times and seasons, 
 the warmth and cold, of human thought and will; and as the variety 
 6 
 
62 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 of states will in this case depend upon the brain, and the brain is a 
 physical organ, the motion will not be a mental or ideal, but a phy- 
 sical motion. In other words, if the brain is physical and not mental, 
 then what seem to us to be mental motions in the brain are really 
 physical motions ; and in this case an open mind signifies an open 
 brain, an active mind a moving brain; and human language, or the 
 voice of common sense, contributes abundantly to the illustration of 
 the organ. For the predicates of mind can then be assigned in a 
 bodily, but not in a purely mental sense to the brain. If, however, 
 the mind be regarded, as by the materialists or cerebral Ptolemaics, 
 as the meteor and wandering lamp of the brain, then a mental, or 
 in other words an inexplicable influence or movement will account 
 for or rather accompany the cerebral states. But for ourselves we 
 cannot think of the mind as an ignks fatuus in the swamps of the 
 cerebrum, but as a distinct and superior organ, which has the cere- 
 brum and nervous system between it and the body. But now if the 
 brain has thought movements, there must not only be a law of suc- 
 cession in these, a beginning, a middle and an end of each; in other 
 words, an expansion and contraction ; but also, as we showed before, 
 a ground swell of motion on which they depend, and which if it were 
 not given by nature, no thought could lift the sluggish mass in time 
 enough to give a thought-like action. 
 
 But after all, the question of motion is subordinate to the question 
 of what the motion is ? To show by rational arguments that the 
 planets move, without demonstrating their courses, would leave the 
 theory not only short, but curtailed of its strongest proofs. And to 
 raise the problem of the cerebral motion without showing its times 
 and rules, would be to rest in an embryo law, and to fail of the sup- 
 port which the body itself ought to proffer of so important a truth; 
 if a truth it indeed be. 
 
 In turning to this new aspect of the question, we find in the body 
 that there are already two movements, which we will designate the 
 systemic and the sub-systemic; the movement of the respiration is the 
 systemic, that of the pulse the sub-systemic. The breathing of the 
 lungs is the largest revolution of organic life that the body executes ; 
 the beating of the heart is but a satellitial motion freely included 
 within the former. And if organic life or motion be concentric, a 
 
THE MOTION OF THE BRAIN. • 63 
 
 strong presumption already arises, that the animations of the brain, 
 according to the statement of Swedenborg, are coincident with the 
 respirations of the lungs. Moreover we have already seen, that 
 when the lungs inspire, the brain has room and invitation to expand, 
 and that when they expire, it receives an admonition and pressure 
 to contract. If the brain be impressible at all, and if its motion be 
 physical, it can hardly fail to comply with these opportune times. 
 
 But again the motion of the brain is, or may be, voluntary, and 
 the volitions as we know can play also upon the respiration. Nay 
 every muscular movement however eccentric, is based upon the fixity 
 of the respiration as a central stoma. Whence voluntary breathing 
 becomes analogous to willing, and we are said to breathe the actions 
 which we strongly intend. This points, in the next term of the 
 reasoning, to the conclusion that animation, or the common func- 
 tion of the brain, is analogous to common breathing. For the argu- 
 ment stands thus — the mind of the brain, in falling upon the lungs, 
 controls their states, and makes them voluntary ; and in descending 
 into the muscles, it always enters the lungs at the same time, rais- 
 ing up in the breath a central air or tendency, corresponding to the 
 limbed tendency in the muscles. The motion of the mind of the 
 brain, therefore, is voluntary, and the breathing can be voluntary; 
 and if the brain and the lungs coincide in their extraordinary mo- 
 tions, is it not feasible that they coincide in their ordinary motions ? 
 This is the more conclusive and exclusive, inasmuch as there is no 
 other viscus but the lungs manifesting a peculiar motion, upon which 
 thought and will play. Now these are, physically speaking, the 
 brain playing upon the lungs, or in other words, the brain moving 
 to move the lungs. 
 
 But secondly, we affirm, that the correspondence is not merely 
 general, but precise. It will be remembered that we are not now 
 arguing the question of the motion of the brain, which we consider 
 for the present established j but the rhythm which the motion follows. 
 And we proceed to remark that there can be no doubt of its coin- 
 cidence with breathing. The cerebral motion, the movement of the 
 mind of. the brain, is represented in the movements of the lungs. 
 We all infer the manner in which a man's brains are moving, from 
 the way in which we see his lungs moving. If we see deep breath- 
 
64 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 ing going on during consciousness, we know that it means profound 
 cogitation; slow breathing concurs with deliberation, meditation, 
 &c. And so on through a thousand states of thought and emotion, 
 in which we reason instinctively on the principle of a correspondence 
 between the motions of the brains and lungs. And diseases aug- 
 ment these phenomena. Stertorous breath signifies an oppressed 
 brain ; hurried breath in fevers, a hurried state of mind. And so 
 forth. We take no similar indications from the heart, or any other 
 organ but the lungs, which represent all visceral locomotion, as the 
 muscles represent the locomotion of the outward body. The heart, 
 indeed, is felt by its owner to have a correspondence with the emo- 
 tions particularly, but it is not influenced perceptibly by the will or 
 the understanding. 
 
 In the chest the condition of the nervous system confirms what 
 we are advocating. For the great nerves run through a space 
 governed by the pumping of the lungs, and their external coats, of 
 necessity, are drawn outwards when we inspire the air, and are 
 pressed inwards when expiration occurs. So also in the spinal cord. 
 As these parts are continuous with the brain, the effect also is con- 
 tinuous ; i. e., the brain is subject to the reciprocal invitations and 
 pressures of the lungs. The nervous motion is, notwithstanding, 
 automatic ; and if its expansion be invited, or its contraction pro- 
 moted, it is only that these happen as the true circumstances of the 
 freedom of the brain. 
 
 To carry the thread into another sphere, but one which is in- 
 cluded in our plan, would it not seem that one of the first deside- 
 rata in brains is movement, and in all further progress, a history of 
 the movements of brains ? not only a history of fitful, but of organic 
 and providential thought. In the realm of science this translation 
 of our position is indispensable ; the pistons of aspiration and prac- 
 tice go up and down, the brain opens for life, and opens the body 
 for work, as truth after truth is brought in and converted for the 
 moving intelligence of man. In the sphere of conception and phi- 
 losophy the same strokes of the mental engine are perceived; and 
 the more we contemplate them from the point of a Providence or a 
 plan, the more regular they seem; the more rhythmical thought is 
 found to be; the more its elements are measured; and the more the 
 
THE MOTION OF THE BRAIN. 65 
 
 stirrings of the great brain concur with the tune of the stars, which 
 measure the ages in their vortical tread. In fact the idea of a plan 
 or a relative Providence, cannot subsist, without insinuating to us 
 the oneness of all the motions of the brain, and their combination 
 into a rhyme coordinate with the poetry of every universal law. 
 Thus to look at them from above and beyond the organ, shows them 
 all as one motion, coincident with the wants and aspirations, or in 
 other words, with the breathings of their subject, man. And so 
 again the outward and inward wants, the thoughts and the breaths, 
 are married to each other. In isolated thoughts we cannot recog- 
 nize so much; but the thought of epochs suggests a fate of thought, 
 a movement involuntary as the respiration of sleep, in which the 
 parts succeed each other as breaths, though full of the special will 
 and intellect which are the life of the brain and the race. 
 
 For the last part of the subject, or the function of a brain moving 
 or animating in this wise, it will lie in the distribution of the nerve 
 life according to the principles and forces of the soul, and in the 
 mind, of the understanding and will, considered both as powers and 
 organs. If the fibres and nerves are the roads of life, and if the 
 globular heads of the nerves are its stations and reservoirs, then the 
 expansion and contraction of these in the times of the breathing, 
 amounts to the constant injection of life into every portion of the 
 body, at the moments when the body itself gasps or opens or wants 
 to receive them. And this takes place in successive moments. Thus 
 organic thought and will are present everywhere with a breathing 
 or animating motion : a stimulus superior to nutrition is poured into 
 the frame; and all this, with no thought on our parts. But on the 
 other hand, during our intervals, and from our states, of conscious- 
 ness, the distribution of the cerebral fluid is varied, just as the same 
 consciousness varies the supply of air, or the evenness of the pul- 
 monary respirations. And by the coincidence or synchronism of the 
 latter with the brain-movements, the unity of life is maintained : the 
 lungs dilate the frame to receive, while the nerves dilate to give. 
 Thus the respirations of the brains and lungs are the beginning and 
 end of the animal system, which therefore is poised in freedom 
 like the planet, not supported upon a tortoise of dead matter, but 
 swimming in double tides of motion. 
 
 6* 
 
G6 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 The quantity, colors and kinds of the animal spirit thus inflowing, 
 measuring what it is by what it does, are greater than those of all 
 the other fluids; for it not only fills the brain and nerves, but occu- 
 pies the interstices and the posts of difficulty throughout the body. 
 The good things which seem to be so scarce that they are almost 
 invisible, are yet at the last the only things — are all in all ; and 
 this which is the least and most hidden element, is in its volume 
 necessarily the greatest, and the all-embracing. Whatever is more 
 than gravity and rest comes forth from its active lightness. It is 
 the life of the blood; the strength of the arm, the fire of the eye, 
 and the bloom of the skin. Each intellectual city, each convolu- 
 tion of the brain, nay every spherule, sends forth its characteristic 
 emissaries, possessing the body with the varied spirits of the head. 
 Dryads and naiads, muses and furies, gods, goddesses, and heroes in 
 endless populations, throng the columns of this old pantheon, whose 
 last mythology is yet to come. The starry dance, the music of the 
 spheres, the astrologic influences, the experiences of the superna- 
 tural, are but aims to express the perceptions and properties of this 
 immortal nature which lives on the seeds of the sun. By this liquid 
 flesh it is that the soul sees its face in the rushing river of creations, 
 and feels the issuing universe, and the finest tremble of the stars. 
 In this wisest vest of nature, it sits at the feast of nature's wisdom. 
 This is the panic element of man in unison with the panic of the 
 world. Could we see an apparition of the nervous spirit, waving 
 and sweeping with luminous shoots into the curves of the body, we 
 should behold a form complete in its details; a design exceeding the 
 mortal building; solid as flesh to the eye of the mind; perpetually 
 springing into life; yet though plastic, stable to its ends, and quicker 
 than thought to execute them : shadowy, or terrible, to the senses, 
 but safe reality to the soul. Then should we see, but according to 
 our insight, that there are motions and mechanics which are the 
 likeness and habitation of life, sense, passion, understanding ; and 
 we should know by solemn experiment, that our organization is an 
 imperishable truth which derides the grave of the body. 
 
 But if the brain is not shut but open, not empty but full, and if 
 the organ of thought and will is not stationary, but moving ; if this 
 is the first nature by which it answers to those ever-moving crea- 
 
THE C1RCULUS VITJE. G7 
 
 tures: and if it operates, not by physical nothings, but by tides of 
 animal life : further if the motion be most regular, and the down- 
 rush constant — then there must be a definite channel laid down, or 
 a nervous circulation. Of this circulation there are three elements, 
 1. The influence or influxions of the immaterial mind and soul, 
 which come down as rays from a solar brain above the body, and 
 are the order and supreme agent in organization. 2. The array of 
 accordant agents or imponderable spirits of physical nature, which 
 are the contribution of the world on its bended knees to the soul. 
 And, 3. The highest animal juices, the cream of the body, proffered 
 in the vehicle of the first blood of the heart. Thus the brain con- 
 fers on the organization, first, thoughts and plans, wise as the soul, 
 loving or unitary, and irresistibly organic : secondly, the cosmical 
 and physical kinsmen of these, which are dramatically what the first 
 are really, or which confer mundane efficacy upon the principles of 
 thought. And thirdly, the body of the body, or the primal incar- 
 nation. These three, or life, nature, and body, are one in the nerv- 
 ous spirit. In a word, the nervous circulation, with every stroke of 
 its spirit pulse, distributes the essential principles of thought, force 
 and organization: and the body, therefore, is full of eyes or rational 
 light; full of understandings and judgments \ full of stupendously 
 reasonable deeds ; and materially an incarnation of the soul. This 
 is what the brain is empowered to give; the brain being the com- 
 mon centre of gravitation of the three powers of mind, body, and 
 universe. 
 
 The circulation then of the brain would be threefold; or that of 
 all nature into mind and soul, and vice versa; that of the Kosmos 
 into the brain, and vice versa; and that of the body into the brain, 
 and vice versa. But as we are treating of the body, we can only 
 dwell on the lowest of these circulations, though the brain modifies 
 the other spheres in the same way as the body modifies the brain. 
 Now as to the bodily nervous circulation, it comes, like the rest of 
 the secretions, from* the blood, namely, that of the carotid arte- 
 ries, whose fine twigs, inserted into the cortex, are the vense cavse 
 of the cortical hearts. The secretion is there received, and meets 
 the thoughts which build, and the magnetisms that clasp and cement 
 it : by the contraction of these cortical hearts it is propelled all over 
 
68 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 the body into the terminal loops, from whose fingers' ends it flies 
 with its ministering spirits, and is again received into the blood, 
 whose life it constitutes, and which it incites and forces to construct 
 the body on the principles of the wisdom of the soul and brain. 
 Thus the nervous circulation has solid channels only in the highest 
 or proper sphere ; in the rest it runs through the fluid blood. More- 
 over this system has its excretions just like the vascular; in the 
 ventricles of the brain ; in every interstice of the nerves : so that 
 when it comes into its loops, it has put off the body it assumed, and 
 is again received into the red circulation. Thus the aged spirit of 
 the nerves becomes the youngest life of the blood. This is neces- 
 sary to the continuity of existence : for every end is a new begin- 
 ning in the vortex of our providential universe. We now then see 
 that without this openness of the brain, this animal spirit, this mo- 
 tion of the brain, and this nervous circulation, the soul could not- be 
 incarnate, nor the body animate; nor could the latter for a moment 
 preserve that unanimity which gives it coherence, and constitutes it 
 the ideal not only of physical, but of all social unity. 
 
 If, however, there be other principles of explaining these things, 
 then we ardently desire to know them. But explanation must be 
 attempted, for the people is weary of hearing that they cannot be 
 investigated; and from men, too, whose powers have no preeminence 
 to entitle them to set limits to the faculties of any new child who 
 may be born into the world. We know of but One whose rights 
 went to this extent, but His voice was, " Seek, and ye shall find; 
 knock, and it shall be opened unto you." 
 
 It will not be difficult now, on these principles of motion, to dis- 
 cuss the problem of the respective uses of the cerebrum and cerebel- 
 lum. And in order to approach the subject we would make the 
 following remarks. The nervous system is a casket of stimuli of 
 various orders superadded to the body : the bodily parts or animals 
 are constructed mechanically without it, and only wait to be ordered 
 into action by its spirits or voices. These spirits give different in- 
 structions according to the chamber whence they issue. The voice 
 of the spinal brain to the body produces mimetic perceptions and 
 motions; states that seem to be alive, for they act life perfectly. 
 The spinal cord then endows the body up to the point of represent- 
 
CEREBRUM AND CEREBELLUM. 69 
 
 ing life by accordant motions. The voice of the sensual brain fills 
 the body with sensual perceptions and sensual motions : it raises it up 
 to the enjoyment of the cunning of the senses. Whatever is re- 
 quired for their gratification comes from this source in the shape of 
 emotions and organic instincts. Under its influence the organs and 
 viscera are like the animals hunting for their prey; and each takes 
 what it wants from the common stock, as the living creatures take 
 their pabulum from the earth. The organs would indeed do this 
 without these sensual brains, but only as vegetables in a kind of 
 wooden representation. Finally, the cortical surfaces, or the ganglia 
 of thought and will, by their spirits diffuse their own light through 
 the body, so that all and singular the organic acts and processes are 
 done with the tincture of a higher than animal wisdom. All these 
 would be done by the senses, but then their essence would be differ- 
 ent ; as the essence of bee architecture is different from that of hu- 
 man, though not different in its mathematics. 
 
 Thus the human body is all obedience to these three degrees of 
 nerve-spirit, and if it stopped with the reflex actions, it would be but 
 a dramatic mask, involving no wisdom beyond that of supreme mim- 
 icry : and in the same way, if it stopped with the animal brain, it 
 would still involve no wisdom beyond the perfect adaptation of sen- 
 sual means to sensual ends. It does not however stop here; but 
 even its theatricism and animality become instinct with reason and 
 will. And the like process which impregnates sense and motion, 
 as we know them, with reasonable thought and voluntary ac- 
 tion, strikes the same through the secretest parts of the organization, 
 and makes the blood rational, and the bile rational, and in short 
 makes the whole body human by the radiation of that which alone 
 is human, from above its summit. 
 
 But now, in the human being, these upper states are not only 
 fitful, but also intermitting or regularly periodical. Sleep comes to 
 all, and takes away impression, sense and understanding, as well as 
 motion, impulse and will. And in this respect waking too is full 
 of somnolency, or abrogation of our superior powers. "'"If then there 
 were not some provision, sleepless and permanent, to keep us up to 
 the human level, the answerableness of the body to the soul, and 
 consequently the animation of the former, would perish many times 
 
70 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 every day, and certainly with the first slumber. For if all that is 
 animal really died down to the surface of the earth in the seasons 
 of sleep, the body, heavy mass as it is, and belonging of right to 
 the ground, would be in the clutches of the grave, irrecallable from 
 its congenial gravitation. To prevent this, there are two brains, a 
 constant and an inconstant, but each, corresponding to the other. 
 The cerebellum does unconsciously and permanently whatever the 
 cerebrum performs rationally and by fits. The cerebellum follows 
 and adopts the states induced by the cerebrum on the organization, 
 and holds the notes of the ruling mind. Thus immediately after 
 sleep, the motions of thought may begin at once, for they have not 
 been organically, but only consciously suspended. We see this in 
 an image in the lungs. If the latter were voluntary organs, the 
 man would cease breathing so soon as he fell asleep. But they are 
 both voluntary and involuntary, the latter when not the former; and 
 the movement is always proceeding, night and day, so that it has 
 not to be created, but what is an easy matter, merely directed into 
 the voluntary channels. Similarly so with the organic motions of 
 thought and will : these are always going on, and merely require 
 direction, not creation, by the cerebrum. Concordantly with this 
 we can explain sleep, and much that occurs in sleep: e.g., the fact 
 that our thoughts and judgments are marvellously cleared and ar- 
 ranged during that state; as though a reason more perfect than 
 reason, and uninfluenced by its partialities, had been at work when 
 we were in our beds. This also — that our first waking thoughts are 
 often our finest and truest; and that dreams are sometimes eminent 
 and wise; which phenomena are incompatible with the idea that we 
 die down like grass into our organic roots at night, and are resusci- 
 tated as from a winter in the morning. And it must again be ad- 
 verted to, that this would not suit the Grand Economist; for after 
 nature has ascended to one plateau of life, represented by a day, she 
 will surely not tumble down into the valley because rest is needed, 
 but will pitch her tent, and make her couch upon that elevation. 
 "We conclude then that the cerebrum is the brain of the mind, and 
 the cerebellum the corresponding brain of the body ; and as during 
 sleep the cerebrum is a body, the cerebellum at such time is the 
 brain of the cerebrum also. It may be added that the cerebellum, 
 
FUNCTION OF THE CEREBELLUM. 71 
 
 in adopting the mental states as her standards, is also a register of 
 the mind, and converts actions into habits, or in other words, into 
 structures. And thus the whole man, genius, intelligence, logic, 
 sense, skill, action, may be called instinctive or given in nature, if 
 we look at him from this providential side, whose organ neither 
 slumbers nor sleeps. 
 
 Man then, as we see, is captured in sleep, not by death, but by 
 his better nature : today runs in through a deeper day to become 
 the parent of to-morrow; and the man issues every morning, bright 
 as the morning and of life size, from the peaceful womb of the 
 cerebellum. 
 
 If these views be carefully weighed, it will be found that they 
 harmonize with the facts of the case, and not less so with experi- 
 ments and vivisections. For if the harmonies of the frame, and 
 the undercurrents which make its fitful states normal, depend upon 
 the cerebellum, so also do the harmonies of motions, the production 
 of which has been supposed to be the office of the lesser brain. If 
 we are right, the removal of the cerebellum ought to leave for a 
 time the conscious machinery and powers, but fitful as thought, sense 
 or fancy : the body ought to change like a mind, now acting in part, 
 now ceasing, and in short in everything capricious and partial, as 
 might be expected when the man or animal was given up to his own 
 wisdom, and had lost his organic providence. On the other hand 
 the removal of the cerebrum ought to leave everything, and the 
 power of everything, minus consciousness, and therefore minus the 
 stimuli and beginnings of action which come through consciousness. 
 This of course where no other parts were injured. We may also 
 infer on these principles, that where the condition of animals ap- 
 proaches sleep or inaction, there is less need of a cerebellum, for 
 these creatures are already on the ground, and comparatively secure. 
 But where the least absence of mind might cause a fall, there a per- 
 manent organic provision is required, in the shape of a larger cere- 
 bellum. For we may lay it down as a formula resulting from all 
 now said, that the perpetuation of high motion, composite motion, 
 or harmony, is the function of this organ. On the same principles 
 again it becomes probable, that the genital function assigned by the 
 phrenologists to the cerebellum is founded upon truth, xlnd now 
 
72 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 we leave it as a problem, -whether there be, or not, an analogous 
 provision for the sensual ganglia, to preserve the level of sense when 
 our senses are annulled; and what the organ is? And the question 
 may be repeated for the spinal cord also, with the insinuation, 
 whether the sympathetic nerve be not its cerebellum? For we 
 regard it as certain that the naturalness and economy of force, and 
 the accumulation, are secured everywhere in the bodily system. 
 
 The above function of the cerebellum has its analogues in every 
 sphere. We see it in thought, which has two elements, viz., that 
 of consciousness and personal energy, and that of natural growth, 
 the first corresponding to cerebrum, the latter to cerebellum. And 
 these are often disparted in individuals. In some there is a prepon- 
 derance of cerebral mind; their thoughts move quickly, but flightily ; 
 as we say, there is a want of balance; a want of body or nature in 
 their minds ; a defect of organic or cerebellar faculty. Their mental 
 movements are random and inharmonious; they do not retain or ac- 
 cumulate wisdom; even repetition does them no good; but they 
 strike out afresh in the vagueness of discourse, with no nature to 
 back them. They have all the senses but common sense, which is 
 the spring, incarnation and harmony of them all. In philosophy 
 or collective thought the same division is visible. Philosophies are 
 made, and also they grow; they are both cerebral and cerebellar. 
 Universal tradition, the largest pressure of common sense, is the 
 philosophical cerebellum. And here we see what complete experi- 
 ments of vivisection have been performed ; and what the result has 
 been in philosophies that cut away the nature, accumulation, force 
 and body of preceding thought; which extirpate the fixed organ on 
 of human growth, or the traditionary cerebellum. Dr. Carpenter, 
 speaking of smaller things, describes to the letter the effects which 
 follow: "It does not seem," says he, "that the animal has in any 
 degree lost the voluntary power over its individual muscles : but it 
 
 cannot combine their actions for any general movement The 
 
 reflex movements, such as those of respiration, remain unimpaired. 
 When an animal thus mutilated is laid on its back, it cannot recover 
 its former posture; but it moves its limbs, or flutters its wings, and 
 evidently is not in a state of stupor. When placed in the erect 
 position j it staggers and fedls like a drunken man; not, however, 
 
USAGE OF THE BRAIN. 73 
 
 without making efforts to maintain its balance."* Such is the want 
 of health or wholeness that comes from rescinding the natural brain 
 that lies behind us, and beginning the intellect afresh with each 
 passing day: for where there is no vis a tergo, there is no direction 
 either in physics or metaphysics. And the sphere may be changed 
 again with the same result. Law-making, which is the political 
 cerebrum, stands in a similar ratio to the public morality, which is 
 the political cerebellum; and where the latter is ignored, political 
 vivisection is performed, and constitution-makers repeat Dr. Car- 
 penter's phenomena on the scale of nations. And even in the high- 
 est sphere, where the cerebrum is termed prudence, and sometimes 
 wisdom, and the cerebellum is providence, we see the same thing. 
 Here the vivisection is frequent, and the results very confirmatory. 
 We see the quirks of men whose actions, vigorous enough, are all 
 tumbling to pieces; spiritual staggering and drunkenness; a positive 
 sense that there is no Glod, but that man is the manager; and the 
 like aberrations. All these instances are in the series of the cere- 
 bellum, and prove the universality of its functions. Man is in the 
 leading-strings of God and nature, and what is greater than himself, 
 to the end of his career; he is as a little child, whether he benefit 
 by it or not; and the sovereignty of the things above him is repre- 
 sented by an organ or envoy from the everlasting, planted in his 
 own head; and which, as we have now sufficiently said, is the cere- 
 bellum. But it lies unobtrusively underneath the cerebrum, be- 
 cause its guidance is nocturnal and unseen; and where it concurs 
 with reason and will, it delights to seem to be their servant and not 
 their master. When therefore the cerebellum or its similars are 
 abstracted, the result is, motion and no harmony, progress without 
 balance, thought without common sense, art without nature, philo- 
 sophy without humanity, freedom without a career or destiny, and 
 prudence alien to providence. In constituting this little series, we 
 seem to hear the whisper of a reason why our own age has no reve- 
 lation concerning the function of the cerebellum. 
 
 A word with regard to the usage of the brain. This grows with 
 our years. At first all is impression and convulsion ; very little 
 
 * Manual of Physiology, n. 912. 
 
74 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 cerebral exercise concurs with this state. Then all is sensation, and 
 action gratifying sense; and the cerebral hemispheres are called 
 into play in a more important degree. Lastly comes the rational 
 period mixed or marred with the others, and the brain movements 
 are directed more finely to suit the new demands. The mind 
 moreover handles the brain as the brain handles the body. At 
 first the thoughts are little better that confused impressions, and 
 the rational actions like sensual or spasmodic states. But by de- 
 grees the will gets into the cortex, and the understanding also, and 
 mental continence is established. The brain sits and notices, and 
 stands and runs, as its limbs are directed by the voluntary powers. 
 It becomes to the full locomotive through a host of fears, trials and 
 falls. Every nerve muscle now comes under control, and the 
 brain enters on the command of its position. Learning to think 
 appears to be analogous to learning to observe; and learning to 
 will, to learning to act. Hence a good education would enable us 
 to use all parts of the brain, as a fine gymnastic system calls into 
 play all and unwonted parts of the body. But let the education 
 be as good as it will, there is still a difference in brains, and one 
 can do feats which another cannot attempt. The brain, however, 
 is not the limit but the vessel of the mind, nor do the faculties of 
 one sphere necessarily argue those of the other. This world's 
 idiots may only be taking a long natural rest, to fit them for the 
 activities of another station ; where the brain cannot be a chariot 
 to ride in, it is still a bed to sleep upon. 
 
 We have thus taken notice of some leading problems respecting 
 the brain, dismissing many others ; but still there are matters of 
 importance on which a few words may be said. And first as to the 
 use of the two symmetrical halves of the nervous system. This, 
 we believe, is a deep problem, and capable of a large superficial 
 reply. Have not all things two sides, and must not the brain and 
 nerves image and use the doubleness of universal nature ? Man 
 has two halves, respectively called the male and female, and the 
 body has two, in its right and left sides. Action is the function of 
 the one, and passion, answering to action, is the function of the 
 other. The left hand steadies the object upon which the right 
 hand works. The woman constructs the material groundwork, the 
 
WHY THE BRAIN HAS TWO HALVES. 75 
 
 home, from which the man sallies, and to which he reverts, as his 
 centre of operations. The one brain holds the object of thought, 
 while the other brain works upon it with active power. This func- 
 tion of the two sides is a peculiar repetition of that of the cerebrum 
 and cerebellum, without which consciousness would not hold, just 
 as the male sex without the female would be a power without a ful- 
 crum, a wanderer without the strength of home. Principles cannot 
 be applied without a special envoy of their own, and the cerebel- 
 lum must have the weaker sex or better half of the cerebrum in its 
 interest in order to manage the cerebrum aright. If the reader 
 consults his mind, he will find that in one and the same operation 
 the process of steadying the grasp of thought concurs with that of 
 exercising its active movements; that his soul has two hands; and 
 these two processes or hands, widely different but united, are suited 
 in the twofoldness of the cerebral lobes. But what is more, the 
 two brains decussate or copulate, and the right head is married to 
 the left body, and the left head to the right body ; and this cross- 
 ing of powers, whereby active and passive are not only collateral, 
 but embrace, not only symmetrical, but one superposed upon the 
 other, is a necessity for action and thought, considered as mental 
 fruitfulness. The delights of harmony would not be felt if the two 
 brains did not thus combine, nor would the brain have a circle in 
 itself, unless each half had the support of contact with its partner 
 before going forth into the body. 
 
 Furthermore, we have noticed in the nervous system a reference 
 to something beyond and above, which soon lands us in the mind, 
 as the first permanent station. Thus the feeling of the fingers con- 
 ducts us anatomically to the spinal cord, in the centres of which, 
 and not in the fingers, the sensation lodges. The cord at once re- 
 fers us to the base of the brain, where sensation has its proper 
 home. "We know, however, that it is in the cortical centres that 
 that attention lives, which is the inner sense, or the owner of sen- 
 sation. These cortices, however, arc dead and material per se, and 
 thence the reference is straight to the mind, as the first organism 
 that appropriates sensation, and calls it really its own. TVe stop 
 here, not because the journey is done, but because the day of 
 thought is spent, and our science wants a rest. Thus one lesson 
 
76 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 of this system is the unselfishness of our organization, and its re- 
 cognition of a hierarchy which has no top save in that which is 
 more than body, and of supernatural endowments. And in the 
 downward series, running from wills to motions, the prime movers 
 are as much above us as the original feelers in sensation : a super- 
 incumbent organism to be called spiritual, and which makes itself 
 away to God with treble velocity of unselfishness, must be suppli- 
 cated as at once the original arbitrator of will, and the last receiver 
 of the thoughts which come from the world under the dresses of 
 sensations. 
 
 This system, however, whilst we think of the body, is a land of 
 mountains, from which the whole microcosm is visible. It rises 
 white, with its pillars of alabaster, from the blood-lands of limb, 
 heart and liver, and comprehends wider scenes as steep after steep 
 is surmounted. Its elevation is measured by function, which gives 
 the altitude over the level of the rolling juices and their shores. 
 The representation of life by the spinal chain is already a summit 
 towering above the flesh. The streams from this, falling upon the 
 machinery of organization, give powers corresponding to the height 
 and force of the descent. The rivers of sensation and impulse, again, 
 descending from loftier tables, have the force of their greater fall, 
 and press sense into paits and functions, into which no weaker tor- 
 rents could gain way. And finally, the mental streams, each in- 
 stinct with the view of the whole commanded from the top, have a 
 power of descent and penetration which belongs to such intellectual 
 rivers, whose sources are as the beads that the sun engenders on the 
 needles of the supreme hills, heaven-kissing. We say nothing of 
 the cloudy ranges beyond, or the spiritual temple, excepting that it 
 too is of a new mountain order, though built out of the firmament, 
 whose waters are above us as below us, and all the rest but currents 
 in their eternal sea. 
 
 We may here assign two reasons why the brain is at the top ) in 
 the first place, because nature herself is the worship of rank and 
 station, under their other names of excellence and power; and 
 secondly, because the soul is the top of the top, and the brain by 
 its place meets the soul. And as the arts and industries flow down 
 from the brain, and the spiritual waters tend to find their level, so 
 
RELATION OF THE BRAIN TO THE BODY. 77 
 
 here a force is provided which carries them back, of their nature, 
 when the channels are provided, to the altitude whence they came, 
 or to the feet of the soul : that the life of man may not be wasted 
 underground among his viscera, but may circulate from his head to 
 his head, without a drop being spilt from the high nervousness of 
 the body. 
 
 It is not surprising in this eminent region, that physiologists, 
 loyal to their heads, have assigned to the brain the perpetual govern- 
 ment of the body, or have regarded every function and every struc- 
 ture, as but a procedure or emanation from these commanding parts. 
 Indeed, on the spiritual or nocturnal side, such a view becomes just, 
 for the brain absorbs all the light and power of the system, and is 
 the only noticeable part, or the body of the body. So when the 
 sun ceases to shine, our domestic and motherly ground disappears, 
 and contemplation, facing the vault, sees no longer the opaque 
 earth, but only the ignited planets and the suns of systems, as it 
 were the galaxies of the starry brain. And so with the body also : 
 when its grosser senses cease to overwhelm us, and thought kindles 
 in the teeming night, the body drops away, and organ after organ 
 ceases to show, until we are left in the presence of a man, standing 
 with luminous feet upon the darkness, and we see the ghostly human 
 form, all nerve, feeling and volition; the brain as head and eye, 
 body and limbs, founded not upon matter, but like the organic stars 
 on its own sufficient form. We awaken, however, from these alti- 
 tudes, and find that the planet too, and the material body, are things 
 in themselves, nay, are our mothers, and deserve our best considera- 
 tion in the homely way. 
 
 But the organic relation of the brain to the body generally, has 
 not yet been well made out. It is clear, that the brain is the en- 
 gine of the mind, and that the other viscera make up the body, 
 which seems to be nourished on its own account. This, however, 
 does not explain the immersion of the one within the other, or the 
 subjection of each to the necessities of each. But surely, if the 
 body gives the brain substance, the brain gives the body what it has 
 to give, namely, brains. In this case, all the processes of nutrition, 
 circulation, secretion, &c, must be controllable by the brain accord- 
 ing to its perfection; and that this is the case, we know from the 
 
78 . THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 emotions which always and involuntarily transfer the state of the 
 brain into the visceral lives. Convivial joy, the brain's joy, makes 
 the stomach do double digestion with no harm to itself. Energy, 
 brain tension, fires the muscles to feats that muscles never meant. 
 Other passions scourge the liver or the kidneys into speed of manu- 
 facture, quite beyond their proper powers. The function of the 
 brain then to the body is one of forcing or culture. The brain 
 makes no clod of the body, no drop of the secretions : it makes no 
 seed that the body grows. But it is the husbandman of the corpo- 
 real farm. The farm may go wild, and it is still something, though 
 then called a desert. And organization may subsist without brains, 
 but it becomes more and more tangled, lower and lower, until you 
 cannot say that it is alive. The ratio of the brain to the body, is 
 that of man to the planet. The planet is ready-made; every stone, 
 plant and animal, night and day, the greater and the lesser light, 
 are all there, and could not be created by us if they were not. But, 
 man comes, the brain comes, as the cultivator. He is set there to 
 have dominion over all; to be the image of the wisdom who made 
 all; to spread himself as a head over all; and to modify all, as the 
 last result, or the secondary soul of all. Therefore, until the brain 
 has penetrated every viscus and function, it has not cultivated the 
 body, as until man has grasped the climates, and forced them 
 through their products and exotics, he has not cultivated the earth. 
 The relation of the brain then to the body is, as the cultivator of 
 the fields, originally wild, of nutrition, secretion, excretion, and the 
 like. The cultivation begins as soon as the emotions of the brain 
 begin, and every state of the brain plays in good or bad husbandry 
 upon the brute or visceral powers. 
 
 But the brain could do nothing of this, if it were not itself among 
 the natures that it commands. For what commander can speak to 
 his soldiers, unless he be a common man like themselves, though an 
 officer to boot? And, if man be not the supreme animal, the lion 
 and the lamb^o;* excellence, how can he wield the animal tribes? 
 And again, if spirit have not all that matter has, how can the soul 
 govern the body ? Now, we have shown in detail, that the brain, 
 as commanding organ, possesses the attributes of the lower organs 
 in a superlative degree. We have shown that it is the heart of 
 
RELATION OF THE BRAIN TO THE BODY. 79 
 
 hearts, for it receives from the body and the universe a spiritual 
 blood, which its cortices pulse forth in infinite streams throughout 
 the frame. We have shown that it is the lung of lungs, for its ani- 
 mation is the breathing of the soul in the all-communicative ether. 
 We have shown that it is the stomach of stomachs, because of its bold 
 chyniistry in the preparation of the food of food, which is the nerve- 
 spirit. It is also the gland of glands, and the muscle of muscles, 
 for it secretes the purest of juices, and obeys the beginnings of the 
 motor force. Aye, and it is the primal womb of life and thought. 
 In short, it is the body over again, piece by piece, with a truth be- 
 fitting the brain. Hence, again, comes corroboration of our views, 
 for we now perceive that we have assigned functions to the brain, of 
 opening, breathing, moving, circulating, and the like, which are in- 
 dispensable to its maintaining relations with the similar functions of 
 the body. In short, we find that our deductions are but the claim 
 of a common nature, as it were a common humanity, between the 
 brain and the body. The brain, however, we must remember, is 
 unmeasured by the body, and its attributes are peculiar, and not to 
 be named by low names, excepting for the sake of illustration. 
 
 With all these advantages, however, of a community of nature 
 and aims with the body, the brain could still do nothing, if there 
 were not a physical motion in the body corresponding to the mental 
 motion in the brain. If the body did not conspire or breathe with 
 the brain, the metaphysical force which alone the brain per se pos- 
 sesses, could not be carried out. So, if the force of the seasons did 
 not concur with the force of the cultivator, husbandry would be im- 
 possible. And so, if the moving disciplines of an army were not 
 unanimous with the commander's voice, military operations could 
 not exist. But we have said enough on this subject, which con- 
 cerns the seconding of the fine brain thoughts by the powerful phy- 
 sical lungs. 
 
 The result of our observations hitherto is, that the brain opens 
 the body to new influences, or gives it animation, and weighs upon 
 it with the pressure of numerous changes or reforms; causing it to 
 follow the mind, so far as the latter consists in the brain, through 
 its vicissitudes. A similar animation, as we have seen, is introduced 
 by man upon the earth, wbich he is born to subdue, and to recon- 
 
80 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 struct upon his own wants and ideals. By this means, for example, 
 the inanimate ground is covered with waving vegetations ; the vege- 
 table kingdom is compressed by the animal, which browses down its 
 increase, and serves as a partial end to arrest its exaggerations ; and 
 all together are braced round by man in girths and limbs of muscu- 
 lar arts, upon which sciences and volitions directly play for tighten- 
 ing the world to human aims, and carrying it through those revolu- 
 tions of culture which are its aspects towards our wants. In this 
 respect the trees are not inanimate, nor the beasts without progress ) 
 but they breathe and walk after man down the line of ages as after 
 Orpheus in the days of old. Their proper brain, the genus homo, 
 takes them along with him, and they become what he makes them, 
 or are as he leaves them; as God has ordained. 
 
 The last part of our theme has yet to be written, or the compara- 
 tives and affinities of the brain. And here we may state, that we 
 extend the province of comparative reasoning, and if the reader 
 pleases, of comparative anatomy, above the human brain as well as 
 beneath it. And we hold that the brains of the creatures larger 
 than individual man are truly illustrative of his little brain, whereas 
 animal cerebra are but falsely or negatively illustrative. By the 
 creatures larger than man we designate societies, nations, races, or 
 the individuals who cultivate the globe of history. The bodies of 
 these are definite, fibrous, and individual, like animal bodies : they 
 are mechanical also, though in a higher range of mechanics. 
 
 In the second consideration of the individual man, the brain is 
 his genius — that which fills him with spirit, makes a truth or aim 
 into his virtual intellect and will, and pours luminous rivers of these 
 over his works. This punctum vivens of his mind animates the rest, 
 and radiating its ideals far and near, irritates his apathies to death 
 under hot arrows of zeal. This genius creates and then concurs 
 with his wants; and the two together, or his life and his necessity, 
 animate up to the shape and point at which determination can have 
 actions done. These brain attributes, absent in none, are brilliant 
 in some men, who take the name of geniuses on that account, and 
 their deeds, by a fated fortuity, are treasured by their fellows as a 
 common interest, though of no more than individual growth, These 
 
HIGHER ANALOGUES OF THE BRAIN. 81 
 
 are the open men of their time, who hinder God the least : more 
 rays shine through them than through the rest : you cannot say what 
 their genius is, apart from what it shows and does, unless it be a 
 natural road from heaven to earth : influx and the fluid kingdoms 
 are their substances, and they know that the solid world is fuel laid 
 up against the day of heat; also that truths and ideals are kings and 
 priests, whose mortal namesakes, visceral and vegetating, are clay 
 as in the potter's hands when that clay comes. Their private 
 thoughts seem the wants of the time and the schemes of societies; 
 they are said to be sent and to have their mission ; for the Maker 
 has set them in the rhythm of his plan, and this world and that 
 world heave to help them to shoot their lightnings to their destined 
 ends. And still they are only the first brains that the epoch touches, 
 and which, therefore, it publishes; and being the highest they are 
 the longest visible as we pass away : but, as we said, every man is a 
 genius or an end, a space crowded with ideals, and these ideals are 
 the brain of the soul, or the personal life. 
 
 This word, genius, reminds us also of what we may call the So- 
 cratic brain, which attends upon the mortal organ. In this sense 
 the brain-principle is an organization of guardian spirits, who live 
 with our minds, fight our battles over our heads, whisper wisdom 
 more than belongs to us, make our lights and resources exceed our 
 days, and extend our debts into the unseen land to which we are 
 adjourning. This vicarious function of souls is the result of their 
 concatenation on the cortical plan. For here, where we are, our 
 purer minds are infant, not yet detached from the matrix of the 
 brain, and they sorely need guardians on the other side of time — as 
 it were, parent hands and instructions to see them fairly through 
 this big nursery, the world. We know not how little our lives 
 would be, or how inanimate, if the gaps of power and the passing- 
 ness of the day were not filled and compensated from another source 
 where power is incessant and wisdom eternal. It would be as though 
 each nervous fibril had but one cortical dot prefixed to it, and not 
 the whole brain; or as though each mind stood alone, and were not 
 environed and kept upright by an array of minds as long as the ages 
 and as high as the heavens. 
 
 But epochs have brains as well as individuals, and these are the 
 
82 THE HUMAN BRAIN. 
 
 ruling spirits and ideas which are enshrined in their institutions. 
 For epochs are the duration of the social life, and what is death and 
 birth for the individual is but the exchange of old atoms for new in 
 the marching epoch. These cerebral ideas are at first the private 
 ends common to the race in a given period, which appear on a new 
 morning in the field of individualities, and are the germ and birth- 
 day of a social state. The principle assumed, the grouping of the 
 cell, governs the composition from the least to the greatest, from the 
 single family to the epoch of twenty centuries. As the grouping 
 proceeds the action becomes grander, and the scale of operations is 
 transferred from homesteads to continents, but the same cause is 
 carried on in both extremes. Like fate it revolves through senates 
 and priesthoods, whose maddest strifes it builds into its plan. The 
 truths of the time enter the epoch through its own convenient 
 sciences or eyes. The acts and charities of life are interpreted ac- 
 cording to its familiar pattern, and committed to the spirit of its 
 nerves. In short, the collective brain has an animus like the in- 
 dividual. And like the individual it has its decline ; and also its 
 better successors, which are the appointed angels of time. 
 
 These, however, are the animal brains of societies, receiving and 
 transmitting the rush of destiny as it tramples through the chaos of 
 the worlds. But another brain, with power over fate, is set above 
 us as our social sun. For a firmamental organism of Prophecy and 
 Revelation overarches the weltering centuries, and sends down spirit 
 and divine light to the nations and races of the intellectual clime. 
 Openness and circulation here are religions and adorations : the 
 pressure of the life comes manifestly from above : as there is a God 
 and Lord, it comes punctually to our wants, and the clank of our 
 dire necessity is His mercy heard in terrestrial echoes ; the sighs 
 and heavings of mankind coincide with the birth of larger souls and 
 societies, and with the advent of fresh dispensations. 
 
DESCRIPTION. 83 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 Human life is illustrated by every organ of the body. Each 
 contributes a share to the general vitality. The brains are as the 
 tranquil inward respiring of existence elevated into mind; a life 
 which seems immaterial and motionless, until from the opened head 
 the capacities of organization come to light, and the brain demon- 
 strates that our noblest powers are incarnate, real and progressive. 
 That which is the secret of the brains is the open lesson of the 
 lungs. They live physically and largely the same life which the 
 brains live metaphysically and most minutely. In the running 
 wheel of life the imperceptible motion of the axle is thought; the 
 sweep at the periphery is respiration. The brains give us the free 
 principles of life, and the lungs, its free play in nature. 
 
 It is this idea of the play of life which is the principal point in 
 our first knowledge of the lungs : it is in the completion of this 
 idea that we must endeavor to bring out their functions. Of all the 
 internal organs, not excepting the heart, the lungs move the most 
 evidently. And as they are the plainest engines in our frames, we 
 must, in that inevitable way from the known to the unknown, rea- 
 son perforce from them to other parts, which also are engines, 
 though more difficult to exhibit at work. 
 
 The nose and mouth are the two doors which open inwards to- 
 wards the lungs ; the nose being the special entrance to the chest, 
 and the mouth, common to the chest and abdomen. The inner 
 door leading to the lungs is the fissure of the glottis, which opens 
 directly into the larynx, a cartilaginous box fitted up with muscles, 
 membranes, and other appliances requisite for the articulation of 
 sound. The larynx terminates in the windpipe or trachea, a pipe 
 extending from below the middle of the neck to opposite the third 
 
84 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 vertebra of the back, where it divides into two tubes termed the 
 bronchi. The trachea, the trunk of the windpipe, consists of from 
 fifteen to twenty fibro-cartilaginous rings, which, however, do not 
 form complete circles, being deficient at the back part, where the 
 tube is completed by a strong membrane. These rings, like little 
 ribs, are separated from, or connected with, each other by strong 
 elastic membrane, so that first there is the membrane, then a ring; 
 then again the membrane, then a ring; and so forth. The trachea 
 is lined on the inside by a soft membrane continued from that of 
 the mouth. It is the great stem which bears the ramifications of 
 the lungs. 
 
 The two large branches of the trachea, the first bronchial tubes, 
 run on each side to the lungs. On arriving thither, each divides 
 into two smaller branches, and the subdivision continues, of each 
 little branch into two twigs, and of each twig into lesser twigs, un- 
 til at the last division the air cells terminate the tubes. These air 
 cells are minute hollow chambers or vesicles, which hang like glo- 
 bules or grapes from the ends of the bronchia, and the air passes 
 into them with every breath we draw, and is expelled from them 
 more or less completely during each expiration. They form the 
 characteristic element of the lungs, which are themselves nothing- 
 more than a vast, manifold and corroborated air cell. The amount 
 of surface exposed by the cells is very great. 
 
 The whole of the constituents of the trachea exist virtually, in 
 function and principle, in the smallest elements of the lungs, and 
 the trachea with the lungs is a goodly diagram of the minutest 
 bronchial twig with its delicate air cell. In the grand consistency 
 of nature, the parts belong to the whole, and vice versa, the mass 
 being a spontaneous association of myriads of equally integral and 
 so far independent structures. 
 
 We have now drawn an outline of the pulmonic tree. Its roots 
 are the nose and mouth extending into the atmospheres; its boss is 
 the larynx; its shaft the trachea; its first two branches are the 
 bronchia; its other branches, twigs, and fruits are collectively the 
 lungs; the fruits or air cells, however, are the lungs especially and 
 essentially. 
 
 All the organs of the body are supplied by arteries carrying vivid 
 
DESCRIPTION. 85 
 
 blood, and the lungs are nourished by the bronchial arteries, which, 
 running alongside the bronchi, form an arterial tree corresponding, 
 in some measure, with their ramifications; the blood of the bron- 
 chial arteries being brought back out of the lungs into the circula- 
 tion by the bronchial veins, which again form an inverse system of 
 twigs, branches, and trunks, answering to that of the bronchial ar- 
 teries. The bronchial vessels are of small calibre. 
 
 Besides these there are the pulmonary artery and veins, the for- 
 mer a very large vessel, which, coming direct by a single trunk from 
 the venous side of the heart, accompanies the bronchia, and splitting 
 into finer and finer ramifications, forms at last a " wonderful net- 
 work" of blood-vessels around the air cells, the blood in which is se- 
 parated from the air only by a membrane of extreme thinness. From 
 the air cells this network reunites from twigs into branches, and 
 from branches into the four trunks of the pulmonary veins, which 
 pour the arterialized blood direct into the left side of the heart. 
 Thus, the lungs are like forests of blood trees, the air cells being 
 open spaces between, whereby the atmosphere is admitted to nourish 
 and ventilate them; one set of trees, dull and venous, representing 
 the blood before the ventilation, the other set blooming and arterial, 
 representing the beauty and flower which succeeds where the vernal 
 air has blown. This turn from autumn to organic spring is mo- 
 mentaneous in the lungs, which may not inaptly be compared to trees, 
 inasmuch as leaves are the lungs of plants, and the vegetable king- 
 dom, transmuting the earth and the atmosphere, belongs to the lung- 
 department of material nature. 
 
 The lungs, like the other important organs, have a plentiful supply 
 of nerves, which coming from both the cerebral and sympathetic 
 systems, pursue the bronchia to the air cells. 
 
 The parts enumerated make up the active constituents of the 
 lungs. In recapitulation, they are the tree of the air tubes, four 
 other arterial and venous trees, and a nervous tree, terminating 
 around and within the air tubes. All these are compacted by a 
 system of membranes or skins, which make of the lungs not a five- 
 fold or sixfold system of trunks, boughs, branches and twigs, but 
 one solid though distinctly lobulated organ. 
 
 These membranes may be generalized under the name of the 
 8 
 
86 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 pleura, including under that title all the cellular tissue which is 
 directly continuous with the pleura. This pleura is a skin envelop- 
 ing each lung; the cellular tissue is a web of skins that dips down 
 into the substance of the lungs, and separates stem from stem, 
 bough from bough, branch from branch, and twig from twig ; at 
 once dividing the parts from each other, and uniting them into a 
 common body. The cellular tissue is therefore the bed in which 
 the several parts of the lungs are planted. As it runs between the 
 parts, and makes them into aggregate portions, or lobes and little 
 lobes, it is sometimes called the interlobular tissue. 
 
 The lungs which we have thus endeavored to construct, are two 
 conical organs, filling, with the heart, the cavity of the chest. They 
 correspond in shape with the inside of the chest, and press below 
 upon the diaphragm. The pleura which covers them, contracts and 
 dilates with every respiration, and maintains its spring during life. 
 The elasticity of this serous membrane is an indication that where 
 serous membranes are present, as for instance over the brain, and 
 over the abdominal viscera, a similar elasticity is intended, or an ex- 
 pansile and contractile motion like breathing is performed. 
 
 The chest, in which the lungs are placed, is a conical box, move- 
 able in its parts, and capable not only of dilatation and contraction, 
 but of infinite variations of shape, ylt harmonizes with the lungs 
 in their movements, forming with them but one machine, so that it' 
 is indifferent whether we say that we breathe with the lungs or with 
 the chest. In good health, when consent between the two is per- 
 fect, the bones and muscles of the ribs are of no heaviness in func- 
 tion, but rock and swim upon the lungs. Thus when we speak of 
 the lungs in the sequel, we imply the whole engine of breathing 
 even to the skin, and regard the chest itself as a dress or membrane 
 inseparable from the lung-principle. 
 
 Inspiration, or the drawing in of the breath, is caused by certain 
 muscles drawing out the walls of the chest, and enlarging its inward 
 cavity, in which case the pressure of the external column of atmos- 
 phere causes the air to rush down into the windpipe and fill the 
 lungs, which then enlarge to fill the cavity of the chest. Expira- 
 tion or breathing out depends upon the relaxation of the muscles 
 and the resiliency of the parts of the chest, as well as upon the elasti- 
 
ONENESS OP THE LUNGS AND CHEST. 87 
 
 city and contractility of the lungs themselves. Thus the force of 
 the diaphragm and of the muscles between the ribs engenders inspi- 
 ration, and overcomes the elasticity of the lungs ; the elastic power 
 of the lungs produces expiration. The prolonged alternation of 
 these two forces is " a contest in which victory declaring on one 
 side, or the other, is [under ordinary circumstances] the instant 
 death of the fabric." 
 
 In the act of breathing we notice four divisions, each of import- 
 ance to our sequel. First, inspiration ; secondly, a pause which 
 ensues when the inspiration is completed; thirdly, expiration; and 
 fourthly, a pause when the expiration ends ; after which inspiration 
 again occurs, and the same course is measured. Inspiration rises to 
 a certain level, and there rests for a time ; expiration descends also 
 to its level, and registers it by a pause. Further, the inspiration 
 may either take place continuously in one long breath, or by several 
 smaller inhalations and pauses; the expiration likewise may either 
 proceed without a stop, or it may be divided into several levels of 
 exhalation, each with its own proper pause. 
 
 But let us come to the use of respiration, or the benefits of breath- 
 ing. These are twofold: 1. The use of the air drawn in, towards 
 the renovation of the blood, and of the air emitted, towards its puri- 
 fication. 2. The mechanical effect of the breathing upon the circu- 
 lation and the body generally. We speak first of the first of these 
 uses, because of the exclusive importance usually attached to it. 
 
 The result of investigations on this subject need detain us but a 
 short time. It is in substance this — that when the air is breathed 
 in, the expanded network of capillaries besetting the air cells absorb 
 from it oxygen into the blood, and at the same time pour forth car- 
 bonic acid gas from the blood, which is carried out of the system by 
 the air leaving the lungs. In consequence of these two changes, the 
 reception of oxygen and the expulsion of carbonic acid, the altera- 
 tion of the blood from dark venous to florid arterial in the air cells, 
 is accounted for. 
 
 These changes, authors tell us, are purely chemical, and the same 
 as happen to venous blood out of the body. We rejoin, however, 
 that this theory is out of place, being chemical and not organic. It 
 deals only with what is external to the body. The air of inspira- 
 
8Q THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 tion is on the way in, and the air of expiration is on the way out, 
 but neither the one nor the other is a part of the living frame ; how- 
 ever deep either may be in the passages of the body, still it is not 
 indoors. The lining membrane or wall of the cell is the partition 
 between life and death ; inside the cell is vitality, outside of it, 
 dead nature : within it, the man lives ; without it, the universe envi- 
 rons him : the oxygen which is lost is missed from the outside, and 
 the carbonic acid which is found is on the outside also ; but on the 
 inside no corresponding observation has been made, or can be made ; 
 and it is a questionable inference whether carbonic acid, as such, 
 exists in the blood, or whether oxygen, as such, is there either. As 
 an account of the food of the blood, and of the excrements of the 
 blood, both external to the man, the chemical report is valid, but is 
 it a satisfactory statement of any changes in the blood itself circu- 
 >. lating in the system? Assuredly not; and let us here remark that 
 the terms of every subject should be in keeping with the subject ; 
 the things which are life's should be rendered to life, and those of 
 chemistry to chemistry. We cannot judge of the living, either by 
 the raw material which they pasture from the world, or by the re- 
 fuse which they leave behind them; or even by both together. 
 Organization is the one fact in organization; chemistry disappears 
 into it, and is seen no more as chemistry. The blood, as an organic 
 creature, into which all thiags stream, and from which the body 
 issues as the work of works, is the sole reality in our veins ; it is as 
 blood alone that its elements come before us. As well regard all 
 heroic actions as instances of muscular exertion, and these as powers 
 of lever and fulcrum, and other produce of mechanics, and not con- 
 nect them with the fountains of human nature, as make the living 
 union of all things in the blood into a congeries of chemical sub- 
 stances. Chemical indeed they are when they die and are experi- 
 mented on, but chemical is not their name while they are part and 
 parcel of our human blood. They must be addressed in the language 
 proper to organic life, or the keeping of their science will be violated 
 irretrievably. 
 
 We the more insist upon this, because by a very natural insur- 
 gency, chemistry has of late years been pushing what are called its 
 conquests into the domain of physiology. But physiology has to 
 
CHEMISTRY. 89 
 
 consider the organic characters of things, whether animal or vegeta- 
 ble; chemistry, their inorganic or mineral elements. This is a broad 
 distinction, and easy to apply. We would not rescind one chemi- 
 cal experiment, or deny the value of one fact therefrom resulting ; 
 but we protest against the logic of reasoning from chemistry to phy- 
 siology; from bricks to architecture; from neutral matter to forms 
 shapen for particular purposes, and with qualities that constitute 
 their point, and their very existence. 
 
 At the same time there is no objection to regard life as a fire, 
 and the chest as one of its principal grates ; the fuel being the blood, 
 and the draught, the fresh air of the lungs. In proportion as the 
 outward world is cold, this lung-fire must be kept up by more in- 
 flammable materials, just as larger coals and logs are in use in De- 
 cember than in May. And moreover in proportion to the size of 
 the fire is the quantity of smoke or carbonic acid disengaged from 
 the system. All this is safe analogy and good experiment. But 
 let us not be deceived into regarding this as animal heat: it is as 
 purely mineral heat — this presumed " combustion" of carbon and 
 fat — as the heat in an ordinary stove. Animal heat is that which 
 warms life, or inflames the animal, as such. Its burnings are desires, 
 the flames of animal existence. These are kindled by their appro- 
 priate objects. The universal animal heat of the body is the or- 
 ganic zeal or love of self-preservation hotly present in every part. 
 This is the origin of hunger and thirst, which tend to continue bodi- 
 ly life, and lay the world under contribution, not despising even its 
 mineral fire. There are different orders of fire; even in nature there 
 is a substratum of heat of which we make all our fires. And so in 
 the body there is an animal heat which lies at the basis of human 
 warmth, even when the temperature can be fully accounted for by 
 the " combustion" of the food. Take the sun out of nature, and 
 the numbed flints will have lost their sparks; and take the soul out 
 of the body, and you may indeed roast it or boil it, but cannot warm 
 it with one ray of "animal heat." 
 
 Moreover there are several kinds of chemistry. The present 
 chemical sciences are of the mineral degree, although their higher 
 branches are indeed mineral-vegetable and mineral-animal. But 
 there is no such science yet as either vegetable or animal chemistry. 
 
 8* 
 
 
90 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 Mineral chemistry teaches the composition of mineral substances by 
 analysis and synthesis. It makes minerals by mixing together their 
 components under favorable conditions. In like manner vegetable 
 chemistry makes plants, and animal chemistry makes animals. Na«- 
 ture does this, and so far nature is the only vegetable and animal 
 chemist. But though we cannot produce in her laboratory scien- 
 tifically, but only blindly, we can observe her processes and learn the 
 results. For example, the mixture of sexes produces animals, and 
 in a certain sense plants also. The mixture of breeds varies these 
 substances, namely, animals, and creates new compounds or animal 
 varieties. The mixture of opinions produces ideas, and then we 
 have intellectual chemistry. The present is distilled out of the past 
 by the same law. Chemistry then is the mineral term. Raise it a 
 step into the vegetable, and in plants it becomes propagation ; into 
 the animal, and it becomes generation : and so forth. This of syn- 
 thetical or creative chemistry. The terms alter as the theatre 
 changes. But to run one term through all the stages, is to miss 
 the essence of all but the lowest. When science does this, it not 
 only finds " sermons in stones," but is petrified by their discourses. 
 Dwelling therefore briefly, and under physiological protest, upon 
 the oxygen and carbonic acid disengaged, or absorbed, during respi- 
 ration, we proceed to remark, that the whole of the venous blood of 
 the body, which is comparatively exhausted by its circulation, and 
 also the whole of the new chyle or realized essence of the food, passes 
 by the pulmonary artery to the networks of minute blood-vessels 
 in their air cells, and so through the lungs, and in those fine vessels 
 is counted out and thoroughly sifted, and its purification takes place. 
 Whatever disabled portions it contains, are there taken to pieces, 
 their broken elements thrown awa}^ and the sound reconstituted. 
 Whatever injuries the blood may have received from the passions 
 of the mind, which as we know have all power to bless or to hurt it, 
 are palliated by the removal of clouds of exhalations, as witness the 
 odor of the breath. When the fire of life burns dark and fuligi- 
 nous, the windpipe is as the chimney that relieves the body of its 
 noxious smoke. Moreover, whatever crudities or superfluities the 
 new chyle, or the milky produce of our food, may contain, are expelled 
 by the lungs through the same channel. In short, the lungs are the 
 
PHYSICAL ACTIONS OF THE LUNGS. 91 
 
 general strainers and cleansers of the blood. Globule by globule 
 they discuss its problems, separate its truths from its errors and its 
 dead from its living, and hold it to its brief but energetic trials for 
 purification and the consequences which follow. 
 
 Let us now turn from the act of expiration, from the air " laden 
 like a mule," as has been aptly said, "with a burden and baggage 
 of adulterations, and forced to carry them out," to inspiration — to 
 the newly-arriving air, the provision for supporting, and the blast 
 for rekindling, the blood. And let us spend a moment upon the 
 admirable means of nature for managing this very air, and present- 
 ing it to the blood in the last place, clear, genial, and warm. First 
 the nose, as the administrator of the sense of smell, takes cogni- 
 zance of any odorous or stimulating properties in the atmosphere, 
 and acts accordingly ; if pure, sweet, and fragrant, it draws in the 
 air by volumes, inspiring confidence and openness down to the very 
 air cells : if manifestly noxious or impure, the nose closes in propor- 
 tion, extemporizes a thousand valves that keep out the baser parti- 
 cles, and the air is driven against the sides of the passage, all the 
 way to the same cells, its uncleanly accompaniments being caught 
 in a viscid snarework all down the tube : it also gives notice to the 
 mouth, whose mucus catches its share of effluvia, which are rejected 
 by the shortest way. The mucus of these passages performs an im- 
 portant use, detaining clouds of particles which are unworthy to pass 
 inwards, and this operation increases in strictness the further the air 
 advances in the narrowing tubes. Consequently when it arrives in 
 the cells, it is clothed with kindly vapors issuing from the body, has 
 caught the tincture of the living heat, and is in fine unison with 
 the blood. And the blood has no sooner sniffed it well, than it again 
 becomes auroral and arterial. Immediately that this is accomplished, 
 the air, exhausted for this primary use, is spent, as we saw before, 
 upon the secondary and servile use, of undertaking and carrying 
 forth the dead exhalations. 
 
 The blood that comes up to meet the air is all the blood in the 
 body, for after circulating, it all requires refreshment or purification. 
 It is carried into the lungs through the trunk of the pulmonary 
 artery. But we mentioned another artery, the bronchial, which 
 performs an office in the lungs. The old, exhausted and impure 
 
92 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 blood is conveyed in the pulmonary vessel; the blood which is pure 
 and young as the heart can make it, runs parallel with the former 
 in the bronchial. The pulmonary blood is to become regenerate in 
 the lungs ; the bronchial is the running model of its future state, 
 and exercises a contagion of youth upon its pulmonary associate. 
 For nature never prescribes an end, without showing a present 
 example of it. 
 
 The air ministers to the blood an infinity of fine endowments 
 which chemistry does not appreciate. How full it is of odors and 
 iufluences that other animals, if not man, discern, and which in 
 certain states of disease and over-susceptibility, become sensible to 
 all : moreover at particular seasons all fertile countries are bathed 
 in the fragrance shaken from their vegetable robes. Is it conceiv- 
 able that this aroma of four continents emanating from the life of 
 plants has no communication with our impressible blood ? Is it 
 reasonable to regard it as an accidental portion of the atmosphere ? 
 Is it not certain that each spring and season is a force which is 
 propagated onwards; that the orderly supply, according to the 
 months, of these subtlest dainties of the sense, corresponds to fixed 
 conditions of the atmospheric and imponderable world adequate to 
 receive and contain them ; that the skies are the medium and 
 market of the kingdoms, whither life resorts with its lungs, to 
 buy ; that therefore the winds are cases of odors ; and that distinct 
 aromas, obeying the laws of time and place, conform also to other 
 laws, and are not lost, but are drawn and appreciated by our blood. 
 Nay more, that there is an incessant economy of the breath and 
 emanations of men and animals, and that these are a permanent 
 company and animal kingdom in the air. It is indeed no matter 
 of doubt, that the air is a product elaborated from all the king- 
 doms ; that the seasons are its education ; that spring begins and 
 sows it ; that summer puts in the airy flowers and autumn the airy 
 fruits, which close-fisted winter shuts up ripe in wind granaries for 
 the use of lungs and their dependent forms. Thus it is passed 
 through the fingers of every herb and growing thing, and each en- 
 riches its clear shining tissue with a division of labor, and a succes- 
 sion of touches, at least as great as goes to the manufacture of a 
 pin. Whosoever then looks upon air as one unvaried thing, is like 
 
THE WEALTH OF THE AIR. 93 
 
 the infant to whom all animals are a repetition of the fireside cat ; 
 or like a dreamer playing with the words animal kingdom, vegetable 
 kingdom, atmosphere, and so forth ; and forgetting that each com- 
 prises many genera, innumerable species, and individuals many 
 times innumerable. From such a vague idea, we form no estimate 
 of the harmony of the air with the blood in its myriad-fold consti- 
 tution. The earth might as well be bare granite, and the atmo- 
 sphere, untinctured gas, if the vegetable kingdom has no organic 
 products to bestow through the medium of the air, upon the lungs 
 of animal tribes. Failing all analysis, we are bound to believe, 
 that the atmosphere varies by a fixed order parallel with that of the 
 seasons and climates ; that aromas themselves are abiding continents 
 and kingdoms ; and that the air is a cellarage of aerial wines, the 
 heaven of the spirits of the plants and flowers, which are safely 
 kept in it, without destruction or random mixture, until they are 
 called for by the lungs and skin of the animate tribes. Fact shows 
 this past all destructive analysis. It is also evident that accumula- 
 tion gees on in this kind, and that the atmosphere like the soil 
 alters in its vegetable depth, and grows richer or poorer from age to 
 age in proportion to cultivation. The progress of mankind would 
 be impossible, if the winds did not go with them. Therefore not 
 rejecting the oxygen formula, we subordinate it to the broad fact 
 of the reception by the atmosphere of the choicest produce of the 
 year, and we regard the oxygen more as the minimum which is 
 provided even in the sandy wilderness, or rather as the crockery 
 upon which the dinner is eaten, than as the repast that hospitable 
 nature intends for the living blood in the lungs. The assumption 
 that the oxygen is the all, would be tolerable only in some Esqui- 
 maux philosopher, in the place and time of thick -ribbed ice; there 
 is something too ungrateful in it for the inhabitant of any land 
 whose fields are fresh services of fragrance from county to county, 
 and from year to year. Chemistry itself wants a change of air, a 
 breath of the liberal landscape, when it would limit us to such 
 prison diet. 
 
 Here, however, is a science to be undertaken; the study of the 
 atmosphere by the earth which it repeats ; of the mosaic pillars of 
 the landscape and climate in the crystal sky : of the map of the 
 
94 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 scented and tinted winds; and the tracing of the virtues of the 
 ground, through exhalation and aroma, property by property, into 
 the lungs and the circulating blood. For the physical man himself 
 is the builded aroma of the world. This, then, at least, is the 
 office of the lungs — to drink the atmosphere with the planet dis- 
 solved in it. And a physiological chemistry with no crucible but 
 brains must arise, and be pushed to the ends of the air, before we 
 can know what we take when we breathe, or what is the import of 
 change of air, and how each pair of lungs has a native air under 
 some one dome of the sky ; for these phrases are old and conse- 
 quently new truths. 
 
 We notice, indeed, a great difference in the manner of the lungs 
 to the different seasons, for the genial times of the year cause the 
 lungs to open to an unwonted depth. The breaths that we draw in 
 the summer fields, rich with the sweets of verdure and bloom, are 
 deeper than those that we take perforce on our hard wintry walks. 
 Far more emotion animates the lungs at these pleasant tides. Nor 
 is this to be wondered at, any more than that we open more freely 
 at a table loaded with delicacies, than at a poorly furnished board. 
 The endowments of the vegetable kingdom in the atmosphere not 
 only feed us better with aerial food, but also keep us more open and 
 more deeply moved; and we shall see presently that the movement 
 of the lungs is the wheel on which the chariot of life runs, with 
 more or less intensity according as the revolution is great or small. 
 Now in summer it is great, and in winter it is small, for manifest 
 motives.* Furthermore, our noses themselves, the features of the 
 lungs, are in evidence that there is more to be met with per- 
 manently in the air than inodorous gases. For we cannot suppose 
 that scent ends organically where we fail to perceive it with the 
 sense. But enough has been said already on the flavorless world 
 and noseless doctrine of the chemists. 
 
 * In a regular treatise on the chemistry of the lungs, the atmosphere would 
 be separately considered in its mineral, vegetable, animal and human constitu- 
 ents, and in the effects of these, as introduced through the lungs, upon the body 
 and the mind. In this work, however, we make no pretensions to treat the 
 subject according to this larger order, though other considerations following out 
 the above series will be presented in the sequel. 
 
THE LUNG MOVEMENTS. 95 
 
 This extension of the subject has a practical bearing. The che- 
 mical view blinds us to the seeds of health and disease contained in 
 the atmosphere. We pound it into oxygen, hydrogen and carbon, 
 and find its ruins pretty invariable in all places under all circum- 
 stances. Plagues and fevers give a different analysis, and tell 
 another tale. They prove that the air is haunted by forcible elements 
 that resist segregation and distillation. The strokes of these airy 
 legions are seen, though the destroyers themselves are invisible. In 
 the atmosphere as a place of retribution, the cleanness or unclean- 
 ness of the ground and the people is animated by ever wandering 
 powers, which raise cleanliness into health, and filth into pestilence, 
 and dispense them downwards according to desert with an unerring 
 award. But who could guess this from the destructive analysis 
 into oxygen, hydrogen and carbon ; which misses out the great 
 shapes that stalk through the air, and laugh at our bottles and re- 
 torts often with a diabolic laugh ? But we shall recur to this sub- 
 ject when we treat of Public Health. 
 
 To conclude this part of our subject, we have seen that the lungs 
 raise the blood into its principles, and discuss them on a higher 
 arena ; that they continually refresh and enlarge it by bringing it 
 into contact with the outward world in the shape of the atmosphere, 
 where at once it gives up its antiquities as the free breath unlocks it ; 
 that the lungs also humanize the air as it enters, and fill it with the 
 organic warmth and movements of the nose and the head. But 
 further, the blood, in passing into the lungs, is held as it were above 
 the body by virtue of the lightness of the sphere. And not only 
 in the lungs but everywhere in the system, the pulmonic levity, or 
 the rise of the surface, operates statically upon the fluids ; so that 
 each breath amounts to a posture or rather a hover of the entire 
 capillary blood and nervous spirit of the body. This levity-giving 
 is an intermediate function between the aerial and motor offices of 
 the lungs. We shall speak of it again at the end of this Chapter. 
 
 We have now considered the chemical and physical functions of 
 the lungs, and glanced at their statical office ; it remains to treat 
 the second part of the subject, namely, the respiratory movements, 
 or the mechanics and dynamics of the lungs. 
 
 That the effects of the lung movements are not small, a short 
 
96 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 description will convince us. Every time that we draw in the air, 
 our brains fall, from the venous blood being sucked out of the head 
 to fill the threatened vacuum in the chest ; and when we breathe 
 out the air, the brains rise, from the return of the blood from the 
 head to the chest being impeded. The same also takes place with 
 the heart. During inspiration, the lungs breathe up the venous 
 blood into that organ, and retard the passage of the arterial blood 
 from it ; during expiration they keep the venous blood away, and 
 increase the onward impulse given to the arterial blood. So like- 
 wise in the belly. Largely emptied, as it is of venous blood in 
 inspiration, and subject to the movements of the superincumbent 
 lungs, it necessarily undergoes great motion during breathing. 
 
 Now, that movements like these have a universal part to play, it 
 would be idle to deny. They actuate the body some fourteen times, 
 or more, every minute of our lives. If we watch our neighbor as 
 he sits upon his chair, we see, not his wind chest only, but the man 
 himself, expand and contract each time he breathes. If we watch 
 the face, we see a corresponding change : if we lay the hand upon 
 the stomach, we feel it rise and fall as plainly as the chest. And 
 common sense ordains, that in a machine divinely economic, the 
 use of any motion is co-extensive with the motion itself, and if the 
 motion be universal, the end it serves is likewise universal. 
 
 As we have seen, the pressure of the atmosphere distends the 
 lungs and produces inspiration : the living contraction of the lungs 
 causes expiration. The result is, to engender a power which 
 alternately stirs the frame. As a familiar instance of what this 
 power is, I appeal to those who have sat to the sun for a daguerreo- 
 type portrait. You know that the greatest stillness is needed to 
 bind down that quick artist to the execution of single portraits ; 
 to make his successive ideas or touches fall in identical lines; other- 
 wise, he will paint you not one, but a chaos of likenesses, equal in 
 number to your variations of position. In the painfulness of your 
 anxiety to sit still, to suppress the breath, you find that you are a 
 frame which verily exists in motion j you ascertain what a struggle 
 it is to combat your life's progress, to wrestle with the moving 
 lungs. To the fingers' ends, to the toes' ends you pant and swell, 
 and sink again, with irrepressible heavings ; and the voice which 
 
OFFICE OF THE LUNG-MOVEMENTS. 97 
 
 emancipates you from the effort, and bids you breathe as you 
 please, unobservant of the fact, is release from a straitness which 
 could not be long endured. The same thing is experienced more 
 or less, whenever it is necessary to use great stillness, to control 
 the breath. The consciousness which is then awakened comes into 
 collision with a power whose resources we never estimate practically 
 but at such times of struggle. Ask any of those who have been 
 engaged in poses plastiques, and they will tell you that of all hard 
 work, standing still is among the hardest. 
 
 What becomes of the power created by the air falling with the 
 whole weight of its column upon the movable lungs, and displacing 
 or expanding them, and by the subsequent living contraction of the 
 lungs ? Can we imagine that its use is confined to the outside 
 of the system ? to the admission of fresh and the expulsion of con- 
 taminated air ? This would be as reasonable as to suppose that the 
 main office of a water wheel, connected with an extensive and com- 
 plicated machinery, was confined to the water which falls upon it, 
 and that the mechanical power engendered was not communicated 
 inwards to the plant. At this rate nature would be less thrifty 
 than our engineers, who know that power is precious, to be husband- 
 ed f o the last degree, conducted where it is required, and never ex- 
 pended without a result. Suppose that a portion of the water be 
 needed inside the mill, as is generally the case, this is easily sup- 
 plied by some sideward allowance of the machinery, or by the 
 pressure of the water itself, which contains the power in an un- 
 mechanized state; but the main action is never spent upon that 
 which comes of its own accord. The blood is aerated in some ani- 
 mals, and the juice in plants, without any motion of the lungs, 
 which may suggest that the aeration of the blood is not the grand 
 office of these movements. But in machineries, any motion which 
 is superabundant, or not turned to use, is hurtful to the object 
 sought, precisely because motion always has effects, which in the 
 latter case mix with the intended result, and confuse or disarrange 
 it. This applies more strongly to the human frame than to any- 
 thing of man's making. 
 
 Thus, we observe that there are really two questions which have 
 been confounded with each other : Firstly, What is the use of air 
 9 
 
98 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 to us? and secondly, What is the use of 'breathing? And with re- 
 spect to this second inquiry, we now see that it will be puerile to 
 say that we breathe in order to breathe. Let us grapple with the 
 problem, and solve it otherwise than by a verbal retort. We an- 
 swer, then, that the use of breathing is to communicate motion to 
 the body, to distribute it to the different machineries or viscera, to 
 enable them each to go to work according to their powers. 
 
 Our position is, that the blood and blood-vessels make and repair 
 the organization, and keep it in working trim ; while on the other 
 hand the lungs and the brains use and work it : like as an engine is 
 made in the factory by one set of artisans, but is taken elsewhere to 
 enlarged conditions of liberty or motion, to be worked by another 
 class of persons. Thus, the heart's fabricative strokes are the lesser 
 motion : the experimental play and employment of the lungs is the 
 greater motion. By the one the hammer is plied upon the engine; 
 by the other, the completed engine is made to use its qualities, and 
 to work according to its construction. Every body contains two 
 bodies — the one which is forming, and the other which is finished 
 and working : the heart is the spring and centre of the first, and the 
 lungs of the second ; the one represents matter, and the other spirit ; 
 and the ratio between the pulses and the breaths gives the constant 
 equation which subsists between these inseparable two. 
 
 It needs but little consideration to show that the organs and viscera 
 of the body require a supply of motion to enable them to perform 
 their functions. These functions consist, firstly, in the reception of 
 a peculiar quantity as well as quality of blood, from which they, 
 secondly, are to separate certain materials, or upon which they are 
 to produce some change : the quantity and quality required varies 
 also at different times. What is it that supplies them with this 
 peculiar blood ? Not the impulse of the heart and arteries, for this 
 could cause no discrimination in the supply to different parts; on the 
 contrary, its action is uniform all over the body. Each organ then 
 requires an individuality to enable it to choose and take what it wants 
 from the common system. How can this individual power be given 
 to the organs, except by their exercising a motion of expansion and 
 contraction, whereby they draw in or shut away the blood, as they 
 find it necessary? 
 
NECESSITY OF THE PULMONARY MOTION. 99 
 
 But again, if the organs are alive, the operations that they per- 
 form upon the blood demand a general motion on their part. If we 
 are to regard them as dead sieves or filtering stones, then it may be 
 sumcient for fluid to run into them, and the various secretions, the 
 bile, the saliva, &c, may drip through them without any action on 
 their part. The humanities and industries of the inner man may 
 sit down deadly still, like mesmerized Turks. But is such a con- 
 ception proper in a body overrun by spirited nerves, which in pro- 
 portion as they are impressed or passive on the one hand, rise up in 
 activity on the other ? And if the parts of the organs are not only 
 passively but actively engaged in elaborating the various juices, must 
 not their activities combine by a law into one general action or mo- 
 tion common to the whole organ ? Does not all function in a living 
 body imply motion, and is not the sum of particular motions neces- 
 sarily represented by an aggregate motion equal to all its parts? 
 Though his blood may be circulating, yet a motionless man is a man 
 doing nothing; and a motionless organ is just as ineffectual. To 
 exist is one thing; to do is another and a further. In the whole man, 
 the management of his motions constitutes his skill; in the partial 
 man or the organ a corresponding management performs its functions. 
 Without precise means set in real motion, you have no art and ma- 
 nufacture, no saliva and no bile. These latter are the most mar- 
 vellous of fabrics; the body is the most stupendous of factories. 
 Our commonest thoughts upon such subjects are the way to the best. 
 Destruction, then, is in a manner compatible with rest, but construc- 
 tion never. 
 
 The sap is indeed distributed in plants without any apparent ex- 
 pansion and contraction of their organs, as it were by a magnetic or 
 elective affinity between the parts of the plant, and the fluids they 
 require. And this election is, doubtless, involved in the animal also. 
 But then the meaning of animal as contradistinguished from vege- 
 table, is motion as distinct from growth, or local as different from 
 and superior to molecular movement. And the several organs of 
 animals are animal like the whole. No vegetable tissue could asso- 
 ciate in the body of life, but it would be the sport of activities which 
 it could not share or reciprocate. A liver that was merely vegetating 
 would be pressed to death in a body that is ceaselessly animating. 
 
100 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 Therefore the motion of the organs is indispensable to make them 
 parts of the whole, or to raise them into the animal sphere. 
 
 To return to facts, Ave find in the motion of the lungs communi- 
 cated to the system, the very power which the organs require. For 
 the body is a chain of substances and organs, whose connections are 
 so disposed, that motions communicated from within, vibrate from 
 end to end, and from side to side, and extend to the extremities of 
 the limbs before they are absorbed. And in the intimate fellowship 
 pervading it, and which is brought about by the skin and the mem- 
 branes, we see the condition whereby a general motion, like that of 
 the lungs, amounts to an attraction exerted by the frame and its 
 parts upon the world without and the world within; by which, in 
 each different voluntary expansion, it draws in as it pleases the fluid 
 contained in its own cavities, as well as whatever it requires from 
 the great ocean of the atmosphere. Such is the value of the move- 
 ments of the lungs. They not only breathe themselves, but make 
 the body breathe similarly with them ; and in this consists its life, 
 whereby it becomes an individual, and takes what it wants for itself, 
 suffering no intrusion from within or without, whether from the blood 
 of the heart, or from the pressure of the universe. 
 
 To follow the gear by which the motion of the lungs is commu- 
 nicated to other organs, belongs to anatomy and experiment, but 
 the general fact belongs to common sense, and science has only to 
 confirm it. We do not now enter upon the anatomy, but will con- 
 tent ourselves with observing the effect of the pulmonary engine 
 upon the great departments of the system. And first for the effect 
 upon the nerves and the brain. 
 
 First, with respect to the nerves, the motions of the lungs, occur- 
 ring fourteen times per minute, act upon them more than upon any 
 other part, because they are the most impressible of the organs. 
 Now a large portion of the nerves runs through the chest, a space 
 subject to threatened vacuum during every breath; and more than 
 a third part of the spinal marrow virtually lies open into the same 
 exhausting receiver. The plain consequence is, that the nerves and 
 the spinal marrow are expanded with each inspiration. Either that 
 — or they resist the inspiration, and in this case the unity of the 
 body is at an end. But we cannot make the latter supposition. If 
 
THE BREATHING OF THE BRAIN. 101 
 
 they are expanded or enlarged when the lungs draw them out, of 
 course a physical fluid enters them to fill the space created, and tends 
 to fill the organs to which they are distributed. In this way the 
 nervous system, the focus of life, opens the frame at the same inter- 
 vals as the lungs, the circumference of life; the lungs being simply 
 the want of living fluid, and the nerves the corresponding supply. 
 This is an organic cooperation between effect and cause, whereby the 
 highest purposes of the organization are seconded most absolutely, 
 and yet most freely, by the lowest. 
 
 The nerves then breathe their atmosphere, the nervous fluid, at 
 the same intervals as the lungs breathe theirs, which is the proper 
 atmospheric fluid, and the breath of the nerves is the life of the 
 lungs, as the breath of the lungs is the bodily action of the nerves. 
 The nerves, however, are continuous with the brain, and secondly, 
 we observe that their expansion is its expansion. It opens, for mo- 
 tion's purposes, into the chest, by the nerves, and by the spinal 
 marrow ; the lungs have their suckers upon it everywhere, through 
 the membranes and the blood-vessels. It, therefore, breathes under 
 the attractions of the pulmonic air-pump. Like every other part it 
 respires its own thoughts or objects. What these are, it does not 
 behove us to inquire, but we may affirm generally, that they are 
 those fluids which are the brains of the body and outward universe. 
 The lungs breathe that which answers to lungs in nature, namely, 
 the air. The heart breathes that which is the heart's in the system, 
 namely, the blood ; and each organ, as a rule, breathes its own cor- 
 responding fluids. 
 
 The heart, as we have just anticipated, breathes also with the 
 lungs, and so manifestly, that physiology already contains many 
 chapters upon the influence of the respiration upon the circulation. 
 The pulmonary motions acting upon the heart and great vessels, 
 cause the venous blood to return to the heart, and somewhat retard 
 the outgoing arterial blood, during the inspirations; and vice versa; 
 and imprint upon the pulse at the fountain-head the force which is 
 destined to supplant the pulse where the vessels enter the organs. 
 By this means the ultimate intention is intimated from the begin- 
 ning; the blood in its childhood is let into the secret of its destiny; 
 and the sanguineous system is prepared at once for submission to 
 
 9* 
 
102 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 the brains and lungs. The lungs then inaugurate the grand circu- 
 lation into the life and habitudes of the rational body, animating 
 the blood itself with the moving spirit of the atmospheres. 
 
 The belly, too, is in the human conspiracy; it would be dead to 
 the rest if it did not breathe. The abdominal breath is the most 
 physical of all, commanded by powerful muscles, and destined to 
 suck in that large food upon which the belly lives, and whose plea- 
 sures it respires. As we have observed already, we need only lay 
 the hand low down, and we shall feel our hunger moving and busy 
 in the workings of its native cave. 
 
 The belly, however, not merely breathes its general atmosphere, 
 the food, from the world of food lying in the stomach and intestines, 
 but its organs and viscera breathe in each their peculiar blood, and 
 breathe out their excretions. For each organ has a precise form 
 and constitution, and like every other machine acts according to its 
 construction. The power of the great steam engine, the lungs, is 
 communicated to all, but each takes it in its own way. For exam- 
 ple, whpn the liver is drawn out or breathes, and is filled with liver- 
 thoughts and energies by its roused nerves, the expansion follows 
 its make and texture; it is a motion of the machinery of the liver; 
 and the purified blood on the one hand, and the bile on the other, 
 are woven accordingly. So when the kidney is drawn out to act, it 
 is a motion of the machinery of the kidney. The different machines 
 moving in different ways, perform their functions, draw in their 
 blood and manufacture it, exactly according to their build, each 
 with a difference from the rest. There is no tyrannous influence of 
 the lungs; their traction upon the gear of the organs is only the 
 power necessary to set them to work, to enable them to revolve in 
 their places, and to put forth their given genius for the common- 
 wealth of which they are independent members. 
 
 Each organ of the body has, therefore, its own sphere, within 
 which it is individual. It is true that its force comes from without, 
 but then it is a force answering to that which it desires from within 
 by the very nature of its nerves. It is, therefore, a rule, that the 
 blood is merely carried by the heart and vessels to the doors of the 
 organs, but is not intruded; for on the threshold of the organs it 
 encounters another force, and is drawn inwards or sent outwards 
 
THE BREATHING OF TnE BODY. 103 
 
 only at the times when the organ draws it or expels it. In a word, 
 at the organs the jurisdiction of the heart and arteries ceases ; and 
 that of the organ itself begins. 
 
 To complete the empire of the respiration, we notice that the 
 muscles and limbs breathe like the rest. During repose this is more 
 difficult to show, but even then, if we attend carefully to the draw 
 of the expansion passing from the belly down the legs, we shall 
 find that the skin tends out in an inverse pyramid from the loins to 
 the toes and heels; like trowsers tight at the bottom, but expanding 
 and contracting above, and chiefly at the top. While, however, we 
 are at rest, the respiration of the limbs is scarcely noticeable, be- 
 yond the parts, of the arms and thighs immediately contiguous to 
 the body. But when we rise into motion, and the will comes forth, 
 the effect is different; and in powerful volitions and actions a limb 
 of air becomes steel, runs rigorously down to our toes and fingers. 
 The skin is braced so tight, that the muscles threaten to start 
 through it, and the will in the same manner menaces to bare itself 
 by throwing off the muscles. The clothes and the body fly out like 
 concentric planetary rings in a rapid vortex. The man becomes 
 more and more of air; he ceases to lie, he ceases to sit, he ceases 
 to stand, and, like an elastic sphere bounding upon a point, the ball 
 of the foot is his only contact with the ground. This is the extreme 
 effect of the aeration of his limbs. He has become a bird for that 
 moment, and can then fly through difficulties, which are the atmo- 
 sphere of these great actions of the lungs. 
 
 The lungs, then, are consenting organs in muscular and gymnas- 
 tic efforts, and precise muscles of breath or spirit lie under the mus- 
 cles of flesh, and lend them force, hardness, and sphere in their 
 operations. 
 
 It is also to be remarked, that as inspiration commences a poste- 
 riori, or from the muscular system, and as all the muscles concur 
 to it more or less, so the inspiratory effort may commence from any 
 part of the frame, and the breathing will be differenced according 
 to the part. In ordinary normal breathing, the thoracic and inter- 
 costal muscles appear to begin the act; but in pleurisy the centre 
 of operations is changed, the breathing becomes " abdominal," and 
 the action upon the chest is secondary. In like manner, any mus- 
 
104 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 cle of the frame may take the lead in initiating the action, for all 
 the muscles are connected together, and tend instinctively to influ- 
 ence each other. Thus we may have splenic breathing, or umbilical 
 breathing, or hepatic breathing, according to the part of the surface 
 which begins the inspiratory traction. Now, the spirit of any ac- 
 tion is according to its beginning in the body. But this is too im- 
 portant a subject to be discussed within our present limits. 
 
 It is now, therefore, evident that the movements of the respira- 
 tion are not confined to the chest, but are systemic motions pervad- 
 ing the head, body and limbs, and lying at the basis of the func- 
 tions of the parts; and thus that bodily actions or functions are 
 never created, but only shaped or formed out of a stock of motion 
 given in the nature of things. Furthermore, as habits are no 
 sooner engendered than they are written upon the body, and espe- 
 cially upon the nervous system, it is plain that this habit of recipro- 
 cal breathing is deeply inscribed as a second nature upon the animal 
 textures, and that they tend to fall into it upon the least impulse 
 given ; according to the well-known laws of recurrence in the bodily 
 frame. Thus, on the showing of facts, life may be defined as the 
 progressive education of the organs and viscera into habits of breath- 
 ing which contradistinguish them from dead organs. 
 
 What we have said might have been taken by analogy from the 
 air as well as from the lungs. For the air also has the three func- 
 tions; a chemical, by which it combines with other substances; a 
 statical, by which it presses with so many pounds to the square 
 inch; and a mechanical, by which it serves as a motor force when- 
 ever its columns are displaced or its volume agitated. The lungs, 
 as we have now shown, correspond to, and make use of the air in all 
 these three departments. We may, therefore, resume in saying, 
 that the chemical powers of air are chemico-vital powers of lungs, 
 and the mechanical powers of air, mechanico-vital powers of lungs. 
 
 We do not forget, in these observations, that breathing commences 
 only at birth, and that another order of things prevails previously. 
 But this different state does not contradict the views put forth. 
 Were this the place, we might pursue the thread of science into that 
 other and attractive but mysterious sphere of whose still spring the 
 round of this life jg but the first expansion. But we must be con- 
 
UNIVERSAL ATTRACTION. 105 
 
 tent with remarking, that, during embryonic existence, the main 
 business is the work of formation ; the body is then upon the stocks ; 
 and as the blood first and the heart afterwards are the builders of 
 the body, the brain or nervous principle operates through them, 
 and its movements keep pace with theirs; but after birth, the usage 
 of the body is the main thing; the life becomes more than the 
 meat; the body is now to be worn out in action; its growth and 
 repair are secondary, and all with reference to its employment; and 
 this, as we have seen, depends upon the lungs; wherefore, in the 
 second case, the brain shifts its patronage and alters its step, and 
 works through and with the lungs. It is what might be expected — 
 that the brain should respire with the heart in the heart-epoch, 
 which anticipates the period of birth, but in the epoch of the lungs, 
 or conscious life, should sympathize or synchronize with those 
 organs which have the ruling mission, and transfer its sceptre to the 
 younger dynasty of the chest. 
 
 The views we have been considering find an agreeable response in 
 established laws of nature, constituting a branch of the doctrine of 
 universal attraction, whose appliance they show in the human frame. 
 Nor is this an insignificant support that they receive. When a law 
 is sure for one department, we have a right, assuming unity of sys- 
 tem, to look for that law in every sphere, though modified in each 
 by its new circumstances. So, if attraction be the most general 
 law of the dead universe, we know that in a new sense it is the 
 general law of organization, and also of the human or living uni- 
 verse. But, in the actions of the lungs we have found it omni- 
 present in the body; and have seen the spring of an attraction 
 applied to the organs, which causes them to operate ^ery much ac- 
 cording to the Newtonian formula. Here then we join forces with 
 the discoverer of material attraction, who regarded it as the imme- 
 diate finger of God, freshly noting the solidity of whose wisdom, we 
 find in the body that attraction is no abstract formula, but palpable 
 and living lungs. Nor can we doubt than when analogy is better 
 known, and can be boldly worked, the light that issues from the 
 unfolded doors of the human body, will stream forth into the vault 
 of nature, and kindle celestial physics with a breathing wisdom that 
 
106 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 never could come from inanimate things, even though their theatre 
 be ancient night with its gorgeous pageant of stars. 
 
 The active or alternate attraction in the body, like all attraction, 
 amounts also to a law of association — in this case the association of 
 the organs. If each organ takes, and does, what it wants, each 
 organ is conveniently placed to do and to take it. The organs 
 which need the best blood, are so seated at the banquet that they 
 obtain it naturally and necessarily. They are succeeded in punc- 
 tilious rank by the rest, each having its attractions seconded by its 
 place round the table. There is a society in our members. But 
 this is such a subject, that we must be content with a glance at its 
 stupendous proprieties. The order which it involves, could we open 
 it but a little, is of visionary magnificence, and might make us into 
 propagandists of the organization of the body. For the Divine 
 Architect rests not in middling fitness, but now, as at the first, per- 
 fection is his way, and embodied truth is his everlasting child. 
 
 Surely, then, we say, at the risk of repetition, it is no longer 
 difficult to see the fundamental importance of the lungs in the 
 human body. Life consists in the peculiar faculties, passions, in- 
 stincts, senses and actions, which our bodies execute ; or life is spirit- 
 ual motion. This cannot be founded upon physical inertia or dead 
 body, but upon physical activity or living body. And this activity 
 must be constant and pervading, lest life should be stopped by some 
 lump of rest or carcase remaining on its hands. Motion or vibra- 
 tion, therefore, in various degrees, continually sways the organism, 
 and shakes it out of the rank of death-like things. Thus it is always 
 on the tremble and tiptoe ; its motion its main essence, and ready for 
 obedience, as a servant all ear, eye and sense, watching for command. 
 This could not be the case if the body, or any part of it were at rest. 
 The rest would require to be broken, and the body to be roused, 
 before it could obey, and a thousand volitions would fail before one 
 was brought into effect. But by means of the lungs which keep 
 everything on the move, the man is ever ready for living operations. 
 Thus, the quickness of the body's service depends entirely upon its 
 response to the animations of the lungs. Or, life is founded upon 
 motion, and the motion is evoked and maintained out of rest by 
 physical life, animation, or in other words, pulmonary breathing. 
 
SUMMARY OF MATERIAL BREATHING. 107 
 
 Thus far, we recognize a scale of physiological truths pertaining 
 to the respiration, and which we may distinguish into vegetable, 
 animal and human. The doctrine which recognizes the lungs as 
 providers of air, is on the vegetable level; well for it, if it does not 
 think that it is talking about men, when it concerns only cabbages. 
 For plants are like men in this particular, of taking in and giving 
 out air. The doctrine which regards breathing as of use for motion, 
 belongs properly to animal physiology. Lastly, that doctrine which 
 considers the psychological part of breathing, or the manner in 
 which the motion embodies, represents and carries out those facul- 
 ties of thought, feeling and action, and those destinies that are 
 peculiarly human, is proper human physiology. So each thing is 
 named and characterized from its own essence, and from nothing 
 either beneath it or above it. 
 
 This concludes our present study of the effects that the lungs pro- 
 duce upon the exterior, and thereby upon the interiors of the frame ; 
 we observe that they endow every organ with outward life, courage 
 and spirit, and call forth its talents in its daily work by the influ- 
 ence of attraction. And the attraction being most general, is 
 common to all the members, which therefore, conspire or breathe 
 together for realizing the goods of life, and thence come under a 
 genuine law of association. 
 
 Now as truths always point out duties, there is something im- 
 mediately practical which arises from our view of the importance 
 of the movements of the lungs. If each organ contributes its 
 share to the ensemble of life, each demands a special care in the 
 maintenance of health, which is the wealth of life. Much has 
 been written, and justly, upon tight lacing, as injurious both to 
 the development and stability of the body. But if our ideas be 
 correct, the duty of leaving the chest and the body free, becomes ten- 
 fold more imperative than before. If motion be the essence of the life 
 of the organs, and if it extends to the whole frame and to the limbs, 
 then all articles of apparel may fairly be supervised and limited in 
 their pressure, in order to give our persons their lawful liberty. In 
 this case the emancipation of the body itself is a subject of indivi- 
 dual and domestic politics of the utmost importance, and the science 
 of every organ should wring a progressive Magna Charta of dress 
 
108 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 from the kings of fashion. It is another proof that we speak the 
 truth, because it tends so directly, yet so newly, to reinforce our 
 old duties, which is an excellent test of truth. There are in fact 
 as many kinds of public health as there are different organs. There 
 is one which should be represented at the board of fashion, as hav- 
 ing a veto, and establishing a precedent upon whatever is enslaving 
 in dress. And it is not to be doubted that in what we wear, equally 
 as in what we are, grace, pleasure, and beauty are compatible with 
 freedom, and with freedom only.* 
 
 But dress is not the only thing that coerces the frame ; or rather 
 I should say, the body itself is a dress which under certain circum- 
 stances may oppress and hinder the breathing. A " belly with 
 good capon lined," is a garment difficult to ensoul. Over eating is 
 a tyrant against motion. It impedes the play, not only of the 
 lungs, but of the other members. A mass of crude food is like an 
 avalanche of stones descending upon a country, which buries the soil 
 under dead materials. How plainly do we see the small life in the 
 scant breath of the unwieldy hon vivant, whose lungs have porter's 
 work to do in lifting his disproportioned paunch. So it is that 
 liberty and temperance are among the natural commandments of 
 the lungs. 
 
 We have now spoken of the first commerce of the lungs with 
 the body ; it remains to consider some relations which they main- 
 tain with the senses and the other powers, that is to say, with the 
 faculties of the brain, and by which they again influence the bodily 
 organs. 
 
 Now the material senses inspire the body with its first proper 
 life, and concur with the pulmonary inspiration. For beginning 
 with touch } we find that pleasant contact which soothes the skin, is 
 
 * All parts of the body may be smothered or suffocated if confined. This is 
 often seen in disease, and particularly in delicate and nervous females, who begin 
 to gasp if there is the least pressure of physical restraint, and a touch sets them 
 off into hysterical movements, the feeling of suffocation reacting from the cir- 
 cumferences or limbs towards the centres. Life in such persons is an exquisite 
 balance which appreciates quantities of compulsion and restraint that make no 
 sensible impression upon hardier organisms. 
 
THE BREATH OF THE SENSES. 109 
 
 accompanied with full breaths, sometimes running into deep sighs if 
 the sense be peculiarly grateful ; and in extreme cases of the kind, 
 inspiration almost obliterates expiration, which survives only in 
 gasps and murmurs. Painful contact on the other hand strait- 
 ens the lungs, and causes the breath to be held as long as possible. 
 In short we breathe in the touches that delight us, but confine to 
 their first place of invasion, and shut away from the vitals, the 
 discords or agonies of our skins ; and this by fixation or resolute- 
 ness of the lungs. Respiration then draws up the sense of touch 
 towards the general sensorium. It also sucks in the sense of taste 
 to the same goal. For taste lives when inspiration is proceeding, 
 but when we breathe out, or stop the breath, sapid substances do 
 not make their proper impressions. We keep back breath when we 
 swallow drugs, and the nauseous taste is not drawn into our con- 
 sciousness. At meals, however, we breath with satisfaction, for the 
 circumstances are inspiring; and tending, as they do, to enlarge the 
 man, they set his machineries in motion with a life of extra breaths. 
 Smell is inspiration in its highest case ; the nose is a lung planted 
 upon the brain, to feed it with perceptions and excite it to opera- 
 tions. Air and scent are inseparable companions. To breathe 
 therefore involves to smell, the one function swallowing the other 
 up into the brain, and down to the bottom of the lungs. The 
 motives to breathe furnished by these three senses make inspiration 
 deeper and larger than it would otherwise be (p. 94), for pleasure 
 takes great lungfuls ; thus they animate the lungs with superior 
 life, and the organization is opened by the senses through the lungs 
 to a degree beyond what insensate lungs could effect. As for the 
 senses of hearing and siylit, the lungs do not so directly aid them, 
 because light and sound are above their attractions. Their active 
 offices terminate with the blood and the air ; only their passive offices 
 extend to the ether and the nervous system. For hearing and sight, 
 so far as they are essentially acts of attention, are best transacted 
 when the breath is held ) and indeed impressive sights and sounds 
 tend to suspend it. We observe then, with regard to the senses 
 and their connection with the lungs, that touch and taste browse in 
 the fields of inspiration ; that smell, a winged sense, flits with cease- 
 10 
 
110 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 less play between inspiration and expiration ; and that sight and 
 hearing, concurring often with suspension of the breath, live above 
 the lungs in the airless cairns of the brain. Touches and tastes 
 we breathe in ; smells we scent, or breathe in and out ; and sights 
 and sounds we do not breathe, but see and hear, athwart the air, 
 either in spite or in the absence of its proper motions. 
 
 Thus much for the passive immission of the material or pulmo- 
 nary senses. The senses however have an active condition in which 
 their sensations are perceptions. In this state they partake of the 
 common law of the two higher senses, and are awake and efficient 
 at the times of suspended respiration. For active sense is a breath- 
 less power, and does not draw in body, but puts forth soul. Thus 
 touch as a mental product is tact: it turns the tables upon its 
 objects, makes itself critically harder than they, and resists and 
 rejects, picks and chooses their impressions by deliberate inquest. 
 The breath awaits while the steady-fingering thought explores, and 
 then inspires, not whatever comes, but precise information. Let 
 the reader observe himself when he is feeling for such information, 
 and he will find his curiosity rejoicing in periods of suspended lungs. 
 In active taste the same rule obtains. We no longer draw in the 
 pleasant flavors by mouthfuls, but disparting the tongue for special 
 acts, we make little sucks and respirations of the palate upon speci- 
 men morsels; we fill the decent sense with judgment, taking small 
 account of pleasure ; and holding the general breath, we calculate 
 the result, undistracted by the lungs, in its smallest figures. last- 
 ing, then, as contradistinguished from taste, is carried on in the 
 intervals of common breathing. So also is smelling, which works 
 its problems upon minute quantities of odors, shutting away the 
 volumes ; actively we exert our smell upon mere snatches of scent 
 made to run hither and thither in the inquisition of the nose. 
 And as we said before, we hear best in breathless attention, and see 
 most observantly when the eye-thought gazes, unshaken and un- 
 prompted by the lungs. 
 
 It is also to be noticed that the voice, which consists of percep- 
 tions freed from the mind, and launched into the air, is made of the 
 material of the expirations. The mind is breathed out into the so- 
 
THE BREATH OF THE PASSIONS. Ill 
 
 cial world by the expirations and their pauses, and not by the inspi- 
 rations.* 
 
 The sum of these remarks is, that the exercise of the senses is 
 rhythmical, chiming with some part of the respiration of the lungs ; 
 either with inspiration, expiration, or some level or pause of the one 
 or the other at which the breath may be suspended. And as the 
 senses belong to the brain, evidence is afforded that its animations, 
 which comprise the senses, coincide with the respirations of the 
 lungs.f 
 
 Passing to another sphere, we may glance at the connection of the 
 lungs with the passions. On this theme it may be sufficient to say, 
 that the breathing varies with every emotion j a circumstance which 
 may be verified in experience, by noting the respiration at different 
 times. If we could remove from the language of passion all refer- 
 ence to these organs, we should cancel I know not how much of its 
 expressiveness. If we could take the variety of the breath itself 
 away, the man, the bigger he was, would be the more an unmean- 
 ing lump. Where would mirth be, if it lost all its laughter? What 
 would become of hope, if it had no dilated breast ? What would be the 
 
 * Oratory especially requires the management of the breath, or the economical 
 guidance of the expirations by the conceptions. If you spend your air too fast, 
 a part of your in-coming air will go to pay off the extravagance, and you will 
 probably be in nature's debt throughout the speech, presenting more or less of 
 the phenomenon of a person who has " lost his breath." To " lose the breath" 
 is to fall into an unnatural rapidity of inspiration and expiration, which will not 
 be governed by the will, in which case the mind has pro tanto lost the power 
 of dispensing the air. 
 
 f We have a further proof of the consentaneousness of the lung movements 
 with the brain movements (pp. 62 — 65), in the fact that the voice, proceeding 
 from the head of the lungs, is the voice of the mind, and images its thought or 
 corresponds to its animations. But if in this exalted function of air such corre- 
 spondence exists, does not thej_ung_air correspond in its times with the brain 
 spirit, equally with the larynx air, which is the voice ? If the top of the pulmonic 
 wind answers to the surface of the brain spirit, or, in other words, the voice to 
 the mind of the moment, does not the correspondence run upwards and down- 
 wards, and does not deep call unto deep through silence more than through 
 speech, and the spirit above to the spirit below through the lifetime as well as 
 through the second? Do not our little harmonies swim in great harmonies, 
 which are not ours only, but creation's and the Creator's? But upon this sub- 
 ject we do not dwell, because we purpose to treat of the voice on another occa- 
 sion. 
 
112 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 plight of love, bereft of its delicious sighs?* How could pride exist 
 without its hardened chest and swollen throat ? Or rage without 
 his choking breaths ? Or anger without his tempests ? How should 
 our poor weariness endure, if it had never a yawn to console it ? 
 And how would joy and gladness fail if their healthy bosoms did not 
 swell with trembling airs of the clear blue firmament, eager to re- 
 ascend in songs? But these are only a few of the presents that the 
 lungs draw from the mighty winds to bestow upon their brethren, 
 the passions. The law is this. Each infant or dawning passion 
 disports itself first in the brain; attitudinizes there to the top 
 of its bent in the chambers of imagery ; observes and admires its 
 goodly appearance in the mirrors of fancy, and is king uncontrolled 
 in its own little cortical spheres. Then as the lungs are plastic as 
 air, it descends into the theatre of resistance through their conve- 
 nient mid-way, and shapes and crystalizes the wind for the moment 
 into hardness and strength, softness or gentleness, sighs or fulness, 
 or any of the other forms which the dramatic occasion requires, or 
 the muscles and limbs demand as a ground for peculiar action. For 
 each emotion it hews the body into a different block, wherewith the 
 emotion pushes its way in the world. In a word, the lungs are the 
 bodily arena of the passions; they give shape to our impulses, in- 
 crease and deepen them, and begin to carry them into works. In 
 inward gestures and deeply silent murmurings they first imprison 
 the words and deeds that are at last to resound through history, and 
 push the nations to their goal. 
 
 But to trace the special inhabitation of the passions or brain spirits 
 in the breaths or lung spirits, will require a volume. f It may how- 
 ever be noticed that the inspiring passions concur with the pleasant 
 
 * Here we may remark that the spirit of the passions and actions, nay, of the 
 states of man generally, may receive its formula from the breath of the lungs ; 
 for the breathing is a representative phenomenon, and is to action what words 
 are to thought, and what tones or music are to feeling. If we hear the breathing 
 of those whom we do not see, we infer to a certain degree what they are doing, 
 and their general tranquillity, or the reverse. And this is a walk of observation 
 that may be cultivated to almost any extent. In very susceptible persons, the 
 inferences drawn from the breathing of others are wonderful. 
 
 f We have made some progress with such a work, but the field is of an un- 
 expected magnitude. 
 
THE BREATH BUILDING OF IMAGINATION, 113 
 
 senses, and are boused in the inspirations ; that the depressing pas- 
 sions tend to lower or kill the breath; as extreme fear, for instance, 
 which makes us aghast or ghostless, and causes the lungs to forget 
 their reciprocations : and that the middle passions have a middle 
 effect. And it may further be noted that the peculiar respirations 
 which are the bodily spirits or tendencies of the several passions, 
 have the office of provoking the latter, or reacting upon them. For 
 example, in rage, does it not begin to fume and swell in the lungs ? 
 is not "the steam got up" in those locomotives; and does not the 
 brain, with tempests in his hand, not only lash the body into the 
 pace which answers to its own madness, but feed the madness out 
 of the wind-swift speed ? These passionate breaths, although not 
 classified by science, are known to the observing, and interpret the 
 underplay of the feelings, even when speech and smiles dissemble. 
 In this field then the lungs have several offices. By concurring with 
 the passions they raise the frame into each, or communicate it to the 
 blood and secretions, enabling the mind and body to keep company 
 through all changes, or to be impassioned together. By the same 
 concurrence they amplify the field, and stimulate the fire of the pas- 
 sions, fanning it with the oxygen of their spacious movements. They 
 also enlarge the material body to the scope of animal life, which is 
 passion, causing stomach and liver to flame and expand with it; as 
 we saw in the case of the senses, that they extend the enlarging 
 breath of sense through the lungs to the same material organs. The 
 lungs then lend the passions of the mind physical force, and the or- 
 gans of the body passionate movements ; and by this means they 
 make the one and the other, or the brain and the viscera, into per- 
 fect bodily animals. 
 
 But the imagination also, which is the intellect of passion, builds 
 especial houses in the breath, or, as it is said, forms air castles. 
 These are its own expirations, in which it revels, for what it draws 
 in is nothing to it, but what it breaths out is all. It does not how- 
 ever expire either to do or to die, but to run after its breaths as they 
 sail through the air; not desiring to leave the world, but to propa- 
 gate its image children in the universal imagery. The smoke of its 
 lung-pipe keeps it busy with the plasma of a thousand twirls. It 
 makes its objects out of its breath, and hence we locate it among 
 
 10* 
 
114 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 the expirations. During such imagination, accordingly, the head is 
 held up, and the breathing tube to the very mouth levelled like a 
 barrel : words fly forth with arrowy straightness; the inspiration is 
 inaudible though sufficient, but the man pants audibly towards the 
 unseen, and each pant externizes more of the breath on which the 
 faculty pulls and feeds. When the breath-palace is built, the laws 
 of gravity bring it to the ground; whence air castles, as the frequent 
 beginning of earth castles, are not to be despised; imagination being 
 the proximate architect of the arts and sciences. We may formulize 
 the respiration of this faculty by saying, that during its exercise the 
 lungs take their airs to themselves just as the imagination repre- 
 sents its objects to itself externally. This lung conceit is one means 
 by which the body holds its own sphere, and protects it amid the 
 great fluctuations. 
 
 Respiration has also a peculiar relation to the intellectual pro- 
 cesses, which lie, it will be found, in fixity of breath, proper state 
 of lungs, or suspended respiration. Among other reasons for this is 
 the fact, already pointed out, that inspiration is a means of drawing 
 up the bodily sensations to the brain ; for the body is as a sponge 
 let down into the world, whose attraction upon the waves of mate- 
 rial sense is exerted by pulmonary inspiration. But in proportion 
 as these lower influences are admitted, often in the same proportion 
 intellect is drugged, and sleeps in the cortical beds. We speak of 
 a familiar fact. But because the mind has power over the lungs, 
 it can handle the senses by their means, and prevent the floods of 
 worldliness from penetrating to the upper sensoria. So also can it 
 stop the mounting passions. This it does by suspending the breath, 
 and cutting off" the supplies of sense and animality. Or, to speak 
 more anatomically, the brain at such times refuses to be invaded by 
 the blood, which contains the turmoil of the lower life : the cortical 
 spherules keep it at arm's length : for it is to be remembered that 
 the brain expires concurrently with the lungs, and when the latter 
 shut off the blood, the brain does the like. Hence it is that thought 
 is still, and contemplation breathless: each involving, first, fixed 
 breath, and second, a small expiring; and so on, until the thought 
 is traversed, or the effort ends and begins anew. Deep thought, 
 then, where not given directly by heaven, but conceded to human 
 
THE BREATH OF THOUGHT. 115 
 
 effort, is gained by the descent of a ladder of expirations, and the 
 body dies down into intelligence by this scale : the best of such per- 
 ceptions come from the confines of expiration and the grave, which 
 lies at the bottom of the lungs. Intellect, therefore, in this light, 
 is the capacity of standing and expiring, and living still ; death to 
 the body governing the body; an infinitesimal immortality into which 
 thought expires and expires, to brighten and brighten its lives. To 
 the senses, suspended animation is suspended consciousness ; to the 
 intellect suspended animation may be life, thought and supreme 
 wakefulness. For it lives when the body is gasping : its chosen 
 sons, as they drag the world onwards, are verily at their list gasp, 
 in the acceptance of their own mortal immortality. The intellect, 
 then, through the lungs, puts the body down under its palm ; 
 whispers to the sea of delirious sense, "Peace, be still !" and plays 
 its melodies in the charmed air upon the whitest keys of silence. 
 
 Intellect touches so near upon trance, that the highest cases of 
 either involve common phenomena, and exist in the same persons. 
 But trance is complete suspension of the breath, sometimes foi long 
 periods. This suspension of the breath of the lungs involves the 
 standing of the spirit of the brain, and the stand of this is tie gaze 
 of the intellectual eye, whose final and hard victory is to sie. In 
 some subjects, if the lungs are fixed, including the brain, tie body 
 can wait for breath and spirit for an indefinite time. It stll lives, 
 because there is a standing spirit in the body and a standing breath 
 in the lungs, which partake of the fixity, or are charned and 
 entranced. These are cases in which life stands, and tie proper 
 spirit can go and return, because the animal state is safe md fixed. 
 Nay, the time of the trance or separation counts for nothing. We 
 do not know a limit to the duration of the body under tiese condi- 
 tions ; it is as a day miraculously prolonged, when our sun stands 
 still upon Mount Gibeon and our moon in the Valley of Ajalon. 
 Nor do we know a limit to the excursions of the intelbct on these 
 holidays, when it visits its celestial birthplace, secure cf finding its 
 lungs and factories ready to start into reciprocation at a moment's 
 notice on its re-arrival.* 
 
 * The reader will notice that scientific experiments maybe nude by whoever 
 pleases, upon the concurrences of the lungs with the mind and ttebody ; and that 
 
116 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 It must be recollected that in these conditions the lungs are not 
 emptied of air; for expiration does not go to that extent, but plays 
 upon a certain depth of the pulmonary reservoir, leaving the re- 
 mainder undisturbed. The involuntary right of the lungs to the 
 air is strongly asserted if we attempt to expire beyond a certain 
 point. Otherwise, the body would lose its life size, the wedge of 
 atmosp'aere would have ceased to open it, and the spirit crushed out 
 of the body could not lift it a second time into the operations of 
 breathing. 
 
 Moreover, in these conditions of suspended animation the chemical 
 laws do not persist, but like the rest are suspended. Held breath 
 concurs with held spirit, held blood,* held life and held time. The 
 tissues, particles and fluids, and the wind in the lungs, are entranced ; 
 the body is absent from chemical corrosions as the mind from animal 
 provocations. The air is not required for exchanging products with 
 the blood, but for maintaining the level of the state, and serving as 
 an eHstic animus under the fixed attitude of the brain. And even 
 when the air is expired in partial trance, it is not because it is 
 vitiatal, but for deepening the state, and as it were steering and 
 standing in nearer to the shores and lighthouses of death. 
 
 We aow see what this concurrence of the lungs bestows upon the 
 organs, for they all stand when the lungs stand, taking up their 
 places as fleshly eyes in the attitude and body of the intelligence.']" 
 
 for this purpose no apparatus is necessary beyond observation on the one hand, 
 and the possession of the human frame on the other. This, then, may be a uni- 
 versal science. In the same way we showed, in the Chapter on the Brain, (pp. 
 72, 73), fbit there are vivisections which may be studied without torturing 
 animals, na\nely, the divisions and sects of a certain creature which cuts up its 
 own specie a and its own brains for us every day. 
 
 * The hea-t indeed in itself, though not in its blood in the organs, is an excep- 
 tion to the universal concurrence of the frame with the breathing ; for although 
 influenced thereby, it is not reduced, like the organs, to the pulmonic rhythm. 
 But as we shall show, it belongs to another regiment of natures, and to a dif- 
 ferent disciplhe from the lungs. 
 
 t The concurrence of the head with the body is provided in many ways ; but 
 the moving hoimony of the lungs and the brains appears to be at the basis of all. 
 Let us take art instance of this concurrence from the muscular system, and let 
 the subject of he experiment be walking. Now let him fix the eyes in a gaze 
 upon any object. Soon the walk becomes slower, and the body is brought to a 
 pause, as it seem, voluntarily. If the gaze be continued under favorable circum- 
 
SUSPENDED ANIMATION. 117 
 
 It is the interpolation of the higher life and endurance into the 
 organic movement; breathless but deathless moments set in the 
 midst of the wear and tear of the tissues; chemical moth and rust 
 ceasing their gnaw, and incorruptibility paramount in the corruptible. 
 So the body represents the proper mind ; the intellect sinks a shaft 
 into the flesh, making it dramatic of the moments that we live 
 beyond sense and passion. Man would not be embodied if that 
 which is best in him were not bodily set forth. The lungs then in- 
 troduce this transcendent representation, and the mOral virtues that 
 inhabit this order of intelligence commune with the organs through 
 their means. They put down the body, give it the lesson of death or 
 self-denial, and frame in it still windows of experience opening to the 
 timeless state. They emancipate the mind for the occasion from the 
 stimulus of the passions. In short, they embody the moral intel- 
 lect, or give the frame a hyper-animal life not lying in physical 
 
 stances, the will thus brought into the topmost muscles (those of the eyes), and 
 which has riveted the feet, will begin to rivet the muscular attention from above 
 downwards. And although the eyes close, if the will be kept up, rigidity will 
 invade the jaws, then the arms, and then the legs — producing a state like cata- 
 lepsy. These facts are familiar to those who are acquainted with Mr. Braid's 
 admirable discoveries in Hypnotism. It is upon this principle that lockjaw, at- 
 tacking the high ranges of muscles about the jaw, runs down the inclined plane 
 of the muscular system, locking it as it goes, and bringing muscle after muscle 
 in tributary streams to constitute tetanus. And it is by acting on the still higher 
 point of the muscles of the eyes, that this disease may be commanded from 
 muscles loftier than its own origin. By the force of this inclined plane system, 
 the expressions of the face tend naturally to produce the gestures of the arm and 
 the postures of the body, which maybe looked upon as torrents of will, that have 
 come down at first in little streams from the mountain springs of fleshly action in 
 the countenance. 
 
 Thus the muscular frame is all made for concurrence, and forces which act upon 
 one part of it, tend to be diffused through it, as through a contimtum, but with a 
 difference of function according to the regions. The expression of the face, which 
 is the dial plate of the general mind, is the mainspring and clockwork of the 
 active body. Upon this principle, we see that smiles precede laughs, that 
 clenched jaws go before clenched fists, and, in short, that expression not only 
 anticipates but also stirs action. 
 
 These considerations furnish fresh evidence that the body is solidaire ; that 
 whatever the head does, the trunk does in its way, and the limbs in theirs: in 
 short, that man is so formed as to act only in wholes, each full size. In this way 
 we are constructed upon the principles of poetic unity, the mind and the body 
 being but one volume written out in the rhymes of the brain and the lungs. 
 
118 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 movement ; and they intellectualize the body, or contribute their 
 share towards constituting its peculiar humanity. 
 
 If sense, passion, and thought are in a certain dependence upon 
 breathing, so also is action to at least an equal extent. All fineness 
 of work, all that in art which comes out of the infinite delicacy of 
 manhood as contrasted with animality, requires a peculiar breath- 
 lessness and expiring. To listen attentively to the finest and least 
 obtrusive sounds, as with the stethoscope to the murmurs in the 
 breast, or with mouth and ear to distant music, needs a hush that 
 breathing disturbs; the common ear has to die and be born again, 
 to exercise these delicate attentions. To take an aim at a rapid- 
 flying or minute object, requires in like manner a breathless time 
 and a steady act; the very pulse must receive from the stopped 
 lungs a pressure of calm. To adjust the exquisite machinery of 
 watches or other instruments, requires in the manipulator a motion- 
 less hover of his own central springs. Even to see and observe 
 with an eye like the mind itself, necessitates a radiant pause. For 
 the negative proof, the first actions and attempts of children are 
 unsuccessful, being too quick, and full moreover of confusing 
 breaths ; the life has not fixed aerial space to play the game, but 
 the scene itself flaps and flutters with alien wishes and thoughts. 
 In short, the whole reverence of remark and deed depends upon the 
 above conditions, and we lay it down as a general truth, that every 
 man requires to educate Jus breath for Ms business. Bodily strength, 
 mental strength, both lean upon our respirations. 
 
 The co-operation and state of the lungs in mental effort is repre- 
 sented on a large scale in their strain during parturition, in which 
 they let out the air in groans from the relaxed and almost closed 
 larynx. This, which is the type of all labor, as child-bearing is the 
 image of all productiveness, is carried on by holding the breath, and 
 determining it not towards the air but towards the obstacle ; the por- 
 tion of air whose spirit is broken by the effort escaping immediately 
 afterwards in the form of a broken breath or groan. The air, 
 which exercises everywhere a universal pressure, exerts in the body, 
 when compressed by the muscles, a universal push, and is a medi- 
 um in all our fruitful pangs, whether those by which children are 
 born, or those by which thoughts, which are the mind's children. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ACTION. 119 
 
 For the brain is the womb of the soul, and the held breath during 
 the effort of thinking tends to exclude the desired thought when the 
 determination of all the parts strives towards the right part of the 
 brain. After the effort comes the groan, which shows that the 
 breath has no more will, but has done its work. It would seem 
 that in labor, the rhythm of the uterus takes the lead (pp. 103, 
 117), in commencing the breathing, and the lungs are obliged to 
 follow the strong contractions by shutting their apertures, and la- 
 boring precisely like the womb. The nervous system and the mind 
 labor also at the time in the same ratio. There is neither the free 
 child, the free mother, the free breath, or the free spirit, until the 
 birth takes place ; but the bondage of all is common and oppressive 
 to insure the emancipation. 
 
 We remarked before (pp. 87, 111) that the respiration is divisi- 
 ble into four terms, namely, inspiration, the pause or satisfaction 
 succeeding inspiration, then expiration, and then the deliberation or 
 pause which follows expiration. And we have now shown that in- 
 spiration concurs with the agrSments of sense and feeling. This is 
 the first motive of the lungs, or the pulmonary atom of the pleasures 
 of the world, compounded however of two elements, the nose-breath 
 and the mouth-breath, the former to please or inspire the mind of 
 the brain, and the latter to please the mind of the body. This term, 
 if persisted in, leads to swoon, from defect of expiration ; whence 
 swoon is the prolonged or compound atom of the pause after inspi- 
 ration. The pleased lungs are so gluttonous of this world's life, 
 that the world, bent upon equilibrium, swallows and drowns them 
 in this swoon, which is the ocean of sensual satisfactions. Expira- 
 tion, however, concurs with the spiritual life, and is the condition 
 of intellect or of dying daily. And the pause which follows expi- 
 ration, the refusal to breathe in from the surface, and the stand 
 taken in the depths, is the atom which in its least form concurs with 
 abstraction of thought, but when compounded, runs on into trance. 
 The likeness of this in the animal world is hybernation. Thus 
 every thought is a little trance, and every pleasure an initial swoon, 
 as we shall presently see that each fair breath is a little life, whe- 
 er of sleeping or waking. And thus if the breath is given in inspi- 
 ration, the spirit is impressed upon expiration ; for the spirit of hu- 
 
120 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 inanity is not in the breath which is taken in, but in that which is 
 given out; the former being planetary, but the latter psychical. 
 There is, then, something beyond foul air which man breathes forth ; 
 for the air is charged with the vital movements; there is the cha- 
 racter of the life wrought into the atmosphere, as drawn upon the 
 organs. And here again we turn to chemistry, aud demand of it, 
 besides the analysis of average breathings, the contents of the acci- 
 dental breaths emitted in peculiar moments ? We ask of it whether 
 the breath of mercy is foul to the lungs of those over whom the mer- 
 cy leans? Whether the laws of vitiated air hold here, or no? or 
 whether there is an angel- galvanism by whose tension at such times 
 the body and the air fly clean above matter and its pedantries? — 
 Whether there is any antiseptic significance in the fact, that Jesus 
 breathed upon his disciples, and said, receive ye the Holy Ghost? 
 or in this that we swallow the breaths of those we love, and listen 
 to the breaths of those we venerate ? Whether the last breath of 
 beloved friends, caught in all unsophisticated times, is exhaustively 
 represented by the formula, O+H+C? Whether the blood and the 
 body decompose in the same ratio during all states of the mind ? or 
 whether there are not moments, and degrees every moment, in the 
 ratio of destruction; moments of immortality in which no waste oc- 
 curs, and all intermediate grades between these and physical ruin 
 and decay ? And further whether there are not facts in human so- 
 ciety, as of intimacy, closeness of persons, community of breaths, 
 which show that the expirations of one man are in a cheerful and 
 life-giving sense the inspirations of another ? But chemistry can no 
 more analyze human air, than animal air and vegetable air, but it 
 throws them down before oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, the insati- 
 able Cerberus of the laboratory. On the contrary, we induce from 
 larger facts, not otherwise accounted for, that the motions of the in- 
 tellect and will, or the better faculties, are the salts of the human 
 air, which varyingly wrest it from the gripe of the chemical laws. 
 We induce that humanized (p 107) lungs have a duty to perform 
 to the social sphere outside, and that the expirations from such pay 
 back the world with usury for the simple air which the inspirations 
 take away. This, however, cannot be confirmed from the steams of 
 crowded assemblies, but from the closets of privacy, and from the 
 
THE CONSPIRING OF MANKIND. 121 
 
 exceptional facts and moments in which neighbor comes close to 
 neighbor, and man hangs as a lover upon the breath of man. 
 
 Indeed it seems remarkable that the influence of the vegetable 
 world upon climate, and of electricity upon the atmosphere, should 
 be admitted, and that no influence of the human world of a similar 
 but higher kind, should be suspected. Are the thought-movements 
 and the will-movements sooner absorbed than the sound-movements ? 
 do they pattern and sculpture the air with less efficiency? or in what 
 do their modifications end? Is the music of man's brain and lungs 
 of no Orphic power in the tenseness of God's created harmony? 
 But the time is not yet for these and similar questions; they are how- 
 ever as doves which float already in the poetic air, and the dry land 
 of science is about to appear, upon which they can alight. 
 
 Quitting this consideration we have to say, that not only the mo- 
 ments but the lifetime are parted into breathing spaces; for the first 
 breath and the last are the bounds of this existence, and the ends 
 shape the means, or constitute the career itself into a series of breath- 
 ings. These larger lines of breath consist of habitual modes of 
 respiration answering to the tone of life, and constituting pulmonary 
 morals, manners and customs. They are determined by the mixture 
 of the four terms already specified in various proportions, and by 
 the velocities and spiritual qualities which are carried into these. 
 In this way the lungs move and associate individuals, as we before 
 noticed that they move and associate the organs (p. 106); for only 
 those who conspire or breathe alike are together in thought and in- 
 tention ; and the society of persons tends to last only so long as they 
 have common respirations. The attempt to prolong companionship 
 beyond these limits disarranges the springs of the organs; the pre- 
 sence of heterogeneous persons straitens our breath, or as we say, 
 dispirits us. But we shall have to recur to this subject, of discord 
 or want of tune in breathing, when we speak of Public Health, which 
 means public association on the principles of the organs. 
 
 In mechanical cooperation the unanimity of breathing among the 
 workmen is essential to oneness of effort. Hence the rude cheery 
 work-shouts that sailors extemporize in weighing anchor, masons in 
 hauling up blocks of stone, and so forth; and hence the adjunction 
 of music to battalions, which require to have one spirit and step. 
 11 
 
122 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 A mass that is to be as one man must breathe alike in its parts. 
 The same thing is true of society, or unanimity in its higher depart- 
 ments. The heard breath of your neighbor is moreover regulative 
 and contagious upon your own, and increases and realizes the union 
 of which it is the effect, especially when the breath of all is repre- 
 sented in an audible rhythm. In this way the Eddas and poetries 
 bind mankind into sheaves, being as common respirations or great 
 world-tunes, the sum of beginnings of musical acts from the sailors 
 upon the river of time. 
 
 And here we may observe that throughout life the lungs exercise 
 the dramatic office of producing in the frame those motions which 
 answer to the periods of existence. When the man is to sleep, the 
 lungs give the effigy of sleep in the system, and the slumbering soul 
 is imbedded in a slumbering body. When he is to awaken, the 
 breath of morning sparkles from the lungs throughout him, and 
 master and servant rise in a breath for their unanimous day's work. 
 As a child, his innocent brains find a sisterly helpmate in his playful 
 and peace-breathing lungs;* his blood and vitals, like his pretty face, 
 are full of sweet and innocuous motions; his lungs transplant the 
 childhood to his tissues; and soul and body, head and feet, he is all 
 one child. The youthful spirit again and the youthful body are each 
 the other's, and the bond between them is still lung, attraction, or 
 the lover's link. When he is a man, his lungs too put away child- 
 ish things; heart, liver, brain and bowels are engaged in manly 
 movements; the breath of manhood strengthens him; his vitals are 
 adult and personal; and the man lives well in an outer man who is 
 the body of his powers and the servant of thoughts. Age steals 
 upon him in the wants of a second childhood; he begins to breathe 
 fainter; his old days are a young lesson of living above the air; 
 and his last breath sets the body free as no longer able to move in 
 his service. And so from the beginning to the end of life, the body 
 conspires with the mind, through the friendly intervention of the 
 lungs. 
 
 * Let the reader try to breathe like a child, and let the auditors of the breath 
 decide "whether he succeeds, or no. There is, indeed, in adult breath such a 
 peopling of multitudinous thoughts, such a tramp of hardness and troubles, as 
 does not cede to the attempt to act the infantine even for a moment. 
 
EVEN BREATHING. 123 
 
 But in speaking of the four parts of breath we have separated 
 qualities which are not incapable of union. Thus we have regarded 
 expiration as of spiritual significance, and inspiration as of sensual, 
 whereas these two may be balanced, and the just lungs in consecu- 
 tive moments may show them to be equal weights. Pleasure indeed 
 makes inspiration, and energy and resolve animate expiration, but 
 pleasure and energy are sometimes united in the joy of ivork, and 
 then the inspiration and expiration are at one, and the man breathes 
 con amove. Thus in what we call happy moments, when we do our 
 little miracles, put in our least imitable touches, and sing our best 
 songs, we breathe as if we breathed not; there is no greed on the 
 one side of the lungs, or effort on the other, but levelness of taking 
 in and giving out : the gold of inspiration is minted with the die of 
 action, and it passes through expiration without a challenge, and so 
 expiration itself becomes plenarily inspired. In this state both sides 
 of the Janus of breath, peace and war, pleasure and energy, are 
 combined in happiness. The highest moments and emotions are of 
 this balanced order; innocence, peace, and the perfect qualities, pro- 
 duce equality on the two scales of the functions of the lungs. Man 
 inhabits the world aright, in this equilibrium between his passions 
 and his actions, whose hours are as the immortality of his childhood 
 and the genius of his life. And innocence, peace, and all the sweet 
 even-breathers glide down through a variety of states into that which 
 is their compound atom, sleep, the fountain into which they descend, 
 and from which again they arise like love born fresh from the morn- 
 ing ocean waters. In this sleep there are many depths of the level 
 breathing; the child's, which scarcely stirs the surface of his tiny 
 lake of breath;* the man's, which goes deeper, but always accord- 
 ing to justice and equation. Thus in the fair proportion of the four 
 terms, we locate the model states of waking and sleep : even-mind- 
 
 * The laws of the diffusion of gases are adequate to produce the function or- 
 dinarily assigned to expiration ; but the motion of expiration, and its constant 
 variations, are additional to this function, and to be looked upon as livingly me- 
 chanical, or, in other words, psychical phenomena. Moreover, the chemical 
 impregnation of the air with the breath, is a different thing, both in regard to 
 space or extension, and time or permanence, from the vital impregnation of the 
 air with motions : for the material breath falls in dregs which soon pass away, 
 
124 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 edness, which gives all things their places, and is the ever-vigilant 
 balance of the soul; and even-bodiedness, which lays us along under 
 our happy coverlets, and makes our slumber as still as our good con- 
 science. This state is the rare complement of lop-sided pleasures 
 and duties; of the swoons of delirious sense, and the trances of the 
 ascetic soul : and he breathes best who most completely enjoys it. 
 
 We have now seen how fully the breathing is inhabited by the liv- 
 ing powers, and how our breasts heave with our natures and our minds; 
 in other words, how the faculties of the soul go up and down through 
 the arches of respiration. We have seen what a thread of human 
 life courses through the actions of the lungs, and by them is trans- 
 ferred to the organs. One function then of the lungs consists in 
 equating the body with the soul, and momentaneously keeping up 
 the equation. But these organs produce also the momentaneous 
 connection between the psychical and corporeal frames. For if it 
 is they that give motion to every organ; that attract material sense 
 from the world towards the head; that represent all emotions, pas- 
 sions, and imaginations, and give them to the body; and by their 
 power of station are the footstool of thought and will, first submis- 
 sion to which they likewise embody : if it is they that sleep with 
 sleep and that wake with waking : again, if it is they that prepare 
 the body by a model agency for every action ; and furthermore, that 
 draw down the real spirit of the brain into the body, or, in other 
 words, pump us out of our spiritual reservoirs; — then it follows that 
 it is the lungs which physically connect the organism with its ani- 
 mating soul. And what connects the lungs themselves with the 
 same soul is, that their movements correspond with those of the 
 brain ; whence the feeling which we all have, that in breathing we 
 are living. 
 
 We have endeavored throughout this doctrine to follow learned 
 Vestiges, and .to show that knowledge, like organization, may pass 
 
 while the mental breath endures, we know not how long : for as the poet says of 
 the Forum — 
 
 " Still the eloquent air burns, breathes with Cicero." 
 
 Poor Byron! Even for the skeptics, as soon as they begin to sing, nature is 
 either nothing, or haunted ! 
 
PULMONARY CONNECTION OF BODY AND SOUL. 125 
 
 through " developments :" that science is sometime a cold-blooded 
 animal, and sees respiration from a fishy point of view, as is the case 
 with the existing physiology, whose doctrine lies motionless in the 
 seas of knowledge, and without proper breathing takes in and gives 
 out the little and casual air which is dissolved in the waters. But 
 it is time for the scientific fish to undergo another stage, and putting 
 oif the piscine, to busy itself with warm-blooded motions. And, 
 finally, the fish must become a man, and derive the pulmonary 
 motions from another kind of warmth, which in old wisdom is the 
 Soul. This will be something practical in the doctrine of " develop- 
 ment." 
 
 For assuredly the lungs give our bodies a series of endowments 
 which are not animal ; comparative anatomy sheds no light upon 
 these, unless you reckon the anatomy of the soul in the series of the 
 comparisons. And this leads us to speak again of the lungs as 
 space-makers; a function of which we are so jealous, that if we be 
 confined in breath, or restraint put upon the chest — arms, legs, and 
 every muscle fight with convulsive energy against the oppressor. 
 For human liberty is doubly grounded, in the body, and in the soul. 
 And in the body, the liberty, by virtue of the airy and opinionated 
 lungs, is given attractively to every organ, as we showed before. 
 Thus, each faculty has its proper size, or liberty, which is the air it 
 breathes ; and if it has it not, it dies. Breathing makes the living- 
 body bigger than the corpse. Sense makes the body roomy enough 
 for a lustier exercise of powers. The passions dilate it to the scope 
 and size of public strife. Thought again diminishes it, because 
 thought does miracles in minimis, and alters worlds, if need be, 
 from the throne of poverty, or from examples radiant through dun- 
 geon-walls. But free thought, by the blessing of God, is a liberty 
 beyond liberty. In truth, each faculty and each fixed opinion, 
 spaces the body to suit its own play; whence sects and parties wear 
 their very bodies for liveries, and are dry or juicy, liberal or stinted, 
 sensual or spirited, according to the openness that their tenets put 
 into their lungs, and their lungs into their livers and frames. 
 
 Much has been written about the cause of the first breath, as 
 though it had not the same cause as all the breaths, being derivable 
 from no other source than the motion of the organic mind in the 
 
 11* 
 
126 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 head. To be bom alive, is to be born -with a germ of mind related 
 world wards J to have such a spark, is to have a rhythmical motion 
 of the brain directed bodywards, which motion cannot subsist or 
 be promoted without a seconding rhythmical action of the lungs. 
 There is no need of any other principle than the harmony of the 
 lungs with the brain to account for the first act of breathing, which 
 in fact, is the beginning of our life. We take the first breath be- 
 cause we choose, and we take the ten thousandth for the same 
 reason ; and when we do not choose, as in sleep, it is as if we did, 
 because Providence backs our wills with similar wills of His own, 
 then called souls, which fill up our intervals, and make our lives 
 coherent.* Before all inquiries into the causes of beginnings in 
 the body, there stand two inexorable axioms: 1. The soul; and, 2. 
 The consentancousness between it and the body. After this, the 
 explanation of any given first effect, as, e.g., breathing, lies in our 
 knowledge of the functions of the effect, which account for our using 
 it. The argument of the human body is like the body, living; or 
 every physiological problem may be put thus : Why does the soul 
 do so and so? 
 
 Before concluding, we revert (p. 95) for a moment to the statical 
 function of the lungs, to remark how these organs distribute life 
 into strata. The vulgar call the lungs lights, and so they are; for 
 the belly gives us gravity and links us to the ground, but the lungs 
 give us levity, and lift us towards the air. Erectness of attitude 
 (p. 103) begins in the chest; we give ourselves the airs by which we 
 strut, first in the breaths and last in the muscles. The second 
 power of erectness is flight, such as we see in birds and insects, 
 which conspire with the air so well, because their bones and tissues 
 are open to it ; besides which they can rarefy the air, both by their 
 heat, and by the cupping action of their powerful muscles upon the 
 closed cavities of the frame. Their feathers too are outward air 
 cells, answering to the universality of their lungs within. Man 
 
 * Here it may be noted that the lungs correspond to both the cerebrum and 
 cerebellum. For their breathing- may be either involuntary or voluntary. In 
 this respect they combine in a single organ the functions of the accidental and 
 permanent life, or of the will and the nature (p. 70). They therefore cement 
 the bond between the two brains by a marriage of their motions in the body. 
 
THE TEACHING OF LANGUAGE AS AN ORGANON. 127 
 
 seems heavy compared with the swallows and the eagles. Yet with 
 faiths for his second lungs and sciences for his wings, he is the 
 lightest of the tribes; and if he seems chained to the ground now, 
 it is because these, his lives, have not been admitted into his bones. 
 His lungs, which may hang in the air (p. 95), are a prophecy that 
 his body, and bodies of his body, may be similarly suspended. For 
 what are his lungs but a balloon corded down into his flesh, of 
 which, when fully inflated by the spirit, his body is the car ? The 
 earth belongs to the human lungs as birthright and natural gift ; 
 they are "tied" to have it. The ocean belongs to the human lungs 
 by the held breath of the diver, who is at once the fisherman and 
 the fish. The air belongs to the human lungs by want, prophecy 
 and science; by the leading of Him who has ascended already, and 
 trod the lightness of the crystal climes. The spirit belongs to the 
 human lungs, by their sails filled with every sense, passion and 
 thought; by the trances of man, which are above the air, and by 
 the breadth of the supernal life, which does not disdain the concur- 
 rence of the lungs. And peace and greater powers than these be- 
 long to them in all and through all, as the gift of God, who breathes 
 his blessings upon his chosen. 
 
 It is good to look to the ordinary language of mankind, not only 
 for the attestation of natural truths, but for their suggestion, be- 
 cause common sense transfers itself spontaneously into language, 
 and common sense in every age, is the ground of the truths which 
 can possibly be revealed to it. If there be no common sense to 
 welcome a truth, that truth, however vivid, is lost in the darkness 
 of the mind. It is of no use to speak it. If we set our ideas of 
 the lungs before the glass of language, they receive, to say the least, 
 a cordial welcome. For undoubtedly most of the words expressive 
 of life, are borrowed by analogy, either from the atmosphere, or its 
 organ the lungs. Thus, animation is the Latinized form of breath- 
 ing; an animal, a living creature, is a breathing creature; an ani- 
 mated body is a breathing body; the soul also is an anima, a 
 breath ; the mind or disposition is an animus, also a wind or breath; 
 we receive inspirations, which are the breathings in of high influ- 
 ences; we have aspirations therefrom, which are our voluntary 
 breathings back after the good which has been shown to us; we are 
 
128 TUB HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 spirits, that is again to say breaths or attractions towards one 
 Eternal Object, who, through our finite organism draws us to Him- 
 self. Finally, we read of the breath of life that was breathed into 
 the nostrils of our first parents, and man became a living soul. Now 
 we have attempted to show that these phrases are nature's own ana- 
 logies ; that the functions of the lungs are so identified with that 
 motion which is the representative of life, that life cannot be imaged 
 save in words borrowed from the lungs and their august ministra- 
 tions. In this respect, I trust to have the whole of the depositories 
 of past truth and genius, the old wives, upon my side, which will 
 atone for the absence of others, because there are no better begin- 
 nings of physiology than these old wives' tales. Most of them are 
 point blank true, and will come out more and more as they are 
 wanted, constituting in time the last novelties of a sublimely scien- 
 tific age. 
 
 But when shall the theme be ended of the atmosphere of the 
 microcosm ? Or what is the entire drift of these iEolian harmonies 
 let out upon the sciences from the lungs ? We can only further 
 say, without pretending to a formula, that the planet-air is the double 
 of the lung air. For in the human sphere the viscera stand as 
 trees with the lungs for leaves, and quiet absorption subsists in this 
 vegetable degree. But furthermore, the superincumbent lung-air 
 presses down upon the vitals, whence the physics and mechanics of 
 the atmosphere run parallel with those of the lungs. But again, 
 the lung-air has its system of winds, beginning whencesoever the 
 will pleases, and blowing from the poles either of matter or spirit, 
 love or hate, passion or consideration, and making the climate of 
 the ruling state to travel through the whole body. Then also the 
 lung-air is as full of the soul as the world is full of the sun. And 
 lastly our little atmosphere in motion, like the great atmosphere, 
 rubs our atoms against each other everywhere with electric rustle 
 and collision, and by its congenial friction magnetizes the assem- 
 bled parts, and they open the cases of the life-gems. But for the 
 rest, the voice would cease to speak before these truths are exhausted 
 that chant themselves up from the deep well of the lungs. For ever 
 and anon as we listen we hear a more inward chorus. 
 
 At least we have seen that the body lives in alternation ; that 
 
UNIVERSALITY OF THE LUNG PRINCIPLE. 129 
 
 the voluntary moments of the machine are the breathings ; that 
 thus time is meted out in our frames, and we are introduced as 
 finished clocks of time into a world of time — of measured changes. 
 So it is that we are tuned to the universe, which exhibits the same 
 play in its furnitures through all their fortunes. And so it is that 
 we are fitted to our place in humanity, which expands and contracts 
 from epoch to epoch, from idea to idea, from institution to institu- 
 tion. All things are as cycles of not an unending but an ever- 
 during providential change. Their existence in time consists in 
 their motion and change. Merely subsisting without moving on- 
 wards, would involve their rejection into the rear, among the 
 shadows of the past. They live in the present by breathing as the 
 universe is breathing. Moreover all things have their own space, 
 their means of liberty, the play-ground of their being. And the 
 wonder of the body lies in this, that it brings man into the whole 
 order of the world, without surprise, because with full preparation. 
 If he is to be subject to day and night, there is day and night already 
 written upon his members; half his moments are a rest, even when 
 work and thought are in their fullest power; his aims and desires 
 have their gay, fresh morning, their high-flown noon, dubious twi- 
 light, meditative evening, and night of cessation or repose. If he 
 is to ride in the train of the fourfold seasons, the reins which direct 
 the procession pass through his own soul and system ; he finds that 
 there is a season for all things human ; that the body has its spring, 
 of refining delight and happiness ; its good summer ; its fruitful 
 autumn ; its winter, whether of needful rest, or unhappy torpidity ; 
 and this, on the minute scale of hours as well as in the circle of 
 the threescore years and ten. If he is to live in the revolutions of 
 his own societies, his mind and body are still at home, for they 
 themselves are nothing but revolutions. And if he is to die — to 
 expire at last — does he not die in his atoms, and expire many 
 times every minute during his longest life; and carelessly lets go 
 his breath after each inspiration, secure that the outward and in- 
 ward powers are ordered to revive him from the fast embrace of this 
 mimic death. So he is a genuine part of the series of nature ; a 
 true heir of time; a life depending on variety; amoving accident 
 of progress; a being of alternate cycles; one to whom nothing is 
 
130 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 
 
 alien that happens or can happen in the wide creation. This is 
 owing to his body first, and subsequently to his mind. The lungs 
 are the divine provision which introduces and accommodates him to 
 the world of change. 
 
 Let us then end by translating the lungs into thought and hu- 
 manity. Every principle has a first name by which we lisp it in 
 material representations. First it is an individual thing j next a 
 being with relations ; and at last it figures among the grand ends 
 of existence. The world and man are the same principles, trans- 
 lated as they rise from the ground, into other atmospheres, or into 
 more and more universal languages. Form in the lowest degree, 
 means life in the second, and love in the third, and intellect in the 
 highest; terms and things which are very diverse, and yet but one 
 principle, full of resources, and showing its face through different 
 windows of the universe. The soul, an inhabitant of all heights 
 and climates, addresses the tongue of each to the creatures of the 
 same ; and one word is a brain, another the lungs, and so 
 on through the hieroglyphical polyglot of the body. Every syl- 
 lable there has its mission, to make mind, to support mind, and to 
 alter it. Good is the interpreter of the whole, and truth is the 
 interpretation. 
 
 What now are the lungs ? They are a yawning hollow in the 
 top of the man, the sides of which cavern are alive. The world 
 enters them bodily. Tendency to vacuum, which nature abhors, is 
 their spirit. They draw us out into more than we are, and we 
 shrink back as nearly as we can into our old dimensions. Reluc- 
 tant vegetation ceases as they open, and life is born, crying. They 
 are an engine added to the body, under whose draw it becomes pro- 
 gressive, and every space therein is enlarged, to take in more, and 
 to live more. They pull open all the solids, that all the fluids may 
 enter them ) and strain every nerve and blood-vessel into fresh ac- 
 tivities and virtues. They give room and airiness to the inward 
 parts, and set them to work in a daily larger sphere. Now these, 
 in altered phrase, are also the functions of the understanding mind, 
 which as it is opened, shows and causes new wants, and new wills 
 and ways. Our wants are so many threatened vacua, according to 
 the form of which, we open to the pressure of the truth, whether 
 
HIGHER ANALOGUES OF THE LUNGS. 131 
 
 of nature or of heaven. The necessity to be more and better than we 
 are, the divine dissatisfaction in which we live and move, is the germ 
 of understanding; it is the want which can never be done, but is 
 to breathe and ponder on through incessant ages. The under- 
 standing, like the lungs, is no wind, or shadow, but the substantive 
 power and voice of all our wants, calling us away to larger lives 
 and finer occupations. It is the consciousness of our position, and 
 of how to change it ; the solemn claim of the future on the present; 
 the beckoning of the universe to the atom, to come up among the 
 stars. 
 
 This is the root of the lungs, this is the mind which they carry, 
 but mathematically speaking, what are the powers? Millions of 
 vesicles make one lung; greater millions of lungs figured afresh 
 make one humanity. Here they are want again; first, physical 
 wants, necessities, the iron understandings which are the mothers 
 of inventions ; the looms and hammers which must ever ply, or we 
 lapse into nakedness and starvation. Second, and based upon the 
 first, all the necessities of public progress which strain and distress 
 the time; domestic, political, social, and spiritual understandings; 
 which show us, in bold imagination, ideal commonwealths, built all 
 of white justice, and bid us strive, although we die, to reach them; 
 Utopian societies, lovely and reciprocal, peaceful in the length of a 
 redder sunshine, in plains beyond our travels' strength ; our own 
 and the world's infancy, painted with agonizing truth upon the 
 stormy skies of manhood, or the dark cope of age ; and with no 
 desponding voice command us to bo born again. These are signs 
 and warnings, portents, or promises, in every understanding; there 
 is no speech or language where their voice is not heard ; attracting, 
 commanding, or threatening, to one and the same intent ; and airy 
 or cloudy though they be, they stand in the breath of the eternal. 
 
132 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 Organized beings grow from, and subsist upon, matter which is 
 extraneous to themselves, and the fitting of this matter for the pur- 
 poses flf their lives, constitutes the process of digestion in a wide 
 sense. In the human body, the immediate end of digestion is the 
 blood, which is the fountain or beginning of the whole solid fabric. 
 The food, on the other hand, is the matter to be digested — to be 
 converted into blood. Looking, then, at the food as the one end, 
 and at the blood as the other, and noting the marked difference be- 
 tween the two, it may be anticipated that a long chain of means is 
 necessary before the one can become the other. Where the diver- 
 sity is great between any two things, their assimilation must be 
 proportionately gradual, and their reconcilement gently successive; 
 and the passage which either of them describes on its way to the 
 other, will probably have many joints, and lead about through 
 strange turnings to an unexpected union. Such is the case with 
 the food itself, and especially with the portions of it that are intro- 
 duced as chyle into the sanguineous current. Digestion, therefore, 
 and its organs, present us with a new element in our studies of or- 
 ganization; with the element of a series pervading the body; in 
 this case, a series terminating in the blood, and recommencing 
 from the blood ; and, as a consequence of the powers of series or 
 gradualness, with the notion of assimilation, or the likening of 
 one thing to another through a succession of changes occurring 
 in a certain order, and exhibiting a play of harmonious differences 
 and increasing likenesses running without a break through the 
 whole. Let us, then, bear in mind, for the present, that successive 
 series, and successive assimilation, are the meaning of the digestive 
 act, and that these apply to the digestive organs, as well as to the 
 digestive objects or the alimentary substances which we consume. 
 
THE LAW OF SERIES. 133 
 
 Let us also remark in the preliminaries, that if the substances of 
 the external world were not inherently adapted for our sustenance, 
 the possibility of any series of changes harmonizing them with our 
 physical system, would be cut off; so that in the very fact of di- 
 gestion we find a co-ordained fitness between man and nature. This 
 we detect in all things the more and the better we look for it. It 
 is a well of truth to draw upon in the sciences, and especially in 
 human physiology. 
 
 We have said that organizations depend for growth and mainte- 
 nance upon materials extraneous to themselves, and this is equally 
 true of the vegetable as of the animal kingdom. There is, however, 
 a difference between the methods of nutrition in the two cases. The 
 plant or tree is fixed by its roots into the soil, and imbibes at their 
 extremities the nutritious juices; it is imprisoned in a particular 
 spot, and its supplies depend upon the fertility of a very limited 
 area ; although by its leaves it extends into the movable atmosphere, 
 and at the summit of its powers begins to take advantage of the 
 new principle of locomotion. In the animal, on the other hand, 
 motion is the pedestal of life ; the pillars which support it are en- 
 gines of movement, and the ground under it is fluid ; its roots also 
 are turned inwards, collected and associated, and constitute reposi- 
 tories or stomachs, into which alimentary substances are carried by 
 proper animal actions. The range and freedom of animal exist- 
 ence immensely excel the strait security of the lower nature; the 
 precarious income of life is far better than the small certainties of 
 vegetation. Thus, while the stately tree subsists on a few square 
 yards of earth, the animal which it shades, and the bird that lodges 
 in its branches, choose their food from wide districts, and are only 
 confined by the barriers of nature, as the shores of the ocean, or 
 the limits of the climate. Moreover, the vegetable, with few ex- 
 ceptions, draws its sap from the underground — from the dark scurf 
 of the mineral kingdom; whereas, the animal takes its nutrient 
 juices from among the children of air, light, and motion; from the 
 succulent tops and fruits of nature ; from the results of an elaborate 
 previous digestion in the bosom of the earth, the plant, or even the 
 animal frame itself. 
 
 Much more are these superiorities true of man physically, or 
 12 
 
134 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 rather of the physical man considered as a member of society; 
 for apart from society man is not a man, but the most destitute of 
 animals ; an animal without instincts ; with a germ of reason never 
 to be expanded ; with wants never to be known to himself — never 
 to serve as ends of action : his intellect, a sad surmise of a false 
 destiny and lost estate j his jaws, hands and limbs embruted and 
 maimed in the attempt to awaken his dead mother, nature, and in 
 contesting his mights with his fellow-creatures, the beasts. Man, 
 however, as in this late age we are to observe him — man as the 
 unit of society, is infinitely more locomotive than any animal in its 
 natural condition, and as all men are travelers either by proxy or 
 in person, each as a centre can draw his supplies from all. The 
 human home has one universal season, and one universal climate. 
 The produce of every zone and month is for the board where toil is 
 compensated and industry refreshed. For man alone, the universal 
 animal, can wield the powers of fire, the universal element, whereby 
 seasons, latitudes, and altitudes are levelled into one genial tem- 
 perature ; nay, whereby every spot may in time bear its harvest of 
 men, and contribute its proper merchandise to even the poorest 
 brother of the social table. Man alone can command the archi- 
 tecture that will hold the domestic hearth, and on the inevitable 
 model of his own frame, build a house in which he can use, and yet 
 shut out, the universe and its atmospheres. And man alone, that 
 is to say, the social man alone, can want, and duly conceive and 
 invent, that which is digestion going forth into nature as a creative 
 art, namely, cookery, which by recondite processes of division and 
 combination, by cunning varieties of shape, by the insinuation of 
 subtle flavors; by tincturings with precious spice as with vegetable 
 flames; by fluids extracted and added again, absorbed, dissolving 
 and surrounding; by the discovery and cementing of new amities 
 between different substances, provinces and kingdoms of nature; 
 by the old truth of wine, and the reasonable order of service; 
 in short, by the superior unity which it produces in the eatable 
 world ; also by a new birth of feelings, properly termed convivial, 
 which run between food and friendship, and make eating fes- 
 tive; all through the conjunction of our Promethean with our 
 culinary fire; raises up new powers and species of food to the 
 
VEGETARIANISM. 135 
 
 human frame; and indeed performs by machinery a part of the 
 work of assimilation ; enriching the sense of taste with a world of 
 profound objects: and making it the refined participator, percipient 
 and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. 
 
 Man then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties 
 into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby 
 a thousand new aromas answering to as many possible tastes in his 
 wonderful constitution ; and therefore his food is as different from 
 that of animals in quality, as it is plainly different in quantity and 
 resource. How wise should not reason become in comparison with 
 instinct, in order to our making a right use of so vast an apparatus 
 of nutrition ! Is it surprising if the prodigy of human digestion 
 too often sinks into a perverse development, or if diseases that hap- 
 pen never to simple animals, are engendered in the course of the 
 indefinite appetites of man? 
 
 A controversy that may one day be of importance, and whose 
 data seem coeval with history, requires a passing mention while we 
 are speaking of human food. It has been held by many individuals, 
 and even by sects, that vegetable substances are our natural and 
 proper aliment, and that our taste for the flesh of animals is an 
 acquired and a morbid appetite, the gratification of which unmans 
 us in our better part, aggravates whatever is low and fierce in our 
 characters, and discourages our highest and gentlest affections, and 
 our calmest reasons. As to what may be natural to man, the 
 argument is suspect. An old writer has pithily remarked, that 
 " many things which would be preternatural in a natural state, are 
 natural enough in the preternatural state in which we live at 
 present." Human nature indeed is always changing by its own 
 act and deed — by its own choice of change ; and no change in 
 which it concurs is to it artificial, but it remains human nature 
 still. The career of mankind is a line and chain of new human 
 natures, and nothing is so natural to us now as artifice itself. For 
 the rest, experienced anatomists and physiologists, reasoning from 
 the teeth, and from the comparative properties of the intestinal 
 tube, its length, and so forth, are confident that the human being 
 is omnivorous, and they have the historical and geographical fact, 
 if not the right upon their side. There seems to be a series of ali- 
 
136 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 ments required by the different races from the equator to the pole ; 
 the vegetable predominating at the equator, and running by a les- 
 sening scale down the sides of the globe ; the animal commencing, 
 if I may so speak, at the polar end, and likewise running by a 
 lessening scale, modulated according to climates, towards its mini- 
 mum in the torrid zones. Thus we have the highly baked white 
 meats of India passing through long gradations to the raw red flesh 
 and blubber* of the Arctic regions; and again by a curious inver- 
 sion, the highly flavored vegetable dishes of India decline in the 
 same manner towards the insipid vegetable cookery of the north. 
 In the tropics, taste is the great allurement, and cookery there, as 
 in China and Hindostan, is in its most varied perfection ; in the 
 frigid zones, hunger is the predominating sense, and readiness and 
 quantity satisfy it best. As measured by the sense of taste, the 
 hot countries are the tongue of the world, delicate, liguriating, fasti- 
 dious, in which hunger is near to thirst; the other regions are the 
 successive portions of the alimentary canal, ravenous and void at 
 last ; little appreciating quality, but loving impletion. The tropi- 
 cal man lives upon the sun, which gives him its warmth, and he 
 
 * Although fatty substances seem to be taken in cold climates upon the 
 principle of supplying fuel to the animal fire, yet oils or vegetable fats are con- 
 sumed in large quantities in warmer countries, and especially in the summer 
 season. The diet in Italy, for example, is largely mixed with oil. The frigid 
 zones provide animal fats in abundance, the torrid yield vegetable fats, rich oily 
 nuts, &c. ; and undoubtedly the staple of the soil is a kind of measure of the 
 diet of the inhabitants. In cold latitudes fat makes heat, and keeps out cold, for 
 a well-lined skin is an important ingredient of warmth, and is the basis of warm 
 clothing. But in hot parts oily aliment is taken upon a different principle. It 
 is demanded in the latter case as a corrective to the watery, pungent, acid and 
 cold things which are so refreshing to the frame. On this principle it is used 
 with salads, cucumbers, &c. &c. It acts mechanically or sensationally, com- 
 municating its own smoothness to the otherwise irritated stomach and intestines ; 
 or giving a soothing organic feeling to the parts, which is communicated to the 
 nervous centres. All foods have this contagion in addition to their other effects ; 
 they propagate their own feel to the body. The pleasures of taste depend part- 
 ly on this/ee/, as well as upon proper gustation; thus the crunch of nuts and the 
 smoothness of cream are agreeable apart from the taste. We cannot but think 
 that this demulcent use of oil is important in a medical point of view, in 
 spasmodic actions of the intestines. It is said to have been remarkably success- 
 ful in Spain in the treatment of cholera, which involves intestinal insurrection of 
 the greatest intensity. 
 
THE PLANETARY DINNER TABLE. 137 
 
 requires to be strongly attracted to material food ; while at the ex- 
 tremities of the planet food is the gross fuel of life, which is 
 constantly consumed in large quantity, and must be constantly 
 supplied. 
 
 What is true of the world at large holds equally of its countries, 
 which partake of the roundness of time in the whirl of the fluent 
 seasons. Summer is our torrid zone, and winter, our frigid ; and 
 we feed as Esquimaux in our nocturnal solstice, and are as abste- 
 mious Hindoos in our melting dog-days. The planetary dinner- 
 table has its various latitudes and longitudes, and plant and animal 
 and mineral and wine are grown around it and set upon it, accord- 
 ing to the map of taste in the spherical appetite of our race. There 
 is the great ecliptic of thirst, with its lesser circles, the path and 
 parallels of the burning sun ; and there are the poles of hunger, 
 also with circles, terminating in the equator of languid appetite and 
 easy satiety. For hunger is the child of cold and night, and comes 
 upwards from the all-swallowing ground ; but thirst descends from 
 above, and is born of the solar rays. The fluid and the solid are of 
 inverse genealogies, and different centres, and their primordial 
 wants are as much opposed as their sources. Thirst lives in the 
 throat, at the summit of the alimentary tube ; substantial hunger 
 low down ; and the two run upwards and downwards, intermingling 
 their desires, are happily blended in the stomach, and each is lost 
 in each at the extremes. And so the man is solid, or fluid, which 
 you please; the blood so liquid in its vessels, becomes bone in the 
 bones, and flesh in the muscles ; the human form looked at from 
 within, is an ever-changing fountain ; seen from without it is one 
 steady crystal, congealed and unmoving, though rolling swiftly still 
 along the line of years. 
 
 Let it however be observed, that hunger and thirst are strong 
 terms, and the things themselves are too feverish provocations for 
 civilized man. They are incompatible with the sense of taste in its 
 epicureanism, and their gratification is of a very bodily order. The 
 savage man, like a boa constrictor, would swallow his animals whole, 
 if his gullet would let him. This is to cheat the taste with unman- 
 ageable objects, as though we should give an estate to a child. On 
 the other hand civilization, house-building, warm apartments and 
 
 12* 
 
138 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 kitchen fires, well-stored larders, and especially exemption from 
 rude toil, abolish these extreme caricatures ; and keeping appetite 
 down to a middling level by the rote of meals, and thus taking 
 away the incentives to ravenous haste, they allow the mind to tutor 
 and variegate the tongue, and to substitute the harmonies and mel- 
 odies of deliberate gustation for such unseemly bolting. Under 
 this direction, hunger becomes polite ; a long-drawn, many-colored 
 taste; the tongue, like a skillful instrument, holds its notes: and 
 thirst, redeemed from drowning, rises from the throat to the tongue 
 and lips, and full of discrimination becomes the gladdening love of 
 all delicious flavors. At the same time there is this benefit also, 
 that we can always descend to the lower condition, and find an 
 agreeable variety in the plainest fare. 
 
 But to recur for a moment to the vegetarians (not to do them an 
 injustice), although we accept the testimony of the anatomists and 
 physiologists, and the dictation of facts, as of value for the present, 
 yet it must be admitted that it is not conclusive for the future j for 
 in a being mutable like man, capable of improvement and of de- 
 terioration, with power to alter his mind, and therefore his brains 
 and his body, it is difficult to say to what extent his anatomy may 
 have conformed to his habits, good or evil. No doubt our frames 
 have changed with the times since the world began. Existing cus- 
 toms and organisms are not fixed points to limit the truth, or to 
 govern the future. Anew appetite for flesh, conceived in the mind, 
 and daily gratified, and of consequence daily strengthened, could 
 not fail in the course of generations to mould the consumer to the 
 desired end ; and in short to make animal food natural to the human 
 constitution, by modifying the latter. That it may fairly be called 
 natural now, is evident, for where is the race that abstains from 
 flesh unless either religion, or strict necessity, forbids its use ? The 
 question therefore, like other administrative questions, is one of 
 times, and wants, and wise expediency. If by other sorts of tempe- 
 rance the members of society find their thoughts calmed and deep- 
 ened, their senses refined, their emotions more constant, powerful 
 and peaceful, it is hard to say to what new sublimities temperance 
 may not aspire; what fresh interpretations it may not assume, or 
 how it may not assault the carnivorous man. Every herb and 
 
139 
 
 every fruit may presently be for our meat, as in tlie days of our 
 first parents. In the meantime, however, man is strictly and po- 
 tently omnivorous in the nineteenth century ; and we may well ques- 
 tion whether the vegetable kingdom is at present sufficiently com- 
 prehended to supply the varied qualities of food which are necessary 
 for our support; for how few of the said herbs and fruits con- 
 tinue to be eatable. We cannot banquet like the first men ; until 
 we get back the golden earth. As it is, the encroachment of drugs 
 and poisons has driven our esculents into a penfold, and we are 
 fortunate if from the exceptions to the kingdoms, we can furnish 
 our table. Assuredly the woods, fields, and gardens must be more 
 humane, which no doubt they are willing to re-become; the stomach 
 also must put forth the hands of a more inventive agriculture, be- 
 fore the vegetarian crusaders can be allowed to wave their leafy flag 
 over the city of the cooks. But by dabbling too much, or prema- 
 turely, in their limping pultaceous diet, we should become not the 
 children, but the abortions of Paradise. 
 
 It has been suggested by Dr. Prout, that the milk which is our 
 first aliment — an aliment certainly human, if not animal — and 
 which is the food prepared by nature herself, is the type of all food 
 whatever; that it contains certain alimentitious principles in com- 
 bination, which are but repeated, and their combination re-attempt- 
 ed, in the most elaborate cuisine. His analysis of the components 
 of the milk, is, into oily, saccharine, and albuminous matter; and 
 after investigating our food and its combinations, he finds that his 
 view regarding milk is borne out by the instinctive tastes and artificial 
 cookery of mankind. According to this, all our meals are but as- 
 pirations to our original milk. There may however be different 
 analyses of milk besides the partly chemical one he has mentioned, 
 and it remains to be seen whether other views will equally comport 
 with this reference of food to the lacteal type. We can scarcely 
 doubt that the idea has a truth; it wears so organic an aspect, and 
 takes its stand with such powerful innocence at the head of a science 
 of alimentation. Moreover nature, the mighty mother, offers her- 
 self breastwise to all her little natures ; she swells in landscape and 
 undulating hill with mammary tenderness; each creation is a dug 
 
140 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 held forth to a younger creature ; and milk is thus again a symbol 
 of the food and feeding which are everywhere. 
 
 But let us pass onwards from the food which is the matter, to the 
 fluids which are the medium, and to the organs which are the in- 
 struments, of digestion. Now there is nothing more general in ani- 
 mal life than the digestive apparatus, because matter is the largest, 
 if not the greatest, fact in the material universe. Every creature 
 which is here, must be made of something, and maintained by some- 
 thing, or must be landlord of itself. Every part, and every faculty, 
 of every being inhabiting the planet, must be duly clothed and bal- 
 lasted with stuff derived from the earth, or it would have no ope- 
 ration in the body, or upon the body, much less upon the external 
 world. Hence the stomach is an organ of the first importance to 
 all mortals. You may take away brain and nervous system, and 
 leave their place to be supplied by the fluxions and imponderables 
 of nature ; you may take away the lungs, and consign their office 
 to the circumambient lifeless atmospheres j you may abstract the 
 heart with its blood-vessels, and commit the dull, gluey circulation 
 to the almost mechanical and chemical laws of affinity that obtain 
 in vegetables : and notwithstanding all this, you may still have an 
 animal being remaining. In short, there are animals which are no- 
 thing but stomachs, but there are no animals which are nothing but 
 brains. In the human race also the stomach is of the same para- 
 mount importance ; its existence, and due impletion, are the first 
 or last conditions of the existence of the individual ; they are the basis 
 of humanity, and nothing is so sublime but it rests upon them, and 
 must perish out of this world if they cease, and otherwise follow their 
 vicissitudes. The assured feeding of the nations, is a question 
 that involves in its settlement all other questions, and postpones 
 sublimities until necessities are complied with. Jewelled goblets 
 there are besides, but this earthen cup must be satisfied before the 
 other vessels of the man can begin to be filled. 
 
 The food, consisting of matters from the animal, vegetable, and 
 mineral kingdoms, is at first received by the lips, which present to 
 it a more and more delicately sensitive surface from their beginning 
 at the external skin towards the roots of the teeth ; and especially 
 where the sight is not employed, it is apprehended by a sense of 
 
SALIVARY GLANDS. 141 
 
 touch so gradually fine, as if touch itself were passing into taste, as 
 the food is passing to the tongue. It is next transmitted to the teeth 
 arranged in manifest row and series. What is received by the front 
 or incisor teeth, is delicately treated, or minced, and the fine things 
 set free go at once to the tip of the tongue, which is waiting close 
 behind to receive tljem. At the sides of the mouth the molar teeth 
 stand ready to grind their portion, and their milling surfaces become 
 more and more severe and powerful from before to behind; they also 
 are a distinct series of structures, and involve a series of operations; 
 for every new tool has a new action. Intermediate between the 
 mincing and grinding teeth are the canine, so large in carnivorous 
 animals, which both thrust and cut the food, and submit it to the 
 molar action. It is good to believe, that the juices separated by 
 the different teeth go primarily to the part of the tongue alongside 
 those teeth, and are especially to the taste of that part; for the neigh- 
 borliness of the body is not useless but functional. 
 
 All this time the food has not been merely reduced, and its juices 
 set free, but animalized also ; and this, from the very porches of the 
 mouth. Even before the first nutrient fluids are expressed from 
 it, a living fluid, the saliva, has come out of the body to re- 
 ceive them. There is a series cf salivary glands running from the 
 lips throughout the tube. The sight of the food, the action of mas- 
 tication, the pleasantness of the morsels, and the suctorial power of 
 the tongue, draw out the saliva from the respective glands in the 
 mouth, as it is wanted to moisten the organs, and to penetrate and 
 dissolve the food. Especially do the emotions call out the attentive 
 saliva, and the mouth waters with appetency. Sight and fancy 
 wherewith it is full, and which it obeys in the first place, have fed 
 it with anticipatory fire, and schooled it for its duties. Moreover 
 the saliva is no menial, but the immediate product of the blood pro- 
 ceeding to the head and the organs of the senses, and if not sum- 
 moned into the mouth, goes its course towards the brain; and being 
 thus descended from the blood, and akin to the blood, it is clearly 
 an excellent medium between the blood and the new food, whose 
 finest portions, under its guidance, are themselves to be educated 
 into blood. The expressed food is the new guest which is to be in- 
 augurated into the duties of the household; the blood is the royal 
 
142 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 table itself; the saliva is the commissioned master of the ordinances, 
 who busies himself to instruct the food in the laws of the place, and 
 in the conditions of its hospitality. 
 
 The saliva, like everything else in this system, exhibits a play of 
 varieties. In the mouth this is manifest to all. Do we not feel 
 that in the front of the mouth the saliva is thin and trickling; in 
 the back part, as it approaches the throat, more and more viscid and 
 tenacious? How this difference in thickening is produced, we need 
 not now inquire, but may simply note the fact of an orderly series 
 existing even in this small compass. 
 
 The food already upon the tongue, carved by the front teeth, pierced 
 by the middle teeth, and ground by the back teeth ; also saturated by 
 the saliva; affords the sense of taste to the sensorial papillae of the 
 tongue, which tongue-like themselves, protrude and exert themselves 
 to enjoy it ; and this nimble member seeks and suffers the pleasures of 
 the time with infinite agitation and emotion. What is the sense of 
 taste ? Is it merely that abstract thing, an influence, made of nothing 
 but metaphysical motions? Do tasty substances knock at the door of 
 the organ, and leave their names, without going in themselves ? It 
 may be difficult to demonstrate by anatomy the absorption of juices 
 by the tongue, yet facts show that such absorption takes place. 
 The sudden recruiting of bodily and nervous power by matters 
 taken into the system ; the effect produced by wine and other fluids 
 when only held in the mouth; the fact that the tongue is the be- 
 ginning of the great absorbent organs, and must, therefore, in con- 
 sistency begin the absorption; also the variously-formed promi- 
 nences or papilla) upon the tongue, which are poorly accounted for 
 by physiologists, because they overlook the right of the tongue to 
 taste in that real sense which tasting implies; moreover, the cer- 
 tainty that there are in creation no abstract influences or impres- 
 sions unaccompanied by streams of tangible stuff: all these reasons 
 establish, that the tongue enjoys an antepast of the food; drafts its 
 best essences, recruit after recruit, into the system, in union with 
 the finest saliva; and only sends down into the stomach the por- 
 tions which are exhausted for the mouth. 
 
 But current science tells us, that there is no tasting in the tongue, 
 and no feeding in the stomach, but that the man is nourished en- 
 
PASSAGE OF FOOD TO THE STOMACH. 143 
 
 tirely from the lower belly — from the intestinal tube. A physio- 
 logy that confesses to living so grossly, can have little enjoyment 
 of refined truths — small sympathy with the good things of the 
 world. It is the very servility of the senses, to make the man dine 
 in his own kitchen ; to bring the repast laboriously down from the 
 drawing-room of the mouth and the saloon of the stomach, to the 
 place of sanded floors and wooden trenchers. It is, indeed, a mat- 
 ter of taste. For the reasons stated, we cling to the upper story, 
 and the other opinion. 
 
 As soon as the exhaustive feast of the tongue is ended, the food 
 is prepared for its next destination, and an act of swallowing takes 
 place ; the tongue rolls the morsel back into the pharynx, a cham- 
 ber intermediate between the mouth and the gullet; the pharynx, 
 successively contracting, moves it down into the latter; and this, 
 taking up the contraction, forwards the ball from point to point, 
 until it reaches the upper or cardiac orifice of the stomach. The 
 viscid saliva of the back of the mouth, and, moreover, all the fluids 
 supplied, or drank, either sheathe the food, or lubricate the passage, 
 and make the transmission easy, and almost spontaneous. Arrived 
 at the entrance to the stomach, which is shut by a circular muscle, 
 the food opens the latter, and passes into the great cavity of the 
 organ. The passage from the mouth to the stomach is accom- 
 plished with rapidity, yet perchance there is a graduated absorption 
 which takes place more swiftly still, and leaves not even an apparent 
 break in the absorbent function following the absorbent structure. 
 
 At the back of the mouth, under ordinary circumstances, the 
 food becomes lost to our consciousness; but as in the tongue we 
 have found manifest taste with invisible feeding or absorption, so 
 here the matter is reversed, and we have henceforth to contemplate 
 manifest absorption with a latent sense of taste. Generalizing the 
 functions of the elongated parts we are enumerating, we may con- 
 sider that the function of taste or quality reigns throughout it, 
 equally with the function of eating or quantity; that to the aliment- 
 ary organs, from beginning to end, there can be no substance with- 
 out taste; and, on the other hand, no taste without substance. 
 
 In the stomach, judging by what there is done, what a scene we 
 are about to enter ! What a palatial kitchen, and more than mo- 
 
144 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 nasterial refectory ! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the brief and 
 elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at this 
 lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a 
 profusion of covers is made and laid ! What a variety of solvents, 
 sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call from the blood, 
 and raining down from the mouth, into the natural patines of the 
 meats ! What a quenching of desires — what an end and goal of 
 the world is here ! No wonder ; for the stomach sits for four or 
 five assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will 
 dispatch in a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is 
 bound to supply the extended body, while the tongue wafts only 
 faery gifts to the close and spiritual brain. 
 
 The stomach, anatomically speaking, is a vaulted chamber con- 
 sisting of three walls or coats common to the whole tube. Its 
 inner wall is made up of little compartments placed side by side, 
 and which open into its cavity, and differ in construction in differ- 
 ent parts. These are beset by a mesh of the smallest blood-vessels. 
 The inside of the stomach forms a kind of honeycomb surface 
 crowded with little mouths, and when the organ is roused, red and 
 turgid with blood. At this time also numerous little points or 
 papillae waken up upon the membrane, and bring forth a dissolvent 
 liquid termed the gastric juice. These honeycomb structures are 
 the stomachs of the stomach ) the natural components of the organ. 
 
 The muscular coat is the middle wall of the stomach. Its fibres 
 run circularly, spirally, vortically, in all the writhings of stomachic 
 taste. They are the moving arms of the stomach, which enable it 
 to lay hold of the food, and to work and agitate it. The principle 
 of the mouth, the jaws, and the fingers, here ensouls a sheet of 
 membrane, which extemporizes shapes of every required variety. 
 Thus this seemingly simple organ erects itself into a thousand dif- 
 ferent apartments, in each of which a peculiar digestion, and a pe- 
 culiar assimilation, is proceeding. This encameration, insured by 
 motion in the human stomach, is the fixed condition of the part in 
 some animals, as the camel, the ox, &c, in which one of the sto- 
 machs is formed of deep pouches, lodging the food. The body- 
 kitchen of man and carnivorous animals is levelled away when the 
 stomach's meal is done : while the kitchen of creatures which chew 
 
THE SCALE OF ASSIMILATIONS. 145 
 
 the cud, is a permanent building, in order that eating may consume 
 the bulk of their waking hours. 
 
 So much for the muscular coat of this series, whose activity con- 
 stantly builds the plastic walls into new and ever-varying chambers, 
 in which the functions of the place are carried on ; for every pass- 
 ing wrinkle on the surface is a fresh thought and artifice of diges- 
 tion and assimilation. 
 
 But as we are not on a medical quest, let us henceforth rather 
 pursue the food that is assimilated, and the organs which take, and 
 convey it, than the portion which is rejected, or the extensive 
 system of public works that underlies the thoroughfares of the 
 human city. Respecting this department it will be sufficient to 
 note the principle, that series governs here as elsewhere ; that what 
 is renounced as useless by the first cavity becomes the especial food 
 of the second; that the leavings of the second are the table of the 
 third ; and finally that what is of no use to the animal kingdom 
 becomes the support of the vegetable world. Thus the purposes 
 of the aliment are drawn forth one by one in regular order, and 
 with a thrift that can go no further, the last use returns to the first, 
 in the fertility of the earth, in the precious yield of the plant, and 
 in the support of the animal, which reverts to the human body by 
 this circle of renunciation and absorption. 
 
 Let us now note the distinct divisions or joints of the alimentary 
 tube, which prove that a series of different digestions and assimila- 
 tions are performed therein. Observe the mouth, which is guarded 
 by the lips, and then by the teeth, against any unmeet intrusion of 
 the food. This is the type of what takes place five times over in 
 the lower parts of the series. Thus the entrance to the pharynx 
 and gullet is analogously guarded. The entrance to the stomach is 
 secured by strong muscular lips, which are only opened by the mus- 
 cular wave flowing down the oesophagus, and playing upon the wedge 
 of food. The exit from the stomach is a similar lip or ring, which 
 is likewise opened by the successive action of the stomach and the 
 aliment. And so forth. The cause therefore which determines 
 the passage of the food from cavity to cavity, is that the first cavity 
 has assimilated its portion, and digested its portion, and having no 
 longer any affinity for the latter, the walls contract against it, and 
 
146 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 send it down stairs, where it is received or wanted by the next 
 chamber ; which in like manner exhausts, digests, and detrudes it. 
 In this wise the successive digestion by the agency of the succes- 
 sive muscular coats, is the means of sending the aliment from stage 
 to stage of its useful journey. 
 
 In health however there is no intrusion from above downwards, 
 which is not commanded by an equal attraction from beneath. The 
 food lies upon the plate, and the man and the mouth voluntarily take 
 it. Eating and drinking are quad voluntary all the way down as in this 
 first instance at the top. Whatever violence of supply is superadded, 
 is the answer to a greater urgency of demand ; for the intestines be- 
 come bigger as they proceed, and more and more ravenous. The 
 lower belly, hollow by nature, calls to the upper with loud Halloos. 
 But the consequence of any force unsolicited from below, is seen 
 in a lively image when food is thrust down our throats without our 
 consent, in which case we cannot swallow it. And just as jealous 
 as the man, is the stomach, and are the intestines, of having any- 
 thing thrust down their throats. So food to which we are averse, 
 rouses the hostility of the whole line, and is successively unswal- 
 lowed by part after part; for swallowing in its finer meanings, 
 blends with digestion. Many facts prove this case, and also that a 
 series of instincts or voices are located in the tube, which command 
 or refuse particular aliments. 
 
 But the series of parts has a series of powers whose existence is 
 written upon the forms of the organs. The velvety palpation of 
 the food by the lips, its reduction by the teeth, the warm squeeze 
 of parts and juices by the tongue, are again the exemplars of all 
 the forces and actions which succeed them. There is however 
 nothing so violently physical in any other part of the tube as in 
 the mouth, but motion, warmth, long delay, incessant working, and 
 the semi-chemical forces of certain fluids, perform changes which 
 arc in reality far more sweeping, without the assistance of any rude 
 agency. Nevertheless from the stomach the muscular powers and 
 opposing surfaces become more forcible and urgent, and thrash out 
 the last grain from the chaff with somewhat of indignant exaspera- 
 tion. 
 
 As the point of this series of muscular forces there is a corres- 
 
ORGANIC PROPERTIES OF THE SALIVA. 147 
 
 ponding series of solvent fluids. These are the wheels of the diges- 
 tive chariot, carrying its passengers either inwards as food, or out- 
 wards as drainage, for food and drainage are the same problem 
 applied to two different worlds, the animal and the vegetable, and 
 constipation whether in a town or an individual, whether in gut or 
 in sewer, is a limit to the circle of nutrition. Now of all the 
 solvent and locomotive fluids, the saliva, so called from its salty pro- 
 perties, is the head and the type. It is the vehicle and the flux of 
 the particles which it liberates from the food. These it dilutes, 
 softens, and dissolves ', draws forth their essences ; alters them into 
 suitable forms; sheathes the latter, and enables them to glide 
 through the pores which carry them to their destination in the 
 chyle or the blood. These are organic properties of the saliva, as 
 declared by its acts. But each joint of the tube has its specific 
 saliva, in addition to the previous fluid that descends from above. 
 The saliva of the stomach is the gastric juice. This saliva the 
 stomach can digest, and leave it mild, or grind it sharp, according 
 to the materials upon which it is to act. It can vary the fluid, and 
 suit the condiment, to its own want and palate. Moreover it can 
 modify the heat which is disengaged, and alter the shape and inten- 
 sity of its own culinary fire, fueling it well, and stirring it up, as 
 the viands require. This the stomach chiefly effects by the opening 
 of the saliva itself, when the vital fire comes cheerily forth, and 
 eats up the chemical heat which is also disengaged. The saliva of 
 the next compartment is the threefold contribution of the liver, the 
 gall-bladder and the pancreas. This triple-headed saliva is more 
 raging and terribly chemical than what went before it, and wastes 
 and melts the food with gross heat and uncompromising persecution. 
 Nor are there wanting other fluids suited in a series to all the 
 offices of these elongated tables. The point to be kept in memory 
 is, that there exists a commonwealth of salivas, and that the saliva 
 of each part is derived into the next when its proper uses have been 
 accomplished. These uses have been already enumerated in part. 
 In the first place they consist in the business of absorption, of which 
 they are the primary medium ; in the last, in the work of rejec- 
 tion, of which they are at once the measure and the stimulant. 
 "We now come to the series of matters realized or absorbed. The 
 
148 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 food of the mouth is the freest, comprising the particles which only 
 require the moving opportunity offered by the teeth and the tongue, 
 to quit their former attachments in the substance they belonged to, 
 and to rise at once into the new society whither they are bound. 
 They put off their bodies with nimble ease, and are presently at 
 home among the particles and occupations of the human form. 
 The grosser molecules never miss them, or know how they go in, or 
 whither they have gone. The most living saliva, wing-footed as 
 Mercury, spirits them in by the secret paths which it has trodden 
 perhaps often, and of its own nature knows so well. 
 
 The food of the stomach, immeasurably more bulky, and subject 
 to greater and longer probations, yet passes immediately into the 
 hungry blood : the little veins which stand open-throated on every 
 portion of the distinctly ventriculated surface, carry crowds of these 
 slower individuals into the bosom of the abdominal circulation. The 
 alimentary mass reduced into chyme in the stomach, yields its re- 
 luctant vintage directly to the blood. The possibility of an imme- 
 diate reception of the food by the blood, appears for the most part 
 to end with the stomach ; the way for the next order of particles is 
 long and difficult, and the preparation corresponding. Beyond the 
 stomach a lower order of vessels than the veins receives the food, 
 namely, the lacteals; there is an intermediate school between the 
 food and the blood, namely, the chyle. These lac teals arising from 
 the alimentary tube, but decreasing in number in its lower parts, 
 where there is less of the milky chyle to absorb, converge from the 
 intestines to the receptacle of the chyle, a small reservoir seated in 
 front of the lower vertebras; this reservoir is then continued up- 
 wards in a fine pipe called the thoracic duct, and runs all the way 
 to the left side of the neck, where it runs into the fork of a great 
 vein that pours its blood directly into the right side of the heart. 
 A long passage for the chyle, contrasted with the short cut which 
 the higher portions of the food enjoy, to their desired haven in the 
 blood ! "We infer from this, the comparative imperfection of the 
 chyle, vexed as it is with such abundant trials, and ultimately let 
 in through the intervention of a peculiar saliva, termed the lymph. 
 This lymph is brought by the lymphatics from all parts of the frame 
 to the same receptacle and duct : it is the old spirit of the blood 
 
INTESTINE SERIES OF FOODS. 149 
 
 serving to inaugurate the new body, and thus is the last of the sali- 
 vas, which digests and introduces the chyle itself as the other sali- 
 vary fluids digest and alter the food. 
 
 As a corollary of this we may infer, that delicious, pleasant and 
 agreeable foods contain a native series of offerings to our intestine 
 wants. Fruits, aromatic and luscious, hold their delights the loosest 
 of all, and give them away at the first solicitation. Their nectars 
 claim instant kindred with the tongue and the oral saliva. Na- 
 ture has cooked them, and they need no mixture, nor artificial fire : 
 the grape and the pineapple are a sauce unto themselves, and are 
 baked and roasted and boiled in the sunlight. They are at the top 
 of their life at the table ; their niceness is not foreign, nor does their 
 beauty depend upon disguise. By feeding the eyes with bloom and 
 loveliness, they call forth a chaster saliva into the mouth to wel- 
 come and introduce them; different from the carnal gush which sa- 
 vory meats engender. They are flasks of the spiritual blood of the 
 earth, of the kith of our tree of life, and nearer to it than aught be- 
 sides, unless it be the mother's milk. The term fruit implies that 
 which is for use, or which has attained its own object, and seeks its 
 place in another system. Fruits therefore hang before our mouths, 
 and tempt us by nature's sweetest wiles ; as it were the nipples of 
 her bosom, which still run pure with rills of the milk of her ancient 
 kindness. They belong essentially to mouth digestion, which is mere 
 melting. 
 
 Meats belong to the lower man — to the blood and the chyle. 
 Animal life has diverted them to itself, and the spirit of the beast 
 has to be exorcised ere they can enter the human body. They de- 
 mand a long and severe process of reformation and excretion ; artful 
 fire and elaborate treatment before their preoccupation is put aside. 
 They are proper to the belly, and are the taskmasters of digestion. 
 Vegetables are, in these respects, intermediate between meats and 
 fruits ; and milk, eggs, and the like products, which are the fruits 
 that animals yield us, are also intermediates put forth from the ani- 
 mal side. As we said before, the modern man requires all these 
 viands to supply his different natures, seated one after another 
 adown the long hungers of his entrails. 
 
 Let us then assimilate this idea in passing onwards, that every 
 
 13* 
 
150 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 step of the alimentary tube has its distinct food; and let us be sure 
 that these great varieties are necessary to the maintenance of the 
 human blood, that the spirit may come down into the world thereby, 
 through its own mysterious process of avatars and incarnations. 
 
 But in this extensive system, for aught that we have hitherto 
 said, the parts might be deficient in unity, and want active combi- 
 nation. Have we then left out no fact in our treatment of these 
 straggling organs? Undoubtedly, for we have said nothing of the 
 motion that we feel pervading the belly, and whose use should be 
 as palpable as its existence : we have taken no account of the alter- 
 nate movements of the lungs, "which press and actuate the inferior 
 viscera as the atmospheres press and actuate the earth." Now the 
 grand effects of the body depend upon this actuation of the lungs : 
 it is the source of mechanical power to the whole of the organs. 
 This is manifest in the alimentary tube. When portions of this 
 tube are exposed to sight, or removed from the rest, they still ex- 
 hibit a creeping or peristaltic motion. This is their last individual 
 effort, when they have lost the support of the neighboring organs, 
 and the fulcrum of the skin and muscles ; and it is vague and inde- 
 terminate. They still indeed move for a brief space, though no 
 lungs draw them, because everything in the body is constructed to 
 do of itself, as far as may be, whatever other parts do for it ; so little 
 is man's work physical, and so helpful are all things to all things. 
 But this individual life, though it exists, cannot of itself maintain 
 itself. Before, however, the machine is broken into, the movement 
 of these parts is rhythmical and exact, chiming with the motions of 
 the breath. For the gullet runs down through the lungs, and 
 necessarily obeys their attractions, and as necessarily rolls onward 
 its motion to the subsequent structures. As for the stomach and 
 abdominal organs, we know by touch that they are subject to recip- 
 rocal breathings coming down from above. The same is the case 
 with the lacteals and the thoracic duct, which latter runs up, as the 
 gullet down, through the active space of the chest — the air-pump 
 of the frame. Thus the digestive series, from the mouth of the lips 
 to the mouth of the subclavian vein, and including the myriads of 
 mouths between the two, eats and drinks (for the two are no longer 
 two in assimilation) in alternate moments, as the lungs draw in 
 
THE END OF ASSIMILATION. 151 
 
 their food, the air; and in the next moment swallows along the 
 whole line; then eats again; and so forth. It is in this way that 
 the lungs are continually drawing up the food to the blood, which 
 is seconded by every point of the tube, successively contracting and 
 expelling it ; somewhat as the arteries contract upon the blood, and 
 produce the pulse. And by the same agency, through the general 
 framework of the body, the lungs harmonize and combine these 
 creeping parts and their motions, peristaltic and vermicular, into one 
 coordinate system. 
 
 We have seen above that the work of assimilation terminates in 
 the blood, in the introduction of new elements into the living circle, 
 and we have to note that the blood itself, so soon as it is formed, 
 begins to undergo the process of regeneration, or to be eaten by 
 higher purposes and powers, and charged with impurities that must 
 be put aside. Thus as there is a scale of stages leading upwards 
 from the food to the blood, there is a parallel scale leading down- 
 wards from the blood, and consisting of its excretions, or the various 
 salivas, which come out of the system near the spots where the new 
 materials are entering it, and uniting with the latter, as the similar 
 old with the similar young, lead them to a certain distance through 
 the first schools that conduct them towards their destination in the 
 organs. 
 
 "What is the end in view in all this digestion and assimilation? 
 In one sense, the formation of the blood; but let us advance beyond 
 this answer, and inquire after the human end for which we instinct- 
 ively, and our bodies organically, appropriate the substances of the 
 external universe. The end is, that we may live in the world by 
 means of a body derived from the world, and representing the world. 
 Each place has its laws, and when we are at Home we must do as 
 the Romans. To be full freedmen of nature, we require to be allied 
 to her by our constitution ; to marry into all her royal families ; and 
 to take a body from every kingdom, in order that we may enter, 
 inhabit, appreciate and understand it. The sense of taste, and that 
 alimentary series which we have been considering, afford us our 
 material embodiment, by which we are brought into fellowship with 
 the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms ; the sense of smell and 
 the pulmonary series draw down our aerial food, by which we gain 
 
152 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 the freedom of the atmosphere; finally, the brain is the governor of 
 assimilation, and compasses on our behalf the ethers and spaces of 
 the mundane system, introducing us to the illimitable spheres. The 
 human body, as Pan's last flock, crops every nature that it touches. 
 The highest organization also coincides in this with the lowest, that 
 it is an omnivorous stomach, which has the senses and faculties of 
 human kind domesticated as tastes in its comprehensive cellwork. 
 And so by a just divination, the word taste is synonymous with what- 
 ever is refined and of good fashion in the objects of our knowledge. 
 And in the process of assimilation, and the parallel process of 
 nutrition, we are to consider that day by day, and year by year, the 
 spiritual essence is assiduous to constitute the body in its likeness ; 
 this being the reason of the vast series of materials supplied by the 
 earth and the atmospheres; of the various influences brought to bear ; 
 of the manifold changes and purifications that occur momentaneously 
 in the body itself; of the stupendous chemistry and growth carried 
 on there : — all with a view to bring forth, and support, a piece of 
 nature, which shall availably correspond to the soul, to which, how- 
 ever, nothing in the world can more than conveniently approximate. 
 This ever-nearing, ever-distant correspondency of the soul, is the 
 human body, whose form or plan is spiritual, or from the spiritual, 
 and only the matter of its seeming is material. 
 
 It is wonderful indeed how this correspondence is maintained dur- 
 ing our quickest variations. We sleep and wrestle, work and play, 
 weep and laugh, with the same body, which answers equally to all 
 these states. Every passion, as a human extense, uses the person 
 of this dramatic frame, in which all that we do, or can do, is con- 
 templated from the first. This is notorious from the countenance, 
 which assimilates with the momentary spirit. The world also and 
 circumstance are as flexible and correspondent: according to our 
 wants, they feed us with good or evil, and bend about to the whole 
 exigency and gladiatorship of the spirit. The soul distils the food 
 not into chemicals and gases, but incarnations of its moods. Anger 
 sops in the same dish with love, and both are confirmed at the one 
 supper. This rapid ensoulment of the alimental chain is especially 
 marked in the saliva, which as we noticed before is a running com- 
 missary between the mind and the food. The soul glitters down 
 
THE EMOTIONS OF THE SALIVA. 153 
 
 upon its salts, and smites them with the reigning love beam. They 
 become as different at different times and in different persons, as the 
 billing of the dove from the bite of the rattlesnake, or the sweetest 
 milk from the deadliest poison. There is saliva full of care and 
 sourness, which eats, not the food, but the stomach itself. There is 
 saliva charged with contempt, which is spit upon meanness, and 
 carries the badge from soul to soul where it lights. There is the 
 saliva of disgust, which is vomited from the loathing blood, and 
 avenges our disgust upon the ground. There is the spittle of self- 
 complacency, elicited by the happy tongue, and too good not to be 
 swallowed. There is the saliva of luxury, which runs greedily after 
 the meats, and loses its life of immoderateness. There is the saliva 
 of rage, which foams violently forth upon the beard, and that of 
 haste and hurry, which froths and sputters. There is the saliva of 
 grief, hard to get down, and full of choking. There is the mouth 
 of fear, from which the saliva is frightened, and the dry tongue 
 cleaves to the palate. There are lovers' kisses, in which soul is fluid 
 unto soul. In the lower animals the saliva becomes actively poison- 
 ous, sometimes by nature, sometimes by vehemence and passion. 
 We might extend the instances to every well-marked affection, and 
 point out the sympathy of the saliva with each. It is, however, 
 sufficient to observe, that this medium between the food and the 
 blood is the abode of an ever-varying life, according to which it sum- 
 mons from the food the pabulum of that very life, making the new 
 elements of the body into vehicles and implements of the inclina- 
 tions. Were it not for this, every meal would disarrange the har- 
 mony between the body and the soul, by furnishing materials that 
 could not become incorporated.* 
 
 Recurring for a moment to the act of spitting, it teaches us that 
 the casting out of evil spirits is a branch of bodily truths. The 
 excretions are emotional, i. e., they are excretions of the emotions 
 themselves, and as they pass off, they help to rid the body of dis- 
 turbances. Speech is an excretion from an overburdened heart; 
 
 * We postpone speaking of the psychology of the abdominal organs until we 
 treat of the heart, when we shall offer some general remarks on the life and 
 feelings of the viscera. In anticipation we assure the reader, that these parts 
 belong to the soul as much as the brain itself. 
 
154 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 we tell our sorrows and halve them. Tears abate the grief which 
 they carry and signify, for they roll it out. The excretion of the 
 bile affords a similar vehicle and relief for other strongly troublous 
 states. The saliva, full of melted feelings, is very busy in these 
 clearances. Filthy odors assailing the sense and striking foul upon 
 the mind, are rejected and forgotten by the satisfaction of spitting. 
 It is not merely the material but the animal sense, not only odor 
 but idea, that is thus cast out : were it the former alone, the nose 
 ought to be blown and not the mouth cleared : whereas stenches 
 cause the holding of the nose : the fingers nip it to take no more, 
 while the downright mouth acquits us of that which is already. 
 The motion concerned in rejection goes some way towards the rid- 
 dance of the mind ; hence inner annoyances of various kinds cause 
 shocks, muscular twitches, efforts, throes, and in short bodily strug- 
 gles, by which their effect is not only symbolized, but in part thrown 
 away. Nature begins the cure of diseases in their own first results 
 upon the instincts. It is where no excretion or movement occur 
 that trouble works with terrible energy upon the vitals : the dry 
 eye of great grief is nearly insane ; its motionless attitude is the 
 frost of catalepsy. But the subject of "casting out" requires a vol- 
 ume. As a practice it is resorted to unconsciously every day in 
 medicine, which stimulates the excretions. We are most familiar 
 with its rationale in our Saviour's casting out of the devils, and 
 their entrance into the herd of swine, as it were the carnal salivary 
 medium which conducted Satan to Satan, or spat the devils into the 
 deep. This miracle is no isolated case, but has little miracles of a 
 similar kind and from the same God, happening constantly in our 
 bodies, the name of whose troubles also is legion. I do not know 
 whether this be not the prime law of excrementitious rejection. It 
 is morally true also, for we have the power of clearing the mind 
 through its nutrient tube, the memory, when evil contents come in, 
 by refusing to think of them, and rejecting them. The excretional 
 herd is always ready, and the infernals beseech to pass into the pigs 
 as soon as the whole man is against them, or the divine power is 
 fully present. 
 
 We have further testimony to the ensoulment of the tube in the 
 play of the emotions upon the appetite of hunger. Who does not 
 
THE EMOTIONS OF THE SALIVA. 155 
 
 know that the stomach may be hungry, and provision at hand, and 
 yet the receipt of painful news, a tale of horror, the arising of dis- 
 putes, or the suggestion of anxieties, may, in a moment, not only 
 expunge the sensation of hunger, but produce a loathing worse than 
 heavy satiety? The organic mind will not extend its miseries by 
 feeding them. But when it is in peaceful outflow, respiring un- 
 hindered action, the appropriation of food which supports it is de- 
 lightful. Cseteris paribus, peaceful workers have the best appe- 
 tites, and can consume the most with benefit. Peace, indeed, is the 
 eating-time of whatever is best in our informations j it is the spirit- 
 ual world of the satisfactions of conviviality. On the other hand, 
 the time of trial is the time of fasting, and it is only afterwards 
 that we are again an hungered. 
 
 Let us then remember, that every permanent passion that we 
 cherish, dines with us at every table ; and that as for temporary 
 conditions, tranquillity can eat, but strong emotions go to suspend 
 the want of food, that they ma.y use the time for their own work. 
 
 The subject of food subdivides itself into quantity and quality. 
 A certain assured amount of provision — a decent minimum — is the 
 ground of further wants. This annuls those distressing anxieties 
 that consume the stomach, and make it the seat of care instead of 
 exhilaration for a large portion of our fellow men. Under these 
 circumstances the body feeds upon itself, only miserable sensations 
 are alive, and the mind has neither leisure nor wish to pursue its 
 own avocations. But when the first demand is satisfied, quality and 
 variety are the next necessities to be considered. And here there 
 is room for a new gastronomy, to instruct us under all circumstances 
 and seasons, what nutrient matters, and what artificial compounds 
 and alterations of these, will enable the body to carry forward hap- 
 pily the various works required at our hands. We know that the 
 mind can modify the frame to almost any extent by the manner of 
 feeding it: by the substances introduced we already produce the 
 baser conditions, of fatness, intoxication, stupidity, ferocity; and it 
 must be the business of a charitable science to reverse the direction, 
 and to feed the industries and virtues with their daily bread, from 
 among the riches in this kind which the earth is instructed to yield. 
 There is not an emotion however retiring, not a thought however 
 
156 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 fine, not an action however skillful, but may be carried into further 
 and more exquisite perfection by some helpmate from the social 
 board, when humanity there enlarges its heart, and brightens its 
 calculating cheerfulness. 
 
 With respect to diet, however, it is as various as days and moods, 
 and in the largest sense no food as digestible or indigestible per se, 
 but according to persons, times, and circumstances. Private judg- 
 ment, where it exists, has full rights here; where it does not exist, 
 the patient comes under dietetic rules. Fixed habits of diet other- 
 wise are a prison to changeable man, and curtail his versatility in 
 every sphere. His body ought to oscillate from the middle ordinary 
 point to fasting on the one hand, and to conviviality on the other, 
 in order that all his faculties may be helped by steering the appe- 
 tites in the direction where their power lies. Judicious fasting 
 especially is to the structure of the mind what held breath and ex- 
 piration is to its movements; the abstraction of food corresponds to 
 the abstraction of thought; without it there are no times of ascetic 
 intellectual separation, and without these, an important part of man 
 is unrepresented. Moreover, without times of fasting, the tongue 
 is immersed and lost in its objects, whereas fasting places the whole 
 of diet at a distance, sees it clearly and appreciates it sharply, and 
 introduces the criticism of intellect into the gastrosophic sphere. 
 Cooks, therefore, require these self-denials for their own business, as 
 well as other Christians for theirs. In short, we find that fasting 
 answers to spiritual eating, conviviality to human eating, and ordi- 
 nary meals, pleasant and calm, to the regulated private senses and 
 sensibilities; which three spheres contribute to make up the visceral 
 man. 
 
 Nothing is more important than society for the useful pleasures 
 of the table. " Chatted food," the proverb says, " is half digested." 
 As a rule, the solitary man does not reap full advantage from his 
 cheer. Setting aside that single blessedness is opposed to economy 
 and abundance, it also leaves out convivial mirth, which otherwise 
 pervades the body, and gives sunshine and activity to its operations. 
 In the breaking of bread our better eyes are opened, and the truths 
 of communion are made known to us. We all know how very 
 much good company enhances the enjoyments of the palate; this is 
 
TEETOTALISM. 157 
 
 an open sign of the delightful influence that it exerts upon the en- 
 tire work of assimilation. Ancient habitudes might be imitated in 
 these respects. The hospitalities of other times enabled the guests 
 to digest hard things for which their successors have no stomachs : 
 courage and clanship and bold ambition haunted the boars' heads 
 and smoking beeves, and horns of mead and of wine. The re- 
 velers were firmer in friendship, brighter in honor, softer in love, 
 and stronger in battle, for the spirits which descended upon the hall. 
 We, too, must dine as our forefathers, only the board should be 
 newly laid to invite down the later graces of labor, justice, and 
 peace. Our fight for to-day is not with men, but with the enemies 
 and difficulties of all men. Our honors are the extensions of the 
 tone of peace, disarming the world by the dispersion of offences. 
 It is a new supper of gathered rich and poor that will refresh 
 us in this second epoch. Nor on grounds of mere utility should 
 the song of the bard and the replication of the jester be absent 
 from a work in which a merry complacency is the springtide of the 
 season, and the oil and smoothness of the whole machine. 
 
 Let us remember, therefore, in passing from the subject, that this 
 intestine public question implies the dispensation to all of the due 
 quantity of the proper quality of food, subject to the law of variety, 
 and under the best circumstances, internal and external, or mental 
 and convivial ; and further that precarious modes of life, to many 
 temperaments, are incompatible with a healthy assimilation. 
 
 We have postponed to this place the subject of wine as a part of 
 diet, because the case of stimulants rests on human life, and not 
 otherwise on physiological laws. Alcohol in its various forms acts 
 specifically upon the brain and animal nature, themselves the stimu- 
 lants of the other systems of the body. Teetotalism on this ac- 
 count takes rank with vegetarianism, as both of them tend to reduce 
 the animal powers. 
 
 What is called " total abstinence" has claims which deserve to be 
 admitted. The abstainer on principle is generally workful to an 
 extraordinary degree; has his senses about him, such as they are; 
 is equally cool and collected at all parts of the day ; feels little ir- 
 ritability from current events, but bears and forbears well. This is 
 while health and strength last. And if he be capable of fanaticism, 
 14 
 
158 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 or kindly speaking, faith in abstinence, he may be a strong man 
 through life on cold water. His strength will be in proportion to 
 his dose of faith. A batch of abstinence soldiers working in emu- 
 lation against a batch accustomed to stimulants, will generally be 
 the conquerors. New systems, and especially self-denials, have the 
 advantage of enlisting faith, the wonder-worker. The victories of 
 Mohammedanism were due in part to the combination of a religious 
 faith with a faith in abstinence; a union of two powerful springs 
 affecting the soul and the body. Torrents of passion which had 
 been wont to vent themselves in pleasures, were suddenly stopped 
 off, and they burst through another channel, in faith and energetic 
 fighting. Faiths, however, wear out in many cases, and the truth 
 of things is the ultimate level, unaffected by mortal enthusiasm. 
 
 Successful abstinence shows that stimulation is a law of existence, 
 for an abstinence neither hereditary nor stimulating is not kept up. 
 The most sober people have their " pocket pistols," and take their 
 own stimulants as neat as they can get them. For there are two 
 sides of the cellar, two decanters of spirit, the body and the soul. 
 Take away the bodily decanter, and life itself must furnish an ex- 
 citement that will be equivalent. There are other stimulants be- 
 sides drink that cheat us of our senses, other drunkenness than that 
 of the public house. Teetotalism might be drunk with its own 
 cause, with the additional indecorum of exhibiting its disgrace in 
 Exeter Hall. 
 
 Abstinence excludes temperance or the faculty of balance, which 
 communicates with reason, the temperance of the upper degree. 
 For the sake of the evil it bans both the good and the evil. It is 
 the suicide of choice. Similarly, vowed celibacy excludes chastity, 
 and is a knot tied in the will against both cleanness and uncleanness. 
 This is not healing, but castration. But there are those who require 
 these extirpations, at least with our present means of cure. " If 
 thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; if thy 
 right hand offend thee, cut it off. It is better for thee to enter into 
 life," &c. &c. Thence we note that total abstinence is a thing com- 
 manded, and a means entering into an ultimate plan of fulness of 
 life. But there is an if in the case — " If thine eye offend thee !" 
 
 Teetotalism reasons without this if and brandishes its surgical 
 
TEETOTALISM. 159 
 
 vow over temperate and intemperate alike. It goes to science and 
 morals for corroborations. It says that intoxication is poisoning, 
 and that poisons are like themselves in their least doses as in their 
 greatest. There is a mistake here founded upon an etymology. 
 Poison is one thing, and stimulus is another. Poisons destroy the 
 structure, or subvert the functions of the body; stimuli kindle it 
 into life and exhaust it into repose, or even death if their action be 
 excessive. The sleep of the night is nature's recovery from the 
 excitement of the clay. The sleep of death is the spirit's recovery 
 from the lifetime. Our machines are meant to wear out, and sti- 
 muli are the wearers. The organs of the body and mind live by 
 stimuli, which in temperance animate, and in excess destroy them. 
 Light is the stimulus of the eye, but its intensity will extinguish 
 sight; yet is it no poison even when its glare is destructive. We 
 do not " totally abstain" from light, though a part of our brethren 
 have weak eyes, and are ordered into dark rooms. Sound, which in 
 voice and music makes the ear alive, deadens hearing when too 
 loud, and destroys the sense. In short, the sensible world is one 
 great excitement to carry man beyond his first organic water. Joy, 
 too, the wine of the soul, will kill by its abundance and unexpect- 
 edness, and yet it is next of kin to the life that its overmuchness 
 withers. High truth intoxicates those not fit to drink it; causing 
 oftentimes madness from its misapprehension and abuse ; causing 
 still more frequently need of rest, to recover from its dazzling reve- 
 lations. We repeat that man lives by stimuli, any of which, ad- 
 ministered in too great quantity, too often, or too fast, may cause 
 destruction or suspension of life. Yet none of them is, therefore, a 
 poison. Just as little can we so denominate alcohol, from the fact 
 of its producing intoxication or death. For every stimulus carried 
 to excess has the like effects, and, in all the cases, the excess is repre- 
 hensible, but the stimulus natural. Our Saxon word Drunkenness 
 bears no poisonous sense; it is merely the far-gone past participle of 
 Drink made substantive. 
 
 In truth poison differs from stimulus as medicine from food, for 
 poisons in little doses are medicines, and food in its greatest concen- 
 tration is stimulus. The plainest food will kill in too great quan- 
 tity. And then again, medicinal substances, as coffee, tea, &c, 
 
160 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 come into dietetic use. Yet we cannot infer that food and medicine 
 are the same thing, though they touch each other and are not in- 
 compatible at the extremes. 
 
 However this may be, the nomenclature of a subject from its 
 abuses is inadmissible : we might as well name rich and provocative 
 viands from gluttony as good wine from drunkenness. We might 
 call fruits after diarrhoea, plum-pudding after vomiting, or peas after 
 flatulence. But who would have evil courage enough to go through 
 with such a dictionary ? 
 
 But here the chemists occur, and tell us that alcohol is never 
 absorbed j they have smelt the brains of sots, and the reek of un- 
 altered liquor was manifest in the tissues. Thence they argue that 
 stimulants are poisons which the body naturally refuses. We 
 distrust this argument from drunkards to humanity and from the 
 dead to the living. Bather let good men's boards be canvassed, 
 where temperance reigns, and let it be seen whether there is no 
 assimilation of wine. Surely the flow of soul can drink the 
 measured cup, and fill its mood better than when the intellectual fire 
 is dry. It is at banquets like Plato's that wine is vindicated. 
 Their guests show the scope of human assimilation. What this is 
 in extenso may be briefly sketched in an English fashion. The 
 laborer wants the support of labor in good solid food, which under 
 the magic of assimilation becomes muscle and sinew. The artisan 
 wants nicer feeding, to support and not overbear the finesse of his 
 fingers. Intellectual artisans need greater temperance still. We 
 are now speaking of the hours of work. As for stimulants, the 
 laborer may moderately mingle them with his food ; the hayfield 
 and cornfield, especially at cutting and reaping times, are wisely wet 
 with cans of wholesome harvest ale. But as we rise in the quality 
 of labor, work and stimulants are more incompatible ; for the edge 
 of the eye must be sharp and hard to bear the weight of the soul 
 behind it. So much for work, which thus becomes ascetic, or shall 
 we say, stimulating in itself, and intolerant of secondary excite- 
 ments. The case alters in play hours, when a new set of faculties 
 and feelings, and a new set of assimilations begin. The spirit of 
 play mates with the spirit of wine ) the pleasant emotions and the 
 brilliant saws and dreams of society, like wine-lilies naturally rock 
 
TEETOTALISM. 161 
 
 upon the cup, and clip their spirity roots into the beakers. The 
 imaginative skies are vinous then ; Valhalla has its mead, and great 
 Odin never eats, but all sustenance is liquor to Allfather, who 
 drinks only wine. Elysium too would be a poor Elysium without 
 nectar and ambrosia. The case is purely one of assimilation. If 
 the life can drink the wine, and make life of it, then the wine is 
 food j if the life is overtopped by the wine, which lies in pools in the 
 reeking stomach and above the swampy brains, then there is excess, 
 sensuality, or spiritual drowning. It is like the case of the horse 
 and his rider. Many are thrown, and break their bodies ; many 
 should never get on horseback ; some can ride where their animal 
 is not too spirited j and some can back any charger even were it 
 Bucephalus. But it is to be noted that allowance is only to persons 
 in health, and not to those who have bodily ailments, diseased 
 imaginations, or predominant lusts, or other maladies which want a 
 physician. 
 
 It is now therefore obvious that we cannot take the personal 
 experience of any man as to abstinence, beyond the limits of his 
 own temperament, business and pleasures. The different functions 
 to which our employments convert our organs, require for the or- 
 gans different stimulation to put them " into condition" for their 
 work. A Newton may require to fast and agonize before he can 
 end his fearful mathematics, but that is no reason why our grooms 
 and gardeners, with no end of the kind, should go through the like 
 discipline. The adjustment must be left to experience, but it can- 
 not come from an author's study. 
 
 Thus the power of assimilating wine is various in different per- 
 sons, and in the same person at different times, and a flexible sense 
 is necessary, to adjust the indulgence to the occasion. Observation 
 proves this, for we can drink more at some times than at others, 
 and sometimes with impunity and great restoration ; at other times 
 we feel ill consequences which show that we have not judged wisely 
 at the boar J. 
 
 Above all things it is plain that cutting up dead sots will not settle 
 the question. On the contrary, we must dissect all the drinkers, 
 temperate and intemperate, and the same man at many different 
 times, to elicit the living law of temperance. And first we must 
 
 14* 
 
162 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 dissect ourselves. We know already that the habitual abuser of 
 stimulants is full to the brim, and will run over with each fresh 
 potation without assimilating it. He has no digestion left for com- 
 mon food, and therefore in point of assimilation his case proves 
 nothing. It is the casual use of wine according to times and sea- 
 sons, as Solomon says, and according to the feelings of the hour, 
 which is life-giving, healthy and enjoyable. But whatever is good 
 becomes, out of its place, an evil. Air which sustains us, native 
 and exhilarating in the chest, is a torment and insurrection in the 
 belly. The spirit and consciousness of the brain, too much poured 
 forth upon a spot of skin, are sensitiveness, or agony, according to 
 the degree. The blood thrown down from its vessels is a foreign 
 body and black death in the system. Continence is the case in 
 which forces are safe. And so with wine, which now and always 
 has unflawed goblets in some men's brains, from which it is safely 
 drank by their powers, and these of the very highest. The ideal 
 then is, to emulate those chaste but intense qualities that enfranchise 
 the favored guests of nature to dip their cups in the rubies. 
 
 And if wine is good to drink, it need not be drank on pretexts. 
 Men have drunk it from the beginning for that which is the best 
 and the worst of reasons — because they like it. " Wine maketh 
 glad the heart of man" — there lies the fortress of its usage. To 
 the wise it is the adjunct of society • the launch of the mind from 
 the care and hiuderance of the day ; the wheel of emotion ; the 
 preparator of inventive idea ; the blanclness of every sense obedient 
 to the best impulses of the hours when labor is done. Its use is to 
 deepen ease and pleasure on high-tides and at harvest-homes, when 
 endurance is not required ; for delight has important functions, and 
 originates life as it were afresh from a childhood of sportive feeling, 
 which must recur at seasons for the most of men, or motive itself 
 would stop. A second use is, to enable us to surmount seasons of 
 physical and moral depression, and to keep up the life-mark to a 
 constant level, influenced as little as possible by the circumstances 
 of the hour. Also to show to age by occasions, that its youth lies 
 still within it, and may be found like a spring in a dry land with 
 the thyrsus for a divining rod. A third use is, to soften us ; to 
 make us kinder than our reason, and more admissive than our can- 
 
USES OF WINE. 163 
 
 dor, and to enable us to begin larger sympathies and associations 
 from a state in which the feelings are warm and plastic. A fourth 
 use is, to save the resources of mental excitement by a succedaneous 
 excitement of another kind, or to balance the animation of the soul 
 by the animation of the body, so that life may be pleasant as well 
 as profitable, and the pleasure be reckoned among the profits. A 
 fifth use is, to stimulate thoughts, and to reveal men's powers to 
 themselves and their fellows, for in vino Veritas, and intimacy is 
 born of the blood of the grape. But is it not unworthy of us to 
 pour joy's aid from a decanter, or to count upon " circumstances" 
 for a delight which the soul alone should furnish ? Oh, no ! for by 
 Grod's blessing the world is a circumstance ; our friends are circum- 
 stances ) our wax-lights and gaieties likewise j and all these are 
 stimuli and touch the being within us ; and where then is the limit 
 to the application of art and nature to the soul ? At least, however, 
 our doctrine is^ dangerous ; but then fire is dangerous, and love is 
 dangerous, and life with its responsibilities is very dangerous. All 
 strong things are perils to one whose honor's path is over hair- 
 breadth bridges and along giddy precipices. A sixth use is, to make 
 the body more easily industrious in work times. This is the test of 
 temperance and the proof of the other uses. That wine is good 
 for us which has no fumes, but which leaves us to sing over our 
 daily labors with ruddier cheeks, purer feelings and brighter eyes 
 than water can bestow. The seventh use is, in this highest form of 
 assimilation, to symbolize the highest form of communion, according 
 to the Testament which our Saviour left, and to stand on the altar 
 as the representative of spiritual truth. All foods, as we have 
 shown before, feed the soul, and this, on the principles of a universal 
 symbolism : this then is the highest use of bread and wine — to be 
 taken and assimilated in the ever-new spirit of the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 The corollary that we draw, is, that total abstinence contains 
 no universal argument ; that it is an admirable strait-waistcoat for 
 many of us ) that abstinence is a needful discipline for every one 
 at the most of times, and then coincident with temperance ; but 
 that moreover wine is an indispensable gift of heaven, and the use 
 of it to the sane an inalienable matter of private judgment, into 
 
164 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 which abstinence-leagues, though backed by medicine and chemistry, 
 will find it impossible to intrude. 
 
 Time has not yet perhaps elapsed sufficient to show the ultimate 
 results which follow to those who steadily maintain the abstinence 
 pledge. We can therefore only conjecture that the effect will be, 
 to dry up somewhat of those feelings which give the body an extra- 
 ordinary life when they enter it well. And as these feelings are the 
 horses of our greater power, and when skillfully ridden accomplish 
 times and spaces that are impossible without them, we suppose that 
 the teetotallers will be somewhat pedestrian and prosy, excepting in 
 the first vigorous days of their self-denials. But as human nature 
 contains all wants represented in particular persons, there are pro- 
 bably born abstainers from, as well as born requirers of, wine. And 
 if some of the most ordinary because passionless men are in the 
 former class, they seem to have with them the men of peaceful 
 power and supermundane continence, with whom stimulus is less 
 the law of life than a spiritual tranquillity passing common under- 
 standing. 
 
 The current disadvantages of vowed abstinence, supposing it not 
 to be natural also, appear to us to lie in a certain dilution of the 
 powers ; a certain want of sleep in the faculties ; an unending 
 character in the days, or a want of difference between the evening 
 and the morning ; also in a certain rigidity of reason, and a loss of 
 those spiritual chances which are a part of the empire of clairvoy- 
 ance and Providence in the mind • and in an undue incessant 
 drift towards public, utilitarian, and money-making enterprise, to 
 compensate for the loss of that stimulus of the heart which to the 
 generality is of festive growth. But we would speak modestly in a 
 case involving the experience of others. 
 
 As for temperance, it may range in respect of times from a daily 
 moderation of wine to a single annual glass dropped into the diet. 
 And as to quantity also, instinct and experience are its compass. 
 But whatever the natural regime, the practice of temperance is a 
 divine blessing second only to the use of reason. For temperance 
 is the whetstone of our faculty of observation, and the axe of reform, 
 which is to hew away forever at one vice after another, is nowhere so 
 well sharpened as on its square and eager sides. Temperance again 
 
VASTNESS OF THE ASSIMILATIVE FUNCTION. 165 
 
 is the home of the virtues and powers, which shelters them in their 
 nonage, and which they enlarge and furnish in their maturity, until 
 it includes the images, pictures and tastes of them all. Or again it 
 is the native land of man as different from the beasts. Or to speak 
 without figure, temperance, including eating as well as drinking, is 
 the foundation of our refinement, as involving constant acts of 
 physical judgment or bodily wisdom. Intemperance is the devil 
 opposite to this angel, temperance. It dulls every sense, burns out 
 passion prematurely, and turns the mild light of intelligence, as it 
 flickers towards extinction, into a horrid reproach against a swine- 
 hood which is reeling down to disciplines of which total abstinence 
 is but a shadow. For intemperance fosters and aggravates nearly 
 every disease that flesh is heir to, and sharpens the power and sting 
 of every sin, nay, calls out fresh legions of infernals : the ghastly 
 troops of malady and wickedness deploy before it, and muster, as 
 on a field day of death, where excess of wine is a prevalent vice 
 among the people.* 
 
 But now to recur to our main subject, the vastness of the assim- 
 ilative function may be comprehended from the great agencies set 
 in motion by the palate and the stomach. The skin or cloth-making 
 spirit enjoys a considerable realm, but the spirit of the stomach is 
 the owner of three-fourths of the world's navies, the ultimate land- 
 lord of three-fourths of the cultivable earth. Every sea is benetted 
 with the lacteals of the social intestines ; every road is laid down 
 from men to men, as a vessel for food. Agriculture and commerce 
 in their staples are an instinctive obedience to the claims of the 
 belly. Armies are the guardians of its interests ; and the dynasties 
 of a thousand years are transmitted in security, or rock and dissolve, 
 according to the dinners of the people. Such is the material force 
 conferred upon hunger, thirst and assimilation. And in working 
 out this destiny, whereby the globe is remodeled upon the base- 
 ment story of the human body, and converges to our mouths by 
 trains of produce from every climate, man grows socially also, and 
 
 * To those who wish to know what can be said chemically, medically and 
 experimentally in favor of total abstinence, we recommend the perusal of Dr. 
 Carpenter's essay, On the Use and Abuse of Alcoholic Liquors in Health and 
 Disease ; 8vo., London, 1850. 
 
166 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 becomes assimilated to liis fellows; the merchant behest carries him 
 abroad, and informs him from other races ; the aroma of his bro- 
 ther's industry clings to every stuff that he brings; forbidding 
 waste as the loss of humanity and virtue. Thus the organs that 
 assimilate our food, cover themselves with sensibilities, and assimi- 
 late our fellows. And thus we note that the spade-way or plough- 
 track of the husbandman, the paths of ships over the sea, of cara- 
 vans over the desert, and the road with its refinements, are only 
 magnified images of that which goes on with intense smallness in 
 the assimilative organs. 
 
 It is not in the lower kingdoms only that assimilation and diges- 
 tion are proceeding. The plant, it is true, assimilates the mineral, 
 and assimilates the atmosphere, the fruitful soil being the amalgam 
 of their twofold natures in the one case, and the active aroma in the 
 other. The animal again digests all beneath, and fertilizes all. 
 Above the lowest nature each thing is eater and meat, end and be- 
 ginning in succession. The external world in its extent is progress- 
 ive assimilation and refinement. Through every change, by a se- 
 cret providence, the surface of the planet is steadily fitting itself to 
 sustain a grander edifice of society. For this, the primitive forests 
 and their inhabitants have been industriously making, and shed- 
 ding, their frames, in unrcckoned generations. For this, the little 
 flowers have been working since the first were self-sown from the 
 miraculous garden. For this, the earth has rested uncropped in the 
 balmiest latitudes, and still the sun pours the tropical spirit on her 
 unexhausted islands. For this, an aboriginal savage tenantry lease 
 but as hunters the future corn-lands of a long-deferred civilization. 
 The human body, also — fallow and in great part tenantless as the 
 planet — shall it not refine its organization century after century, 
 and become the microcosm of a new mind, to be connected with it 
 entirely, and to inhabit and cultivate it entirely ? 
 
 And what is the growth of this mind itself, but renewed diges- 
 tion and assimilation ? In this again the creation is our food, but 
 which enters through the mouths of the senses. Touch, taste, smell, 
 hearing, sight, carry inwards their several matters of information to 
 the nutrient reservoirs of the memory, where by the active imagina- 
 tion they are raised to some uniformity of life, and being cast into 
 
HIGHER ANALOGUES OF ASSIMILATION. 167 
 
 imagery, are extracted by the understanding, and the upshot is re- 
 ferred to the judgment and the will. The broadest common sense 
 strikes home the first ; is received at once without any process, and 
 identified with the life of the mind ; the details, difficulties and am- 
 biguities of sense, which seem to suggest no present action, are long 
 and passively retained in the entrance, and only come back to mind 
 through other and oblique considerations ; being not the chief, 
 though the bulkiest sustenance of the human understanding. 
 
 Passing from bare consciousness to practical education — from the 
 mind to the man — What is education but an assimilative career ? 
 The full social form is the blood into which we are to enter; the 
 nature of the child, or the roughness of the adult, is the material 
 to be admitted or refined — Delight and curiosity, with tiny gestures 
 and sparkling eyes, come tripping forth to their lessons' time in the 
 classes of existence. The cradle and the mother are one organic 
 school; the nursery is another; the school-proper is another; the 
 workman's probationary bench, and the student's table, are another; 
 the life-calling is another still ; and there is no finish to education, 
 because there is no end to the refinement of mutual good works, 
 or to the closer friendship of the human family. That grand indi- 
 vidual, mankind, true to the spirit of Him who evokes it — can it 
 less than reflect what is "infinite in conjunction, and eternal in per- 
 petuity V 
 
 Does this throw any light of probability on the dim hereafter ? 
 Somewhat of a luminous hope seems to overshadow and tremble 
 around us, while we follow the analogies that proclaim the oneness 
 of God's laws in nature and in man. Are these primordial laws so 
 divine that they govern with their own flexibility even in the future 
 life? Are we attracted thither to feed a mightier organization? 
 Is the good received and welcomed, and the ill renounced, with a 
 selection more discriminating, a rejection more total, and a wisdom 
 more unconceived and irresistible, than even in that human form 
 which comes from the spirit, and returns to the spirit ? Or rather, 
 is the principle one and the same in both cases ? Let us lean on 
 nature's arm, and follow the analogy until we have better lights : the 
 rather because analogy itself is assimilation. 
 
 But to condense and finish. — The possibility of assimilation lies 
 
168 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 
 
 in the fact, that the universe runs man-ward from its source. The 
 means to assimilation are implanted faculties in the soul, the body 
 and the mind, of imitation, emulation and order. The use of assi- 
 milation consists in renewing all things upon their highest models, 
 and by their best examples. Accordingly in the physical man, it is 
 the bringing together of the ends of the earth, to be built in the 
 temple of the body. In the mind, it is the translation of nature 
 into thought, and of matter into spirit. In the household, it is the 
 grouping of young and old upon larger affections into consolidated 
 kindreds. In the state, it is that love and warrant of the common- 
 wealth which reconstructs our private lives into the elements of an 
 advancing society. And in the individual and the race, as the part 
 and the whole of existence, it is that supernal fire which burns to 
 make us more and more from the dust of the earth in the jjnage 
 and likeness of the Divinity. The steps of these assimilations are 
 miracles ; the emulation of every nature to other and better than it 
 is ; the death of the old, and the emancipation and resurrection of 
 the new ) the conversion of all brass into gold, of all grubs 'into 
 butterflies ; of earth into passions ; of men into spirits ; — we see not 
 the stages here ; because they are easier, smaller, purer and faster than 
 our light ', but neither do we refuse to credit them, for the result is 
 humanity. 
 
 Therefore it is thus : at one end the universe is the quarry, at the 
 other is the heaven of heavens already shapen and ever shaping ; 
 and God is the sculptor ; and between lie all time and form moulded 
 as they emerge into new heavens and new earths, the likeness of 
 the wisdom uncreated. And all together rises now, because in the 
 new covenant no temple made with hands, but immensity is the 
 mercy-seat. 
 
DESCRIPTION. 169 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 The brains animate the body with intention and purpose, and the 
 lungs give it corresponding motion, as the active spirit of the organs, 
 and the basis of the operations of the will ; the heart, as the blood's 
 executive power, gives corporeal substance to the frame, inasmuch as 
 the body itself arises from the blood. The existence of the human 
 machine depends upon the heart, but its usage upon the lungs and 
 brains. The heart is the source whence the finished blood descends 
 to the organs throughout the system ; it is the immediate adminis- 
 trator of the supply of nutrition to the body. And as the life is in 
 the blood, the heart is the agent for bestowing that life upon the or- 
 ganization, and for giving every man a temperament, or peculiarity 
 of animal being, secondary to and seconding that nervous life which 
 he receives from the spirit of the brain. In a word, the heart or 
 blood determines the fleshly tenement. Let what powers there may 
 act upon us from within, or from without, we are made of no other 
 stuff, and carry no other body, than comes from the fountain of our 
 blood. We put it to what use we please or can, but the body it- 
 self is given, limited, constituted by the life-blood poured forth by 
 the heart. 
 
 We have then to consider the heart as the centre of the blood-sys- 
 tem ; as a vessel suited to the whole composition of the blood ; as 
 the forceful agent in various motions whereby the circulation is per- 
 petuated, or whereby the end of bodily life coincides with the begin- 
 ning, and the animal circle is completed : also as the isthmus which, 
 according to its build, receives the wave and shock of the passions 
 advancing body ward on the one side, and transmits them in modified 
 vibrations to the expectant tide of blood on the other side. In short, 
 15 
 
170 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 we have to regard the heart in its own peculiar relations to physics, 
 physiology and psychology. 
 
 The anatomical heart is a conical, hollow, muscular organ, lying 
 obliquely in the chest between the two lungs, the base of the cone 
 pointing upwards in the direction of the right shoulder, the apex 
 pointing to the space between the fifth and sixth ribs. It rests upon 
 the tendinous portion of the diaphragm, which is the partition be- 
 tween the chest and abdomen ; and it is encased in a peculiar bag or 
 capsule, the pericardium, which consists of two layers, the outer 
 fibrous, by which the pericardium is attached to the great vessels at 
 the root of the heart ; the inner, a serous layer, continuous with the 
 serous membrane that covers the outer surface of the heart. The 
 cavity between the heart and pericardium, thus lined by a serous 
 covering, generally contains more or less fluid, whereby the heart 
 is lubricated on the outside, and its local motions are rendered easy. 
 
 The heart comprises four cavities, two auricles and two ventricles, 
 one auricle and one ventricle being on each side, and the right pair 
 of cavities being devoted to the circulation of the venous blood, the 
 left pair, to that of- the arterial blood. The auricles are at the top, 
 constituting the base of the heart; the ventricles form the apex; the 
 latter are much stronger than the auricles, consisting of very thick 
 muscular walls, the reason of which we shall see presently. 
 
 The heart is a peculiar muscle, and when any of its four cavities 
 contract, they have the power of expelling their contents, the force 
 of the expulsion being the prime mover of the circulation of the 
 blood. TVe may begin the circle where we please, and we shall find 
 that it returns into itself. Starting for instance from the left ven- 
 tricle, we see that the blood is driven by the contraction of that ca- 
 vity into the aorta, the highway which leads into all the arteries of 
 the body; through these the blood is discharged into the veins, which 
 unite to form at last only two great trunks, the vense cavse, which are 
 again the thresholds of the heart, and debouch into the right auricle. 
 The blood which has now passed from the left ventricle to the right 
 auricle, has still a journey to make before it completes its course. 
 Accordingly from the right auricle it is forced into the right ventri- 
 cle, and by the right ventricle, into the pulmonary artery, which 
 conveys it to the lungs, where it ramifies through the multiple 
 
DESCRIPTION. 171 
 
 branches of that artery, and whence it is brought back by the pul- 
 monary veins, forming ultimately four large trunks, which discharge 
 themselves into the heart's left auricle, by the contraction of which 
 the blood is next forced into the left ventricle, to the place from 
 which we began. 
 
 "We have sketched out the circulation before treating more mi- 
 nutely of the structure of the heart, in order that we may have the 
 blood for a guide, and proceed from the uses of the organ to the 
 anatomical structure. "We shall however again recur to the circu- 
 lation in greater detail. 
 
 The left ventricle of the heart, a powerful contractile cavity, has 
 the task of projecting the florid or arterial blood which has just tra- 
 versed the lungs, through the aorta over the whole body ; upwards, 
 to the head, downwards to the feet ; this office it discharges by a 
 quick act of contraction, or as it is termed, systole, which propels 
 the blood into the aorta. The aorta, like the other large arteries, 
 is elastic and muscular, and tends constantly to assume its smallest 
 calibre, in consequence of which it moves the blood forwards where- 
 ever a free space is found. But when the heart again expands or 
 performs diastole, the blood would regurgitate from the aortic tube 
 into the ventricle, were there not a provision against this in the pre- 
 sence of three semilunar valves, little crescents of the lining mem- 
 brane of the aorta, which swell out into pouches when the blood re- 
 gurgitates, and close the passage. Their function in this respect is 
 constantly called for, and the sudden stop of the blood by the valve 
 gives rise to a click which may be heard among the other sounds of 
 the heart. 
 
 The volume of blood we are considering is now fairly in the arte- 
 ry, and like a slippery ball it eludes the successive pressure of the 
 vessels, and flies onwards in its course. The opening of the artery 
 by the injected wave, and its contraction upon the same, ensues 
 like a rapid undulation along the whole line, and constitutes the 
 pulse. Eighty times per minute the quiver of this stroke permeates 
 the life tree of the body and its infinite ramifications. The station, 
 the tram and the passengers are all locomotives on this railway. 
 First, the heart closes, and its out-thrown blood opens the artery; 
 then the artery itself successively closes and opens down the entire 
 
172 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 extent ; and the result is, the propagation of the wave from the cen- 
 tres to the circumferences of the system. The heart in successive 
 moments forces life upon the arteries ; the arteries, by an even pres- 
 sure, tend to contraction or death, and thereby diffuse the life, or 
 make it universal. Organic beings are expanded ab extra, but con- 
 tract of themselves. Were it not for pressure from without, the 
 contractility of all things would result in general death. But the 
 influx of life opens the narrow into the wide, and ultimately effects 
 a compromise, whereby contraction or individuality rules conjointly 
 with expansion or receptiveness, and the two together perpetuate 
 the commonwealth. This is the indispensable strife between pro- 
 gress and conservation, here represented by the heart and arteries. 
 
 The arteries, forming a tree whose stem is the aorta, terminate by 
 their capillary twigs in the veins, which form another tree corres- 
 ponding to the former, but the reverse of it in motion or function ; 
 for the blood that runs from the largest to the lesser and least arte- 
 ries, returns to the heart through first the least, then the lesser, and 
 then the largest veins. The arterial pulse is quite lost in the mi- 
 nute branches and twigs of the arteries, and the blood passing into 
 the veins presents one continuous flow not manifestly influenced by 
 the beating of the heart. Nevertheless it receives the force of the 
 heart, which is the grand cause of the venous circulation, there being 
 many secondary causes promotive of the same effect, and particularly 
 the respiratory movements. The blood in the veins is prevented 
 from running back, both by the vis a tergo, and during muscular 
 efforts by a set of valves, something like those in the aorta, and 
 which are placed at short intervals in many of the veins, and deter- 
 mine the wavering current onwards. Arrived in the venae cavse, 
 the heads of the veins, the blood receives a new stroke from the 
 muscular strength added to the cava?, and presses with all its forces 
 into the right auricle of the heart, which thus receives the last of 
 the blood, and in the words of Harvey, " is the first part of the 
 heart to live, and the last to die." Thus intruded, it distends the 
 auricle; which, when it has borne the distention to the utmost, 
 begins to resist, to react, to contract ; it does contract and expels the 
 intruded blood. Whither does it expel it ? Not of course into the 
 venae cavae, excepting in the slight proportion between the whole 
 
THE CIRCULATION. 173 
 
 force of the oncoming venous blood and the contrary force of the 
 contracting auricle ; for the steady pressure of the blood in the cavee 
 has already been sufficient to open and command the auricle. The 
 latter then drives the blood into the ventricle, and so is relieved and 
 contracts ; and now the ventricle expands, and the blood which it 
 contains shuts upwards a triple valve, the tricuspid, which is at- 
 tached by tendinous cords to the muscular columns of the heart j 
 and the ventricle, reacting against its own forcible expansion, bear- 
 ing it no longer, throws out the blood, prevented from regurgitating 
 into the auricle by the tricuspid valve, into the pulmonary artery, 
 which is an artery carrying venous blood. The blood thus injected 
 into the pulmonary artery, is in its turn prevented from reflux by 
 three semilunar valves placed at its commencement, and it circulates 
 through another or second circle of arteries and veins, which con- 
 stitute the pulmonic circulation in contradistinction to the general 
 circulation upon which we have already expatiated. By the twigs 
 or ends of the pulmonary arteries it is returned into the twigs or 
 beginnings of the pulmonary veins ; and we may somewhat appreci- 
 ate the reason of an artery in this system carrying venous blood, and 
 a vein carrying arterial blood, when we learn, that this system is in an 
 important respect the inverse of the general system ; inasmuch as 
 the blood becomes de-arterialized, dark and venous in the capillary 
 vessels of the general circulation, but becomes re-arterialized and 
 crimson in the capillaries of the lungs or pulmonary system. 
 
 It is not now necessary to consider the circulation of the lungs, 
 although it may be observed in passing, that the pulmonary arteries 
 and veins, running through those energetic air-pumps, can hardly 
 beat at any other times than during inspiration and expiration ; and 
 the pulse or stroke of the left ventricle can only act to the root of 
 the lungs, and fill the beginning of the pulmonary artery, as a reservoir 
 from which the lungs, at their own intervals, drink in the accumulated 
 blood. One function of the pericardium or heart-bag lies in eman- 
 cipating the heart from the power of the respiratory motions ; for 
 the heart lies in the midst of the lungs, grasped by their two arms, 
 the pulmonary arteries and veins, and were it naked or unprotected, 
 it would be drawn into the pulmonary votex, in which case its in- 
 voluntary life would cease, it would receive the immediate play of 
 
 15* 
 
174 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 the mind just like the lungs, and the spontaneous order of the body 
 would be lost ; in a word, the pulse would coincide with the respi- 
 ration. Even as it is, the respiration exerts a marked influence upon 
 the pericardium, though the heart is not further affected thereby 
 than as it receives the general movements of the lungs and brains, 
 while at the same time it exerts under them its own movements, or 
 maintains its individuality. 
 
 We have now pursued the blood into the trunks of the pulmo- 
 nary veins, where it is still impelled by the vis a tergo, and moreover 
 drawn by the inviting lungs, until it is poured by the four trunks 
 of those veins into the left auricle, which it opens and distends. 
 The auricle now reacts or contracts, and squeezes the blood whither 
 there is the smallest resistance, that is to say, into the left ventricle, 
 which, when filled, in its turn contracts, and its blood shutting back 
 the mitral valves placed between it and its auricle, is driven forwards 
 into the aorta ) again to perform the same revolutions, and to per- 
 petuate life by incessant cycles of formation, destruction and reform- 
 ation. 
 
 From this second view of the circulation we may follow the ac- 
 count given by one physiologist, namely, that the cause of the alter- 
 nate motion of the heart is the action and reaction of the blood and 
 the vessels ; that the immediate cause of the motion of the ven- 
 tricles is the action of the blood and the auricles ; and the immedi- 
 ate cause of the motion of the auricles is the action of the blood 
 and the venae cavae ; further that the immediate cause of the motion 
 of the vena cava is each particular branch of it ; the immediate 
 cause of the motion of the branch is each particular twig of it, and 
 of each capillary tube thereto appended ; the immediate cause of the 
 motion of each venous twig is the action of the little arterial vessel 
 which empties itself into it ; and the immediate cause of this action 
 is the action of the branch, of the trunk, and finally of the heart : 
 wherefore the cause of the heart's motion is continuous, and like the 
 blood itself runs in a circle from the left ventricle, throughout the 
 blood-system, to the right ventricle; showing that there is not a 
 point in the system but contributes to the motion of the heart. We 
 see from this whirl or world of immediate causes how necessarily a 
 motion once begun in these living wheels, rolls onwards, circling 
 
ESSENTIALNESS OF THE HEART. 175 
 
 round, and how slight the resistance is, where all the parts contri- 
 bute in their places to reciprocation and equilibrium. Under these 
 provisions the smallest touch awakens the organism into its beauti- 
 ful motions, emulous so far as nature can be, of everlasting exist- 
 ence and immortal life. 
 
 But if we delve a little under the human organism, we shall 
 find that the circulation of the blood by the heart, is based upon a 
 natural or spontaneous tendency to circulation in the blood itself, 
 and that as in the case of the nervous system (p. 31), there is an 
 automatic life at the foundation in every part, the fluids as well as 
 the solids, to which higher stories or more measured powers are 
 afterwards superadded. Thus the sap circulates in plants, and the 
 blood in many of the lower animals without any heart to propel 
 it. The fluid runs by attraction to the spot where it is wanted, and 
 forms an uninterrupted fibre of supply, which is continually wound 
 off into the loom of the organs ; and it is indifferent whether we look 
 upon it as fluid or solid, for the one end draws the middle and the 
 other end, as if the current of life were a series of coherent 
 threads; while on the other hand the portions wanted for deposit, 
 drop out of the chain when and whither the want pulls them ; for 
 want itself, in its phases in this sphere, is their magnetism and their 
 string. 
 
 The heart, nevertheless, though based upon all that is hearty, 
 magnetic or occultly impulsive in the animate and inanimate worlds, 
 is itself the essence of the human circulation, just as the supreme 
 or rational brain is the essence of the human nervous system with 
 its animation. We may indeed say that there are two essences to 
 every progressive being, the beginning and the end of it, or the germ 
 and the ideal. The germ gives the body and the ideal the spirit, 
 which latter is to alter the body, made already with a capacity to be 
 altered, into its own likeness. The ideal, or what is the same thing, 
 the uppermost addition, as in the vascular system, the heart, in the 
 nervous system, the mind and the cerebrum, become the essence of 
 their respective orders; for in a progressive nature, it is not that 
 which is, but that which becomes, that comports with the moving 
 series, or comes into the view of ends. Moreover, the essence or 
 peculiar capacity is that which distinguishes each organization from 
 
176 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 all others. The essence of man is that mind which he possesses in 
 disco mniunity with any animal ; the essence of his lungs is their 
 idealization by that mind, and the peculiar physical structure which 
 capacitates them for this becoming ; the essentialness of his heart 
 is thus likewise. Hence it is unscientific to regard the spine as the 
 essential part of the nervous system in any animals but those in which 
 the spine is the highest part ; or the heartless circulation as essential 
 in any but acardiac systems . Cerebrate organizations are created 
 for a brain, and long for a brain, and acephalous monsters, though 
 they may exist, cannot continue; so also organizations fitted for a 
 heart, though they may maintain life for a time with a defective 
 heart, yet cannot become adult, or travel on the road of ends, for 
 their essence has failed them. This is not a matter of words, but a 
 difference of ends and methods, involving the question of whether 
 the sciences shall be founded upon distinctions or upon confusion ; 
 of whether they shall walk upon their feet, or stand upon their 
 heads; and of whether the high, the moving and the intelligible 
 shall give the cue to induction, or the stationary, the occult and the 
 low. 
 
 And here we may remark that in organizations it is the additions 
 ab extra that become of all importance in the long run. Thus 
 nature, at first vertebral and serpentine, becomes capital and human 
 by the addition of parts which snakes and tortoises can dispense 
 with. And these extraneous organisms, not at first necessary to 
 mere existence, but necessary to the ends of existence, become the 
 essentials of useful knowledge, because they show the aims of facts, 
 or the ends of all developments. On the other hand, the basis 
 which nature supplies to be built upon, is of no importance except 
 for the building, just as the vertebral column is insignificant except- 
 ing for and to the head. Precisely in the same manner, the magnetic, 
 sap-like, and even animal forces of the circulation, are of no import- 
 ance in our bodies excepting as the ground upon which the last 
 essence, the human heart, is to be built and chambered. Man at 
 any rate is a distinct subject, and that which is manly in his heart 
 is all that belongs to its human physiology. The rest is animality, 
 vegetable physiology or general physics, and had better be sought 
 after in its purity among the beasts, the plants, or the loadstones. 
 
ESSENTIALNESS OF THE HEART. 177 
 
 This theme requires to be dwelt upon from the currenf misappre- ' 
 hensions respecting it. For at present it is held, that that which is 
 essential in the human body is that which the body possesses in 
 common with hydatids and zoophytes — that a digestive sac or cell 
 is the essence of mankind. And the reason given is, that all but 
 stomach and nutrition can be dispensed with, and that these can go on 
 for a time on their own account without the brain and nerves. It is 
 perfectly true that these foundations are as independent as they can be, 
 and that they are automatic. The very flesh is alive perse, and carnally 
 ensouled, before the better life is added to it by the brain. But in 
 developments the development becomes everything, and covers and 
 gradually buries the matrix out of which it sprang. And if the 
 development does not come, the barren matrix cannot last or work. 
 No one ever heard of an acephalous monster going to church or 
 taking a hand at whist; on the other hand, it is walked out of the 
 ranks sexlessly and shabbily into the unconsecrated piece of the next 
 churchyard. And all headless things which come up among those 
 which have heads, must take the same fate; headless sciences among 
 the rest. Moral headlessness is in the same category; those who 
 make the belly and the flesh essential because they are the last 
 things that can be done without, and throw away the higher parts 
 because they are merely additions, and some function continues 
 without them, go to the worms by their own claims. For just that 
 which is first and easiest lost and lived without, is the pearl of the 
 human mind. 
 
 To return from this digression. At one end of the circulatory 
 system is the heart; at the other a class of vessels termed, from 
 their hair-like fineness, the capillaries. The heart, as we before 
 observed, sends from its left ventricle a grand arterial arch, the aorta, 
 which in its turn produces stems, branches and twigs, and these last 
 the capillary tubes, an intermediate field, which is the end of the 
 arteries and the beginning of the veins. In these almost invisible 
 capillaries, nature, "greatest in the least things," carries on some of 
 her most wonderful operations. The blood which in the larger arte- 
 ries is a medley volume of red globules floating in serum, and only 
 comes into indiscriminate contact with the sides of the vessels, as it 
 runs down from the larger into the lesser tubes, becomes more and 
 
178 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 more distinctly divided, and in the capillaries the red globules are in 
 the highest state of discrimination, fit for supplying from their bosoms 
 living nutriment and warmth, and whatever depends upon the most 
 individual endowments. In the great vessels the blood is in public, 
 exercising general offices, and thronging the body to keep it wide 
 and open ; in the capillaries it is at home, its freedom, power, and 
 fluidity raised to the greatest pitch, and subject to the still influences 
 of a higher spirit than its own. Accordingly the capillaries are 
 more plainly under the direction of the brain, than the larger 
 vessels j their exquisite nervous coats undergo greater proportional 
 changes in calibre, and enjoy more individuality in differents parts 
 than the Herculean aorta and its tubes ; the emotions of the nerves 
 being almost omnipotent in their influence over these kindred and 
 subtle disciples. For the most part the blood-globules march in 
 single file through the capillaries ; but under the influence of cold, 
 stimulants, or inflammation, the latter will either close, so as appa- 
 rently to admit no red particles, or will enlarge considerably enough 
 to give passage to several rows abreast. A familiar instance of the 
 power of the mind or nerves upon this system, is seen in the pheno- 
 menon of blushing, in which the modest emotions, giving all place 
 to the pressure about them, instantaneously relax an outspread field 
 of capillaries, which lose their straight-laced dignity, and red blood 
 is injected into vessels that before carried only colorless fluid, or in 
 which the amount of red blood is now so greatly increased as to glow 
 through the skin of the face and neck, and tinge them with apparent 
 crimson. If we generalize this common fact, we observe what a 
 prodigious sway the brain must exercise over these blood-vessels. 
 The capillary system is coextensive with the body, for looking from 
 the heart as a centre, the framework of every organ and part con- 
 sists of capillaries. These, the brain and nerves have the power of 
 expanding and constringing in any place, or any number of places, 
 in a moment ; of producing secretions or stopping secretions at will ; 
 of varying the life that comes from without to any particle of the 
 frame. In short, the circulation in its active and flexible part, is 
 held in the leashes of the brain, and the accommodation of the 
 blood system to the existing state of the body and mind depends 
 mainly on the nerves acting on the capillaries. Nay, the texture of 
 
THE CAPILLARY SYSTEM. 179 
 
 the heart itself is capillary, and by consequence that private force 
 and freedom which belong to these quick vessels, lies in the very 
 core of the heart as the general force. In view of this, we might 
 begin with these ambidextrous and complaisant parts, and derive the 
 power of the heart itself from the array of their combined indivi- 
 dualities. And if there exists even in the cold life of plants a 
 natural attraction of particled fluids to their destination, and an an- 
 swerable force which creates the vegetable current, much more in 
 the human frame with its powerful lungs and brains, is there an 
 attraction of the particles of the blood towards the capillaries — an 
 attraction which draws them at an accelerated ratio the nearer they 
 approach those original conduits older than the heart, where their 
 uses and sacrifices are to be accomplished. It has indeed been sup- 
 posed by some that the blood is freest in the great vessels, but that 
 its globules scrape against the sides of the capillaries, and lose their 
 power by friction ; and this has been supported by microscopic views ; 
 but then on the other hand it is impossible to place any living sheet 
 of membrane, e. g., the web of a frog's foot, under the microscope, 
 without changing the conditions, setting disturbing emotions at work 
 upon the circulation, and destroying the equilibrium between the 
 globules and their homes. And even if this be done during the 
 insensibility of the animal, the case is not normal still ; the anae- 
 sthesia itself is a new element ; and moreover there are organic 
 emotions as well as conscious ones, which go on under inflictions 
 just as though the pained animal were at the back of them (p. 31). 
 Even dead leather crinkles and writhes over the fire as though it 
 were full of burning agony. Rational induction alone can then 
 decide the question. And this ignores the idea that our blood ex- 
 periences new physical difficulties when it nears the goal of its exist- 
 ence, or is hindered more and more by material clogs as it comes 
 within hail of the spirit of the brain. It is true that the blood dies 
 in the capillaries, and its ruddy frame turns blue, but it is never so 
 tenderly alive as on its death-bed, never so near to its real ends, and 
 in its ascent from the earthy heart it wings itself with speed, until 
 at the last, in its final place and secret hour, it is all spontaneity and 
 calmness. It is wrong then to speculate upon any rigidity of the 
 tubes in the balance of healthy life : if the globule tends to impinge, 
 
180 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 the tube will tend to yield before it, and the contact will be nothing 
 more than the support and maintenance by both sides of any inclina- 
 tion which may exist on either. 
 
 Let us now proceed to the use of the circulation. The first use 
 is, the formation or determination of the body. The second is, the 
 nutrition, maintenance or reformation of the body. The third is, 
 its prolonged vitality, or perpetual stimulation. These three pur- 
 poses mutually suppose each other. The formation of the body is 
 effected by the germinal fluids, determined into membranes, canals, 
 and ultimately into vessels with coats; and as the blood-vessels are 
 the last expression of these, we speak of them as the framers of the 
 body; for the solid comes out of the fluid at first, and the substan- 
 tial body grows from the blood even in the adult state ; the capil- 
 laries moulding the organs; which, however, when they are built, 
 work on their own account, and govern their blood, calling into ex- 
 istence the second use of the circulation, or the nutrition and re- 
 formation of the body. The progress of discovery upon this point, 
 tends to establish the individuality not only of every organ, but of 
 the elements or smallest impersonations of the organs. The depo- 
 sition of the solids from the blood does not take place immediately 
 or by intrusion, but the organs put forth fine cells or stomachs from 
 their several absorbing surfaces, which take what they want from 
 the capillary circulation, and make it over to the organ through a 
 fresh similar organization. In short, the body grows from the vital 
 blood by its own vitality, as a plant grows from the sappy meltings 
 of the ground ; its development is due inside, and in every part, to 
 its own attractions, and not to the rush or thrust of the blood. The 
 increment is not like placing brick upon brick from without, each 
 with no peculiar relation to the building, but every brick is a cellule 
 or little building of itself, similar to the edifice of which it forms 
 part. 
 
 This is a higher idea of nutrition than that which it supplanted, 
 and deserves to be called a vegetable idea, in distinction from the 
 other, which was a mineral idea. We must, however, remember, 
 that in the human body we are on the stair of endless ends, and 
 that no fixed idea will last out of its place and time. We must 
 also note, that we are reasoning in a sphere where the fluids are 
 
THE USES OF THE CIRCULATION. 181 
 
 next to all ; where the toughness of vegetation is a disease, and 
 where fresh formations are extemporized with mushroom rapidity, 
 and dissolutions take place with equal speed. Cells in this case 
 melt like mist into their original currents, and the only set of ana- 
 logues which do not fail us, are the changes of the mind itself, whose 
 velocity belongs by transference to the body in its higher and 
 healthier moods. Thus the organs are nourished as well and rapidly 
 as though the blood was forced into them by the pulses, but in 
 those moments of moments they have deliberated, judged, chosen, 
 and lastly acted, by shooting forth a cellular gauze, wise to let in 
 the exact quantity and quality that they require. 
 
 The rule then is, that the heart and its powers act only to the 
 door of the organs, and no further, after which the organs take from 
 the proffered blood their own demand. This is true, as we showed 
 in speaking of the lungs (p. 102), of the largest tissues of the body; 
 it is true, as observation shows, of the smallest parts of the tissues. 
 In a word, attraction is the law; and it exists between all the fluids 
 and their respective destinations and uses; it is a true animal mag- 
 netism; and in this high form there is a manifest propulsion or 
 heart to second it on the one side, and a manifest invitation or 
 lungs to create it on the other : to which we may add, that the fluid 
 itself is so natured as to run of its own accord away from the parts 
 which do not want it, and away to those which do. Thus, in this 
 system of divine convenience, where every tendency is trebly grati- 
 fied, the blood propelled to any organ is no longer the heart's, or to 
 be denominated from the heart, but it belongs to the organ, part, or 
 particle, wherever it may be ; it is always sailing upwards and in- 
 wards to deeper purposes, and taking new names and new liberties; 
 just as sensation rises from the eye into the brain, is adopted into 
 intellect and faculty, and walks at last, unknown to the lower scene, 
 in the breadth and color of the sky. It is thus, that the red blood 
 from the heart mounts into the region of the capillaries and organs, 
 that new world where the nervous system hangs its ethereal expanse 
 over the vascular. 
 
 The third use of the circulation consists in giving life or nervous 
 fluid to the tissues. This presupposes that such a fluid proceeds 
 from the brain through the nerves, and is shed perpetually into the 
 16 
 
182 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 body, and especially into the blood. The red globules of the latter 
 are its most living parts, and may be likened to little caskets in 
 which this nervous fluid is carried about, and dispensed as life to 
 the tissues, to which it gives a natural, though engrafted capacity to 
 be acted upon by the brains and lungs, and to react on their own 
 account. The freeing of this nervous fluid in the capillaries is as a 
 millionfold torch that kindles the decompounded elements of the 
 globules, and produces a graduated scale of heats, of which the first 
 or living fire is the nervous fluid itself, instinct with its organic 
 emotion, and the excrement, residue or caput mortuum is the oxy- 
 gen and carbon which the blood and tissues yield to the curious 
 chemist; the difference between which two is greater than that be- 
 tween the smoking ashes of a burnt house and heaven's lightning. 
 
 Were it not for this inspiration by the brain, the blood could not 
 be humanly alive, or in other words, the soul could not associate 
 with it. With respect to the change that takes place at the ends of 
 the arteries, or in the capillary circulation, where the blood loses its 
 arterial color, and purples or becomes venous, the manner of it is 
 sufficiently obscure, and has only been investigated at present from 
 chemical grounds. But looking at the blood itself as organic, or 
 vitally compounded and mechanical, it is easy to see, that in the 
 place where it has to yield up any of its constituent parts that the 
 successive organisms require, it must lose its principle of combina- 
 tion in order to allow it to pass into other forms. In short, it must 
 undergo a vital decomposition for the purposes of the body; and if 
 its arterial glitter depends upon the spirit shining through it as 
 through an organic face, then when this spirit escapes and comes 
 out, and the subordination of parts is lost, the comparatively life- 
 less hue of venous blood will be assumed. Furthermore, we may 
 infer that the nerve spirit, which is the charioteer of the globule, 
 and its principle of organization (p. 55), when its heat or desire of 
 blood-organization is ended, and when it comes down among the 
 other elements, will kindle with that sensible heat which is expe- 
 rienced in the lowest sphere ; in other words, that in the body, the 
 intellectual or organific heat is in a lower degree the parent of true 
 animal heat. This we find to be the case on a large scale by the 
 glow of zeal, passion and affection in the cheeks and the body; and 
 
THE ARTERIAL AND VENOUS CURRENTS. 183 
 
 these large instances, in which the whole body displays itself as one 
 globule of impassioned blood, give the only analogues we can use 
 consistently with our purpose of reasoning not upon the dead but 
 upon the living blood (p. 181). The difference then between the 
 arterial and the venous blood is, in the first place, that the arterial 
 is organized, spirited or impassioned, and just like ourselves in such 
 a case, is ruddy with the fervor of a soul, while the venous blood is 
 disorganized, chaotic and aimless, and like ourselves again under 
 these circumstances, is murky in its hue and leaden in its gait. In 
 the second place, the arterial is full blood, but the venous has yielded 
 up many of its elements, and has no spirit or nerve fire, but the 
 residue of this is taken up by the lymphatics, while the apathetic 
 body of the blood is derived into the tardy veins. Such is an ap- 
 proximative organic account of the change. 
 
 We have now treated of the use of the heart to the general cir- 
 culation, and if this were all, the heart would be a simple forcing 
 pump, as Chambers's Journal declared it to be ; " a good heart," in 
 their words, would be u a good forcing pump," and " good hearted- 
 ness" would either mean " good force-pumpishness," or nothing at 
 all. But when we glance at what is taking place around us; at the 
 subjects which are extending their limits; at the old things that are 
 again brought forward by our growing love of fairness, because they 
 have been previously dismissed without a hearing, which says no- 
 thing against them, and much against their judges; at the new 
 things which are thronging into notice in shapes that cannot be ne- 
 glected — when we glance at this we may be expected, in the face of 
 any shabby idea of nature or her Author, to propound the question, 
 Is that all? and to cut short the men who say to us, It is only this, 
 and It is only that, by a decision that no finite mind has a right to 
 palm one such only anywhere upon nature. For our part, when we 
 look at the human frame, we are always impelled to put this ques- 
 tion, and in the same breath to answer, that there is more and ever 
 more to be known about it, not in the way of niggling additions 
 and grains of scientific sand, but in great principles, in new tracts 
 of knowledge, underlying, overspreading, and surrounding that tiny 
 edifice of books and cards where we are so comfortably at home. 
 Yes, at this very hour methinks there is a good and guiding genius 
 
184 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 standing just ^beyond the range of every conception that has en- 
 tered the w 
 childhood : 
 
 tered the world, and beckoning us forwards in words familiar from 
 
 " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, 
 Than are dreamt of in your philosophy ;" 
 
 and then as we pitter out, " 'Tis strange, 'tis wondrous strange," 
 
 the same apostle to the Saxons speaks yet again in mother English : 
 
 " And therefore as a stranger give it welcome." 
 
 There are points in the structure of the heart of which we have 
 said nothing hitherto, but we must now describe what are called the 
 coronary vessels, which are supposed to nourish the heart with blood. 
 They are called coronary from corona, a crown, because they run in 
 crowns or coronal circles around the heart. They arise from the 
 aorta close beside the semilunar valves, and running around the 
 base of the heart, and sending branches down the lines of partition 
 between its fourfold chambers, they form a kind of vascular cage- 
 work in which it is contained. The coronary veins, said to begin 
 from the minutest twigs of the coronary arteries, by their consider- 
 able branches for the most part accompany those of the arteries, 
 and discharge themselves by one, two, or three orifices into the right 
 auricle. 
 
 The interior of the four cavities of the heart is not a smooth even 
 surface, but is rendered extremely irregular by muscular columns, 
 projections and partitions; it is scooped, channeled, and caverned; 
 besides which, on the walls of the cavities there are minute open- 
 ings, the foramina of Thebesius, which are supposed to be the 
 mouths of little veins. 
 
 Everything in nature, and especially the cardinal movements of 
 living systems, are designed for more than one use; for, unlike 
 rest, motion is a steed which can have innumerable riders. We 
 are, therefore, certain that the movements of the heart are of other 
 uses besides the propulsion of the general blood, unless it could be 
 shown that the provisions of the heart are exhausted in this pro- 
 pulsion ; which cannot be done. On looking further at the heart 
 itself, we find that its working is also employed to insure the 
 commixture of the elements of the blood, especially in the right 
 
THE SUBSTANCE OF THE HEART. 185 
 
 ventricle, which receives all the venous or disintegrated blood com- 
 ing from the most divers organs; all the chyle arriving from the 
 food; moreover, all the lymph; and lastly, the nerve-spirit stream- 
 ing in from the jugular veins, which contain a far greater propor- 
 tion of this than the rest of the venous blood. This triple scale 
 of elements, the blood, the chyle and the nervous fluid, are worked, 
 kneaded and commingled by the right auricle and ventricle : is it 
 too much to grant that the motion of those cavities is intended to 
 do that which it plainly does; or that there is an end answered by 
 the commixtion. There are not two answers to the question. The 
 right ventricle, then, we will say, after a quaint authority, is the 
 great vat of the blood-system, in which the fluids are mingled to 
 form the ingredients of the red blood; after which the mixture is 
 sent through the lungs, to be skimmed of whatever comes forth 
 into the air, and to be subsequently passed into the left auricle and 
 ventricle. 
 
 We are aware that views derived from the forms and powers of 
 the organs, are out of fashion, yet in the living body they are logical 
 and physiological, which the chemical notions are not. There are 
 two ways of looking at organic subjects, which should be carefully 
 distinguished by the mind, and carefully united in the sciences. 
 First, there is the investigation of the form or structure, at rest, or 
 in a dead state; and this gives an osseous basis to our knowledge: 
 but as permanently resting subjects are on the road to death, and 
 dead things are on the road to decomposition, this method leads, in 
 process of time, and in continuity of doctrine, through the land of 
 bad smells to sheer mineral chemistry. The second method is the 
 investigation of the movements, functions and deeds of organic 
 subjects; the examination of what they do, and their judgment by 
 their fruits; and the facts which this supplies are as flesh upon the 
 dry bones of the former knowledge. Let us apply these two me- 
 thods to the blood, both to illustrate what they are, and, at the same 
 time, to pursue our inductions respecting the offices of the heart. 
 In the first method, the examination of the dead, dying or abnor- 
 mally affected blood (p. 179) by the eye or microscope, shows that it 
 consists of red globules in a transparent serum ; and as the blood 
 finally dies, it undergoes a series of changes, forming a clot or co- 
 
 16* 
 
186 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 agulum in which most of the reel particles are entangled. There- 
 after, purely chemical effects succeed, and we have a disengagement 
 of gases, and a further alteration of the clot. Such is the first 
 method and its chronicle. We observe that it is most perfect when 
 the examination begins, and at that time holds on the subject under 
 the eye; but gradually and not slowly the subject changes, and a 
 set of phenomena present themselves, which, if taken for living ap- 
 pearances are mere delusion, for they belong strictly to disorgan- 
 ization. 
 
 The second method with the blood observes it in motion, in order 
 to gain the hint and image of thought, and afterwards and espe- 
 cially learns what it accomplishes in the body, in order to gain the 
 scope and details of the thought again. It is as when you first see 
 a man, and take his impress on your memory, and afterwards from 
 his observed actions you put his character into him, and find what 
 his person is and means. For it is the deeds of men and things 
 which by time's benefit range themselves into their intelligible 
 vitals. Who can care whether the blood contains minnikin particle 
 within particle ad infinitum, without these can be tallied off against 
 something that the whole blood achieves for the human body? 
 Otherwise they are the decomposition of our observing powers, and 
 rot the organic sciences. At best such microscopic observations are 
 the visions of the underworld, the empire of the dwarfs. But what 
 then is the motion of the blood? It is, so far as we see, the stream- 
 ing of an incessant population of globules through the vessels; the 
 body is a city of active life-bloods, moving like the nations and 
 peoples of a whole planetary system at once, through every atom of 
 space and time which the system allows it. And what are the offices 
 of the blood ? We answer that it deposits the elements for every 
 organ; that it perpetually deals out the parts into their respective 
 places; that it is the body itself in a fluid state. Thus, everything 
 in the body contributes to our notion of the blood, and the man is 
 a representation of its powers and tendencies as well as of its sub- 
 stance. We may define it as a compound of all the simple elements 
 of the organization, and as the globules are its most living portion, 
 this is pre-eminently true of them. The eye sees nothing of this 
 its character, as neither does the eye see in the brain the faculties 
 
THE BLOOD. 187 
 
 by which men invent the arts; but that such a wealth lies in the 
 blood the mind's eye knows, for how could the body come out of 
 the blood if it were not first involved within it ? We have now, 
 then, arrived at a certain knowledge of this manlike globule, as 
 being a group of the principles of the solid organs and tissues, 
 resolvable by disintegration as it circulates, through t^e attractive 
 peculiar doors of the organs* (p. 181), into each part to which it 
 passes. For, on its unwearied round it gives heart to heart, lungs 
 to lungs, liver to liver, kidney to kidney, and like to like everywhere ; 
 and what is left in each case, forms the venous blood, the lymph, 
 the deader heat, and the several excretions. Moreover, one set of 
 glands compounds the blood while the other destroys it, and in its 
 perpetual life, death and resurrection, it images the destiny of him 
 whose bodily existence it constitutes. 
 
 With such views of the blood, added to what we derive from the 
 eye and the microscope, we require a vast machinery adequate to 
 produce this composition, and we are driven to look to every organ, 
 and first to those where the blood is contained, for its contribution 
 to the result. Shall the heart be excluded from the privilege of 
 blood-making ? Though a large, it is a highly complex structure, 
 full of special cavities and conduits, edged and jagged machinery 
 of tendons, and fine muscular limbs and fingers. Its two sides 
 contain different kinds and qualities of blood : is there no com- 
 munication between them, no intermediate compounds to edify the 
 little temple of the globule ? Why is there an association of the 
 sides of the heart, and a community in their substance, if there is 
 no society in their functions, and no reciprocation of their goods? 
 Are the two sides of this channel also, natural enemies ? In the 
 right ventricle there is the chyle, the venous blood of the body, 
 the venous blood and spirit of the brain : is it not rational to infer 
 that the left side of the heart furnishes model globules and middle 
 essences to unite these heterogeneous parts ? 
 
 We must touch this matter slightly, and perhaps therefore ob- 
 
 * We must take care not to let the vegetable idea of cells grow to any wood- 
 enness, or interfere with the animal idea of freedom and instant fluidity. The 
 cells in life are mere instant refrigerations of the steam, liable to be vapor again 
 in a moment between the strokes of the life-engine. 
 
188 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 scurely; however, the main guidance is, that the blood consists of 
 an orderly involution of the elements of the bodily organs : this 
 will give light upon what would otherwise be dark. We now recur 
 for a few moments to the coronary vessels, or to the circulation in 
 the walls of the heart. 
 
 It is a curious fact that nearly all the old anatomists, and some 
 also of the moderns, have suspected a puzzle in these coronary ves- 
 sels. They come from the aorta and run backwards to the heart. In 
 a certain proportion of cases estimated at 5 in 20, one or more of their 
 orifices lies behind the semilunar valves, and such orifices it is clear 
 cannot receive the stream propelled from the heart, because it lays 
 down the valve flat upon them, and effectually closes them. As 
 therefore nature's law must be constant, it was argued, that what 
 holds of one orifice must hold of all ; and that the blood runs back into 
 the coronaries from the aorta when the heart's contraction ceases. 
 This was Boerhaave's opinion. Morgagni, a more practical anato- 
 mist, was more cautious, and requested others to decide the too diffi- 
 cult problem. Another view was now propounded by the celebrated 
 Swedenborg. He argued that the raising up of the semilunar valves 
 during the contraction of the heart, when the blood is expelled into 
 the aorta, precludes its passage then into the coronaries; and that 
 the stretching of the coronaries, and their pressure by the full aorta, 
 contributes to the same preclusion. Moreover, that to suppose the 
 heart supplied with blood by regurgitation from the aorta, would be 
 to ascribe to the latter a new action different from what it exerts 
 upon the other blood-vessels; nay to claim for it, after the discharge 
 of its functions, a stronger, inverted and retrograde action upon a 
 body the most muscular of any. These considerations led him to 
 infer, that the coronary arteries do not arise from, but terminate in 
 the aorta; that they are veins relatively to the heart, although run- 
 ning into the beginning of the arteries of the body. The doctrine 
 in brief is this : — that the heart as the head of the vessels and the 
 fountain of the blood, itself requires the firstling blood for the exer- 
 cise of its noble offices, and cannot hold its life by tenure from one 
 of its own arteries, which would be to invert all ideas of the order 
 of nature. The heart is already full of blood, and if fluids, or fluid 
 persons, like solid persons, move with greater velocity in proportion 
 
THE COMMUNION OF THE HEART. 189 
 
 to their life, the best blood in this race will continually outrun the 
 rest, and always first in the heart, will skirt along its porous walls. 
 Now what structures do we find upon those walls, but caverns, jagged 
 cavities, and at the bottom of these a number of little holes, the 
 foramina of Thebesius. Into these caverns, then, miniature ventri- 
 cles in the great ventricle, hearts of the heart, the quickest blood is 
 received, and the pores open with all their hearts to take it in. And 
 when the heart contracts, it drives out the general blood of the body 
 into the grand aorta, but its own particular blood, detained in the 
 cavernous lacunas, it squeezes, slippery with spirit, through its walls 
 into its muscular substance, and thence onwards and outwards to the 
 surface, into the coronary arteries and the coronary veins, from which 
 there is a reflux, when necessary, into the auricles and ventricles. 
 
 It was also held that various currents of blood exist in the heart, 
 and in short a multiple communion, one object of which is, the pro- 
 duction of a successive order or series of stages in the blood itself, 
 fitting it for its manifold operations. This was brought to bear upon 
 another subject, namely, the influence of the mind upon the heart. 
 We must here spend a few lines in considering this well-known cir- 
 cumstance, on which we shall have much to say presently. 
 
 From the oldest times the sympathy between the mind and the 
 heart has been acknowledged. The records of disease likewise show, 
 that the heart is affected and altered by the state of the mind, and 
 vice verm ; and that powerful feelings will cause palpitation, faint- 
 ing, and even sudden death from their influence upon the heart. 
 Now the heart is the centre of the sanguineous system, the organ 
 from which the motions of the blood begin, and the bed in which 
 its pressure terminates. And the reader will recollect (p. 178) that 
 the brain, the organ of the mind, carries the influences of the mind 
 along the nerves to every part of the capillary circulation, and pro- 
 duces in the capillary body, for it is the body, throughout the day, 
 a motion restless and ever-changing like the fluctuations of the atmo- 
 sphere. This is the nature of our human mind. If we recur to the 
 instance of blushing and universalize it, we easily understand what 
 is meant (p. 178). But in this continuous fluid system, every in- 
 constancy in the circulating current produces its effect upon the 
 centre — upon the heart; and in this way the whole play of the mind 
 
190 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 becomes transferred to this wonderful organ. Again, every muscle 
 that moves, whether in breathing, standing, walking, manual labor? 
 eating, or in whatever other way, throws the venous blood forcibly 
 and newly upon the heart, and affects its condition. Of this we have 
 evidence in the operation of bleeding, in which, when the arm is 
 tied to prevent the blood from returning through the veins to the 
 heart, and the fist is rapidly doubled, or even the fingers worked 
 about, the current squirts in forcible jets from the opened vein. 
 What then must be the squirt of the venous blood heartward, in a 
 wrestle of the whole body, or during a rapid run ? Moreover, where 
 the frame is enfeebled by long disease, and the patient is bed- ridden, 
 the motion of rising into the erect position sends dangerous jets to 
 the heart, in many cases oppressing it beyond recovery, and leading 
 to swoon and death. And where there is disorder of the heart, the 
 muscular exertion of undressing and stepping into bed, will cause 
 prolonged anguish, until the heart's circulation is equilibrated. 
 These are proofs that the state of the circulation affects that of the 
 heart, and that the movements of the body affect the circulation; 
 and we have already seen that the mind is continually playing upon 
 the capillaries, and the capillaries referring their disturbances to the 
 heart. The question arises, Is there any provision in the heart to 
 enable it to maintain its own constancy in the midst of the fluctua- 
 tions of the blood, and to make it the head, ratio or balance, as well 
 as the heart of the too mobile circulation ? 
 
 This problem has not been unnoticed by physiologists, and Mr. 
 Abernethy in particular endeavored to connect the solution of one 
 part of it with the foramina of Thebesius. It is here that Sweden- 
 borg's doctrine of these foramina and the coronaries, finds its strong- 
 est present attestations. According to this view, the varying 
 quantities of blood returned upon the heart find an outlet through 
 the walls of the heart itself, and equilibrium is thus maintained by 
 the coronary vessels ; so that the heart plus the coronaries equals 
 all the forces of the circulation; while the heart minus the corona- 
 ries is a comparatively regular force uninfluenced by the general 
 state of the system. Were it not for such provision, the heart would 
 be at the mercy of extraneous influences; the most important organ 
 of the trunk would have no stability, but would in the end yield, 
 
FEAR. 191 
 
 and be distended into a bladder or membrane ; incapable of anything 
 but the most passive recipiency. 
 
 It is contended on this view that there is a representation of the 
 mind by the heart in the manner in which the latter equilibrates 
 the blood by the channels of the coronaries; for the passages may 
 vary in different hearts. Thus in case the blood has a tendency to 
 run out of the heart through these avenues into the aorta, it repre- 
 sents a want of firmness and courage; and universally during fear 
 the systemic arteries empty themselves, and the blood runs away 
 into the veins. On the other hand, when the blood tends to keep 
 in the heart, and to press back into the right auricle, it indicates a 
 firmness and strength of the nervous, arterial and venous systems. 
 And in this way these animal qualities are based upon the construc- 
 tion, tendencies or habitual channeling of the heart. Now we know 
 from our sensations that different feelings cause different actions in 
 our breasts; for example, that in hard and firm resolve, the heart 
 seems to stand its ground, and not to let one soldier-globule ooze 
 away; that in moments of timidity the pit-a-pat of flight and dis- 
 array seizes, and the ear-drum beats the inglorious tune of " devil 
 take the hindmost :" also that in melting moods the heart goes with 
 the eyes and lips, slipping and trickling away from its station as it 
 were a tear. Further, we know that courage and fear are constitu- 
 tional to certain persons. And can we doubt that their constant 
 action upon the heart, implies in the first place a corresponding fa- 
 bric in that organ, and in the second, a continual alteration of the 
 fabric, as the mental state and circumstances vary. For it is to be 
 said that the principles of the mind will govern even the heart, and 
 make cowards brave in the second nature and strength of conscience, 
 or abash the lion-hearted when that higher spirit of courage is gone. 
 
 While we are upon this theme we will take the opportunity to 
 digress for a moment, to dwell again upon the consistency of the 
 body as exemplified in this passion of fear ; a consistency which we 
 have already shown to some extent while treating of the lungs (pp. 
 108 — 119). Now in fear the heart is bloodless, for the blood, as 
 we said before, has run away from it; the lungs are aghast or ghost- 
 less; the brain is mindless, and consciousness gives place to fainting; 
 and the man embodies all this by himself either sinking down, or 
 
192 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 running away. The fact that we avoid what threatens us, often 
 with an instinctive passion called fear, formulizes the action of all 
 our parts in this state. The spirit or mind running away from the 
 brain in mortal chilly streams down the back bone; sight deserting 
 the swoony eye ; hearing leaving the ear ; spirit running off also by 
 the hair, and the hair standing from the head ; the head and all 
 parts horribly wide out and erect for a moment; the tendency to 
 universal displacement seen in head, eyes, tongue, arms, and legs 
 flying out and away from each other; the wind shrieking wildly forth 
 from the lungs ; the blood rushing pellmell from the heart ; the ex- 
 cretions running from the bowels and the bladder; heat falling 
 through abysms of cold, and life, which is courage, perspiring from 
 the skin in big drops of cowardice ; — these are all the same passion 
 in different parts and appearances. In all, the man and the organs 
 run, or tend to run, from the place of terror, which is not only the 
 particular locality, but the body itself; wherefore death, or running 
 away from the body, is not an infrequent effect of fear. Our know- 
 ledge, that fright produces running aivay, carries us through the 
 effects of fear upon all the organs, and we need no other principle, 
 but only the details of this, to explain the state of the blood in the 
 case, or indeed of any of the parts, whether solid, fluid, or mental. 
 We may now generalize further, and afiirm that the broadest con- 
 sequences of every passion and living state march through sphere 
 after sphere of the body, and deposit themselves in fresh but con- 
 sistent shapes as they visit fresh provinces. Thus love, which clasps 
 its objects to its own bosom, draws closer the parts of the loving 
 brain, and makes harmony of thought ; it knits the blood into new 
 relations, and as the newly-kinned globules touch each other, the 
 heart becomes its body's delight. And so each state of man is a 
 human frame complete. The unlearned world may follow this know- 
 ledge, deep and depth-seeking, using broad sights as an organon, 
 and never becoming microscopic, or resting in anything less than 
 limb, trunk and head. Common life is the college to teach live 
 physiology. 
 
 Returning now to our immediate subject, we observe that the 
 theory that the heart alters and amplifies the blood, is supported by 
 the analogies of the principal organs. For example, the brain is not 
 
CONCLUSION OF THE CIRCULATION. 193 
 
 the mere centre of the nerves j it is not a simple turn of fibres in 
 which sensations are converted into motions, but new faculties are 
 there piled upon the summit of sensation, and the brain is a com- 
 manding head to the nervous system. So the larynx is not a sim- 
 ple enlargement of the windpipe, but a super-addition of gifts, by 
 which plain air becomes discourse, and is cast into words of mean- 
 ing, the vocal symbols of intelligence. So the tongue is not a mere 
 thickening of the unconscious gullet and stomach, but a capital organ 
 in which sensation is added to the other functions of the intestinal 
 canal. And so man is not merely an eclectic centre of the world, 
 but he is a spiritual world also, and a set of miracles, if he chooses, 
 playing their will with animalities. In fine, wherever there is a 
 head, it does not differ from its subordinate parts in size and situa- 
 tion alone, but also has a freer life than they, and exercises supreme 
 functions additional to theirs — functions both more in quantity and 
 novel in quality. Therefore, to recapitulate, the heart itself both 
 commixes the elements of the blood ; builds them up in a regular 
 series; and levels and balances the general circulation ; and all this, 
 in addition to the functions which it performs for the arterial system 
 below it, of propelling the blood through the body ; and for the 
 nervous system above it, of receiving and representing the fluxions 
 and passions of the mind. In this way we have a first draught of a 
 beginning, a middle and an end, to some purposes of the human 
 heart. 
 
 Here we conclude our first view of the heart, which we have found 
 to be more than a cross road, or convergence of vessels; in fact, to 
 be the metropolitan city of the blood, the interests and business of 
 whose home-inhabitants are of primary importance in the system. 
 We have then now three great divisions of this subject, viz., the cur- 
 rent through the lungs, the current through the body, and the in- 
 habitation and uses of the most privileged blood in the heart itself. 
 In other words, we have the doctrine of the circulation from the 
 moderns, and a justification, more modern still, of the flux and re- 
 flux of the blood, heart-felt and intuitively seen by the genius of the 
 ancients. 
 
 As to the doctrine of the circulation which was demonstrated by 
 our great countryman, Harvey, it newly teaches us the import of the 
 17 
 
194 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 circle, by life and substance added to the strictness of mathematics. 
 It is also a cardinal instance in a line of universal truths. For there 
 is a circle of all things, as there is a circulation in the human body. 
 Not a fluid is contained in our frames, but according to its perfec- 
 tion aspires to circulate on the model of the circulation of the blood. 
 There is a grand current from the fluid to the solid, and from the 
 solid back into the fluid; a circulation of perpetual life — "formation, 
 destruction, and reformation/' (p. 174.) There is a circulation from 
 the universe into the body, through the food, the skin, the lungs, 
 the senses, the brain ; a circulation back again from the food, the 
 ♦skin, the lungs, the actions, and the mind itself. And the world is 
 an everlasting circulation. The mineral ascends into the vegetable, 
 and both into the animal, and all into man; and man's body de- 
 scends into the dust, and completes its circle there. In short, where- 
 ever we go, we meet this old emblem of eternity : the Midgard- 
 serpent with his tail in his mouth hoops the whole world round ; 
 ends and beginnings meet, and nature is bending round from her 
 first issues towards her source; like the weapon of the Australian, 
 she comes back into the hand that flings her, and the human body 
 is a permanence of her cycles, which are the pulses of our hearts. 
 
 The heart, in common with the other organs, is the subject of a 
 twofold discourse, and has two sets of books and votaries appropri- 
 ated to its consideration. Indeed we may say that the present 
 world has two hearts, which have very little to do with each other. 
 There is the one heart of which Shakspeare is an interpreter, and 
 the other where Harvey reigns. Two Englishmen have been high 
 priests in the service of these two organs, and it would seem to be- 
 long to the same race, to mix the flames of the altars into one com- 
 mon pyre and ascension. Shall Cupid then learn anatomy, and the 
 ace of hearts, transfixed with his ancient dart, stand for something 
 in Carpenter's Physiology, or in the dissecting room? The one 
 heart, it is to be observed, is much older than the other; the heart 
 of love beats through human tongues before sciences were born; its 
 affirmers are that great cloud of men now above and beyond us, who 
 
THE WORLD ON THE HEART. 195 
 
 lost to individual ken, make the cope of the past blue and immense; 
 mythology, poetry, and language itself are the bright points in this 
 firmament, which still ray down to us the same message about this 
 primitive and perennial heart. Every man is still valued in this 
 sense by his heart. Every feeling comes from it and goes to it. 
 Resolve stands in it, or melts away from it; hope deferred makes it 
 sick; fortune sits upon the wheel of its capacities; it makes the 
 breast by which man touches man, or comes fairly forth from its 
 cage on great occasions, when heart touches heart. The most touch- 
 ing thing in the world, it is the most tangible too; it feels before 
 the fingers, and pulls the words from the speaker's tongue by an* 
 anticipated hearing. We should rather say, that all this is attribu- 
 ted to it since the beginning of time. Nor is the attribution lessened 
 to-day, but the air of the nineteenth century vibrates with this heart 
 and its properties wherever free or common speech endures. But 
 we cannot overlook the fact, that another heart has come upon the 
 carpet. 
 
 The scientific heart is that hollow muscle of which we have spoken 
 in the foregoing pages; four rooms with nobody living in them; and 
 the hollow muscle has not been slow to suggest, that the ancient 
 heart is a figure of speech, and only exists metaphorically. Mean- 
 time, however, the latter cedes nothing of its prevalence, but the 
 words which express it are guarded by the whole atmosphere of life, 
 and keep their places under a weight of forty-five passionate pounds 
 to the square inch. Heavy dictates of sense will not allow them to 
 be evaporated. 
 
 Hence arises imperfection and struggle. For an animal with two 
 hearts is lower in the scale than an animal with one, or in which the 
 two are twined cordially into a single organ. And then for struggle, 
 science, which has so much to learn by heart, makes a continual 
 enemy by setting up another heart beside that which has to learn it. 
 But if the two could come together, science would rise into warm- 
 blooded life, and memory, its register, would enlist a new set of 
 feelings in its service, and would become long and tenacious like the 
 heart itself in the higher sense. To say nothing at present of other 
 advantages. 
 
 It is, however, a fair question, notwithstanding the tyranny of 
 
196 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 common speech, whether we be justified, and to what extent, in as- 
 signing feelings to the heart, and making a heart of the feelings ? 
 Whether the quickness of words be according to a method that the 
 structural heart has known and sanctioned? In short, whether com- 
 mon sense is a great instinctive anatomist, or not? Certainly, if it 
 could be shown that the passions belong to the heart, with all their 
 vocabulary; with the heat they receive from heaven, or summon 
 from the abyss; with the power they shoot through limb and brain; 
 with their play and balance at the core of society; with their issues, 
 circuitous and direct; with their countless insinuations, successions 
 and intermixtures; with their lava that lies at some depth under the 
 coldest action, and sustains the vaulted breast of man upon an oven 
 of flames; if they and their progeny, we say, could be charged upon 
 the heart, the scalpel would have new artifices to employ, to get a 
 sight of these wonderful natives, and the professors of death might 
 well be startled to see the children of fire walking among the sciences. 
 The question, therefore, becomes the more pregnant from the new 
 labors which an affirmative answer would enjoin, and from the alarm 
 which proof itself would cause to all but common people. 
 
 What then is the nature of the evidence that the feelings live in 
 the heart? The evidence itself, we reply, if considered apart from 
 language, is a mere matter of feeling. Herein lies the strength and 
 weakness of the case, so far. The evidence, true to the organ, is 
 circular : the heart is a self-supplying knot of affirmations. Stat 
 pro ratione voluntas, is the heavy hammer of this logician. It is 
 because it is, is childish and hearty — a ring of wilful fire; there is 
 no reason in it any more than in the heart, which is a Yea, Yea, of 
 everlasting man, approving himself by living and by feeling. 
 
 Feeling, however, thus affirmative and infinitely irritable, and in- 
 violable in its circle, gives no knowledge of the subject, and where 
 knowledge is in question, though feeling will not yield, yet of itself 
 it cannot conquer. If the case rested here, we could not infer, ex- 
 cept remotely, a constant connection between the heart and the emo- 
 tions. We might, or might not, remember the pulses of our own 
 passions; we might notice our acquaintances beating and striking 
 their breasts when the furies were at them ; and so a few violent 
 instances might fix themselves, iu which feeling and the heart were 
 
THE WORLD ON THE HEART. 197 
 
 together. But feelings have, moreover, tongues, and are the best of 
 talkers; they are notorious for hitting the nail upon the head; they 
 make all men into their poets, and are the authors and founders of 
 languages. The words which convey and assign the feelings are 
 masterpieces of justice and felicity, and hold the sheer perceptions 
 of our brightest moments. They shine with suggestion from age to 
 age. In language, therefore, feeling becomes a staid and intelligible 
 substance, and when the feeling is past, we note what it was by the 
 hearty words that it uttered. Moreover language is a common pro- 
 duct, and chronicles the feelings of the world; for the soul talks to 
 be heard, and therefore speaks by a vocal compact. It is therefore 
 no solitary sound, but the voice of mankind to which we now listen, 
 and which identifies the heart with the feelings. 
 
 There is no point on which language is more trustworthy ; for the 
 heart itself is physically as well as feelingly at the bottom of the 
 wells of language. So near is it to the lungs, that the words in 
 which it signalizes itself are like the bubblings of its own blood. 
 If the heart were wrong in every other synthesis, we should still 
 expect it to be right here. And so when a chorus of nations and 
 tongues chimes forth that their hearts have feelings, we believe from 
 a triple persuasion that those hearts know best about it, and have 
 made them say it; and we take them at their word. 
 
 So far, therefore, the case proceeds upon the joint testimony of 
 feeling and speech, and we may now say, upon the witness of the 
 heart and lungs themselves speaking from the life. They were not 
 summoned to give their testimony, but it was extant in their exist- 
 ence. Gesture and speech, which are heart and lungs marched into 
 the world, without hesitation identify heart and feeling. 
 
 It is on the same grounds that we aver the whole of what we 
 know best respecting the living body; as that the body contains the 
 soul; that the mind is in the head, and then in the brain; and that 
 the senses are in their organs. And in truth, to doubt of these 
 inhabitations or connections would depopulate the physical frame of 
 its lives, and striking out common sense from the scientific faculties, 
 would float the body away from its cables, without a crew, a pilot, 
 or a destination. 
 
 Pathology also, or the science of disease, is equally clear upon 
 
 17* 
 
198 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 the point we are maintaining; for violent feelings not only agitate, 
 but may kill the heart in a moment; in short, broken hearts are 
 medical facts, and the tearing of the organ is often coincident with 
 agonized feelings. 
 
 But why insist upon a fact which nobody denies ? Our answer 
 is, that truths are not well treated when they are only not denied : 
 we desire that these greatest truths of the heart should not simply 
 be assented to, and then passed over, but used as keys to its organ- 
 ization. We desire that every feeling which warms the bosom, 
 should find a place in the scientific heart, and give it the same life 
 which it gives to its human prototype. We desire to conciliate 
 Shakspeare and Harvey, that the genius of the one may cohabit 
 with the genius of the other ; that man's real life may not be missing 
 from his blood ; and on the other hand, that the doctrine of the 
 circulation may make a prouder orbit, and gain its rightful swoop 
 through life and history. For ever the world is a chaos of truths, 
 but fluctuating and inapprehensible ; but when they are fixed, the 
 dry land appears, and habitable ground or proper creation begins, 
 a centre is struck whence order flows; and now we essay to fix this 
 floating allegation of the heart to the feelings, that it may become 
 moored to a solid bottom, and gathering up all its parts and parti- 
 cles, present a sward to the sun of knowledge, whose light and heat 
 dwell with man alone. 
 
 What then is the voice of common experience as to the feelings 
 which are assigned to the heart ? Evidently the heart stands for the 
 affections, and the man devoid of natural affection is said to be 
 "without a heart." Our first business is, to dissect the verdict of 
 language; and the result may be stated as follows. The friend is 
 a man with a heart; friendship is one of the affections commonly 
 denominated by the organ. The good mother has a heart which 
 beats towards her offspring. The lover has a heart, and is a heart, 
 towards his love. The citizen's heart is for his birth-place and his 
 country: he has a public affection or love; a sense that he, and a 
 certain space with its contents, are warm and related to each other. 
 These are the chief natural feelings, to be short of which is to be 
 morally disgraced or diseased, and cut off from the bonds of healthy 
 mankind. We are also commanded to love God " with our whole 
 
THE HEART OF FEELING. 199 
 
 heart," but this is no part of the mere nature of which we are now 
 speaking. There are innumerable other attributions of feelings to 
 the heart, but they are either subordinate, or may be classified under 
 the foregoing. 
 
 Each of these feelings is a warmth or fire peculiar to itself; each 
 gives a different glow in the breast; each shines with its own life in 
 its going forth. Yet they are one inseparably twisted ray, which 
 seen from its end is the quadrine star of human nature. They are 
 the withes and band-makers of our societies ; and they not only 
 draw their own kind about them, but are grappled each to each in 
 the fibrous motives of a mutual self-preservation ; kin and kind, 
 parents and partners — they are one man, clasping, and clasped by, 
 his fellows in the fourfold magnetism of nature. 
 
 Let us see then whether these feelings have any correspondence 
 with the fleshly organ; in other words, whether the flesh be intelli- 
 gibly alive, and whether their signatures be legibly written upon 
 the muscular tables. 
 
 We stated in the foregoing pages that the heart, by the blood- 
 vessels, is everywhere present in the body, and that the frame, in 
 one point of view, is a double tree of arteries and veins. Assuming 
 that feeling and heart are synonymous, each arterial space is of 
 course a part of the extended firmament of feeling. The organs of 
 the senses, for example, are a fivefold feeling of the external world, 
 receiving its impressions of five kinds through these channels. The 
 sensories, however, are neither more nor less than so many blood- 
 . works, constructed and maintained by the circulating streams. Sen- 
 sations are received, not in dead organs, galvanized by the brain, 
 but in a bed of structural desire, where the mind meets and marries 
 them, and carries them to the head. The heart then produces, by 
 continuity, and at a distance, these animal tendencies to five classes 
 of external objects. 
 
 We do not deny the empire and influence of the brain. Each part 
 of the body, however, is alive, and each, so far as possible, is inde- 
 pendent. The heart, and all the feelings, live from the brain at 
 last, but the brain has sunk its capital in building them, and they 
 are no longer convertible; they are not brain, but heart and feelings. 
 They are alive, as their architect is alive ; and we cannot too often 
 
200 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 repeat, that there is nothing but life in the body, and no life with- 
 out feeling, or quasi-feeling. We say quasi-feeling to express, that 
 even where the feeling is inscrutable and unconscious, we dare not, 
 in reason's interest, give it up as feeling. Where all seems not 
 only dead to us, but contradictory to our life, we still know that we 
 are at work with the same versatile tools ; we know by our brains 
 that we are feeling in our very bones, although we never feel our 
 bones but when the nail-prints of pain or inflammation are shown 
 to us. So far as we carry this feeling into our studies, so far we 
 are exploring the living body; so far as we do not, we are groping 
 in dead flesh, and making a science of corpses. 
 
 We do not now investigate the problems of embryology. The 
 order in which the body is formed, is one thing ; the order in which 
 it subsists and acts, is another. The king is not less a king because 
 he was once elected out of his own subjects; and the history of his 
 elevation is a distinct subject from that of his functions. Let us cut 
 off questions, and take limited fields to cultivate. In these pages 
 we treat of the adult heart, and what it is, leaving a thousand prob- 
 lems to be treated at other times, and by other persons. 
 
 To proceed from one expanse of feelings to another, the blood- 
 space which we call the lungs is the bodily affection for those two 
 ends which we term air and thought, whence the synonymous ex- 
 pression of both by the word spirit. The coincidence of thinking 
 and breathing, the representation of what goes on in the mind by 
 what is proceeding in the respiration, is conclusive as to the fact 
 here set forth. The lungs therefore are the love of air on the one. 
 hand; the bodily love of intellect on the other; the processes by 
 which they inspire the atmosphere being the same as those by which 
 they rouse and inspire the mind; thus deep breath will produce 
 deep attention; at all events, a careful minding of the air as it is 
 drawn in, if no more intellectual object be present to the brain. It 
 is here to be remarked, that whether we say that organs have feel- 
 ings, likings, or loves, it amounts to the same thing : for feelings 
 are agreeable or disagreeable; and an agreeable feeling once expe- 
 rienced, leads to a desire to obtain it again at another time, which 
 desire, the child of love, henceforth becomes the active point in the 
 feeling. Therefore the eye is impregnated with the love of the vis- 
 
THE HEART OP FEELING. 201 
 
 ible world, and the skin, of the tangible world, from the first sensa- 
 tions onwards; and to gratify these eye-loves and touch-loves, the 
 body is set in motion in the service of their organs. It will here 
 be remarked again that we are speaking of full-grown senses and 
 sensations, and that we by no means enter upon any question con- 
 nected with the growth and genesis of these feelings. 
 
 We have now therefore located sense, bodily-felt intelligence, and 
 the feelings, respectively in the organs of the senses, in the lungs, 
 and in the heart itself, and we have seen that the organic system of 
 thought is parallel in the three cases, and that the same reason, 
 namely, feeling and speech, which has caught light in the eye, and 
 hearing in the ear, has also surprised spirit in the lungs, and love 
 in the heart.* This short analysis suffices to mark out certain dis- 
 tinct continents in the psychological map, and to show that the 
 living body, though all compacted of feeling, yet distributes it 
 countrywise ; the heart being the central land, where accordingly 
 the feelings proper inhabit, whilst the term feeling in the other 
 parts is changed for that of sense, respiration, &c. Terms however 
 shift according to the occasion when our course lies through new 
 contexts 'and expediences. 
 
 We now then assume it as indisputable that the feelings dwell 
 in some sense in the heart, for experience dictates this conclusion; 
 we feel their correspondence with a certain glow, beating, and sense 
 in the breast, and this unfailing correspondence it is, that forces us 
 to say that the cause is present and agent where the effect is felt. 
 Language, to which we have referred, is the voice of this well-known 
 fact. Let us now adopt this law of correspondence as an instru- 
 ment, and proceed to apply it further. 
 
 The physical heart, we will presume, lies before us, and as we 
 have now exhausted the present information to be derived from our 
 feelings, we can only regard the heart in its physiological functions. 
 The question is, whether these exhibit any correspondence with the 
 emotions ; whether auricle and ventricle, and their bloods, are ex- 
 pressive of passion, somewhat as the face is expressive ; whether, 
 in short, the structures of the heart in action are not a countenance 
 
 * Let it be borne in mind that we use the term love in no limited or sexual 
 sense, but as embracing those active central impulsions that connect mankind 
 everywhere to their human objects. 
 
202 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 in which the play of the feelings may be detected ? If so, we 
 shall make matters of feeling into fresh objects of sight and sense. 
 Let us try. The attempt is one of synthesis, or the putting to- 
 gether of the pieces of language and passion on the one hand, and 
 of the pieces of heart or blood on the other, in one doctrinal 
 machine. In such a composition, it is manifest that fittingness will 
 be the test of truth ; and that if the love-heart interlocks with the 
 fleshly heart by the dove-tails of a just analogy, what we at present 
 propose will be accomplished. We shall see the veritable clasps by 
 which the two are grappled in word and in fact. 
 
 Certainly the heart shows all the signs of loving the blood, which 
 is the fearful and recognized symbol and casket of human life, for 
 it grasps at the blood eighty times every minute. With quadruma- 
 nous hands it clutches the passing life-stream. If the life is indeed 
 the blood, and is in the blood, as the Bible says, then the heart 
 grasping the blood, is the very love of life, and in our case of human 
 life. Its eagerness is apparent from its work, as the busy hands of 
 men show that they also are con amove in their occupations. And 
 if we love the blood of our race and kindred, and embrace it 
 through the skin and outworks of their bodies, much more does 
 the heart love its own blood, which it squeezes hot and naked with 
 its ruddy fingers. Our own affections, which we interpret from 
 their actions, are far-off types of this affection in the heart ; which 
 moreover shows an answerableness to love's common signs, such as 
 no other organ testifies. There is a fiery and as it were abstract 
 purity in this passion of our bosom's lord. If we love ourselves, 
 the heart loves the life which is the self of self; and this love it 
 shows by grasp after grasp, by a zeal which never sleeps, by fresh 
 manipulations of the blood with every varying feeling ; in short, 
 by all the signs which show that we ourselves are in active and im- 
 passioned pursuit of our objects ; but these signs, raised to a con- 
 stancy that belongs to no will, but only to nature, or the fatal will 
 of will ; and exempted from that fatigue which makes night and 
 day into the blessing of mankind ; for the heart is its own day, 
 and works in the fire-factories whether the outward man be turned 
 from it, as in sleeping, or revolve round to consciousness of its 
 influences, when his morning feelings seem to rise. The heart then 
 
THE HEART'S PASSION FOR THE BLOOD. 203 
 
 corresponds to the love of human life by its everlasting grasps and 
 embracings of human blood. By its deeds we know it. 
 
 It may however be said of this reason, that when we see other 
 persons acting, we infer that they have feelings of a particular kind, 
 because in similar actions of our own we experience these feelings 
 ourselves : but that the works of our hearts are not a parallel case, 
 and therefore we cannot argue that hearts have feelings. To this 
 we answer, first, that hearts, as we proved before, have feelings, and 
 we will not be dispossessed of a truth which we have got. More- 
 over we are not arguing that question, but are investigating how 
 hearts show their feelings ; and we have now found that they do 
 this as we ourselves do. But secondly, we do not say that the case 
 between our feelings and theirs is parallel, but correspondent and 
 like ) and of the attribution of feelings and life in this way, com- 
 mon sense gives many examples. Why do we attribute passions 
 to the tiger or the dog, or gentle feelings to the lamb, but because 
 we know that passion and feeling may descend many stages beneath 
 our consciousness, and alter so that we can never experience them, 
 and yet be passion and feeling still ? All we contend for is, that 
 the heart is similarly circumstanced ; that it is in no sense dead, 
 but as the old anatomists said, " the animal in the animal ;" in 
 which case we treat it as we treat the animal kingdom, and infer 
 life, feeling, instinct, ends, as the account of its operations. Our 
 own experience and faculties are therefore as fair an organon for 
 our study of the heart and the other viscera, as for the investi- 
 gation of natural history, to all whose subjects, feeling and thought 
 give their own lives, in the certainty that they will fit, and more 
 than fit, the case. And in proportion as the feeling is broad and 
 common, and the thought scientific, the better does this method 
 succeed in exploring the actions and habits of the lower creatures. 
 We design then here at first to show, that we may safely, and must 
 inevitably, transplant that life which we understand, into the heart, 
 as we have already carried it into zoology. 
 
 Dismissing this general sign, of the heart's eagerness, passion or 
 love for the blood, and noticing that it is common to all the four 
 chambers, we have now to come to details, or to the specific auricles 
 and ventricles. 
 
204 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 Let us commence from the right auricle, which is " the first part 
 of the heart to live, and the last to die;" the primordial feeling and 
 the latest passion of our bodies. And first we have to ask, what it 
 is that this hand would seize ? For the hand has many objects, but 
 wherever it closes, it has a desire of possession, and the grasp is 
 proportioned to the object. And so of the heart, which is the vis- 
 ceral will, or the inmost hand of the body. Now vessels and their 
 contents signify one and the same thing, under active and passive 
 conditions, and as each part desires to perpetuate its life, each 
 grasps at its alter ego in the fluid form. The fluid, therefore, is the 
 index of the solid which holds it ; the organic cup answers to the 
 cordial; the ruby of the chalice is the wine in a mineral metamor- 
 phosis. We have, therefore, to interpret the desires of this auricle 
 by noticing their objects. What are they? The old blood of the 
 body, the elderly blood of the brain, itself wise or cerebrated by its 
 visit to those upper regions, the return blood of the heart, and the 
 white young blood, or the conjoint chyle and lymph, meet together 
 in one common chamber. The end and beginning of life are there 
 represented j at the point of completion of the circle the extremes 
 of existence touch. It is the house of the heart where the elders 
 behold their posterity about them. All that could die of the old 
 blood during its last generation or circulation, has been put aside 
 through the medium of many secretions, and the activity of nume- 
 rous organs, and in the heart again it is a mere abstract or passion, 
 immortal for at least another circle : hence the old blood is but the 
 old in the young, about to continue the gyre through another curri- 
 culum of ages. Father-love and mother-love, or the love of race, 
 naturally exists in such a group ; the bond which seizes the inmates 
 is that which makes families out of individuals. The tide of feel- 
 ings sets in from this first grasp of the heart, whose contents in the 
 right auricle are embraced by the family tie. The free blood re- 
 ceives the impression, and is a patriarchal clan. The right auricle, 
 the first parent of the blood, sends down parental love, as the first 
 river of life, through all its generations, and also recruits itself 
 every moment from its latest offspring. On opening this chamber, 
 then, we see the perspective of race in its various phases j proces- 
 sions of parents and children, the everlasting progeny of the heart : 
 
THE VENTRICLE OF FRIENDSHIP. 205 
 
 man has met man by his first points of contact; the old are as gods 
 and influences to the young, and the blood of our hearts is no longer 
 vague and venous, but it is housed, and feels in the home the powers 
 of time descending from behind and from above, and giving it the 
 first force of past and future in the attachment of race. We gather 
 therefore, from the correspondence, that this fire of natural affection 
 plays upon this home and its inhabitants, and teaches them to 
 be posterity. We call this the hereditary auricle, into which the 
 blood flows by the pressure of fate, in the same way as generations 
 descend from the sources of parentage. 
 
 The blood is now no longer indeterminate, but has received the 
 contagion of one life; the first cord of love or union has been 
 passed around it, and it is full of the household warmth; the right 
 auricle, the ancestor of all, has laid hands upon its generations. 
 But what in the meantime has happened? The solid has grasped 
 at the fluid, the love at its object; but as between solid and fluid, 
 where the solid is an open circular channel, it is plain that the total 
 object can never be caught; the attempt at seizure forces it into 
 progress : the maid pursued by the urgent lover is turned into a 
 stream by the friendly gods, just as he seems about to overtake her. 
 The right ventricle receives the one-lived blood, and fills with it. 
 What is the character of this new object of the heart, at which it is 
 next to grasp ? 
 
 Into the right auricle several streams of blood distinctly emptied 
 themselves, old from the body and the brain, middle-aged from the 
 heart itself — though this in small quantity compared with the rest 
 in the hereditary cavity — and infantile blood or chyle in the current 
 of the rest. It was family which the heart desired, and the family 
 tie which its contraction took and gave. The feelings which we 
 have in our breasts were there at work, and are always there at 
 work, in ^minimis, upon our blood, making us naturally into parents 
 from our first drops upwards. In the right ventricles we have 
 another stage. All the life or blood which is not permanently 
 familiar, eludes the grasp of the auricle, and belongs to another 
 chamber. In the right ventricle there are no distinct streams from 
 different sources, but its blood enters it by a single great orifice, in 
 one uniform gush. The right ventricle has been aptly termed the 
 18 
 
206 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 mixing-vessel or chaos of the heart. Parentage and non-age have 
 both disappeared, and the area is equality and fraternity. The com- 
 mon feelings of man to man, philanthropy or the friendly affections, 
 are at work here ; those feelings which know of no distinctions, but 
 only of brotherhood, toleration, and even-handed intercourse. In 
 the family loves the tie is unequal, descending from parents to 
 children, but in no similar proportion reciprocated ; this being neces- 
 sary in the beginning of the circulation, in which progress as a 
 spring of pressure is the wheel that sets the rest in motion. In the 
 philanthropic passions, however, the tie is double, coming from both 
 sides ; hand grasps hand ; the muscular contraction of the organ is 
 closer ; the ventricle of our friendship is of twofold strength. Here 
 then we have the blood-population in the fiery palace of the heart, 
 themselves all feeling, with no distinction of high or low, old or 
 young, father or child, and what direction can the feelings take but 
 that of universal community, of friendship in its various phases ? 
 The mere apposition of lives in such a place, and under these cir- 
 cumstances of unrestraint, is sufficient to produce the relation that 
 throws down the walls of other distinctions between man and man. 
 We augur then that the friendly emotions play especially upon the 
 right ventricle; that it is there they are felt, and there they live, 
 and enter the blood, giving it this tie momentaneously, as a needful 
 element in the constitution of the bodily society. 
 
 In these investigations let us never lose sight of the keeping of 
 the subject; of the fluid which we are pursuing, and which is both 
 blood and life ; and of the organ, which is Loth heart and feeling, 
 that is to say, heart in both senses. Blood in the heart is different 
 from blood in the head or the belly ; in the former case it is alive 
 with passion ; in the latter, it hungers and thirsts ; while in the 
 head it is subordinated to spirit. Each organ has its genius loci, 
 which possesses everything, even the most transient guest, in the 
 organ. To come then within the sphere of the heart, is to feel and 
 to be all that the heart is and means; for the heart is haunted 
 ground, and there is no escaping its influences. So it is that when 
 youth and maiden come under the grasp of the heart, or when 
 life carries them into the sexual auricle, they are not the same peo- 
 ple, nor have they the same names, as when under the parental 
 
THE BLOOD ENTERING PUBLIC LIFE. 207 
 
 roof, or in the friendly conclave j but love has located them afresh, 
 and gives them its own new names. This is a needful memorandum 
 in the laws of the heart and the blood. We have feeling, the fire 
 of life, already given by fact in this organ ; we need not endeavor 
 to import it; the business is, to see it in its place. 
 
 The grasp of the right ventricle, by which it gratifies its friend- 
 ship, throws the*life upon the lungs, where the blood and the 
 larger world first meet, and here the humane chaos, which is at its 
 height in the pulmonary artery, begins to be discriminated into a 
 new order. The spirit of consideration comes in the spaces of the 
 lungs. In these reservoirs of the voice, the blood hears and takes 
 part in the public murmur expressed by the breathing. It speaks 
 forth its obstacles, and puts them off, telling its mind, and regula- 
 ting its attachments. Thought and breath, as we have already seen, 
 are the united spirit of the lungs j thought and breath only sub- 
 sisting by virtue of supplies from the world. The blood raised to 
 the height of breathing, is full of public imaginations; it has 
 thrown aside childish things, and is polar to a new and vast ideal ; 
 the private robes and windy latitudes of its childhood are put aside 
 in expirations, and the virile or public toga is put on, with the new 
 airs, imaginations or liberties that belong to adolescence. It is 
 inspired with the service of the corporate body. The transition 
 from the veins to the arteries is an incarnation of the passing over 
 of life or feeling from the private to the public stage j of mankind 
 meeting the world, and flaming with a new lustre of eye when the 
 great objects are recognized. The public air is thenceforth inserted 
 into the feelings, whereof each goes round with an oxygen mirror 
 that shows it the universal in the individual, and makes it shape its 
 face and gestures into historic parallels. Every globule of blood 
 thence conceits itself that it is a man-maker and a world-maker, 
 and it is braced with the girdle of the public strength. The 
 feeling in the lungs, accordingly, is one of inspiration and erection, 
 in which the heart's proper feelings swim as in a new atmosphere 
 of power. 
 
 The change of the blood, from venous to arterial, takes place in 
 the lungs; a change which is ably represented in the countenance 
 under the influence of enlarging or enlivening passions. The glow 
 
208 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 of the cheeks when life is in force is due to the same cause as the 
 glow of the arterial blood (p. 182). Powerful healthy feeling is 
 red and burning; and is the true blood and the only animal or 
 living heat, to which nature, with deep architecture (p. 89), adds 
 mineral or dead heat, itself also red, as we see in the fire. Cheeks 
 and fires are the reasons why blood is red ; inanimate countenances 
 and cinders are the reasons why it is dark and Venous. Why do 
 we glow but because we are alive with some public spirit or motive ? 
 and why does the blood glow, but because it is alive with that 
 public spirit the air, and bound thenceforth to act according to the 
 pressure, and to assume the mission of the universe ? We are not 
 insensible to the pleasant weakness of this theory, but we are 
 treating of the circulation and twisting reasons into circles. To 
 exhibit it let us say, that the arterial blood is red because the pas- 
 sions are red, as witness the face while they inflame it; and on the 
 other hand that the face is red because the impassioned blood is red. 
 Truly a circular logic, and dear to the heart therefore. We should 
 despair of understanding any organ if we could not feel with it 
 and follow it ; and to follow the heart, drives us into self-supporting 
 axioms. For the heart is a proposition that never goes beyond a 
 bare statement, but pumps through us the substance of self-evidence, 
 which is the body of our body. The truths of blood and feeling are 
 the ipse dixits of the heart. 
 
 We have now left the private or venous passions, whereof the 
 first, the family life, ancestral house or right auricle, represents the 
 impetus of time, causing all the movement of man and blood by 
 the descent and tradition of generations ; while the second venous 
 passion, the friendly and philanthropic home, or right ventricle, 
 represents the indiscriminate brotherhood of man, which gathers up 
 the race in the second and highest of the private bonds. Both of 
 these, as we say, are private or venous ; domestic in the narrow or 
 the wide sense : in their largest cases it is the private sphere expand- 
 ing itself ; for a whole clan is private and immiscible still with the 
 rest of the community, and the largest friendly reunion still con- 
 templates privacy or intimacy, and would cease as such the moment 
 it were touched by the laws of another love, or of social rank. 
 Both these loves are hot — black-hot, or red-hot; but neither of 
 
TIIE MARRIAGE AURICLE. 209 
 
 them can flame, because they have not met the air, which is the 
 public in contradistinction to the private. Public feelings are there- 
 fore the arterial blood of the heart, while private feelings are the 
 venous. A complete turn of objects exists between the two; the 
 right side of the blood becomes the left and weak side seen in the 
 airy mirror, and the left side becomes the right, and sits at the 
 right hand of power. Every public object proceeds from the pub- 
 lic to the individual — from the common air into the blood ; where- 
 as the private objects run from the individual to the public, or from 
 the blood towards the air. The meeting-point of these two efforts, 
 and of the feelings which run with them, is in the capillaries of the 
 lungs, where the air converts the one into the other, and where 
 consequently the man becomes, and feels himself, inspired. 
 
 The lungs pour the blood into the left auricle, and the first mo- 
 ment of arterial life is spent here; the first feeling that blushes and 
 runs over from the redundant passion. The beginning of virility 
 is sexual knowledge ; the mirage of Eve at the fountain is a vision 
 of rosy flesh seen as her own, and yet felt as other than her own. 
 Love stands at the gate of the larger life, and revels in its flower. 
 The arterial lungs are the puberty of the blood, coming from the 
 dreams or imaginations, with whose hints and incentives the air is 
 full. The left auricle is the marriage-bed where the tension of this 
 bursting life is continually taken down, and renewed continually. 
 Accordingly this auricle or bed is the most hidden of the chambers, 
 decently curtained away by the rest, and least to be felt from the 
 outside. It supports, and is supported by, the family auricle, with 
 which it moves in step ; the synchronism of parts with different 
 functions showing the harmony of different ends, and their ultimate 
 working for each other. The first arterial life of man is then 
 sexual love, whose early stage, preceding conjunction, is incarnated 
 or ensanguined in the arterial circulation of the lungs, and its con- 
 summation is in the left auricle, which grasps at the paired and 
 mated blood, to realize sex and marriage as one of the four corner 
 stones on which all flesh is to be founded. The amorous feelings 
 therefore play upon the left auricle, where nature is always doing 
 their work. 
 
 We have drawn a distinction between the private or venous, and 
 
 18* 
 
210 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 the public or arterial sides of the heart, but it might seem as if 
 this left auricle and the passion that lives in it were both of them 
 of an intensely private character. Let there be a great distinction 
 noted then between private and secret functions. A friendship that 
 is noticed by all the world is not the less a private friendship, 
 whilst a marriage consummated in the most secret bower, and in 
 the bosom of midnight, is public and regular notwithstanding. 
 The council-chambers of nations are most secret, and yet most 
 public in their relations ; they resume the state in a concentrated 
 form. Hence the public chambers, or left side of the heart, retire 
 from view to transact the public business of the feelings ; the pri- 
 vate business is comparatively open and forward, and is not meddled 
 with because it is known. 
 
 But is the sexual relation arterial, aerial, or public ? Philoso- 
 phers discuss at great length the me and the not me, and the rela- 
 tion between them. There is no such instance of this as sex, which 
 is me and not me reciprocally ; each incommunicable to the other, 
 and each fitting and enjoying the other. Man's most external world 
 (for he has several) is woman, the living mould of himself and his 
 faculties. In her he first knows that there must be real size in the 
 feelings, or two beings, who may be conjoined, but cannot be iden- 
 tified, could not be together there. In short, sex or distinction is the 
 beginning of breadth and body, of resisting spaces which can never 
 sink into each other, but must lie side by side. Moreover the sex- 
 ual distinction is the most manifest between human beings, and the 
 dress which makes it secret makes it public also. 
 
 We repeat then that the left auricle is that in which the analogue 
 of love proper is introduced into the blood, and where, by the laws 
 of harmony, that love is physically felt in the blood which is doing 
 its work infinitesimally. The reasons of this in brief are, that the 
 first adolescence of the blood is passed here, and love crops existence 
 in its bloom ; that it moves with the right or family auricle, there 
 being a co-existence of the conjugal and parental ties; that it leads 
 into the patriotic heart or left ventricle; the state being the congre- 
 gate of all the broad or spacious relations, of which marriage is the unit 
 and the beginning; finally, though at the top of the public impulses, 
 it is the most secret of the chambers, and is not merely the house, 
 
THE PATRIOTIC HEART. 211 
 
 but the bed of the organ. Whatever difficulty there be in explor- 
 ing it may be assigned to its own crimson modesty, and will furnish 
 a fresh proof of its chaste or sexual signification. 
 
 The grasp of the auricle, which consummates this life in the blood, 
 drives it onwards, as before, into the next chamber, or the left ven- 
 tricle. The signification of this fourth heart cannot be doubtful. 
 It is the accumulated power of the passions. The blood that it 
 throws forth is scarlet with force — it is the systemic circulation. 
 It is synchronous with the friendly heart, but fourfold stronger. It 
 forms the apex of the cordial pyramid, which beats against the ribs, 
 and aims at the world though its dearest flesh. It is public feeling 
 in all its forms, and we have already anticipated its name, and called 
 it the patriotic heart. Rule and empire throb for ever here, founded 
 in the purple of the blood. The body corporeal streams from the 
 height of the left ventricle, as the body politic from the heart of 
 dominion, which is the instinctive architect of the state. If vice- 
 gerency of functions establishes connection between life and organ- 
 ism, then the love of country or empire must sit upon the throne 
 of this ventricle, whose lordly stroke reaches the confines of the 
 body, and seizes the central blood itself with a conqueror's grasp. 
 
 In the successive consideration of the blood or feelings in the 
 heart, the life of the blood is an ultimate fact, which we need not 
 endeavor to account for. It is a given truth, that the heart or blood 
 has the feelings, and it is no part of our business now to speculate 
 upon it. As it is with the child, so it is with the young blood — it 
 . has the capacity of going through human life, and of being and 
 doing whatever lies in, or issues from, the heart. Our inquiry 
 then is, mainly as to the incentives or circumstances that call forth 
 its faculties; in short, we have chiefly to chronicle the play of its 
 human games. These once depicted, will answer the question of 
 the reasons of life more deeply than that question can now be asked. 
 
 But let us notice in this place that the life which the blood feels 
 in the heart is cumulative. Each cavity seizes it with a feeling 
 whose effects it does not lose. The family bond is assumed in the 
 right auricle, and though rendered latent in the right ventricle, 
 where it gives place to the friendly tie, yet throughout, the blood 
 is the -child of the heart, and remembers the household fire. 
 
212 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 Hence life is added to life, and the four " vital principles" of the 
 heart are simultaneously in the adult blood. It is amusing to con- 
 sider how any philosophers can have sought for the vital principle 
 in so many-lived a creature as man. The vulgar, in assigning to 
 the cat " nine lives/' have shown an example of common sense, 
 which might well have been applied towards a being whose vital 
 principle is as organic as his body, and has its very parts over again, 
 or how could the body be alive ? Hence in the right auricle, the 
 blood-child is one-lived, or is in the parental leash ; in the right 
 ventricle, the blood-youth is double-lived, has received a second 
 squeeze of passion, or represents friendship's hand in hand ; in the 
 left auricle, the blood-lover is treble-lived, or is lover, friend and 
 parent in one, the three being inseparable ; in the left ventricle, the 
 blood-man is in the service of the state, which is the public ordina- 
 tion of all the feelings, or the carrying them out into the body. 
 Hence the left ventricle does not so much alter the blood as receive 
 it all, and give it high public fire. We now then see what it is 
 that the heart confers on the body, and that it is the same set of 
 endowments, only organic and infinitesimal, that the same heart 
 gives to the man, and to the society. 
 
 Such is our equation between the heart of feeling and the heart 
 of flesh, which are the same heart, only in different powers. The 
 blood-heart = V heart; the love heart = heart 2 ; the heart itself 
 being that invisible pulser which we feel under our ribs, and the 
 knowledge of which can only be filled by a conjoint corporeal and 
 social anatomy, or a hearty exploration of all death and life. "We 
 have indeed drawn out the parallel on only the most general grounds, 
 and know far too little of the feelings on the one side, and of the 
 heart on the other, to enter into details. But if the learned will 
 bring dead hearts, and the simple their living ones, to a fair com- 
 parison, we can now no longer doubt that each will adopt the other 
 with most specific joy and claspings. 
 
 Our hearts, we have said, grasp at their objects, and we have 
 tacitly assumed that they get what they grasp. But how is this, 
 if they simply drive the blood away, and pump it into circulation ? 
 In this case life would be not a substance but a mere stimulus, a 
 perpetual alcohol of illusions. Let us remember that we are treat- 
 
THE DIVERS SPEEDS AND OBJECTS OF THE BLOOD. 213 
 
 ing of body, and of a realm where everything is bodily. Does the 
 heart then obtain nothing of that which it clutches ? Is the ox 
 muzzled that treads out the corn ? And is all the real blood thrown 
 outwards from the monarch of the feelings? Analogy forbids. 
 If the heart is a hand that grasps, it is also a person that gets ; it 
 is a very lord of its own objects. The caverns with which it is 
 sculptured, are so many means for retaining the blood; the little 
 mouths with which these are studded, are eagerly absorbent and re- 
 tentive ; and as the heart contracts, it fills its substance with im- 
 mediate blood, by the same act with which it drives the mass of the 
 blood into circulation (p. 189). The heart, we aver, takes the 
 central and most living blood. This it does by the love-laws and 
 justice of physics. The best blood is the fleetest, and enters the 
 cavities first, skirting along the walls (p. 189) ; the next living is 
 another layer which comes up afterwards; and lastly, into the mid- 
 dle, comes up the slowest blood in the rear. The assembled blood 
 in each cavity is grouped in a peculiar form, and contraction works 
 upon it according to the form. The first part of the contraction is 
 stimulated by the fastest and most feeling blood proper to that ca- 
 vity, which is driven by the dead pressure of the central blood, and 
 the counter-pressure of the solid walls, into the substance of the 
 heart itself, where it constitutes the realized life of that one feeling 
 or heart-beat. The racers however are different for the different 
 cavities; the family-blood is fastest, and wins the cup, in the right 
 auricle ; the amorous blood, in the left auricle ; and so forth ; and 
 centre and circumference vary as the goal is changed. We see all 
 this well enough in life or in the play of the great heart. - Each 
 being is prompt and rapid in the working of his own relations ; he 
 who is a laggard in friendship, comes to the surface, and shines with 
 vigor and promptitude when love catches him ; showing that each 
 man belongs to a centre, and lives eminently in and from its fires. 
 And for the parallel of the first point, we know that the heart is 
 not satisfied with grasping at its objects, and feeling their slipperi- 
 ness and flux, but that it must have possession, or the hollowness 
 of perpetual mockery makes it cease to grasp. 
 
 Although then the blood of the right side of the heart is private 
 or venous, yet it is its most spirited portion that enters the living 
 solid of the heart, and feeds the home-fires that blaze on this side 
 
214 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 of our nature. Thus this blood is more than arterial in any ordi- 
 nary sense. We will here also note another point in the doctrine 
 of the heart, viz., that the flesh is prior in dignity to the cavity; 
 the flesh being the substance of the heart itself, while the cavity is 
 only the general high-road of the circulation. Harvey's great dis- 
 covery has had the effect of throwing this obvious truth into the 
 back-ground for a season, but by the love we bear to whatever 
 is solid and central in our hearts, it must be replaced, and the 
 doctrine of the circulation subordinated to it. The body will be 
 but a hollow shell, so long as the heart is regarded from its hollows, 
 and not from its substances. But in order to investigate these, a 
 new course of observations and injections will be necessary, under- 
 taken expressly under the light which the correspondence of the 
 feelings casts upon the physical organ. 
 
 Here we begin to see how profound is the reason for that doctrine 
 that the heart absorbs its own blood through its walls, and does not 
 depend upon the coronary rills for its supply, which would beggar 
 it of what it grasps, and put an end to its motives for contraction. 
 We must never suppose that the heart's wisdom lies in doing that 
 which we should be fools to do in similar circumstances. If all 
 the stores of the earth passed through our hands, should we trans- 
 ship them, and then get our own sustenance back in a little skiff 
 from a foreign country ? Should we not open a retail on the spot, 
 to secure ourselves against difficulties, winds and tides; and come as 
 near to the wholesale stores as possible, avoiding the dearness and 
 losses of trade? And if it were the monarch's palace through 
 which all the goods were carried, as in the case of the sovereign 
 heart, would he not take the pick of every object on the spot, with- 
 out trusting to any honesty less than that of his own eyes ? Our 
 hearts feed more at the fountain-head than our societies ; what is 
 wise in our conscious arrangements is but the broken meat of the 
 organic wisdom: the passions browse upon the mountains of the 
 heart, and lap the blood of the life-covenant at first hand. We feel 
 that they are our bodily life — that they are our blood, and that if 
 anything in the world goes direct to its objects, it is they. For they 
 are the exemplars of all-grasping, all-possessing, and all-holding 
 man; and the heart is they. 
 
THE COMMUNION OF THE FEELINGS. 215 
 
 But we have to notice further a point touched on in the preceding 
 pages, viz., the mixture by emissary rills of the blood in the various 
 cavities (p. 189). On our principles, it is a psychological necessity, 
 and must suggest long trains of experiments. Nothing, we know, 
 can be more mixed or miscible than the great primordial feelings, 
 and the mixtures can never take place without mixtures between 
 the blood of the contiguous chambers. To instance only the case 
 of the conjugal and parental relations, how could these subsist unless 
 by the most liberal communications? The parental love generally 
 contains the conjugal, and vice versa. The feelings, as four pure 
 atoms, would be as barren as nature's chemistry if it consisted only 
 of simple substances. In fact we may say that the main office of 
 the heart consists in blendings; in the intertwinement of private 
 and public life ; in making countless binary, tertiary and other com- 
 pounds of the feelings. In proportion to the combination, life 
 arises, rich, delicate and lovely from the ground of a few simple 
 elements, and fair kingdoms adorn what would otherwise be a stony 
 level. On the purely moral side, the object of all existence and 
 circumstance, is to produce single-heartedness throughout the rela- 
 tions; to universalize every feeling by tincturing it with the rest; 
 to absorb the egotism and correct the weakness of each through 
 something of a wider love inserted into each from the others; in 
 short, to give the heart its last unity, by impregnating the private 
 with the public, and carrying the former into developments, and the 
 latter into exactitudes, that neither could attain on its own account. 
 Therefore in the feeling heart, which is the true fleshly heart in con- 
 tradistinction to the stony, mixture or communion are the law of 
 life; and we arrive at the deduction that the heart is a high forum 
 of intercommunication. The chambers are exclusive enough to con- 
 stitute separate ends, but not to realize that fancied independence 
 and unneighborliness which nature abhors. For nothing is so fluid 
 as feeling; nothing knows so little of walls as love; of barriers as 
 ambition ; of difficulties, whether fire or water, as friendship ; or of 
 time's weary limits, as family joy. And thus we conclude on this 
 side that the truths of communion are those which are proper to the 
 heart ; and that they are greater than the truths of trade or circula- 
 tion, which are proper to the arteries. 
 
216 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 But how are we to see this in the anatomical heart ? It is true, 
 the heart itself tells us that it is there, but how shall we make it 
 visible ? In the first place, by holding it as among the greatest of 
 facts, and not losing heart in it. In the second place, by investiga- 
 tions and injections with an end and a purpose. In any case, the 
 beginning of success must lie in the belief that the physical heart is 
 the centre of blood communion, as the feeling heart is the centre of 
 human communion; a fact which is very certain, though how the 
 case stands has yet to be worked out. Something however has 
 been probably contributed to this by Swedenborg, in his deduc- 
 tions respecting the intercommunications of the cavities. In the 
 meantime we affirm, that the heart, which unites all the feelings 
 and their blood-streams, is the bodily blood-maker j that its blood 
 contained in its own flesh is so transcendent, that it keeps gyrating 
 through the centres many times before it is fatigued or exhausted; 
 that it is more constant to its objects than any of the blood of the 
 body; thus that the circulation of the heart is not to be termed 
 circulation but community ; or if circulation, that it is many times 
 circular — a knot of living rings; that the left side flows into the 
 right, and vice versa, without the intervention of the. systemic or 
 pulmonary circulations; the heart being a spheral thing of cycle 
 and epicycle, a globe of golden girdles suspended in the central life. 
 Through this passes the great arterial curve which attaches it to the 
 earth, and the pulmonic ring by which it is hooked to the air; but 
 the heart, so far as it is true to its place, does not swerve from its 
 own roundness, but remains in every respect central, in its feelings 
 alike as in its blood. 
 
 If this be so, it would appear that the ancients were engaged upon 
 this higher problem of the circulation, but were unable to solve it, 
 when Harvey came, and took us down to a lower field, where truth 
 could become more definite at the time. They felt the fluctuations 
 of nature in their bosoms, and argued that the blood went to and 
 fro in its channels. There was a manliness and mutuality in the 
 thought beyond the science of the time; for certainly the immediate 
 relations of the heart are of a more spiritual power, than that large 
 and roundabout intercourse which makes the tour of the world be- 
 fore it touches the centre. But the incompleteness of the latter 
 
MORAL PARALLELS. 217 
 
 theory, its leanness in moral significance, its comparative heartless- 
 ness, had to be seen, before the former could touch upon physics. 
 Moreover the harmony and union between the body and common 
 life, required to be known and stated, before ever an eye that could 
 see the heart of man could come into the world. But a time has 
 arrived when the feelings of the ancients can be vindicated, or when 
 the communion, or goings and returnings, of the heart itself, can be 
 added to the doctrine of the circulation. 
 
 It may be urged that we are reasoning all along upon precon- 
 ceived opinions, which is not the method in vogue, and that we are 
 expecting nature to conform to our ideas. We reply, that we are 
 investigating the heart of man, in which the main evidence is the 
 feelings. From the height and in the compass of these we would 
 observe and experiment. The relation between them and the heart 
 is of mathematical power, and makes prediction into a duty. We 
 see that they cannot live in harmony with the heart, unless it be so 
 and so; we argue therefore towards the fact; but leave science to 
 find it out. That the present notions cannot be the last, is clear as 
 day; for there is not a common feeling of mankind that attests them; 
 not a thought of human life that connects itself with them ; not a 
 good or a brave heart among us that sees itself in their glass ; and 
 not a moral truth which reposes upon their basis, in the same way 
 as moral relations are founded upon the human heart. They are no 
 better than tricks of hydraulics, which are dead mummeries in our 
 spiritual city. The living body disowns them with horror as having 
 no souls. 
 
 But what a series of moral parallels the current physical doctrine 
 would suggest! Hearts that grasp at their objects for lifetimes, but 
 never catch a drop : disappointment made into an organic principle ! 
 The soul and body founded upon illusions ! Hearts that are as dead 
 as flesh can make them when sundered from our well-known life ' 
 Hearts only cognizable post-mortem, and without a spark of out- 
 spokenness or candor ; not to be trusted till they are stiff and cold ! 
 Hearts without individuality, and which throw everything away upon 
 other organs ! Hearts that are fourfold prisons, each a solitary cell, 
 where the felon-neighbors feel each other thumping, but have no 
 intercourse ! Hearts whose food consists in their own regurgitations ! 
 19 
 
218 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 Hearts in short which are bloodless, lifeless, sympathyless, the fools 
 of peddling rills of circumstance, purveyors of blood to the troughs 
 of the senses! Carbon and oxygen carriers, or coal-porters and 
 scullions to the body at large ! Truly materialism is never so ludi- 
 crous as when we see its upshot translated into the terms of life. 
 
 Our aim is the very contrary. We desire to see in the body a 
 heart that gains its object every moment, and in so doing, ministers 
 to the body at large. In the man, a heart that throbs with the 
 enjoyment of his own life. We desire to take the doctrine of the 
 heart from our noblest breasts, and to have the kingdom of the 
 living body come over again in the sciences of the physical body. 
 We desire to see the heart central in its relations, unspent in its 
 operations, a communal sun, giving life, but keeping life for itself. 
 We desire to see its separate affections open as day to the warmth 
 or streams of their neighbor's lives and fires. We desire to see the 
 heart built up before all things from its own immediate objects, and 
 provoked to life by no coronary squirts, by no circuitous after- 
 thoughts. In short, we desire that the heart should be alive and 
 loving j that the blood should be the life; very much in physics after 
 the same fashion that the Bible commands for our hearts in that 
 which in these days of divorce is thought to be a different sphere. 
 But whether or not the present doctrines of the heart may not be 
 equivalent to the treatment of man's heart by the world, we leave 
 to others to follow out. 
 
 In this place we will take occasion to illustrate to the reader the 
 nature of abstract ideas, taking our instance from the feelings, which 
 are so vital to us, and generally considered to be of an abstract 
 nature when thought about. What are human feelings ? In the 
 concrete, i. c, as substantial things, they are clearly the man him- 
 self alive to certain relations. Thus, a friendly feeling is no other 
 than a particular friend through whom is passing that motion or 
 emotion which produces certain results when occasion serves. So 
 too friendship is the gathered maniple of all friends, quick with 
 these emotions, and gravitating like an atmosphere to satisfy them. 
 What then are the feelings in the abstract? They are the hearts of 
 these same people with attention inwardly directed to them ; the 
 skin and ribs of the manly image are peeled away, and the naked 
 
WHAT ABSTRACTIONS ARE. 219 
 
 heart is contemplated. The true process of abstraction here consists 
 in taking away everything but the heart or cenfre, and regarding it 
 alone. The philosophers have made it lie in removing everything, 
 in which case it consists of words unattached to objects. Whereas 
 its essence is, to find the core of the thing in hand, in order to see 
 its relations centrally. Thus again in the case of the mind : in the con- 
 crete, the mind is the man; in the abstract, the mind is the brain; 
 the difference between the two lying no whit in bodily substance, 
 but in clothing or development. For "pure mind" is a living brain; 
 and mind, as commonly used, is a living person. It is necessary to 
 carry this ballast about, lest words should fly away with us. It is 
 especially necessary in treating of the heart, and of the incarnation 
 of the popular heart in the scientific one. But by no process of ab- 
 straction can we decompose the heart, unless indeed we find out a 
 deeper bodily centre, which is the heart of heart : which organism 
 will then be a more pure abstraction. "We have indicated this, be- 
 cause the philosophical belief that feelings are not incarnate, has 
 been a principal reason why the scientific world, duped by metaphy- 
 sical terms, has never thought for a moment of seeking the feelings 
 in the heart. 
 
 A living anatomy then gives us the abstractions of which human 
 life presents the concrete substances ; and the science of the present 
 inner man consists in tallying the world — le monde — with the 
 organic frame, as it were checking the one by the other, and trans- 
 lating the one into the other. It does not, however, consist in 
 reasoDing upon language, but in treating language as one among 
 organic things, dipping it in the blood-streams, and setting it piece 
 for piece against flesh. 
 
 Another point to be noted is, that as our plan is one of concili- 
 ation, we by no means wish to set up the heart against the head, or 
 to deny feelings of all descriptions to our minds. We grant, on 
 the contrary, that the whole frame or soul-house is made of nothing 
 else, but in various degrees. The man radiates from the central 
 parts, but reposes on the way at several stations, where he is refresh- 
 ed with new names and characters. That part where the grosser 
 consciousness begins, takes the credit of being the prime habitation, 
 whereas the feeling is a line with several nodes, which runs down 
 
220 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 from tip to toe. Language, which proceeds upon feeling, does not 
 attribute to the brain what is felt there only mentally, when there 
 is another place where the same thing is felt bodily. The affections 
 are the mind's as matters of thought, but not as matters of speech. 
 They belong by bodily or natural correspondence to the heart, and 
 are felt beating there, but their physical motion is not felt in the 
 brain. In short, but for the heart, they would not be carnally felt 
 at all, but only thought about, and it is their carnal feeling which be- 
 longs to the body. On account of this they are passions, for we 
 bond fide suffer them in the heart, but command, or ought to com- 
 mand, them in the head. 
 
 We are now then prepared for attributing in the same bodily 
 sense other things to the heart, without prejudice to the mind, 
 which in truth is built upon the heart. Each feeling, let us remark, 
 is surrounded by its own film of imaginations, which body forth 
 what it is, in a <^fm-intellectual glass. "The imagination of the 
 heart" is the light of which feeling is the fire, and causes every 
 emotion to shine with its own peculiar ray. Where are these 
 imaginations localized ? On the inner membrane of the organ, we 
 reply ; for the inward skin of the heart is its blood-face, in which it 
 expresses its desires. Skins are always facial structures, and ex- 
 press what lies beneath them. By this membrane, the blood and 
 the heart understand each other, or look in each other's eyes, which 
 amounts to the same thing. Imagination then is localized all over 
 the cavities, which are indeed the express moulds of the thoughts 
 of the heart, or as the Scripture phrases it, the chambers of image- 
 ry. If we desire to know what these bodily imaginations are, their 
 shape is given in the fine membranes which transmit the emotions 
 of the blood, and the motions of the heart, reciprocally to each 
 other, and make them acquainted. 
 
 Imagination, however, in this case the heart-house, consists of a 
 common chamber with two doors, and here we remark that every- 
 where, in the mind and the body, desire opens us by means of ima- 
 ginations, and thus is the dilating, opening or cavity-making faculty. 
 We open our mouths for food under the influence of hunger work- 
 ing through and shaped by the imagination of a supply : we make 
 ourselves hollow, to take in what supports and enlarges us. We 
 
THE IMAGINATION OF THE HEART. 221 
 
 open our hearts to receive new emotions; our minds, to receive 
 new ideas. Every desire expands us, and each is accompanied by 
 an imagination of the object, which limits the opening to some- 
 thing like the proper size, or constitutes its walls. And so again 
 we are presented with the fact, that imagination is depicted upon 
 the inner walls or front face of the heart. We notice in the 
 lungs the expansive correspondence of imagination, where it is 
 manifestly want (p. 131), or an elaborate vacuum produced in the 
 man by nature every moment, to incite him to new infillings. Ima- 
 gination then is the limit to which the walls stand off, the horizon 
 of present life, or the arch of the caverns of desire. It is different 
 for every cavity, according to its shape, objects, colors, &c. ; but 
 wherever there is a cavity it lives, and peoples the hollow with its 
 teeming forms. It is here to be noted, that desire and imagination 
 are one and the same thing from two points of view; the desire 
 being the hollow or void that we feel, per se, while the imagination 
 is the same regarded from the walls of the void, which imagine it full 
 of what it wants to occupy it. Thus the heart-desires dilate its 
 cavities before the blood is given them, and in the momentaneous 
 void the imagination anticipates the tide which is to come ; and the 
 heart is in every stroke prepared, both by roominess and welcome, 
 for the new life. Thus again, supply ah extra is the law of exist- 
 ence, and preparation for the supply a part of the same law. 
 
 In the heart we notice valves, which prevent the life current from 
 running back; in the feeling heart there are states, or spiritual 
 valves, which hinder the life-loves from regurgitation. To make 
 this cleat let us use an instance. The present time has its own 
 fixed point, from which we regard the past. Manhood can only 
 look at childhood through manhood : the experience and circum- 
 stances of the latter are the present state that flies up before our eyes 
 in all attempts to reach the past : in short, we cannot go but only 
 picture backwards. If the imagination is very transparent, or not 
 greatly colored by the present, then we call it memory ; if opaque, 
 and full of existing passions, then it is merely imagination, which 
 cannot conceive anything beyond the hour. In both cases, however, 
 it is properly termed a state, a film detached from the present, which 
 is applied back against the past, and constitutes a genuine valve 
 
 19* 
 
222 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 in the feelings. Most of us are so full of these valves, that we 
 cannot attend to anything but the present, or believe that we ever 
 were little children, except in the sense of time, but not of state. 
 The present in that case is made of iron, and the imagination of the 
 past is a hatchway that shuts up, and transmits no beam from the 
 infantine days. There are then valves in life, which prevent it 
 from going back. And indeed this valve-function is universal. 
 The flaming sword that turned every way was none other than the 
 valve of Paradise. Death also is a valve, which nature keeps up 
 during all moments of investigation, or regurgitation, and only opens 
 from the other side when birth is to take place, and when nobody is 
 thinking that it is the same door through which the old citizens 
 have departed, and the ne\7 ones arrive. Yet the same it is, only 
 shut, contracted or earthy in the one case, and open, alive, fleshly 
 and maternal in the other. 
 
 Valves then in the feeling heart are the present by its activities 
 shutting away the past ; memories are the states of the present in 
 which it endeavors to image the past; and they live especially 
 upon the roof of the cavities, or upon the outspread valves. 
 
 The heart desire causes it to grasp at the object with which it is 
 now filled, i. e., the blood, and because life cannot go backwards, 
 (for the present stands at its back, and keeps it from the past), it 
 must go forward into the unknown, where no imagination can 
 hinder; for imagination is our limit, but of the future we have no 
 imagination that can dare to bound us. To-morrow is therefore 
 always an open door, and time streams onwards. And yet there is 
 an imagination of the future, which we term hope. Hope* however 
 is not a wall, but a hole in our advancing lives through which the 
 firmament is seen. Its sky has an arch of definite blue, but this 
 is, we know, not the end of things, but mercy's color for the weary 
 point of all our sight-rays. Hope is that hole-work in our nature 
 through which we see the heaven, and to which we stream by pro- 
 pulsion from behind, not less than by the unresistingness of the ori- 
 fice, and the attraction of the greater space, so immense and so 
 lovely. These hopes lead us on into the lungs or the universe of 
 the brain, and into the system, or the universe of the body. As 
 the past becomes impossible, the future opens, or as the blood can- 
 
THE HOPES OF THE HEART. 223 
 
 not regurgitate, it is driven into circulation. Hopes then are the 
 doors by which the little cavities of desire and imagination commu- 
 nicate with the great cavity where light shines in a superior degree, 
 and into which life courses, upon the principle of all fluids, which 
 run where there is the least resistance. This it is that gives its uni- 
 form direction to the current of time; to the little rivers of our 
 heart's blood ; to the stream of experiences from infancy onwards, 
 and to the career of humanity from Eden until to-day ; the heart 
 being the fleshly atom that is involved or evolved in all these courses. 
 The law is the same for them all. Wherever time or blood is to 
 run, a present is constituted, a valvular state runs back, and hope 
 becomes doubly open from the impossibility of retrogression. 
 
 Desire then is the heart-void or cavity, imagination is the heart- 
 wall, our present state is the heart-valve, and our hopes of the 
 future are the heart-orifices. Thus the heart of feeling and the 
 heart of flesh are identical in their parts, and each is the other's. 
 
 It would be useless at present to carry the analysis and synthesis 
 further, for the subject would run into subtleties if it were approached 
 prematurely. Let us be content with the above generalities, and 
 bide our time for further localization ; for the soul, long estranged, 
 will not come to live in the body all at once. 
 
 We may however here obviate an objection, viz., that in the 
 above views, we have taken no account of the anatomical elements 
 of the heart j but have attributed consciousness and feeling to mere 
 flesh, when yet it is known that these are the attributes of nerves 
 and nerve substance. We do not deny it. But we observe in 
 reply, that although anatomically animals live in their nerves, yet 
 the common view is deeply right, that the animals themselves, with 
 their skin, bone, and flesh, are alive also. And we are now looking 
 upon the heart's four bodies as four entire animals, each animated 
 by its own life. In obedience to this point of view, we study the 
 natural history of the heart-animals, in their habits, functions, 
 actions, and not in their nerves ; we study them alive, and know of 
 no distinction into structures, but only into forms, as it were faces, 
 limbs, head, and the like. This study does not deny the other, but 
 postpones it so long as we are making a separate object of the na- 
 tural history of the heart. 
 
224 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 Nor is our attribution of consciousness to the heart without the 
 most vast suffrages in its favor ; indeed we may state broadly, that 
 every organ is conscious, as the whole animal kingdom is conscious; 
 and that the human consciousness is nothing more than the collect- 
 ive consciousness of all parts of the body. In general the whole 
 field of consciousness is cast into the shade by the solar or central 
 consciousness of the brain, which we call our mind ; yet at all times 
 our human form as an outline full of life, is more or less present to 
 us, and makes us embodied men. And in particular conditions, the 
 consciousness of any part may be raised, and as it were detached 
 from the rest ; the viscera may take on humane proportions, and 
 open their eyes upon the scene ; the magnetic animals of which we 
 are made up, may be separately excited, and powers of an animality 
 co-extensive with nature may spring to light in the dark chambers 
 of the flesh. This is because life is like itself in every part, and 
 the body is all heart, or all eye, when the proportions are varied in 
 which ordinary wakefulness and sleep are mixed ; thus when the 
 sun of the brain goes down, the other organs may come forth, and 
 show their ruddy lustres. For we cannot too often repeat, that the 
 human body consists of nothing but expanses of life, all of which 
 are ensouled, conscious or alive. 
 
 Upon the circulation itself, as contradistinguished from the com- 
 munion of the heart, it only remains to repeat, that it stands in 
 analogy with the five senses, and that its passage through the heart 
 represents the active touch which rolls the wheel onwards. The 
 arterial blood is the life going forth to work ; the venous blood is 
 the return circuit ; and the difference between them can be best 
 likened to the man full of resolve and affairs going forth to his call- 
 ing in the morning, and to the same man who has laid care and 
 tension aside, and is returning to his own fireside, to enjoy relaxa- 
 tion in the evening. The difference is in the bodily vigor and the 
 mental polarity. Everything is distributed into arterial and venous 
 in something of the same way; into arterial on the active side, 
 venous on the passive : the day itself and all which it includes, is 
 arterial from the morning to the evening, and venous from the even- 
 ing to the morning again. 
 
POWERS OF CORRESPONDENCE. 225 
 
 It is now time that we should speak of the visceral system as it 
 is connected with life and feeling, and explain the principles upon 
 which such connections proceed. 
 
 For the latter point we have assumed as our organon, that the 
 physical and mental are not dissimilar, though different things j on 
 the contrary, they are so similar that their likeness or congeniality 
 is their bond of coherence. This similarity we express by the term, 
 Correspondence. We find that the body and the soul do the same 
 errands in different spheres; that the man respires objects and the 
 mind thoughts, while the brain respires spirits and the lung, airs ; 
 which two latter are objects and thoughts, inanimate in various 
 degrees ; also that the will circulates affection and feeling, while the 
 heart circulates blood, which is bodily affection and feeling. Again, 
 that the areas thus equated influence each other by correspondence 
 or similarity ; the parts of each, touching and associating with the 
 parts of the other which are likest to them. Thus respiration draws 
 thought, and blood invites life, to incarnation. We shall recur to 
 this law in the sequel, where it will be better understood. 
 
 In the meantime we anticipate further, that correspondence al- 
 ways implies some point of likeness or ground of association between 
 things or persons ; and communication to the same extent. Cor- 
 respondence by letter implies a common interest of some kind, and 
 communication within that interest. In assuming correspondence 
 between the soul and the body, we assume intercourse also. The 
 similarity between the two terms is the principle that we take, and 
 the details of the similarity are the science which we desire v We 
 see two persons — the inner and outer man — associated together \ 
 and when we find the objects that they have in common, we know 
 the ground of their intercourse; but if they have all objects in com- 
 mon, though different fields to work in, we are certain that they 
 were reciprocally made for each other, and will explain as well as 
 supply each other's wants. We take Correspondence for granted ; 
 for the more of truth we take for granted, the more we gain j the 
 inherited fortune of common sense sets us up in business in the 
 sciences. Otherwise we must take for granted the dissimilarity 
 between the body and the soul ; and the non-correspondence ; and 
 then reason will not hear of intercourse between two things that 
 
226 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 have no objects in common. Success or failure, but not preliminary 
 arguirfg, will be the test between the two principles, both equally 
 assumed. 
 
 The heart is one of many viscera connected in a living chain. 
 As the supreme organ of the body, it has a complete orbit of its 
 own ; the rest, as inferior orbits, gyrating around it, and forming an 
 ascending stair of entrails. The brains and nerves are the mental 
 organ ; and the lungs, an intermediate field, lie between the mental 
 and the bodily regions. But every part contains the rest; the brains 
 are omnipresent both by substance and influences ; the individuality 
 of no part excludes them, for the nerves of an organ are its peculiar 
 brains. So also the heart is everywhere ; the bloodvessels of an or- 
 gan are its private heart. The liver is everywhere; the bilious fluids 
 are a current liver wherever they run. No feeling then is more than 
 central in any organ; it has circumferences co-extensive with the 
 body ; for the principle on which its incarnation depends is univer- 
 sal. In attributing feelings to the heart, we imply that they are 
 cordially there, but secondarily, by dilution of correspondence, they 
 are everywhere else. The body is telegraphic with various stations; 
 the messages are different according to the organs, but one at the 
 fountain head. 
 
 If the heart is the centre of the bodily feelings or visceral . sensi- 
 bility, then on the same evidence (p. 195) the stomach and intes- 
 tines have feelings of their own. The glow of content and satisfac- 
 tion is incomplete until its quietude is poured over these contorting 
 parts. The warmth of wine influences the mind by removing un- 
 easiness from this tube. The bowels yearn with audible tenderness 
 when the softer emotions fill them. What is the visceral inhabit- 
 ant that touches their strings and feels in their quivering expanses? 
 Common sensibility is its name, as inferior to the definite sentiments 
 or feelings of the heart, and as internal to those other feelings 
 that possess the five senses. This susceptibility is a well known 
 phenomenon ; some have it in a greater and some in a lesser degree ; 
 but it is always a magnetic or sympathetic contact with things, not 
 on their outsides, but in their tender inward parts. Those who are 
 most apprehensive, feel the tube in constant live motions : women 
 especially have such experiences, and must know more than men 
 
BOWELS OF MERCY. 227 
 
 the depth of the Scriptural phrase " bowels of mercy," and of the 
 saying that those who are devoid of pity " have no bowels." The 
 reason or ratio of these common words is clear. For the good 
 services of the intestinal tube are the materiality of mercy. It 
 stands at the bottom of the vitals, where lowly mercy also stands, 
 for mercy must be at the bottom, or it could not have the poor and 
 needy for its objects. It is at the top also, but beginning from the 
 bottom ; for it is the glory of the crown above the head, and the 
 beauty of the feet of those who preach glad tidings. This mercy- 
 tube satisfies hunger and thirst, clothes naked ribs with fatness, and 
 lifts the starveling into the company of full men. Furthermore, it 
 is microscopically true to its charities; it raises the food from below, 
 taking the infant chyle from the earth, and lifting it towards the 
 blood ; and searches the unclean masses to redeem any parts that 
 can be saved. It yearns over the new offspring of the blood as a 
 mother over her children. Its gifts are unexpected and undeserved, 
 for the life and spirit of man are bestowed upon fruit, flesh and 
 herb. Long suffering is among its offices, for it makes the best of 
 whatever is put into it, and promotes our worst meals, forgiving the 
 abuses of our appetites seventy times seven. Granting that mercy 
 were enclosed for a time in a prison of bowels, what could it do but 
 what these entrails do ? This is the reason why mercy, the full 
 name for sensibilities, associates with the intestinal functions. It 
 matters not whether the work takes place in a city, in a man, in an 
 organ, or in a molecule. Wherever the hungry is fed, the low 
 raised up, the prisoner let out, the erring forgiven, or desert ex- 
 ceeded in blessings, there Mercy lives.* But these works are every- 
 where, in every assimilative act (p. 166), and hence, wherever 
 ground extends, there are processions of chyle-white sisters of mercy, 
 carrying the world up their ladders, and passing from the dust to 
 God. Man feels the influences of the hierarchy as it passes through 
 
 * We observed before (p. 182), that intellectual heat makes human heat; and 
 now we observe that mercy, or the assimilation of the low to the high, makes 
 human assimilation, or the conversion of food into man's blood. The latter can 
 go on apart for a time, even for generations, but not for the long run, and it is the 
 long run, or the end, that contradistinguishes man from the beasts, or separates 
 human from animal assimilation. 
 
228 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 his vitals ; and intellect is smelted and raised, when it admits the 
 meaning of the better longings which its own experience knows. 
 
 Hence a reason for the pleasure connected with the assimilative 
 function. For it is a law that pleasure is given to organism accord- 
 ing to the uses performed, and especially according to the ulterior 
 uses associated with the material organs. Thus the parts whose 
 functions are mercy-like, have bodily pleasures conferred upon them 
 as like as corporeal feeling can be, to the satisfaction and blessed- 
 ness of mercy. Hence we do right to thank God before and after 
 meals for all His mercies. The organs, however, thus furnished 
 with rivers of pleasure from this source, are capable of abuse, or 
 stimulation without a true end. For if pleasures are assigned them 
 for mercy's sake or for just purposes, and man finds the pleasures 
 out, he may choose to enjoy the latter apart from the purposes; as 
 is sufficiently well known : but in that case the first conditions are 
 absent, and the pleasures are verging to retributions. The case of 
 the generative organs is parallel : for the sake of the heart's love 
 which has intercourse with them, and the rich end that they carry, 
 they are endowed with supreme incentives of bodily delights. And 
 in general every part is gifted with these, first according to the ne- 
 cessity of its functions in the body, and secondly according to its 
 privilege of representing, or being similar to, functions of the soul 
 which are delightful self-evidently, or in the order and justice of 
 God. 
 
 The body itself is a group of sensories. As the eye is a bodily 
 sensorium of light, and has intercourse with intelligence ; and as the 
 heart is a bodily sensorium of blood, and has intercourse with the 
 hearty sentiments felt for our greater blood, which is human kind ; 
 and as the bowels are a sensory of our wants from below, and of 
 nature's longings to be raised into blood, and as they have inter- 
 course with gracious sensibilities — so every other part is a feeling of 
 its own objects; and if we knew those objects in common sense, 
 would be found to have intercourse with some principles in the soul 
 that would explain its pleasures, and give the veriest motive of its 
 functions. The liver, for example, the gruff king of the belly, as 
 the stomach is the queen, is the seat and sensory of a severer pro- 
 cess of assimilation, as of judgment added to mercy, or justice to 
 
THE WHOLE BODY SENSORIAL. 229 
 
 sensibility; whence the passion of anger in extreme cases is attrib- 
 uted by the deep vulgar to the liver, and a bilious man by choice 
 exercises upon his society critical and denunciatory functions, dis- 
 turbing their good natures, and digesting their easy admissions with 
 terrible stringency and power. The words of such a prepared in- 
 strument are gall to his age. These are metaphors, because the body 
 itself is a metaphor — a flesh that " carries with it" spirit, because of 
 the likeness it bears to the spirit. The creation is the body and 
 pressure of all metaphors ; and seen actions are done because they 
 carry out the unseeu in everlasting resemblances. Nature is a force 
 willed from the first to sculpture the images and paint the portraits 
 of God's attributes, in earth, plant, beast and bird, nations and 
 peoples, wherever the one problem works, or the one end predomi- 
 nates. The sensorial nature of the body during emotions leads us 
 experimentally into these realms of metaphors; for we feel that an- 
 ger lies in bile, and that bile publishes anger; and out of this double 
 marriage we cannot but infer a natural intercourse, illustrating itself 
 by metaphors of language, and proceeding from a real ground of 
 similarity or correspondence. 
 
 The sensory nature of the body is plain, from the fact that any 
 part may be the seat of pain, and thus become an object of con- 
 sciousness. In disease we have an indication of what also happens 
 in the higher stages of order and content. This sign is used indeed 
 by the sick to disprove the better condition ; those laboring under 
 indigestion long for the intervals in which they do not know that they 
 have stomachs; and the nervous, in like manner, wish that they had 
 no nerves. But then, on the other hand, the pleasures of the body 
 are as much facts as the pains, but with this difference, that pain 
 enthrals the body to self-considerations, whereas healthy pleasure 
 either soothes to slumber, or else excites to activities and a keen 
 relish of objects; for peace and joy are straight aims and energetic 
 powers. 
 
 But if the body be sensorial, it is evidently capable of a liveliness 
 of which at present we have no instances. For if the presence of 
 objects causes so vast a rousing of the five external senses; if the 
 eye gladdened by the light of day, stands so prominently forth, and 
 opens our little halls of light so wide, what will be the state of the 
 20 
 
230 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 heart when it has its objects, as the eye has the range of the mighty 
 universe of nature? And what the joy of the assimilative organs, 
 when the communion of man plays upon them, as the warmth of 
 the sun upon the skin, when the pleased sense opens out every 
 wrinkle of inaction into which the cold had thrown it down ? And 
 what will be the state of the brain when it lives in the truth, and 
 opens its sentient intellectual urns to the light that lighteth every 
 man who comes into the world ? The difference between that state 
 and ours will be at least equal to the difference between waking and 
 sleep; between life with and without an object; between the vigor 
 of the hero-angels, and the drawl of history, slimy with the torpor 
 of our own hybernation three thousand years long. Yet great as 
 this difference is, we are bound to believe that the Christian trains 
 for long ages have been crossing its deserts, and that a time will 
 come when the pleasures of the head and the heart will be as sen- 
 sible in the body as those of the belly ; and when in consequence 
 the body will be inwardly alive and active in its nervous and visceral 
 depths, more than now in its limbs, or its senses. 
 
 We have further to note that the fullness of life depends upon just 
 intercourse between the steps in the sensory ladder. Pleasure or 
 bodily life is incomplete while its materialism only is felt, and the 
 heart untouched by the traveling joy, which as it comes down from 
 on high, longs to strike every cord where its music can be made. 
 But if the heart is incontinent, or has destroyed its delicious sen- 
 sorialness, the joy is spilt from it, and not felt excepting in the lower 
 regions. First love, the comedians say, is " all-overishness;' 7 the 
 whole body feels it; the house is lighted and the lutes are playing 
 from attic to kitchen, and the old neighborhood is amazed. Last 
 love is often another thing; life in holes and corners, but the former 
 halls dark and cold. So also the pleasures of the sensory of taste 
 have a similar wholeness in their design. Without the conviviality 
 which is the incentive of taste, and which supplies its heart touches, 
 these pleasures are poor and half dead, and savors themselves are 
 rinds with dust inside them. For as we said before, pleasure is given 
 upon conditions and for purposes, and the fullness of the pleasures 
 of the soul are the objects of those of the body. But the soul is all 
 over the body, and when it is conciliated, the sensation of its ap- 
 
THE WHOLE BODY SENSORIAL. 231 
 
 proval is as it were the whole man, a choice anatomy of senses in a 
 body of delight. 
 
 The sensories of the body form a key-board played upon by nume- 
 rous hands. The body plays upon itself through their means, and 
 parts of it become present to other parts according to the variations 
 of the correspondence. If the womb, in catering for the embryo, 
 finds the existing larder insufficient, its want is present that moment 
 to the tender-hearted intestinal tube, which uneasily yearns for the 
 food that the nascent nature claims, making as though it were assi- 
 milating it, as we by dumb-show of eating at our mouths, show our 
 hunger to those who do not understand our language. This sign- 
 work is next suggested in idea to the mouth and palate, which set 
 muscle and artifice in motion to procure the viands that the blood de- 
 mands. Thus the hen, in correspondence with her eggs, picks up 
 their shells in bits of lime that will cement and protect her unborn 
 brood. In fact the vitals are the conductors of instincts from the 
 depth of our nature, and the body turns first to them for whatever 
 it wants from their respective fields. Each part is applied to in this 
 manner as occasion requires, for every part knows the rest, and relies 
 upon them. For want of knowing that the body is sensorial, in- 
 stinct is a mystery; whereas instinct is the sight, voice and action 
 of faculties as broad as our faces, and as luminous as thought; but 
 these faculties happen to lie under our skins, and in our entrails, of 
 which they are the wants, the knowledge, and the ways. The com- 
 munication of each want from its starting place, through the course 
 of organisms that lead it to its objects, takes place, as we have said, 
 by no other means than correspondence ; as supply and demand take 
 place in human affairs. The line of sympathy thrills and trembles 
 with the want, which becomes, as in the case cited, yearning in the 
 bowels, expectancy in the mouth, longing in the person, suggestion 
 in the mind, which completes the circle of the womb, gives the want 
 both sight and voice, and then the will is stirred to pursue and grasp 
 the object. And by the line that the want ascended as a protean 
 instinct, the supply descends, putting off husk after husk and hard- 
 ness after hardness, until the pure milk supplicated, is squeezed into 
 the little mouth that made the cry, too tender for the mother to hear, 
 excepting by the ministration and enlarging trumpet tones of part 
 
232 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 after part, as it were successive choirs of faery-footed, guardian 
 organs. 
 
 It may further be remarked, that all substances inside the body, 
 propagate their state as interpreted by their feel, to the body at large. 
 See p. 136. This we illustrated in that place by certain considera- 
 tions touching the feel of oil and other objects in the mouth, as 
 affording sensations of an agreeable kind, apart from the sense of 
 taste, and which seem to be a kind of structural taste that travels 
 beyond the tongue, and soothes the frame at large. The action of 
 demulcents, gums and mucilages, and of cold water, are in part of 
 this kind. And medicines act also in this double way, propagating 
 themselves, and working out their specific problems, both by quality 
 or taste, and by quantity or vibration. If this be true of inanimate 
 substances, a fortiori the living fluids propagate their vibrations in 
 the same way; the organic feel of what goes on in the heart, for 
 example — the groupings, marriages and thrills of the blood, are pro- 
 pagated per sensum in like manner, and influence the general state. 
 Nay more, by incessantly jogging the body, and giving it these 
 atomic hints, the impassioned blood-populations insert into man the 
 beginnings of an impulsion that comes out at last in full actions of 
 a correspondent order; the still small voices whispering year after 
 year, grow louder as the audience of vibrating organs enlarges, and 
 ultimately play their tunes in concert with the whole world of man. 
 The largest wheels begin to stir, to start, to move slowly, and finally 
 to revolve, after the least; and the speed increasing, the revolution 
 is swift enough in time to make one drop of passion into a great ring 
 of fire, as consistent as our fate. The "biting of the maggot" that 
 sets impulse in motion, is an ugly metaphor for these words of com- 
 mand that issue from our eager blood. A fairer saying is, that "all 
 men have their hobbies," and these begin in little toys of globules, 
 or blood-dolls, which the heart dandles, dresses, and nurses, intend- 
 ing that the big body shall one day do the same, when the vibration 
 has grown up, and can be the mother of bodily action. The pri- 
 mordial affections of our blood, are our nature's hobbies, but after 
 they become disanimalized or humanized, they change this name, 
 and become good ends. 
 
 External nature also plays upon the sensorial body, and we sym- 
 
THE VISCERAL SYMPATHIES. 233 
 
 pathize with weather, moons and tides, because our vitals feel them 
 as our skins feel the objects of touch. Hence come innumerable 
 moods that vibrate towards the will, and instigate states of con- 
 sciousness, and corresponding colors in our trains of action. The 
 instincts of the day and the hour are so many, that ever-shifting 
 nature only can produce, and Grod alone can regulate and know 
 them. Sunshine and shade, moist and dry, the east wind and 
 Zephyrus, thunder and frost, and the influences of climate, play 
 upon us thus; some through the mind, some direct through the 
 strings of the vitals ; and hence the reactions by which we add to 
 nature, give a new beam to her beams, or deepen her gloom by our 
 brows. Man in this way inhabits his circumstances by a thousand- 
 fold cunning of sensories : he palpates vapors, winds, magnetisms, 
 and climates, with fingers finer than tact, and himself is a divining- 
 rod which points to everything, whether in earth, ocean, or air, or 
 in the inward streams that build the crystals, and carry the mes- 
 sages of nature between her poles. 
 
 Man acts upon man by the same way, and the presence of persons 
 is felt viscerally even before intercourse commences. Thus a sym- 
 pathy grows up, by which those whom we meet, act upon our special 
 organs. Do not our hearts burn within us when some men look 
 and speak? The presence of others again is choking and oppres- 
 sive. The piteous and sentimental, if we be not too steely, act upon 
 our intestine tenderness, and call it into yearnings. The unhappy 
 give us indigestions, and the mad confuse us, and tend to make their 
 keepers mad. We do not often perceive these influences viscerally, 
 unless the mind be excited and call the sensibilities into play. But 
 from a few plain cases we may argue, that our fellows, according to 
 their predominant character, affect us in all ways, organically as 
 well as mentally, by their vibrating substance and stuff as well as 
 by their actions and words; and that every man is ranged for us in 
 a peculiar organic classification. The brain-men play upon our 
 brains, and the heart-men on our hearts ; the men of pity touch our 
 strings, and so forth. 
 
 The influence of the mind upon the visceral man is very well 
 known. There is not a state of mind however produced, but the 
 body feels it, and responds to it. Our conscious pleasures, or pains, 
 
 20* 
 
234 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 are objects of touch to the whole of the viscera; anxiety exists in 
 the mind as a trouble and a knot, which the consistent stomach 
 makes a knot in itself in order to feel. The viscera shape them- 
 selves upon the mental models that they may sensate the mental 
 states, as the hand makes itself into a cube or a sphere, to feel a 
 cube or a sphere. Thus the body is a set of sensories constantly 
 palpating the mind, by assuming forms which answer to the mental 
 states. It feels the ghosts of thought and passion, not by trying to 
 grasp them, but by making itself like them, and thus experiencing 
 the immaterial by representing it in a correspondent form. 
 
 Providence also uses the sensorialness of the body as a means to 
 guide and shape our lives. For much arises in us without apparent 
 cause ; dictates, suggestions, feelings, calm, seeming to come from 
 afar, and influencing us in important respects. Such vibrations 
 arise from within, and are the passions of passions and the motions 
 of motions. But motions in the organs, however produced, become 
 our own, whether their causes are internal or external to our being. 
 Within our being, work Providence and his ministers, and fate, in- 
 stinct, and succession of thought, are the play of the supreme 
 agencies, not unaccountable since we are all made of sensories, which 
 in their veriest ground are in contact with a higher life than our 
 own. The harp of a thousand strings is a good metaphor for this 
 human frame touched into melody by such divers hands, and espe- 
 cially by Him named of David, the Chief Musician. And as the 
 viscera are so constructed as to hear for us the whispers of the wis- 
 dom of Providence, it is not surprising that their feelings also are 
 the source of many presentiments, or that coming events cast their 
 shadows before, through these trembling fleshly groves; for the 
 main actors in life are already beyond time and history, and put 
 their fatal forethought into the piece, which then speaks, sometimes 
 audibly, of the future as present, and of the distant as here. It 
 was therefore by a remote application, that the augurs consulted 
 entrails as the voices of the gods, and interpreted oracles from the 
 sacrificial quiverings. For the intestine parts are telegraphic of 
 what is and was and shall be, as it were wires for the electricity of 
 ends, which runs by wisdom's way, from the future to the present. 
 These deeply-buried natures are even as the Vala awakened by Odin 
 
THE VISCERAL SYMPATHIES. 235 
 
 for responses which daylight cannot give, and the opening of them 
 as sensories introduces us to magnetisms and communications that 
 the five senses will not know. The unseen world of the body of 
 man is indeed a grave-land of innumerable prophetesses, each to be 
 compelled to speak when the powerful enchanters come. 
 
 This sensory nature of the viscera is the complement, and the 
 antecedent, of the motory nature which we claimed for them in our 
 Chapter on the Lungs. It is because they so keenly feel their ob- 
 jects, that they breathe them, or move towards them. To enable 
 them to do this, the respiration itself varies as the objects vary, and 
 the parts of the machine, trebly consistent, move all together. To 
 promote the sensory nature to a still larger correspondence with ob- 
 jects, the muscular system is given, which has two beginnings of 
 ends, one external, by which it produces all human actions, properly 
 so called; and one internal, by which it engenders all human visce- 
 ral actions. As we may not have another occasion to speak of the 
 muscular man, we shall now dwell upon him briefly, to give a little 
 more completeness to our views. 
 
 The human body, besides containing in potency all organic sensa- 
 tions and motions, from visceral sensibility to intellectual perception, 
 has moreover a will, which decides upon the objects to be sought, 
 and muscles as servants of the will, to bring up the motories to their 
 fields of operation, and the sensories to their stations of feeling. 
 Apart from the will, action is molecular, and feeling, like a dream. 
 But under the force of the will and muscles, the smallest impulses 
 (p. 232) become translated into personal actions, and the minutest 
 senses lead to gratifications of which the whole man is the sensorium. 
 For the will is our sovereign pleasure with a soul added to it, and 
 in the muscles it forms our own motions, in contradistinction to 
 the motions of our blood and fluids. It is our continued human 
 life, and each volition is a tick of our proper clock, without which 
 we are not " going." We may call it the organ of progress, as the 
 muscles are the organs of locomotion or bodily progress. It takes 
 up the helpless viscera in its arms, and runs with them where it 
 chooses, or where they choose, setting them in pleasant places which 
 they could not have reached without a strong will equally supported 
 by numerous muscular servants. 
 
236 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 The viscera are meant in the nature of things for the will and the 
 muscles ; they are meant to be present and serviceable for every 
 action that man performs ; and vice versa, all action is meant to act 
 upon them and to modify them. By means of the muscles they are 
 girded into one body ; each has the benefit of pressure from without, 
 and is forced to do its work in an exact space, or what is the same 
 thing, to refine nature into skill ; and all are set upright, or have 
 their own portion of man's erectness or heaven-sightedness conferred 
 upon them. Thus the liver, the spleen, the stomach become paral- 
 lel with the eyes and hands, and action runs consistently from the 
 soul through the skin, as well as from the will through the fingers. 
 By means of the muscles also they receive the powers of the voli- 
 tions : industry and skill are stricken into their phlegmatic tempers, 
 and they are forced to take part in deeds, and to make blood and 
 humors, not for molecular domestic circulation, but for human aims. 
 The stomach, thrashed by the rods of the voluntary fibres of the 
 abdomen, is allowed to make no sleepy chyle, but a quick and stir- 
 ring milk of support, worthy to feed a workman's blood. And the 
 liver, under the same task-masters, is not permitted to make soapy 
 infantine bile, but sharp decisive stuff, ready in a moment to cut the 
 maudlin of the animal secretions. By means of the muscles also the 
 viscera have the benefit of locomotion and change of air; the will, 
 and these his servants, are the carriage that takes the liver and its 
 companions from London to Paris, or where we please ; the muscles 
 also walk them out, and give them exercise, which they require just 
 as much as ourselves. The muscular system furthermore lends hard- 
 ness to the tender viscera, and contains and corrects their sensibili- 
 ties, just as the will makes the mind firm : thus it enables the vitals, 
 poor jellies without it, to bear what is to be borne, and do what must 
 be done. Where this strength is not given, liver and bowels are as 
 it were out-lying in the world, exaggerated in size, shrinking from 
 healthy sounds and vigorous contacts, and trodden under foot of cir- 
 cumstances that are the playmates of the body in its well-braced 
 powers. In short the viscera are created to receive and appropriate 
 the actions of our muscles, and to be humanized (p. 40), or lose their 
 laziness and animality, by this among other means. It is a fact that 
 they do receive these actions, and being a necessity also, we state it 
 
THE MUSCULAR MAN. 237 
 
 as a law. We therefore look upon muscularity and volition as just 
 as much a part of the liver, as though the liver was itself muscular, 
 which it is not, for in an indissoluble society, all things exist for 
 each. And we notice that human inaction robs every viscus of its 
 endowments, or leaves it forlorn among animal sensibilities and mo- 
 lecular movements. Under these circumstances the man and the 
 viscera are all doing nothing; true, they breathe, but this is nothing 
 for waking man ; industry and skill, in the liver as in the person, 
 begin the human reckoning. 
 
 The muscular system, therefore, as the organ of the progress of 
 the rest of the body, carries the body into action, and by its back- 
 stroke carries action into the body, making us like ourselves in our 
 tiniest humors, as well as in our works. Could we see a globule of 
 our blood with a fine-enough eye for character, we should find that 
 it was a chip of the old block, because it has been under the dominion 
 of our will since it was born ; aye, and inherited our will in its con- 
 ception. The muscles themselves however are a sensory, or they 
 could not have a human motory life. They are the seat of the sense 
 of power ; the verb lean, added to good pleasure, or the verb, I will. 
 The power is possessed of an instinctive sense of the compass of power, 
 by which the muscles know what they can do, according to the dose 
 of will that they receive. This sense is a meter of the will on the 
 one hand, and a meter of the commanded action on the other : if a 
 leap is prescribed, the muscular man feels exactly whether he is 
 wilful enough to attempt it, and powerful enough to carry it through. 
 It is from this sense of power that our bodies become responsible 
 agents, and flesh, a moral humanity; therefore we justly punish 
 human bodies for the sins of human souls; for by sense bodies be- 
 come souls whilst they are awake and here. The way in which we 
 manage our muscles is by ideal actions shown to this sense of power; 
 the plan of the action is held up to the moving army of the flesh, 
 and with it a command is given to execute the action, if it be easy 
 or known ; whereas the cautious mind puts in the query, Is it pos- 
 sible ? if the action be serious, or untried. The ideas thus exhibited 
 are wonderful things ; they are not only surface-pictures of the thing 
 done, or of the arm at the end of the task, but organisms anatomi- 
 cally full of the means that lead to the end; mental skins hard with 
 
238 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 mental muscles or volitions upon the model, or rather in the arche- 
 type, of the whole muscular frame. This is of a piece with that 
 common sense, that he who wills the end, wills the means; or phy- 
 siologically speaking, when we will an action, the structural will, 
 through the sense of power or muscular soul, wills every muscle and 
 every fibre to take its part in the action, because the structural will 
 is the muscle of muscle and the limb of limb. A serious view of 
 these ends, as every one of them a human body ! and yet no new 
 view, but only a fresh mention of " the inner man." In short, the 
 will stretches forth the arm because it is the arm of the arm, and the 
 inner man commands the outer, because he is the man of the man. 
 In proportion to the number of ends, ideas of action or senses of 
 power, that are in the muscular faith and memory, is the quick 
 vitality or presence of mind with which we move and work in the 
 world : the weights that we lift and the tunnels that we bore ; the 
 forlorn hopes that we lead and outlive; the number of evils and 
 errors slain that we count after the battle ; the list of impossibilities 
 flouted ; is not according to the thickness or thinness of our arms, 
 but is measured by the will first, and secondly by the sense of power 
 which is its servant in the muscular array. Will knows nothing of 
 the present arm, but it extemporizes muscle, building it upon its own 
 mould, for as we said before, it is essential muscle. Furthermore, 
 it does not wait for this, but it makes smallness do the work of 
 largeness — a feat at which all life aims. On the other hand, the 
 loss of these ends or senses of power is paralysis of the will and 
 muscles, after which the flesh becomes so. brittle that the consistent 
 intellect sometimes is impressed to dictate, that the sufferer is made 
 of glass, and will break if he is moved ; for when ends become mere 
 pictures without touchingness, nothing can stir the muscles without 
 hurting them. These muscular senses then are the proper powers 
 of man, or the genii of action ; the maids in golden helms that 
 attend us in the field, and bear us harmless through the hurtling 
 showers. 
 
 The contents of the marvelous ideas which thus use our muscles 
 and shape our purposes, lead us to another consideration respecting 
 the external world ; for these ideas take the world for granted, and 
 assume its concurrence. It is not fair to argue, that as they govern 
 
THE SENSE OF POWER. 239 
 
 the body, so they are designed to govern the world ; and that loco- 
 motion, for example, as an end, knows no end but the utmost velo- 
 city of nature ; in other words, that the little world of man is the 
 will of which the great world of nature is the muscles. In this 
 way, when the child says, " I want to go to that hill top," he 
 expresses an end of which railroads are but proximate means ; an 
 end which is successively to enter upon horseflesh, steam, mag- 
 netism, and whatever other ways there are ; an end which is not a 
 picture only, but a spiritual world working upon this kosmos, and 
 claiming it as a highroad and avenue of man. By this rule, every 
 art is as possible as every muscular action, and the goodness and 
 power of human wishes are the only limit of the obsequiousness of 
 nature. The grander ends of a single head have light and magnet- 
 ism for their muscles, and the stars fight for them in their courses. 
 For observe, it is not necessary to know the order of things in order 
 to govern or produce them; the conscious will in commanding a 
 dance has no knowledge of the muscles of the limbs, or of the fibres 
 in the muscles ; yet it stirs them accurately, because the end that it 
 proposes, contains the means, or is anatomical by nature. And 
 again observe that the size of the agent has nothing to do with the 
 power, for a little nerve puts a large muscle in motion, and the will 
 is of no size, relatively to the mortal body. In spiritual leverage, 
 every good action attests the Archimedean power,* and standing on 
 the higher world, actually moves the lower. For the laws of nature, 
 are the laws of the inner man ; as witness Jesus Christ, whose dis- 
 ciples said, " What manner of man is this that the winds and the 
 waves obey him ?" 
 
 We cannot quit the muscular system without noticing also that 
 the heart itself is a muscle, and that the powers of formation in the 
 viscera, depend upon it (p. 98). All muscular action also depends 
 for its continuance upon the supply of arterial blood. And as the 
 heart is pervaded by the feelings, and the muscles are governed by 
 the same feelings under their decisive name of wills, the correspond- 
 ence between the two is regular and exact. The firmness that 
 plants its steel in the heart, has already given iron to the muscles; 
 
 * Archimedes used to say, that given a place to stand on (Jos 7rov <na>), he 
 could move the world by his mechanism. 
 
240 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 and a sfcreani of blood magnetized by the unbending life, runs as a 
 bridge between the two, over which the spirit-soldiers pass and 
 repass. The sympathies founded upon this correspondence or 
 human magnetism, are of all force in man. We have already noted 
 how the muscular system is set in action by sympathy with its 
 higher parts (p. 117); how the muscles of that high round limb, 
 the eye, which rolls upon the beams of light, command actions in 
 the muscles of the trunk and legs. Similarly, the instinctive mus- 
 cular actions tend to be produced by the special movements of the 
 heart. In this respect the whole of the muscular battalions, pro- 
 ceeding downwards in ranks from the eye muscles on the one hand, 
 and outwards in fraternities from the heart muscle on the other, 
 may be likened to the ends of both series, or the five fingers, which 
 are so coordinated in action, that if one, and especially the middle 
 finger be bent, the others instinctively bend with it, and training is 
 needed to isolate the action of any one of the fingers. This is the 
 motor half of that propagation of events from the heart, of which 
 we treated in the foregoing pages, where the sensory part of the 
 question was stated (p. 232). 
 
 We may now attempt a slight recapitulation of the psychology, 
 as it runs parallel with the bodily parts. In the brain and nervous 
 system we have found the mental and moral consciousness embodied; 
 a consciousness of the whole of what goes on in the other and lower 
 spheres, and added to this a sense of mind, or reason and will in all 
 their forms, which through this sense strike their attributes into the 
 body. The sense of mind, and the motion, is therefore the huma- 
 nity or peculiarity of the cerebral spheres. Below this we find the 
 body, which in the complex is the sense of feeling, or of mind, not 
 acting, but acted upon. In the heart we have the natural feelings 
 which connect us with other hearts; the central relations of man 
 present by a sense in the central parts of the body of man. It is 
 the sense of human love which is here perceived. In the lungs we 
 have the sense of thought, whereby we feel bodily the fluctuations 
 and shapings of our minds. Below the heart again, we have ano- 
 ther but more general firmament of feeling, which lives in the bowels, 
 and is termed sensibility, or by a privileged name, the sense of mercy. 
 This forms a compacter power in the liver and chylopoietic glands, 
 
THE INCARNATE PSYCHOLOGY. 241 
 
 the spleen being the reverse of the liver, and testing the blood by 
 laxity and banter, as it were by giving it its own way, and reductio 
 ad absurdum; as the liver by bilious ferment and sharp examina- 
 tion. " Splen ridere facit, cogit amare hepar." Then the skin and 
 external sensories are the abodes of the proper senses, which be- 
 sides entertaining their own objects, are liable to become the fields 
 of the other visceral and mental powers; for not only does the skin 
 feel the objects of touch, but it feels the touch of the passions, and 
 is a sensory of their bloods : and not only does the eye see outward 
 objects, but it is also liable when opened to the second degree, to 
 see mental and spiritual objects, projected through its tubes. These 
 externals give the sense of self. Again, between the inside and out- 
 side, or between the mind and the senses, lies the sense of power 
 and the organ of progress in the muscles, with the bones, or the 
 sense of stability in progress, as their fulcrum and necessary comple- 
 ment. Thus man is not only sense but motion $ motion in sense, 
 and sense in motion, applied to every object in existence. 
 
 The body is simplicity itself when looked at in this living light. 
 And now we recognize that the divine attributes, and not man's 
 faculties, are the key of the human frame. The simple truth of 
 God is the kingdom which has to come into the science of that 
 structure, which is meant in God's image. Only by this means do 
 the last terms that we use, become reliable. In man we talk of 
 sensibility, but with no surety, of mercy. In man we find feelings, 
 lusts, or loves, but not love itself. In man we speak of various 
 powers, but not of power itself. In man we have many senses, but 
 no omnipresent sense ; many faculties wise in their generation and 
 kind, but not wisdom in the full. Did we confine reasons to present 
 human nature, we should find our ideals terminated far below reason's 
 wants, in a mythological maze ; good and evil demons would inhabit 
 our fountains, and whisper in our groves ; we should build a Babel 
 of mesmeric oracles, each violent against the other, and stand comic- 
 ally aghast at our own shadows seen in the ink-pools of our palms. 
 God is the intelligible being in these higher sciences, and common 
 senses; man is in such snaky knots, his heart is so deceitful and 
 desperately wicked, that there is neither scientific nor other depend- 
 ence to be placed on it. To reason from it, would introduce all 
 21 
 
242 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 ungodliness and unreason by rote and rule into the sciences. And 
 a fuddle of fetischism would then arise, compared to which the pre- 
 sent materialism, happily dead as it is, would be but a slight evil. 
 From this we are saved by Revelation, which gives the loadstars of 
 every science; not indeed bestowing knowledge, but opening our 
 eyes and speeding our aims to the ends of knowledge — wisdom, love, 
 mercy, life, power, the Word, which are with God, and which are 
 God. 
 
 Thus much of the visceral psychology, which as it proceeds upon 
 sensation or experience, and the sensation is but faint and glimmer- 
 ing as yet, must needs be of feeble growth. Yet we have made 
 a beginning, because the body of the mind must be added to the 
 head of the mind,* and the arms and legs to the body, in order that 
 the mind may be as good as the body in its own sphere, and that 
 materialism may receive the full tilt of a personality as weighty as 
 its own. Our views aim ultimately at a piece for piece proof that 
 the soul is the man, and in the human form. For if the soul-doc- 
 trine has two auricles and two ventricles, and a heart ; if it has 
 stomach, guts and liver ; if it has limbs, and if it has any brains, 
 then it is in manly guise, like ourselves. And if the soul be the 
 true body, and the only thing material to us, then it is no estranged 
 essence, but a person with whom we can have affairs, and keep in- 
 telligible relations. Of how great moment this is in society, moral 
 life, and religion, we leave others to say : being ourselves but a 
 backwoodsman eager to clear away swamps and forests, and to open 
 sane ground upon which far other workmen than we can base the 
 truth, and carry up the spires of the pious in the impregnable cities 
 of the just. 
 
 We now recur to our canon (p. 225), to illustrate the ground of 
 organization, and its connection with life. And we say, that given 
 an organic structure that will lift the juices of fruit and flesh to- 
 wards human blood, choosing what is best in the world of food, and 
 making it better by new shapes and constant reformations — then 
 sensibility, or in the full sense, mercy, will and can associate with 
 
 * The present philosophies are decapitations, and their doctrine of immor- 
 tality reminds us of Danton's consolation to his companion on the scaffold, 
 " Our heads will meet in that sack." 
 
THE LINKING OF ORGANS TO LIFE. 243 
 
 this material sister, increase her tenderness, and make her alive. 
 Thus given the bowels of man, and the sensibilities are in them. 
 Again, given a structure that will censure the former process, and 
 elect or reject the elements admitted by a firm afterthought and 
 severer examination — then judgment, or just and executive anger 
 will and can cohabit with this material judge; in other words, the 
 bilious liver will have this vital passion with it by the necessity of 
 the case. Again, given a structure that receives the races of our 
 blood with open attractions, blends them into groups,* unites them 
 in new bonds, spaces their infinitesimal lifetimes, and in their great 
 aortic emigration pours them forth to make of one blood all the 
 families of the body— then every sentiment of human nature will 
 and can associate with this royal, generous and grand materialist j 
 thus, given the heart, and love, life, will and affection must clasp 
 
 * la the foregoing pages we designated the chambers of the heart by new 
 names, as " the family auricle," " the patriotic heart," &c. ; for living terms are 
 the proper expressions for the parts and functions of living bodies. Such terms 
 must be borrowed by analogy from life. Already some anatomical terms are 
 founded upon analogy. The word auricle, signifying "the little ear," is an. 
 analogy from the likeness of the part to the external ear. The ventricle means 
 "the little belly." Such nomenclature is a precedent in favor of the use of 
 analogies ; and the roots of language, by which it assimilates things to thoughts, 
 are analogical. But the analogies hitherto made use of in the body, proceed 
 from the low to the high, or from the outside to the inside, and require to be 
 corrected, and set upon their feet, by the addition of terms taken from intelligi- 
 ble affairs. Moreover, the dead languages have ruled our nomenclature in this 
 country. But if truths be living, to call them dead names is unscientific. So 
 long as this is done, universal instruction is impossible ; the democracy, whose 
 education is so vital to modern states, cannot sympathize with unknown tongues, 
 or with sciences scaly with crusts of Latin and Greek. The body must be 
 written out in downright English, before the horny hands can feel its beautiful 
 weight. We inveigh against Popery, for celebrating masses in Latin services, 
 and perhaps think it a mark of a dead church that it enshrouds its voice in the 
 word-garments of deceased nations. Alas, in this respect we are Papists to* the 
 very ground. We put the scientific truths of God in these old clothes, as our 
 brothers, the Roman Catholics, the religious truths. Though we are unlike 
 them, in that our science has no fine music in it, no art or beauty, to touch the 
 heart when common sense is away, and by a certain warmth of feeling to com- 
 pensate for the misfortune of intellectual rags. But providential time, which 
 has buried the old nations, will, we foresee, exorcise their ghosts, and free the 
 sciences from that spectrum of dead languages by which they scare the vulgar, 
 who, we must remember, are not always to be vulgar, but are the sons of God 
 in potency, like the kings and queens. 
 
244 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 it in their arms. Again, given a structure that admits nothing but 
 the first and last essences of every nature ; that knows not of the 
 vine but through the grape, or of the grape but through the vine ; 
 that balances masses of earth by an imponderable weight; that 
 expresses tiny illustrations of light from continents of matter, and 
 maintains bodily heat by a solar glow that costs no fuel ; that is 
 in the parallelism of the miracles of the universe, and related to 
 the farthest stars ; that is naturally autocratic in the body, and pos- 
 sessed of forces that blood and humors dare not disobey — given 
 such a structure, and in its own interest it will cease to itself and 
 live to the mind; in other words, given the brain, and the presence 
 of the mind in the brain, is, and is to be. Again, given the mind 
 with its better faculties, which live with other minds, and the 
 Divine Spirit is with it; as He himself said: " Where two or three 
 are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of 
 them :" observe — not, there " I will be/' but there " I am." So 
 again : given a structure disparted into limbs to insure material 
 motions, or the operancy and progress of the human body ; and 
 brains and volitions, which are the loves of work and progress, will at 
 once order it into play : whence the muscles being gathered together 
 in the name of the will, have the will in the midst of them. Lastly, 
 given a structure, as the human body, designed for harmony, for 
 contiguity of parts, for opening to enlarge its harmonies, for closing 
 to keep them secure — then pleasure and pain, or ordinary sense will 
 live upon its self-defending plains. So much at present in explanation 
 of our canon, w 7 hich is this — that wherever in the body any organ does 
 anything that is like the mind or the mind's doings, there, in propor- 
 tion to the likeness, and according thereto, the mind, and its special 
 deeds are present. But in the human body everything done is like 
 the mind, nay, like wisdom working ; wherefore the whole of it has 
 the mind or the man present to it. Q. E. D. 
 
 We began with the heart, and to the heart we circulate back after 
 this long episode, to complete the present chapter. And first we 
 would say a few words upon the different signification of heart and 
 lungs, or pulsation and respiration. The difference here is, that the 
 lungs ponder and weigh the existing state, and slowly commit it to 
 
THE LINKING OF ORGANS TO LIFE. 245 
 
 the body, or breathe it in by measured stages (pp. 108 — 126); 
 whereas the heart domineers, beats with quick impatient messages 
 at the doors of every organ, and terminates its problems by the im- 
 mediacy and hot pressure of its blood. The lungs are the motives 
 which draw us from without, but the heart is the force that actuates 
 us from within ; or in other words the lungs are the sense of under- 
 standing (p. 130), but the heart is the sense of will. Translating 
 the organs into these known figures, and abolishing the algebraic x 
 y z of matter and physics, it is easy to see the reason of the diverse 
 rhythm between the heart and the lungs. If the breath could coin- 
 cide with the pulse, the body would act out every purpose of the heart, 
 without individuality, pondering or consideration on its own part ; 
 the man would be shot to his ends with faster than tiger pants; his 
 eyes would gleam and glitter in the darkness of his faculties; he 
 would become like the vision of the bloody child which rose from 
 the cauldron before Macbeth, and would enter into the golden age 
 of hell, and speedily into that terrible foetal state which is called the 
 second death. On the other hand, if the pulse coincided with the 
 breath, caution and the slowest life would become the standards of 
 the movements of the inner will ; the candles of life would be made 
 of ice, and burn frore ; slugs of blood would crawl up and down in 
 our veins ; we should learn to walk by the science of anatomy, de- 
 monstrate the existence of God by mathematics, postpone making 
 love until the knowledge of magnetism was complete; and in short 
 be as hoary as Stonehenge before our first down had grown. To 
 guard against this preponderance of either heart or lungs, will or 
 understanding, the movements of either are different, limited, and 
 inviolable ; the heart strokes play one tune, and the breathing lungs 
 another ; the tough pericardium isolates the heart from the pulmo- 
 nary engine, and on the other hand the pulse is broken by the angles 
 of the vessels where they enter the organs : thus the heart closes its 
 circle, and lays down its sceptre, at the cool feet of the lungs ; and 
 the lungs terminate their deliberations at the outside of the fiery 
 palace of the heart. For will is meant to rush through us in its own 
 way, to give life and zeal, but slow understanding is to limit the 
 will, to adopt the part of it which consideration approves, and to let 
 the rest go elsewhere, or back to the will, with the intelligence that 
 
 21* 
 
246 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 if has not been received. And however harmonious the two become, 
 still will is wilful and understanding deliberative, or to speak by 
 nature's algebra, the heart still strikes or pulses, and the lungs still 
 breathe, because their difference is safety and friendship for both. 
 Thus we may say politically, that the white monarchy of the brain 
 through the lungs is founded for ever upon the red republic of the 
 heart. 
 
 Hitherto we have treated of the heart from the analogies of the 
 individual feelings, but it is plain that nothing less than a human 
 race is the prophecy of the blood. For in every two beats, less than 
 two of our seconds, the heart runs through an entire life, and con- 
 structs relations that deployed in a line are seventy years long. It 
 marries and has children in setting one foot down ; it binds all into 
 intimacy, and establishes the state as the other is put forward. The 
 broad sheets of Society write out but a fraction of the momentary 
 news of a single heart. Of all the human lives, the hearts are the 
 least in duration and the greatest in intensity; the smallest answer- 
 ing to the largest sphere. The social man here is a mote and an 
 ephemeris, most wonderful of all, since a click of time and a grain 
 of space contain him full-limbed and perfect-lived. The heart then 
 may justly be termed human nature, which is true to itself in its 
 smallest parts : and it stands in the grove among the beginnings of 
 things, in the place where the stem of the world-tree grows fine 
 towards God. The nature of all things is their very heart. This 
 it is that comes into the world a new essence with every mind and 
 man, and works in restless agitations, aiming to govern the whole 
 earth from that spring of power. The spirit from above, and the 
 universe from without, environ, chastise and endow it, but still it 
 remains, for ever inviolate, the fated well-head of human life. And 
 as with individuals so with nations. Nature is at the bottom there 
 also, inevitable nationality is there ; character improvable but inde- 
 structible; destined to endure, but free for better or for worse; sub- 
 stantial as granite, though fluid fire of the passions; a rough and 
 tough material, but fit to be hewn or twisted into the humanities. 
 
 The powers or issues of the heart are homogeneous throughout. 
 Feeling upon feeling arises out of its bosom, and humanity is built 
 up like coral continents into the red light of the suns. The cease- 
 
THE UNIVERSAL HEARTS. 247 
 
 less pulse which is the invisible architect, makes higher and broader 
 dominions, and conceals itself in its works. But from its waves 
 emerge relations and societies by the unerring laws imprinted on 
 itself. Blood knocks against nature's ribs, and seeming never to 
 come out, yet issues by avenues the widest, for man comes heredi- 
 tary out of man, and the heart fires its progeny by a life that glows 
 through every work, and streams through every pore of feeling. 
 The bonds of this second heart are another coil of loves, firmer than 
 that which begot them; more feeling and impenetrable than flesh; 
 wound tighter around their objects, with a more terrible grasp at 
 passing circumstance ; an easier and more fiery communion of pas- 
 sions; fortune's greater wheel and Providence's handle; the second 
 life of fear and of courage, of good or of evil. 
 
 But we must not tarry in this Yulcanian or Plutonic centre, 
 which throws us forth from the mighty forge where the archetypal 
 powers are working. It is enough to look from the safe outside at 
 the ovens where God's slaves, the Fates, are hammering the natural 
 sinews of the children of Adam. Everything in those dusky ruddy 
 halls looks monstrous and delusive, and the steel of passion, lither 
 than Volund's sword, bends in white-hot waters round our ankles. 
 The glare also of living blood is an illumination past our bearing. 
 The angel of the Lord must be with us in the burning fiery furnace 
 of the passions, and even of their science, or y,q shall not fare forth 
 unhurt like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. 
 
 We conclude the subject of the heart by tracing its principle in 
 other spheres, for the vitals of man run through the world by per- 
 mission from all the natures, and the human body, as method and 
 light, is the Novum Organum of the sciences. 
 
 That which is communion and circulation in the body, is round- 
 ness and unity in the world, and the latter are the produce of an 
 inanimate, as the former of a living, heart. The dead heart is fire, 
 which beats in the centre of things, and is the primitive out-throw 
 of space. Suns and systems arise like bubbles from an ocean of 
 glowing ether that repels them into being. Fire is the love of 
 spheres ; first it makes all things round, and afterwards gives them 
 revolution or moving roundness, or makes circular orbs into circula- 
 tions. All things are of one color in its glow; all things, too, be- 
 
248 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 come tender as they touch it ; the metals are plastic to its thumbs, 
 and granite is a gristly baby and has its melting moods in those 
 thin, dreadful arms. This chaotic love of softness and roundness 
 is the rudest circle of the ancestry of mothers in the heart of the 
 world, where the eldest crones of flame move purring and whirring 
 round "first matter" in its cradles; a giant preparation for finer 
 future tenderness in never ending circles. All force lies here in its 
 seed; for fire is dead love, or natura naturans. Its pulse is the 
 quickness of substance whereby it is self-similar in all property and 
 action; the urgency of gravitations, chemicals, gases and stones 
 from world's end to world's end ; that gesticulation by which each 
 thing thumps the board of existence, and lays down the law; as it 
 were the blood of time bounding uniformly in his mundane body, 
 and if felt at his wrist on this earth, then felt for his whole system, 
 whether in Arcturus, Pleiades, or Aldebaran. 
 
 At the crust where earth cools, lo! a green creeping glow project- 
 ing a new earth on the ruins of the former. The first pipes of flame 
 are its models, and the crystals, veins and rockshafts its prophecies, 
 as they branch through the strata, or stiffen upwards in the vaporous 
 air. Seed, plant and tree have come, full of cool, calculating sap, 
 revolving organization; the vegetable heart, or the love of organism, 
 is beating. The steaming of the terrene crater issues now through 
 a skin of temperature, in musical flutes of a second fire, through 
 roots into new flames, which are trees, each the candle of a milder 
 light in which nature is seen. Brute heat ceases, and fire is culti- 
 vated. The roundness has a beginning, a middle and an end ; the 
 seed is current, and runs in gyres to other seeds; growth is the pur- 
 pose of this heart, and, like a bamboo-cane, every joint puts forth a 
 new joint, till the ground is covered with the green and gay chain- 
 armor of the vegetable soul. 
 
 At the top of the love of groAvth, and running in its grooves, 
 there is already the love of pleasure, or the animal fire. The round 
 earth or tomb of the primitive heat is the ground, and organism is 
 the scaffolding, but pleasure is the heart, of the beasts. Hence a 
 new communion and a new circulation. This heart beats for the 
 alliances of the animal nature; the roundness comes closer; the birds 
 are mated and the beasts are paired; gregarious herds cluster into 
 
THE UNIVERSAL HEARTS. 249 
 
 globes cm prairie and in forest places; the community feels the thrill 
 of its parts, and with open sensories creeps, flies or gallops under its 
 pressure of delights. The stroke of the love of pleasure throws 
 each creature round its world, through the length and breadth of its 
 own climatic organs, and causes it to seek its mesmerism and sham- 
 pooing from every soil, animal, fruit and circumstance, whose friction 
 is good for food, or whose look is pleasant to the sight : grasping the 
 lion globule, it shoots him like a meteor through a night of cruelties 
 and destructions ; softly kneading the lamb-globules, it coaxes them 
 about over meads where dew is bright and innocence is in the grass.* 
 The instincts are the brightness of this love — flames in which, by 
 
 * Oil the above principles we may offer a fresh rationale of the make of the 
 blood and the offices of the heart. If the heart-principle be love in its genera 
 and species, the known effects of love will answer to those of the heart. Let 
 us take an instance to try the equation. The love of science shall be the heart 
 that we choose to grasp us. This love lies in germ in the affinity between in- 
 tellect and nature ; the mind can be assimilated to natural laws ; the assimilation 
 being the stomach process preceding that of the heart. It consists in throwing 
 down the mind before the new object as it were into a fluid state. But every 
 science is round, or a little world in itself, and the heart functions commence by 
 raising up our vague liquid willingness into spherical states. Thereby we 
 turn a side to every portion of our subject, make ourselves in its image, or be- 
 come soft and impressible to it. The first point in entering into any sphere is, to 
 become ourselves that sphere : the first point in the blood life lies in making pre- 
 vious fluids into globules or little bodies answering to the body. This done, the 
 next object comes, and the round mind can go the round of the field, and as it is 
 alive and universal, can give living universality away. The equilibrium and 
 plasticity of the spherical form enable it to pass everywhere, for one sphere is 
 applicable to every other, without regard to difference of dimensions. Moreover 
 the love is a force, energetic upon these round forms, and forces them to visit 
 the parts whose affinities they feel. The blood globule is the love of the whole 
 body, round according to its mathematics, and in the centre of the whole ; hence 
 it represents the radii of the body, and necessarily travels along each, to deposit 
 in the circumference the virtues of the centre. The correspondence of physiolo- 
 gical love or heart love with other love is therefore plain. .For love makes its 
 subject alive, spheral, soft, impressible, facile, cosmopolitan or universal ; in 
 short, makes it into circles, and carries it into circulations. Love is to the heart 
 what the falling apple of Newton was to the moon ; it brings self-evidence to the 
 seemingly inaccessible half of the equation; and with self-evidence science is 
 content. 
 
 Corollary.— There is no subject or thing that we may not explore, if we love 
 it, and where we fail, it is that we are not loving or spherical ; for if we were, we 
 should gyrate through it as necessarily as our blood courses through our bodies. 
 
250 THE HUMAN HEART. 
 
 the creative love, the animal has visions of ways and means; for 
 instincts are animal revelations. 
 
 The love of sphere, the love of organism, and the love of pleasure 
 or harmonic sensation, the triple hearts of nature, are included ip. a 
 new heart, which circulates man through the former places, and 
 through others that exist for man alone. The heart whose grasp is 
 now upon us is the love of happiness, which carries us as men through 
 our various day. The love of happiness must walk through the laws 
 of happiness, and hence pleasure is bored by the augers of duty, 
 and the happy take the course which that iron leaves free. 
 
 At the top of this, as it were a vane or guide, a heart seizes the 
 mind, and this is, the love of truth, which clasps the faculties in the 
 exactest unity, and commands them out on the most far-reaching 
 circulations. As all that is real, is an effluence of the truth, this 
 heart determines us everywhere ; for the love of truth impels the 
 lover of truth wherever truth lies. This insures the ubiquity of the 
 mind, according to the declaration of the Psalmist : "If I ascend 
 up into heaven, Thou art there : if I make my bed in hell, behold 
 Thou art there : if I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in 
 the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, 
 and thy right hand shall hold me." But in loving the truth, we 
 love what we do not know, and hence this heart is faith, the force 
 and fountain of knowledge, the muscle that commands and sends 
 forth the true intellect since our world began. 
 
 But a new heart is upon us, not made but created, not invented 
 but here; and this is, the love of life. Thereby the soul is deter- 
 mined to visit the avenues of the everlasting constructions; to take 
 its architecture from all firmaments, and rear forth the body out of 
 the marrows and backbones of the cosmic laws : to study in the 
 schools of order and truth which are stability; to ask of all good 
 plants the direction of the tree of life; to ponder every old story, 
 from north or from east, that babbles of the waters of health and 
 the fountains of youth; and to hang on the lips of revelation, which 
 brings life and immortality to light. This is our thread of golden 
 fire that runs through the broken moments of time. This is the 
 sustenance of the body, garrisoned with invulnerable troops, a buckler 
 against the hostile chemistries of earth and air. This is the safety 
 
THE UNIVERSAL HEARTS. 251 
 
 of happiness, which with Caesar and his fortunes on deck, rocks with 
 treble thrill upon the waves, a life boat to which ocean danger is a 
 game. This sends the soul to heroism, as its mark and print upon 
 earth, and by contemplation to the starry vault, as the second glass 
 of its endurance. In a word, the love of life, its own permanence, 
 brings the soul to the earth, because it is God's footstool, and bids 
 it go to heaven, because it is his throne. In these errands it runs 
 through every other love; passes every scene, action, affection, 
 through its fires, and gives it the immortal enamel; and crowns 
 itself in death, for the soul that erewhile only loved life, then loves 
 life beyond life. 
 
 And as ancient chiefs traced their lineage to the Gods, we follow 
 their figure, and track up the heart loves until they claim parentage 
 from the God of love. There is another heart, which is the love of 
 God, and which by faith, life, and all faculty not heartless, propels 
 us to the home of many mansions, where the father dwells. But 
 we love God because He first loved us ; and the force and pulse of 
 his love is felt in his Commandments. His " Thou shalt" seizes 
 our " I will," carries it forth, and commands for it the blessing, even 
 life for evermore. The Christian heart is the Word: "Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
 with all thy strength; and thy neighbor as thyself." This is the 
 first and great Commandment. 
 
252 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 Of all the creatures of the natural world, man is intended as the 
 most finished, or, in other words, the most exquisitely finite, and the 
 skin is the instrument which first hems him in, and by limiting, com- 
 pletes and individualizes him. The skin is therefore his house and 
 stronghold ; the architecture of his frame; and this is the simple idea 
 of the numerous offices that it performs. Without this boundary, 
 the body would not contain its possessions, and would have no con- 
 tinence, outline and end, but be shed and dissipated in the univer, e. 
 Moreover the external skin is the outermost of a series of coverings 
 which extend to all parts of the frame, and to every particle of the 
 part. All these are skins, connected with the general skin, and as 
 we follow them through one depth of structure after another, we can- 
 not but arrive at the conception that they are the firmament in which 
 the organism is set, and that to take them away, would reduce the 
 body to an invisible essence, or at least to a fluid, to whose volume 
 we could no more assign a permanent shape than to the unsteady 
 atmosphere. The skin then contributes to the idea of life the com- 
 plementary functions of shape and form, which must pervade all 
 existences before they can take up any location, perform any act, or 
 become the organ, or object, of any faculty whatever. In a compre- 
 hensive sense, the skin, under a thousand forms, is the one vessel of 
 the human spirit; it is all that is tangent and tangible in us. With- 
 out it, the brains would have no receiver wherein to pour their in- 
 fluences ; the lungs would have no fulcrum whereupon to draw their 
 breaths ; and the heart, with the other parts, would redissolve into 
 their unbounded blood : in a word, as we said before, there would 
 be no body at all. 
 
GENERAL FUNCTIONS. 253 
 
 What is true of the man, is true of bis molecules. The microscope 
 affirms that the smallest organic atoms which are visible are little 
 rounded vesicles or cells, very similar in appearance to some of those 
 low forms of animal life denominated infusoria. These cells are the 
 brick-field of the animal body, and each of them with its contents is 
 a small skinful of liquid. Here we have the simplest form of active 
 and passive — of skin and fluid ; and if in imagination you attempt 
 to skin the primordial vesicle, you have the simplest instance of what 
 would happen if you could abstract the skin from the human body. 
 For the frame in its mighty details is even such a vesicle, but con- 
 tracted into chambers innumerable, and its wall folded inwards into 
 the whole complexity of our organization. 
 
 Let us, however, concentrate attention upon the skin proper, es 
 being the face and index of the other skins, observing first, that the 
 general presence to which we allude in speaking of the skin, is a fact 
 which holds, in structure or in function, of every great division of 
 the organism. If the skin passes inwards, and seems, as we trace 
 it, to be the whole body, the same wholeness and ubiquity may be 
 alleged for other parts. Any separate life can be pursued to the 
 end of the frame. The arteries and veins, issuing from the heart, 
 so permeate the regions, organs and tissues, that when they are in- 
 jected with wax or mercury, the shape of the parts seems complete, 
 though with nothing but blood-vessels. The nerves likewise form a 
 tree which ramifies everywhere; which has eyes, nose and mouth, 
 body, limbs, and ends; and in short, represents the human shape. 
 Even the viscera, as the lungs, the liver, and the like, which do not 
 substantially extend beyond a limited space, yet reach by their mo- 
 tions, fluids and influences to the body at large, and draw their sup- 
 port from the common stock, whether far or near. The human body 
 consists of universal principles; it is one system, or many systems, 
 according as it is viewed ; and every part is in all, and for all. Man 
 therefore is the coalescence of many men, each fulfilling the inter- 
 stices of duty that the others do not occupy, and this plenitude it is 
 which makes him into a substance, private from the world. There 
 is no room in his body, but only humanity completing humanity. 
 This is nowhere better exemplified than in the skin, which is the 
 end of the whole and the parts. For the skin-man stands beyond 
 22 
 
254 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 as well as between all his fellows, and clasps them into one. He 
 has the rest not only in his arms, but in his legs, his loins, and his 
 head. In short, he is all-embracing. 
 
 The skin is a threefold or fourfold clothing to the surface of the 
 body; its layers firmly connected to each other, and consisting of 
 the superficial layer or cuticle, also called the scarf-skin — that of 
 which we see the polish on our hands and faces ; secondly, a deeper 
 layer, the Rete Mucosum, in which the coloring matter of the skin 
 resides ; and thirdly, the Corium, Cutis, or true skin, which itself 
 comprises two layers; viz., a sensitive sheet of papillae or minute 
 eminences whose summits look surfacewards; and a firm texture of 
 fibres underneath, supporting the papilla and the other layers of the 
 
 We will now reverse the order, and regard these skins in detail, 
 contemplating each by the light of its function, and we may assure 
 the reader at the beginning, that he is already acquainted intuitively 
 with the main offices of the skin, and only requires to connect them 
 to their anatomy, in order to gain a memorable knowledge of the 
 present subject. 
 
 Underneath the skin, the exterior of the body is muscular and 
 active, with considerable unevenness between the parts, some of the 
 muscles being very prominent ; and to meet the irregularity, and 
 also to afford an unguent for comfortable motion, the surface is 
 padded with fat, which reduces it to a level, and rounds it into 
 convenient beauty, smoothing the harshness of the firm flesh, and 
 gently cushioning and combining its decisive actions. 
 
 But the fat alone could by no means repress the starting muscles, 
 or define the voluntary movements. The will would run out of the 
 leaky vessel before it reached its jets in the hands and feet, if the 
 good easy fat were the only hindrance. Our fat then requires to be 
 bounded by a ring of sterner powers. This second provision is the 
 deep layer placed immediately upon the fat, of the corium, leather, 
 or true skin. The corium is adapted to contain the inner parts and 
 functions. It consists of meshes of fibres inextricably felted toge- 
 ther. These are of many kinds and many purposes. The greater 
 part are tendinous, some muscular, some nervous, with all interme- 
 diate stages of nature ; indeed they comprise the entire scale of 
 
DESCRIPTION. 255 
 
 reaction, from its passive to its active form ; from the power of 
 inertness to the power of actual resistance. Whatever is continent 
 and tenacious in the body, sends its representatives to the assembled 
 fibres of the corium. The compression that they jointly exercise, is 
 facilitated, and at the same time mitigated, by the mode in which 
 they are put together, whereby they constitute myriads of tent-like 
 orifices, with the broad part of the tent towards the fat, and the 
 peak towards the surface ; a solid space of corium being left between 
 these tented pores, which are filled with little bags of fat, and with 
 serous fluid, upon which the contraction of the skin first takes effect. 
 In this way the force is communicated almost through fluids, with 
 the utmost power to the general surface, but with the least violence 
 to the parts. The contractility of this envelope is a measure of the 
 tone and strength of the body; it is conspicuous in bracing winter 
 mornings, and in cold bathing, which make us notably tighter and 
 more compact. 
 
 The corium, in its elastic life, not only prevents the loss of mus- 
 cular force, or embanks the streams of will, but it has the material 
 design of preventing the disorderly entrance of substances from 
 without, and the undue alienation of fluids from within. This func- 
 tion supposes in the skin a discriminating power, or sense of touch 
 — a like and dislike — to inform the brain of whatever goes on at 
 the outposts ; and also an active power, to enable the skin to obey 
 its consequent decrees. That which feels and acts in these subtle 
 purposes, is the next layer of the skin, the papillary cutis, more 
 superficial than the corium. This is an encampment of small conical 
 tents co-extensive with the surface of the body, differing however in 
 different parts, both in the thickness with which the papillae are 
 set, and in their size and power. The papillary substance is a 
 Briarean limb put forth from the corium, consisting also of fibrous 
 elements, and quick with blood distributed in meshes of inconceiva- 
 ble fineness which pervade the papilla, and communicate with similar 
 networks in the layer underneath. Our finger-ends are a type of 
 all the papillae, and like the fingers, the papillae are instruments both 
 of feeling and prehension. They are eminently movable, and being 
 provided with nerves, and grouped together in different forms, they 
 constitute with the corium, of whose grasp of the whole body they 
 
256 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 are the infinitesimals, the immense field of touch and take — the basis 
 of the pyramid of the senses. 
 
 But the necessity that sent us from the fat to the corium, and 
 from the corium to the papillae, pushes us onwards to demand fur- 
 ther instruments. The papillae depending for their exquisite life 
 upon the most delicate sensibility, upon pleasures and pains so fine 
 that our senses give scarcely an idea of them, must not be exposed 
 directly to the rude breath of the outer world, which would cause 
 them agony, and soon blunt them to the delights of touch. The 
 papillae therefore cannot be the last covering. What is nature's next 
 resource ? The blunter sensations are themselves assumed by the 
 superaddition of new layers ; not however actively sensitive layers, 
 but beds of organization that less feel themselves, than regulate the 
 feelings of the skin. These coarser touches become the matrix and 
 defence of the finer. The layer covering in the papillae must of 
 course be soft and yielding, or it would be as injurious to the parts 
 beneath as external objects themselves ; at least when contact with 
 the outer world is taking place. This layer is the rete mucosum, 
 or mucous network of the old anatomists. 
 
 It is a soft, tenacious substance, placed upon and between the 
 conical papillae, and furnishes a bed that groups them together, and 
 into which they protrude. When carefully peeled off, and viewed 
 by the microscope against the light, it assumes the appearance of a 
 network, which is caused by the counter-sinking whereby it fits to 
 the uneven surface of the papillae ; the thin places seeming like 
 holes. Possibly also some of the papillae perforate it. This layer 
 is the seat of the color of the skin both in the European and other 
 races, and what is remarkable, the coloring matter is chiefly abun- 
 dant in its inner parts, and decreases outwards ; though sometimes 
 dark points continue to the surface, and form little streamlets of 
 blackness as far as the exterior integument. 
 
 The unfinished softness of the rete, necessary for fostering the 
 papillae, unfits it for contact with tangible objects, which would 
 lacerate it at the first touch ; and consequently nature (in which 
 utility is creative), not only compresses and hardens the rete in its 
 superficial parts, but superadds to it a fine covering termed the 
 cuticle, a kind of glazy platework, capable of assuming, at the bid- 
 
DESCRIPTION. 257 
 
 ding of the same principle of utility, whatever thickness and deadness 
 is required. Formed out of flattened vesicles or cells, the cuticle, 
 in its adult condition, consists in point of fact of scales ; of which 
 our finger nails are the largest and strongest type. 
 
 We have now considered a fourfold mechanism in the skin, deriv- 
 ing all from the general fact, that the skin gives an outline and end 
 to the body. We will briefly recapitulate our positions, in order to 
 cover in this part of the subject. The body requires to be levelled, 
 both for safety to its parts, and economy of space; this is brought 
 about by the fat, and the cellular frame-work, which round our 
 muscular ridges, fill their clefts, and give sweep and curve to our 
 plains. The body requires to be limited, as well in itself, as in 
 what it takes in and gives out ; this is accomplished by the elastic 
 garment of the corium, which follows our bodily fashions, and sits 
 upon us differently during every moment of our lives. Furthermore 
 the corium requires to do knowingly whatever it performs ; to act 
 discreetly in its functions; to animate reaction, absorption and ex- 
 halation, with the life of the brain, and this is insured by the papillae, 
 which are both brains and hands to the skin. The papilla? on their 
 part need support, encouragement and protection, which are accorded 
 to them in the kindly rete, and in the fine, half-earthly cuticle, which 
 latter is the direct medium between the little world and the great 
 world, or between sense and exterior nature. 
 
 In these pages we do not treat of the sense of touch, excepting 
 so far as it may be necessary to the general consideration of the 
 skin, but we notice nevertheless from what has been said, that the 
 skin enjoys a triple sensibility. First there is the sensation of con- 
 tact from the three layers at once, that is to say, from the surface in- 
 wards; the papilke make common cause with the rete and cuticle, and 
 all feel together. This answers to cuticular sensation or gross touch, 
 and runs in direct lines from the cuticle, through the rete, to the 
 papilla). In the next order, arising from the first, we have those 
 perceptions of touch which are the consciousness of the papillae clad 
 with the rete alone, the cuticle not sharing in these inner feelings. 
 This species of touch is chiefly horizontal, and spreads over the live 
 velvet in sheets of vague sensibility. The last pinnacle of this 
 
 touch, and whose activity is tact, belongs to the papilla? alone, with 
 
 09* 
 
258 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 their naked summits and tiny vortical brains. It is so individual, 
 that we can put forth almost a single papilla, as it were a finger 
 from the finger, and play with a little agony of quest round atomical 
 objects.* The lines of thought and purpose meet it, and set it 
 moving in curved explorations. These three species of touch in 
 their union, make touch itself into a substance, and give it over to 
 the mind, which communicates with the skin, not at first hand, but 
 through the mind of the skin. 
 
 The skin, so far as we have considered it, isolates the man, and 
 makes him world-tight. It is, however, necessary that the world's 
 goods should come into his house, and that his own produce, not to 
 say refuse and wear and tear, should be carried forth : nay more, 
 that he himself should go out and in with the common freedom that 
 a man requires. The skin is our abode, and not our prison. It 
 must therefore have bivalve doors and windows, opening inwards 
 and outwards, and these, as small as the supplies that are to come 
 from without, and collectively as large as the spirit that is to step 
 forth from within. In short, the skin, that is to say, the body, 
 must be porous. 
 
 The cuticle or superficial layer is a very permeable membrane, 
 and the more closely it is examined, the more porous it appears. 
 Three orders of perforations are visible upon it to the naked eye; 
 
 * It is not perhaps easy to realize this statement, seeing that all the layers are 
 perraanetly united to each other ; but so are the parts of the nervous system, 
 which yet may be functionally separated, and the action of the higher, or 
 the lower, stopped oif by the force of the mind. We may lay it down as a 
 rule, that the process by which nature unites is also inversely the process by 
 which she separates, or that all her syntheses contain analyses, and vice versa. 
 It is necessary also to take into account the existence of spheres of life as 
 well as spheres of substances ; for the life of a part extends beyond it, and can 
 come bare to the surface, abrogating for the time the hindrance of whatever 
 parts lie between it and its object. It must be remembered that we are not now 
 treating of dead layers but of three cooperating lives, each of which abstracts 
 itself from the others as use requires. Hence the prodigious sensibility of the 
 skin, and the naked tenderness of the feelings in many cases. The difference 
 between papillary tact and cuticular touch is but a difference of animation. In 
 all cases the inner can be separated from the outer, and itself become the outer, 
 under favorable circumstances. The soul can be separated from the body, viz., 
 at death, and this is the universal of powers of abstraction or separation existing 
 everywhere in the body itself. 
 
UNIVERSAL POROSITY. 259 
 
 namely, the large perspiratory ducts, whose orifices may be seen as 
 little clottings on the wavy ridges at the ends of the fingers ; the 
 sebaceous follicles which anoint the skin with a thin limpid oil that 
 prevents the excessive evaporation of watery moisture ; and the pas- 
 sages which lodge and transmit the hairs. All these are channels 
 of communication for influences, that is to say, influential sub- 
 stances, from the body to the world, and vice versa. They are 
 simple involutions of the skin upon itself, or portions of its three 
 layers as it were pushed deeply inwards, and the end of the tube so 
 intruded, wound upon itself into a little bail in the perspiratory 
 pores and sebaceous follicles; whilst in the hairs on the other hand, 
 the tube is formed as before, but the cuticle at the bottom of it 
 grows into a prolonged cylinder that comes out again through the 
 orifice ; the hair being essentially a linear extension of the cuticle. 
 All these organs, viz., the perspiratory glands and ducts, the seba- 
 ceous follicles, and the hairs, in the channels of which latter the 
 sebaceous follicles frequently open, are beset with little blood-vessels; 
 and as the matters given out and taken in, either come from, or go 
 to, the blood, so the exterior pores are but the outer porticoes to the 
 real pores that lie in the sides of the blood-vessels. The porosity 
 of the outer skin is the sign of a universal porosity in the system, 
 whereby, according to circumstances, everywhere leads to every- 
 where.* 
 
 The offices necessarily performed by the skin as the frontier of 
 the body, consists in the purification of the system, in the elimina- 
 tion cf some of its products, and in its renovation by fresh substances, 
 all under the auspices of the sense of touch. We will now regard 
 it by the light of this threefold function. And first, for the office 
 of 'purification. 
 
 This is effected by the entire surface of the body, which is con- 
 tinually giving off an atmosphere of exhalations, differing in quantity 
 as well as grossness at different times. It is calculated by an inge- 
 
 * The same muscles which produce action without, and carry us along our 
 way, shape and alter the ways and channels within, determining the fluids be- 
 tween new embankments of substances in action; and the possibility of these 
 constant changes in the organism, whereby every action makes its own facilities, 
 is due to the porous cooperation of the skin man. 
 
260 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 nious anatomist, that in a square inch of skin there is a length of 
 tubing of 73 feet, or in the whole body, of 28 miles; this vast 
 drain-work being intended to conduct effete materials from the 
 system. Every organ is engaged night and day in sweating them 
 out, through passages more or less circuitous, to the border shores 
 of the skin. What is the nature of this large clearance of goods ? 
 or what is its common source ? 
 
 The blood is the origin of the sensible perspiration, which com- 
 prises both the watery matter given off by the perspiratory glands, 
 and the unctuous moisture which oozes from the sebaceous follicles. 
 This is shown by the fact that the skin, and especially its glands 
 and follicles, are beset with sheets of capillaries ; and the fat itself, 
 which furnishes the matter to the sebaceous follicles, is a deposit 
 from the blood. The rule is, that the blood all over the system is 
 constantly sent to the frontier, and its useless portions, averse to the 
 life and movements of the rest, are let out through the skin, in 
 obedience to their own unsocial tendency; the skin itself regulating 
 their escape, and preventing the life of the body from being led 
 away at the same time with the worn-out or ill-affected perspirations. 
 This is shown to be the case in health by what takes place in disease, 
 as well as during fear and other mental emotions, in which the proper 
 constraint is not employed by the skin, and the living essences them- 
 selves run away in crowds from the irritated and incontinent blood-ves- 
 sels. As in other parts of the capillary system, the nervous fibres are 
 the intelligent agents of the above elimination, and governing, that is, 
 opening and shutting the pores, from the minute doors of the blood- 
 vessels to the wide avenues in the skin, they grant or refuse passports 
 to the various applicants that incline to go out into the world. This 
 office of the nerves is seconded by the mechanism of the parts, for 
 the perspiratory and sebaceous ducts rise from the convoluted glands 
 in spiral turns through the layers of the skin, and their orifices also 
 exhibit the law of the spiral pathway, and are half-closed by the 
 cuticle, which shuts down upon them like a lid, from under which 
 the perspiration escapes obliquely, by overcoming its gentle force ; 
 exsinuation and insinuation being the methods of this commonwealth. 
 The cutaneous exhalation is reckoned at nearly 30 ounces per day, 
 which is supposed to be about twice the average quantity of matter 
 
THE TRANSPIRATIONS. 261 
 
 breathed out during the same time by the lungs. The skin is 
 therefore our greatest theatre of substantial change, just as the 
 sense of touch is the most influential of the senses, impressions 
 upon which will alter the mind when other means have failed. 
 
 The perspiration is of use up to the moment of its ejection ; nay, 
 after quitting the frame, it partially remains on, and around, the 
 surface, fomenting the cuticle by its watery portions, anointing it by 
 the oily, and providing it with suppleness, and power of intelligent 
 motion or animal fluidity. Take away this natural cosmetic, and 
 what a dried and painful expanse is the skin ; as in fevers, each 
 joint of the tesselated surface grates upon its hinges, until the 
 dulled sense is stung with a misery that rouses the whole nervous 
 system for its removal. Nothing can show more clearly the great 
 though gentle power that the cuticle exercises in health, when it is 
 soft and pliable — its power of reaction as the general bond of the 
 skin, and of performing the functions included under this reaction 
 — than the disadvantages that result when this thin varnish, as it 
 is considered, is either removed, unhealthily produced, or not suf- 
 ficiently fomented with its appropriate emollients and unguents. 
 The interests at stake in the suppleness of the cuticle are known 
 instinctively by savages, and tribes that despise dress, yet protect 
 themselves by a garment of oil and red ochre, which serves as a 
 supplement to the perspirations, as well as takes the place of other 
 clothes. Our own oils, perfumes and pomades come from a similar 
 instinct, and every one must have experienced that dryness, whether 
 of the skin or hair, is more than a detriment to comeliness — that 
 it amounts to discomfort, verging fast towards pain.* 
 
 Besides the sensible perspiration, another species used formerly 
 
 * The use of the cuticle, as we have seen, is to modify the sense of touch, 
 or to produce a more external sense by reducing the papillary keenness and 
 liveliness to earthy conditions. It is not what the cuticle seems, but what it 
 does, that shows what it is. It produces the most general sense of all, which 
 sets in motion the next wheels of sense according as itself is moved. Hence 
 scaly and cuticular diseases are full of annoyance, and subvert the sense as 
 effectually as diseases mainly affecting the other layers. Hence too the pleasant 
 effect of cleanliness and ablutions. In considering the penetration of effects from 
 without, it is best to think of the cuticle as not a layer but a sense, and that sense 
 the outmost, and therefore the first determinant of the quantity and quality of 
 feeling that comes in. 
 
2G2 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 to be admitted under the head of the insensible perspiration, and 
 which was reckoned different from the former, though now it is re- 
 garded as only the minimum of which the sensible sort is the max- 
 imum. We prefer the old classification, which marks a broad dis- 
 tinction both in the circumstances and form of the fluid. The one 
 is to the other what oil, or liquid, is to gas. As a writer has said : 
 " If we examine with a microscope the naked body, exposed during 
 summer to the rays of a burning sun, it appears surrounded with a 
 cloud of steam, which becomes invisible at a little distance from 
 the surface. And if the body is placed before a white wall, it is 
 easy to distinguish the shadow of that emanation." This emana- 
 tion, as the author calls it, constitutes a large proportion of what 
 the skin gives forth. Its functions are no doubt both purificatory 
 and anointing. It would seem to arise from the finer pores in the 
 skin, and from pores in the sides of the perspiratory and sebaceous 
 ducts ) for let us bear in recollection, that it is impossible to conceive 
 anything not porous, and the same principle of permeability which is 
 a physical fact in the external world, is an organic fact in the human 
 body, commencing from the skin. 
 
 A ratio of size is required between the pores or passages, and the 
 sweats. This is partly insured by the varying contractility of the 
 former. But the difference between the sensible and insensible 
 perspiration is too great for this case to meet it. Different sized 
 pores are necessary. The condition of what transpires through the 
 skin, is touch. A fine perspiration would not be felt by too large 
 a pore, and the skin, when such perspiration passed, would know 
 nothing about it. The story of him who cut two holes in his barn 
 door, the one for the cocks and hens, and the other for the little 
 chickens, is no fable in the skin. Such a provision is indispensable 
 where the walls are feelings, and act as checktakers to whatever 
 goes in or comes out. 
 
 But are our communications to the atmosphere limited to pro- 
 ducts which the senses can perceive, whether in small quantities or 
 volumes, in vapors or fluids? This question, not answered anato- 
 mically, is decided in the affirmative by broad facts, fertile of con- 
 sequences. What are those influences that carry contagion over 
 great spaces from skin to skin, and which no eye, or microscope, or 
 
THE TRANSPIRATIONS. 263 
 
 analysis bath seen, notwithstanding that they are irresistible min- 
 isters of disease and death ? What are those odors proceeding 
 from the skin, by which the exorbitant sense of the wild Indian 
 tracks the footsteps of his victim over the long flight of a diversi- 
 fied country ? What aroma shed upon the earth, and stiffer than 
 the sweeping wind, is the guide of the bloodhound and other 
 instinctive hunters, to the distant quarry which they seek ? The 
 footprints of the skin, have they not modified by subtle sheddings 
 the very ground and stones where the tread has been ? And how 
 far, and how long, does the magic work from those scheming life- 
 like centres ? Nay more, we appeal to mesmerism, and we ask what 
 it is, proceeding from the operator's body to the patient, that spell- 
 binds every sense, or produces the play whereby the automaton 
 sleeper is set in motion, and set in thought, at the bidding of an- 
 other's brain. Clearly it is no perspiration in an ordinary sense ; 
 it takes effect through obstacles too great ; yet as clearly it proceeds 
 from the surface of one frame, and is received by the surface of 
 another j in short, it goes from skin to skin. These facts conclude, 
 that through certain channels occult to the microscope, quite un- 
 known to anatomy, but assured by our babe and suckling common 
 sense, the skin, or the nervous system through it, pours forth a sub- 
 tle radiation of tremendous efficacy on other organic creatures. 
 They render it evident that through this battery of surfaces, the 
 animal creation, and man most of all, is constantly impressing a 
 character upon external nature, literally magnetizing it, and produc- 
 ing we know not what modifications and new forms in its plastic 
 matrices. It were foolish to suppose that emanations which en- 
 gender such changes in those delicate tests, organic beings, have 
 been powerless to alter dead things in the ages that have elapsed 
 since first organic life, bent thenceforth upon multiplication and 
 dominion, sprang from the seminary of the original earth. Led 
 in this train of thought, philosophers have suspected, that the tigers, 
 lions and snakes, and other ugly foes not seemingly of our house- 
 hold, were at first but the wind-cast seedlings of our passions, 
 wicked words overheard and dramatized by nature, returning now 
 from we know not whither to plague the inventors ; though doubt- 
 less men will be slow to own such children as these. 
 
264 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 What deduction is to be drawn from the above statement, shown 
 to be a fact by such gross proofs? We claim it in confirmation of 
 the existence of a manifold nervous fluid ; for the subtle exhalations 
 we have been acknowledging, pass through space, and from body to 
 body; nay, take up a location, and keep it, which would be impos- 
 sible were they not bodily themselves. We have therefore traced 
 the sensible perspiration to the red blood, and this influential radia- 
 tion to the nervous system; and grasping these extremes, we may 
 put the mean into its place, and assign the insensible perspiration to 
 the lymphs and colorless fluids pervading the body. Here is a 
 trinity of exhalations, given off by the nervous fluid, the lymph or 
 white blood, and the red blood respectively; and which are esta- 
 blished by huge facts not to be gainsayed. 
 
 This gives new import to the transpirations of the skin, for parti- 
 cles constitute volumes, and volumes are groups according to laws. 
 It flows from the previous conclusions, that there is round each man 
 an atmosphere which has a formal existence equally with the inte- 
 riors of his body. If the organs underneath the skin be different in 
 every part, and if the blood be similarly various, then the emana- 
 tions from different tracts will exhibit the variety of their sources, 
 and the image of the body be stamped on its circumambient sphere. 
 This spheral man environing the skin is not without a witness in 
 ordinary sense. Observe the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy 
 manifested when certain persons come together, and referred by com- 
 mon observation to the feelings, and very rightly, for the matter 
 touches us nearly; and although sight accounts for impressions, yet 
 a residue of influence is experienced which all will say is not seen, 
 but felt. And mark the fear which animals know when they come 
 for the first time into the presence of their natural enemies. Im- 
 pressed by such events and appearances, we recall the doctrine of 
 the microcosm, nor slight the influences of the sky, but recognize in 
 the sympathetic friend some benign planet of our destiny; or in the 
 repulsive presence of others, the malignant rays of an evil star. For 
 as there is no vacuum in the outward world, so there is none in the 
 human world, but all mankind touch each other, and form again a 
 globe; the grand sphere of all individual spheres. One use there- 
 fore, and perhaps the greatest use of the emanations of the skin, is, 
 
THE RADIATIONS. 265 
 
 that we may be instinctively known and knowing, and bring witb us 
 our own groundwork of sympathies and antipathies, whereby to find 
 and maintain our places, according to the old laws, of cohesion, 
 attraction and repulsion. For what is true in the mineral kingdom, 
 is only more and differently true in the human. 
 
 We are accustomed indeed to think of the transpirations as not 
 only effete, but unclean. Yet there is certainly one honorable sweat, 
 namely, that which stands beaded on the brow of toil. Little chil- 
 dren too are of a sweet savor to their mothers, "as the smell of a 
 field which Jehovah has blessed." Lovers also dwell in a common 
 atmosphere of purpureal satisfactions. The redolence of health it- 
 self is like fresh morning air to those that meet it. History more- 
 over gives cases of persons whose presence was pleasantly aromatic. 
 It belongs indeed to the skin to rid the system of particles outworn 
 in its service, but these are not necessarily foul, but simply the dead 
 forms of the same principles which are living forms in the organs. 
 Inanimation does not imply uncleanness, but rather the consolida- 
 tion of a new universe inferior to life. It is the body as influenced 
 by perverse passions and habits from generation to generation, that 
 makes our legitimate spheres into noisome sweats, and the radiations 
 of our minds, actively repulsive. If the rose or the lily could be 
 gluttonous or covetous, lewd or hating, the third generation of them 
 would give out stenches. It is the inner world that exalts, or con- 
 taminates, the outer; and the purity of the soul in the body would 
 add a thousand perfumes to the air, and a manifold attraction of fine 
 sympathies to the instinctive understanding. At present the rule 
 of tolerable scents ascends no higher than the flowers ; the perfume 
 of good and true men is an incense both prophesied and possible. 
 
 But the whole of the transpirations do not consist of effete mate- 
 rials. We feel on the other hand that life is surrounded by life; 
 that a man's outposts extend beyond his skin, and convey his feel- 
 ings by their emissaries to our own. Spheres touch before skins. 
 Judging by the analogy of the saliva, which comes out of its organs 
 alive, and returns back thither after a circuit, we deduce that the 
 transpirations are not primarily dead, but leave the body for a space, 
 to revert to it with fresh supplies won from the atmosphere in their 
 journey. Man in every sense can travel out of himself with profit 
 23 
 
266 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 and interest. He drives not only trade, but commerce, with the 
 surrounding natures. His atoms have the benefit of seeing foreign 
 parts, and bring home new fashions. Are there not also currents 
 or winds in the human sphere, whereby clouds, drawn from one part 
 of the surface, are drafted to other places, to descend with refresh- 
 ment thereupon? for what is dead in the view of the face or chest, 
 may be living enough for the belly and the limbs. 
 
 We therefore see reason to divide the transpirations into active 
 and passive, or into sweats and radiations, the former of which gra- 
 vitate and fall, but the latter are permanent and creative. In treat- 
 ing of the lungs we made a similar division, into breaths and spirits, 
 or into bodily and purposeless respiration, and into spirited breathing. 
 And the same remark applies to every system with greater or lesser 
 exceptions. But this belongs to a new psychology founded on com- 
 mon observations, and which shows that heart touches heart with 
 magnetic fingers, and indeed that organisms are linked to their simi- 
 lar parts by sympathetic columns of emanations. The reason of this 
 is, that the soul is not only included in but also includes the body, 
 or not only lives beyond the brain, but also beyond the skin; being 
 the omega as it is the alpha of the microcosm. 
 
 In Chapter II. we dwelt at some length on the ensoulment of the 
 breaths, and here we might show, did space permit, that each exter- 
 nization* or excretion that we make is a similar spirit-carrier. The 
 sweats are no exceptions to the rule. In faintness whether born of 
 fear or pain, the sweat is mortal cold, for the life has left it prema- 
 turely. In low animal passions the sweat is hircine, to suit the goat 
 who owns it. And so forth. The range is as great as it is subtle. 
 It extends from the shininess of oozy monk and stall-fed prelate, to 
 the glory-rim around the saints, and again to the crucifixion before 
 the crucifixion, the Master's agony-sweat as of great drops of blood 
 in the garden of Gethsemane. 
 
 * The externizalion of things amounts to anew essence in them, whereby 
 they become distinct objects, not only to other beings, but often to themselves. The 
 difference between a foetus and a child is externizalion acting upon a capable 
 organism. Emanation, therefore, where it is an emanation of life, differences 
 itself, or beettuse a fresh object, at each successive elongation from its source. 
 But this for the metaphysical. 
 
THE BIG PORES. 267 
 
 Perspiration then is not only purification, but emission, and ema- 
 nation or creation. We now proceed to the other half of the sub- 
 ject — to the renewal of the body through its cutaneous surface 
 from the external world, or its reception of fluids and exhalations 
 from without. And first for the fact It is proved by the absorp- 
 tion of medicated substances when rubbed upon the skin ; by the 
 relief of thirst, the increase of weight, and the nutrition of the 
 body, when plunged in baths of water, or of alimentitious fluids ; 
 by increase of weight from the air itself, during sleep, as well as 
 at other times, and which cannot be accounted for by the food 
 taken; also by the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, and by 
 the effects of mesmerism ; and in short by the same evidences that 
 attest the cutaneous exhalation. There is then a parallel of giving 
 and taking; the man and the world cross hands; the exchanges 
 are balanced between the skin of the body and the skin of the 
 planet, the atmosphere being their market ; the spirit, lymph, and 
 blood modify nature by their sphere ; and nature by hers constitutes 
 their circumstances and supports their reactions. This is also 
 shown by the organic effects of climate, and by the geographical 
 colorings and other differences of the skin. The rule here is, that 
 as the atmospheres, as well as the earth, environ the skin, the 
 latter is natively adequate to avail itself of their wealth, whether 
 ponderable or imponderable, and to feed its own system with what- 
 ever is inferiorly organic, or earthy, watery, airy, gaseous or 
 ethereal. In short the skin man is a sponge immersed in nature's 
 plenum, and soaking us through, soul-deep, with the substantial 
 properties of every medium. 
 
 This which is established by facts, and afterwards appears self- 
 evident, is the point whence to start in unraveling the texture of 
 the skin ; common sense being the way to uncommon sense. In 
 this texture there are several kinds of fibres that are unaccounted 
 for ; the microscope has done its best, yet they are known but as 
 threads, of different colors and varying elasticity. Are they not 
 conduits of some reasonable stuff to the frame ? Are the primary 
 fibres impervious, the dams and hindrances of motion, spoiling its 
 current by their inadmissive contractedness ? Truth is shocked at 
 the supposition, and answers that nature, the deeper and smaller 
 
268 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 she becomes, is the roomier in accommodation for her essences, 
 which are only represented in the fluids. It is abusing the micro- 
 scope to imagine that it can sound the depth of any structure : 
 honest sight is deeper than the microscope j for we see on the broad 
 canvas of space, effects which point to properties that no lens can 
 verify. 
 
 But the truth is that nature is more considerate than our science, 
 and she places somewhere in every system one or more big facts to 
 show her designs. These are her maternal "great A and bouncing 
 B," her picturesque alphabet, intended to be learnt by implicit 
 rote before anything else. Too often however we begin at the end 
 of her grammar, and never find this alphabet j and can but timidly 
 copy her forms, without the power to spell much less to read them. 
 Now what is the largest pore in the skin ? Without hesitation, 
 the mouth, which shows us, by an unmicroscopic exhibition, that 
 the whole skin feeds upon terrestrial elements, solid and fluid. 
 What are the next pores? Plainly the nostrils and ears, the 
 purveyors of the atmosphere and its motions. And what do these 
 cutaneous orifices declare but the universal aeration of the body by 
 the surface in which they are constituted ? But is there an opening 
 for the ether ? Undoubtedly two — in the eyes, where the mind 
 stands face to face with the world, and the world with the mind. 
 This is sight, which permeates the closed windows of the cornea, and 
 sees that there are pores above the microscope, and that the universe 
 can come in to us when the doors are shut. Those ether wells, the 
 eyes, are the naked truths of a whole humanity of similar orifices 
 whose lids conceal them in other parts of the skin. If these deduc- 
 tions be too strange, we ask then, do not we interpret other things 
 by their leading facts ? And what is our knowledge of the world 
 but the knowledge of its faces and its heads ? 
 
 But upon this subject of the appropriations of the skin, we cau- 
 tion ourselves that the life of each part seeks and takes the kinsmen 
 of the part, and no other things. The lungs or air organs breathe 
 air, gas, whatever ascends from the solid into the void, or tends to 
 enlarge itself or to breathe. The stomach eats whatever is eatable ; 
 it fructifies fruit of every order, or puts the material finish to that 
 process by which nature is eaten and digested until it comes up to 
 
THE SELF-POSSESSION OF THE SKIN. 269 
 
 mankind. So again, skins are the proper object of the skin ; for 
 this system skims the world, takes a film for itself from every sur- 
 face, and assumes the cream of body as the matter of the sense of 
 touch. This sense is the essence or single substance of the skin, 
 which clothes the mind and the organism with the personable out- 
 sides of things. We are not then to think any longer of assimila- 
 tion as a formula in treating of the skin from its own point of view ; 
 for we have left assimilation behind in the stomach. It is the exter- 
 nal apposition and mutual feeling of the parts which alone belong 
 to the skin. 
 
 "We do not however dwell upon the sense of touch or the pleasures 
 of the skin, for we are not yet treating of the senses, but of the 
 bodily organs. Only let us remember that the armies of the papil- 
 lae, encamped in force upon the frontier wherever great sensation is 
 wanted, and everywhere posted, spaced and grouped for watchful- 
 ness and protection, are armies of industry also, being to their 
 adjacent pores what the hands are to the mouth. They are exqui- 
 sitely quick, attentive and manipulative, and can help the skin to 
 what it may feel, or warn it against destructions or irritations, with 
 an agency more discriminating than our consciousness. But the 
 mind acts with great force upon the skin through the nervous sys- 
 tem, and depressing emotions playing upon the surface, 'destroy its 
 equilibrium, damp its courage, throw it off its guard, and cause it 
 to let in the emanations of disease. Hence during fear the papil- 
 lae desert their posts, and contagion invades us. On the other hand, 
 the might of life is similarly transferable to the skin, which thus 
 encouraged, walks the pest-house unharmed, and feels virtues like 
 its own in the poisons. 
 
 Nor must we forget the motion of the skin, with which we are 
 familiar in the breathing. Our feelings of the universality of 
 respiration are the running accompaniments of the universal respi- 
 ration of the skin. Under this, its constant movement, its other 
 movements are performed. The sympathy of sense between it and 
 the lungs is close : the same air and temperature bathes them 
 both, and the winter that narrows the desires of breath, contracts 
 the skin to fit the diminished visceral spheres. The air and earth 
 of the microcosm both lessen together, and both expand together 
 
 23* 
 
270 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 under kindlier seasons. The expansion of the breathing skin is 
 the enlargement of every pore of the lung order, and causes the 
 absorption of the various influences in which the skin is plunged. 
 This is the active cause of the sympathy of the skin with the air 
 and the powers that it contains. The state of the mind or the 
 animation of the brain and nerves is in like manner concerned in 
 the relation that the skin holds to those parts of nature which lie 
 above the air. 
 
 Thus the skin is a natural balancer of temperature, because it is 
 the medium between two fires — those, namely, of the body and the 
 sun. It is a remarkable circumstance indicating the self-possession 
 of the body, that its heat varies but little with climate, or the sea- 
 sons. Standing at about 100 degrees of Fahrenheit, it repulses the 
 equatorial fervor, and the northmost cold. Undoubtedly this is due 
 in the last place to the mettle and temper of the skin. It sprinkles 
 its heated envelope of atmospheres with abundant vapors, cooling as 
 they rise ; for the supply of which our thirst is commanded in the 
 sultry hours : on the other hand, when the outside weather is incle- 
 ment, and winter howls, the skin fastens up its infinite shutter-work, 
 and the fires are fed with liberal materials, which then must be taken 
 according to hunger, which prescribes the fuel. 
 
 The skin then suitably,- or sensibly, gives out and takes in what 
 it requires, this being the sum and substance of inhalation, exhala- 
 tion, and the intermediate touch ; and the sphere surrounding the 
 skin serves as a medium to attemper, humanize, and convey to the 
 body the forces of the external world j much as the atmospheres re- 
 ceive the rays of the sun, and convey them to the planet. 
 
 Whither does the skin go ? or where does it end ? It may be said 
 that it is continuous with itself, and ends nowhere, as it begins no- 
 where. True, but it is more circular than this. For besides that 
 it covers the whole body, it passes in along the great thoroughfares, 
 only assuming a thinner and moist surface, and constitutes the lin- 
 ing of the nostrils, the windpipe and the lungs ; it also enters by the 
 mouth into the alimentary canal, and therefrom into the depths of 
 the liver and the pancreas ; and by other ways into other viscera, 
 and into all the glands. These are its highroads ; as for its private 
 paths, they are innumerable. It passes down every hair-follicle, 
 
THE GEOGRAPHICAL SKIN. 271 
 
 and by the cuticle to the tip of every hair; it runs along each per- 
 spiratory gland and oil gland, through the eight-and-twenty miles of 
 our ingenious surveyor ; and next through every pore of every sieve- 
 like blood-vessel along the sanguineous system, and along the lym- 
 phatic system ; over levels which no anatomical quadrant has taken, 
 and through a mileage which wants another surveyor still ; in short 
 it ranges through brain and body wherever anything touches any- 
 thing, and where consequently a sense of touch and a skin are indis- 
 pensable.* 
 
 So much for the altitude of the skin, or its penetrancy body-deep, 
 and its rise brain-high. But the surface of the organic miracle, its 
 means of display, are not less remarkable. The plummet line that 
 finds no soundings is matched in the lines of sight, which meet a 
 constant horizon, but never a shore. Awe stands giddy over the 
 chasms of the soul ; amazement heaving with joy, finds and loses 
 itself moment by moment, at the prospect of the landscapes of the 
 never-ending life. The skin is as broad as it is high. 
 
 The geographical or regional consideration of the skin, to which 
 we are now pointing, is capable of being pursued in different ways. 
 It may be followed literally, and the diversities of skin traced in 
 nations and races in different parts of the globe -, looking on the 
 earth itself as clothed with men as with a coat of many colors. Or 
 it may be traced over the individual body, where it exhibits a scale 
 of varieties, minute indeed, but apparently as exhaustless as in 
 humanity itself. Let us briefly advert to each of these depart- 
 ments. 
 
 In all races of mankind the corium or true skin is white ; the 
 difference of hue residing in the other layers. Blumenbach reckons 
 five general varieties of color ; the white or Caucasian ; the yellow 
 
 * The presence of skin in the body is the double of the presence of feeling, 
 which is skin-function, in the mind ; and as feeling is cointensive with life, skin 
 is coextensive with bodily structure. Feeling however subsists in different 
 powers and degrees so dissimilar to each other, that no boldness short of com- 
 mon sense dare call by the same general word the sentiment of duty, or love, 
 and the sense of wamth, or resistance ; all of which, however, are rightly de- 
 signated feelings. It requires the same boldness, and no more, to denominate 
 the membranes of the pia mater by the name skin, which signifies the general 
 envelope of the frame. 
 
272 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 or Mongolian j the red, copper-colored, or American ; the brown or 
 Malaic; and the black or Ethiopian. In each of these classes the 
 general varieties are again repeated. Thus the European skin em- 
 braces the swarthy Italian and the fair Swede ; and the English 
 ranges in a lesser compass through the same shades from the blonde 
 to the brunette. What is the cause of the great difference in the 
 color of our skins ? One cause is, that variety is the child of nature, 
 and coextensive with existence. But why should the variety run 
 from white to black, rather than play through the infinitude of white- 
 ness with all coloration and enrichment ? What produces hues re- 
 pulsive between races of brothers, and why does nature char and 
 begrime her offspring ? Is it merely that the sun " will keep baking, 
 broiling on V Not altogether; for in that case the inhabitants of 
 equal levels in the tropics, would be as uniform belts of colored 
 tribes around the globe j which is not the fact. The reason is more 
 complex. The true whiteness of the skin would signify the equili- 
 brium between the light and heat of the man, and the light and heat 
 of the sun, which were they balanced, the face would be a transpa- 
 rent panoply, reflecting both the spirit and the world, and self-de- 
 fended against the invasive subtlety of the solar rays. If the light 
 of life were there, the skin would bleach into more resistless white- 
 ness in the burning noon-day, light living upon light, and energy 
 upon energy; the brave life would stand with gleaming shields upon 
 the extremest ramparts of the cuticle. At present, however, in 
 the black man's skin, his darkness eats up the light, in order to 
 effect the balance. The sable rete of the Ethiopian is an organism 
 that by its relation to light and heat, absorbs the fierceness of the 
 sun without making claim upon the nervous energy; and does by 
 a fixed or unsightly circumstance what life would effect by its own 
 witty heroism. His poor body cannot help being burnt, and kindly 
 nature has strewn it with coal fields for the purpose. No wonder 
 that his color is a felt degradation, for it is the police of weak-eyed 
 and waxen virtues, that would melt under the fierceness of his skies. 
 With respect to the other skins, red, yellow, brown and pied, all 
 rising to their own blackness, they are to be regarded as separate or- 
 ganizations, or as so many intelligent resources for maintaing rea- 
 sonable terms between the tyrannical strength of nature and the 
 
THE GEOGRAPHICAL SKIN. 273 
 
 enfeebled life of man ; and in general the rainbow of human skins 
 is a divine signal against these floods of the sun. The power of 
 climatization is measured very much by the ability of the skin to 
 stand up for itself, or else to take on the restored balance that color 
 produces between the surface and outward influences. The colored 
 parts in each instance appear to be a distinct tribal organization, re- 
 quired in different shades and proportions by various races under 
 the same sky 3 for there is nothing to make it probable that the 
 English skin for instance, place it under the line for a number of 
 generations, would assume the jettiness of the Negro, or the tawny 
 shade of the Malay.* We may therefore see that among the causes 
 that have led to the present distribution of races, the relative life of 
 the skin is one ; and that certain tribes would instinctively move 
 down the sides of the planet, until they found the spot where the 
 slanted sun-beams were dilute enough to befriend, and not injure, 
 their undefended skins ; the flaming sword behind chasing them 
 away to more frigid destinies as their loves waxed fainter. And in- 
 deed the light and heat are continually operating in all great migra- 
 tions, from the east to the west, and now from the west to the east; 
 much as the same causes in nature produce winds and currents, 
 which are inanimate migrations.f 
 
 * The clothing of the different races is significant, relatively to the present 
 state and future prospects of our skins. Under the line, where the rule of the 
 skin is blackness and also thickness, we clothe in white and light garments ; in 
 the temperate regions, in dark woolen clothes. Showing that opposite condi- 
 tions to those of the skin, are sought in the clothing. Were the skin able to 
 keep its own balance, it would be what the clothing now is, whitest at the 
 equator, and darker where greater heat is wanted, and where less bleaching 
 power is given. 
 
 f We see remains of the migratory principle by which the world has been 
 peopled, and which has forced the races to quit the fairest spots, and to move 
 onwards, often into comparatively inhospitable regions, in the fact that many 
 persons are born out of their health's latitude, and cannot live in our English 
 climate, but are sent away to Madeira, Italy, the South of France, or Australia, 
 where they can continue an existence which would be early extinguished here. 
 What was once the rule of races happens now with individuals, and that excep- 
 tionally : yet as it goes on from all countries, it amounts to the collection of new 
 races destined to be united in the amity of new mother climates. The develop- 
 ment of a human race is like that of a human body. At first its parts are movable, 
 and are not born in the places which they are subsequently to occupy : emigra- 
 
274 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 Passing from the geography to the hierarchy of the skin, from its 
 planetary to its social developments, we find that the skins of the 
 extreme classes of society differ as much as the classes themselves. 
 The horny hand of labor represents a prevailing texture of the sur- 
 face, which exposure to the air, coarse exercise, the sweats of toil, 
 and the quality of the bread of toil; in a word, every circumstance 
 connected with the lower classes, tends to produce and perpetuate. 
 Their complexions are those of the brawny limbs of society. The 
 present is ever a magnified time; the past and the future are com- 
 pressed; and the pores and fibres are large that work upon the pre- 
 sent, and deal with the rude exaggeration of our immediate wants. 
 The upper classes are closer knit and finer surfaced, and breeding is 
 unsuccessful, if it does not alter the skin. You do not see the details 
 of their bodies, or criticize their timbers, but they come before you 
 with a whole front at once. 
 
 The skin also exhibits the phenomena of sex with its own cha- 
 racteristic openness, concealing and revealing according to the eldest 
 modesty of nature. Softness and strength are married in the male 
 and feminine skins, and sense and sensibility are completed in that 
 union. The woman is finer grained, to constitute a permanent aris- 
 tocracy — so much of humanity as nature can keep without coarse 
 drudging in the world. She works her feelings by fleet algebra in 
 spaces less than our knowledge, while we swelter behind, learned 
 porters, carrying cumbrous slatefuls of figures. It is because her 
 skin is deeper, more vital or as it were visceral; a sweeter trembling 
 nakedness as of a soul stripped of one earthy covering to show what 
 its mode and doings are when the hood of flesh is gone. For this 
 natural reason, and many other reasons, women are sometimes called 
 angels. This sexual difference of the skin is the sign of such a 
 difference reigning throughout the organism, for the means are car- 
 ried in the extremes; and as the soul is coordinate with the body, 
 
 tion therefore is a distinct branch of embryology : and even at a late, or what we 
 may call the historical period of the frame, some great changes occur : the testes 
 for instance emigrate from their hot birthplace under the kidneys to the neigh- 
 borhood of the pole in the scrotum. Moreover, the opening out and stretching 
 of the infant man at birth amounts to the elongation of his feet from his head to 
 the greatest possible degree. 
 
THE SOCIAL AND SEXUAL SKINS. 275 
 
 the common sense of the skin proclaims the existence of sex in the 
 soul, where the laws of diversity and union become also extended. 
 
 Again the single skin is suited in constitution and color to the 
 part that it covers, and to its function in every place. Where great 
 resistance is demanded, as on the heel, or in the palm, the cuticle, 
 no longer thin, becomes a dense and almost horny pad; and in short, 
 it sympathizes with our occupations and habits, presenting an open 
 declaration of the statesmanship of the body ; for if there be this 
 power of wise change in the scurf of the skin, what is there not in 
 the depth of the system and in the senate of the brain ! So also 
 the reticulum varies with the latitudes and longitudes of the person, 
 being greatest where the sensibility is greatest, as over the hands, 
 and upon the tongue. The papillae also are various everywhere, and 
 peculiarly grouped; multitudinous where feeling is quick and fre- 
 quent; almost indiscernible in other parts. The corium too is thick 
 and thin, and differently woven, as utility desires. In short the in- 
 dividual skin brings us back again to the social and geographical; 
 it too runs from coarseness to fineness, from whiteness to shadow, 
 from life to dullness ; representing on one person the skins of all 
 ranks' and conditions, all seasons and zones; kingly face-skin and 
 peasant foot-skins; swart patches of Ethiopian dusk, and tracts of 
 open fairness, as it were temperate climes. 
 
 Turning from the general map of the body to the head, chest and 
 abdomen, we observe that their great divisions of skin modulate 
 through successive functions. Over the belly, receptivity is the 
 leading oface; it sustains material distention for periods short and 
 long, and recovers itself more or less. In the skin covering the 
 chest there is a higher elasticity, fitting it for its lifelong reciproca- 
 tions; active strength is the gift of the thoracic covering, and it 
 easily recedes before the filling breath, and then as easily runs for- 
 ward after the retreating lungs. In the head, all the other functions 
 of the skin are present, and capital functions superadded. Besides 
 that the head-skin is mechanically yielding and elastic, it is also 
 intellectually expressive; it runs after the changes of the brain, 
 faster than the skin of the chest follows up the alternations of the 
 lungs. But in robing the sovereign brain, the beauty of the organ- 
 ism, such as it is ; dwells in its natural folds, and harmony and love 
 
276 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 come forth perforce around it. Feature or intellectual form, active 
 fitness, and close continence, severally representing mind, motion 
 and body, are thus the three spirits of the skin, according to the 
 three regions; and these are the cornucopia of its uses. 
 
 We have said but little upon one important appendage of the 
 skin, namely, the hair, which is of a threefold kind, and is universal 
 over the body. There is the massive growth upon the scalp, the 
 short hairs met with in other parts, and the invisible down, which 
 appears to exist everywhere. We can only remark that its uses 
 throughout are typified in those of the hair on the head. Warmth, 
 clothing, conduction, protection, expression, beauty — every hair 
 means them all. It is also observable that there is an intimate con- 
 nection between the hair and the temperament, and between the hair 
 and the nervous system, and a sympathy between the hair and the 
 mind in health and disease. The narratives of fear turning the hair 
 white in a single night, are so well attested, that a late clever writer on 
 the subject has nothing to object beyond the " of course it is impos- 
 sible" of his own education. Certain it is that the hair is a part of 
 the man, and in a broad sense comes from his very nerves. In the 
 face of anatomical limits, and heedless of learned giggling, whoever 
 has once felt the hair of his flesh stand up, knows right well that 
 something ran out of his brains when the fright was on his back. 
 Let the anatomist make a scalpel out of that fact, and carve away 
 with it at the hair follicle, and he will soon find that every hair 
 carries a streamlet of his life. 
 
 The hair presents an elongation of the qualities of the cuticle, 
 and analyzed by the wearer, we see in it the same round world 
 again as in the most living organs. The moss and grass of our 
 skulls is just like us. The head is nature's king, and nature crowns 
 it. The essence passes into the crown, and it represents the royalty 
 of the wearer. The manly forelocks rise with independence and 
 openness, equally with the forehead that they overshadow. The 
 clustered curls of the woman catch and benet with the same witch- 
 ery that glitters from her eyes, or fascinates in her smile. Yea, 
 every state and feeling makes as free with the hair as fear itself. 
 Low-browed self abasement has a straight-haired head; its very 
 comb puts it down by instinctive logic of correspondences. Courage 
 
THE HAIR. 277 
 
 and energy crisp the hair like wire. Prolific and young-blooded 
 races like the Negro, are woolly as sheep ; old and decaying tribes, 
 such as the American Indians, are lank and drooping in their locks. 
 Life throws the hair as a substantial shadow around the principal 
 organs, to which it offers a native contrast, forming the colored 
 complement of their grace. Whatever shadow is required comes by 
 this rule : red hair is the contrast in keeping with one complexion, 
 and black hair with another. The background is not only itself 
 expressive, but in harmony with the portrait j the sun-faced day is 
 set and framed in its own casket of night. 
 
 Did space allow, it would here be proper to make a brief excur- 
 sion into the wild-wood nature, to note the fertility of the skin as it 
 undulates over the plains of animal existence. What is wonderful, 
 that demure thing, the cuticle, when applied to lower lives, breaks 
 into a sportiveness that amuses belief. Scale in the fish, coil in the 
 serpent, feather in the bird, many-colored coat woolly or hairy in 
 the quadruped, impenetrable mail in the pachyderm, it shows on a 
 mighty arena what are its delicate and silent uses in the human 
 body. But we must not be led into the pleasant ark of zoology. 
 Suffice it however that these properties are represented in man also, 
 whose fine tact, and its sober instrument, terminate in arts that beat 
 the feathered wing in flight, and outdo the fur in warmth, and the 
 mail in protection ; and his model skin stands inwards unspent the 
 while ; and all is there in its prolific source, which ifs doled out in 
 strict though bountiful measure to the poor unalterable animals. 
 
 We recur, however, to the function of the skin as expressing the 
 mind, and as being, with the Sovereign Artist the canvas of the 
 beauty of the world. This beauty, they tell us truly, is only skin- 
 deep, but none of them has told what is the depth of the skin. At 
 all events it must gauge to profound realms, for it brings the whole 
 man to the surface. Moreover, it is not in fact made up of two 
 layers, but cuticle and cutis are artificial productions, conveniences 
 of books, the work of men's hands. The human countenance 
 especially is the painted stage and natural robing room of the soul. 
 It is no single, double or triple dress, but wardrobes of costumes 
 innumerable. Our seven ages have their liveries there, of every 
 dye and cut from the cradle to the bier : ruddy cheeks, merry dim- 
 24 
 
278 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 pies and plump stuffing for youth ; line and furrow for many- 
 thoughted age ; carnation for the bridal morning, and heavenlier 
 paleness for the new-found mother. Masks are there indeed for 
 every time; and tragedy, comedy, and farce are positive nature in 
 the skin. Every shade of passion has its mantle in that boudoir. 
 All the legions of desires and hopes have uniforms and badges there 
 at hand. It is the loom where the inner man weaves on the instant 
 the garment of his mood, to dissolve again into current life when the 
 hour or the moment is past. There it is that loves put on its celestial 
 rosy red, which is its proper hue ; there lovely shame blushes, and 
 mean shame looks earthy; there hatred contracts its wicked white; 
 their jealousy picks from its own drawer its bodice of constant 
 green ; their anger clothes itself in black, and despair in the grayness 
 of the dead ; there hypocrisy plunders the rest, and takes all their 
 dresses by turns ; sorrow and penitence too have sackcloth there ; 
 and genius and inspiration in immortal hours, encinctured there 
 with the unsought ancient halo, stand forth as present spirits in the 
 supremacy of light. In a word, the compass of human nature, as 
 it is seen and felt, is all to be referred to the inexhaustible repre- 
 sentations of the skin. 
 
 Thus the skin is the kingdom of show, for whatever is seen of 
 mankind is nothing else ; a proof of the expressiveness of a cover- 
 ing which can be the universal face. For the skin is the fine but 
 ample decorum in which the inward terminates ; the only thing 
 that is fit to be seen either in art, in nature, or in science. It hides 
 the rawness of our curious fieshwork, and reveals it anew as comely 
 and personal ; it gathers up thousands of nervous fibres in the speak- 
 ing countenance, and mingles the infinite colors of life into a single 
 complexion ; it groups discordant muscles in lovely or manly limbs, 
 and braces the unseemly viscera into a statuesque humanity, toning 
 and leveling the whole out of its own reservoirs of temperament. 
 And so it is the official presentation, and the bright honor of the 
 body. It is sacred too in its wholeness, and blood lies under it 
 film-deep, to start forth red before man and nature with a divine 
 protest against its violation. 
 
 Clothing or fallen decency comes forth from this original source ; 
 
CLOTHING. 279 
 
 the art and mystery of it is first given in the skin.* The materials 
 of our garments tally with its emanations. The linen is the cool 
 and watery envelope of the body j the cotton is the middle, or 
 earthy; woolen and cloth are the prolongations of the hair, the 
 unctuous and the oily ; silks and satins, with their metalline glow 
 and ocular glancing, stand for the ether and unresting fire that 
 goes out and in, and changes forever in the eyes and countenance 
 with illusive lustre. Jewels and ornaments also are of the brother- 
 hood of the eyes and face, and make dress into rank and dignity. 
 The costume of nations, sexes, times and events descends from their 
 countenances and skins. White and scarlet and Tyrian purple are 
 but their chromatic refractions. The Persian scarf, the Thibetan 
 wool, England and France with their stuffs and laces, China with 
 its cloth of gold, only continue in measured movements the infinite 
 fabric of the weaving corium. The great first shuttle is human 
 nature still. 
 
 This skin, like all things besides, ascends by its powers to other 
 
 * It will be seen on our principle?, that clothes are natural to the human body, 
 because art is included in our nature (p. 135). and man, the image of the Creator, 
 cannot but surround himself with those secondary creations which we are 
 accustomed to term artificial. Vestments however are as natural as birds' nests, 
 or birds' feathers ; but as they spring from the nature of reason and imagination, 
 from the constructive faculties of mind instead of those of body or instinct, they 
 are more free and various than animal clothes. But wherever the human form is, 
 in whatever world, the principle of utility that commands the arts will reproduce 
 the vestures to the occasion. The productions of art are in fact the comparative 
 anatomy of the human frame, as distinct from the comparative anatomy of the 
 animal frame, the procession of which latter is exhibited in the kingdoms of 
 nature. And the tendency and promise of the true humanity is, a world which 
 spontaneously follows what Bacon calls " human uses." " Houses not made with 
 hands" are spoken of in the Bible ; also garments that wax not old. In the same 
 book we learn that the people of heaven are not naked, but clothed in shining 
 raiment ; and the Ancient of Days has " a waistcoat of white wool ;" the armies 
 here also are " clothed in fine linen, white and clean." For if manis immortal, 
 all is immortal — sense, faculty, art, decency ; and in the more plastic world of 
 the spirit, the constructive powers realize instantaneously and organically what 
 is here the result of the same powers working through imperfect machineries. 
 So much for the naturalness of clothes, whose forces and forms are those of the 
 human mind, and accompany the mind wjthersoever it goes. We write this 
 note, because the Bible narratives are sometimes discredited for attributing 
 investiture to the future man, whereas this attribution is in harmony with com- 
 mon sense, and the contrary is a part of the indecent doctrine, that man, when 
 he dies, goes nowhere, and has nothing on. 
 
280 THE IIUMAN SKIN. 
 
 spheres. Surfaces, bonds and communications belong to nature and 
 spirit alike. Manners are a social skin, whereby our savageness is 
 hidden and compressed, our wants are tamed into shapely occasions, 
 and the rules that glide from man to man fold and wrap individuals 
 into communities, and keep the warts of our eccentricity leveled 
 down under the common tone of the time. Laws and bonds are 
 more penetrating manners, as it were the membranous politesse that 
 is binding upon the inward life. And the arts that beautify our 
 estate, live and reside upon the new extensions of human nature 
 formed by these amiable skins. 
 
 The universe also has the cutaneous principle throughout, as the 
 ground of its beauty, and the substantial theatre of its changes. 
 Landscape and ocean-scene are the planetary skin, and field, garden 
 and grove are the expressive face that the world upturns in grati- 
 tude to its cultivators.* Atmosphere, tides and magnetic lines, 
 varied soils and successive climates, depth and deeper depth of 
 strata, enamelled vastness of plant and flower, mutations of all as 
 constant as heaven is constant — these are the natural family of those 
 minutiae of the human frame with which we have busied ourselves 
 here. And go where we will, we cannot transcend one pen-stroke 
 of the everlasting order. The skin is a truth, and omnipresent. 
 
 * It would not be difficult to run the parallel between the human and planet- 
 ary skins. The body with its hard muscular surface is the naked planet, to be 
 clothed with a skin that will receive the sun by inviting but independent forms. 
 The soil, itself chiefly of organic origin, is the fatty layer which first covers in the 
 bare rocks and surfaces, and makes them mildly round. The network of bind- 
 ing grass, the interlacing kingdom of plants and trees, represents the cutis with 
 its fibrous coverings. The animal kingdom, and man especially, is the papillary 
 layer, quick, sentient and locomotive, living on the best and most fertile parts of 
 the great surface. The vegetable kingdom, as it proceeds from human cultiva- 
 tion and through the mind of man, is the rete mucosum, a world of new growth 
 rising to the surface, and covering in the rest. The universal mechanism of the 
 arts, polishing everything externally, educating man, domesticating animals, 
 pruning and raising the culture of plants, and conciliating mineral or mechanical 
 truth with vital rotundity and flexibility, is the varnish of the cuticle, through 
 which man and the world are put in their court dress of beauty, suitable to hold 
 the train of light which falls from the progressive sun. Thus the skin is a circu- 
 lar vesture, coming up like a scarf from the earth to wrap the shoulders of man, 
 and falling down again from him in statelier folds towards the same earth. Its 
 ascending sweep is from the fat to the central or capital cutis ; its descending, 
 from the cutis to the cuticle. 
 
THE UNIVERSAL SKINS. 281 
 
 Especially must it reign in the intellectual sphere. There it is a 
 noble species of touch, allied to all that is great and solid — no other 
 than our common sense — polished, inviolate, sensitive of trivialities, 
 rejecting at once what is antiquated and useless, open as day to 
 edification, reconsidering many things j the basis of capacity ; the 
 beauty of the emotions ; the complexion of the virtues ; the con- 
 versability of the understanding ; the simple drapery of wise actions. 
 This it is which fosters the man, and is the defence of an immortal 
 vesture. 
 
 Let us, then, attend a little more severely to the correspondences 
 of the skin considered as a function and principle, and elicit its 
 formulas in their main departments. In fulfilling this task, we 
 shall come to the largest generalizations, as the skin is the general- 
 ization of the body ; and to self-evident positions, because the skin 
 is ocular evidence of ourselves. This is the reason why the present 
 chapter is descriptive, for the skin being scenery, we wander perforce 
 around its regions, pencil in hand. 
 
 The outer skin of all is space, whose face robes the suns, its 
 breast envelops the air, and its belly overlays the terrene globes; a 
 skin adapted to its contents ; space expressive to the glancing fire, 
 free space to the atmospheres, and fixed space to the earth. At the 
 top the name of space is light, the countenance or beaming of 
 things; in the middle it is expanse, the chest of the same ; and below 
 it is extense, the flatness of matter, or the skin of the ground. Space 
 limits, for nothing can exceed its space, or add a cubit to its stature. 
 But it is porous, and keeps in none but insides of its own grossness. 
 The light-space transpires through the air-space, which becomes 
 luminous thereby; and spiritual things invade space with no re- 
 sistance, for it is not their bound. Space has no existence without 
 things, as neither the skin without the body. But it holds the 
 creatures that want room, and carries them all ; it is the quarry of 
 the sculptures of shape, the canvas of the pictures of color; white 
 and glowing in its sunny eyes, blue in its immensity, green on its 
 seas, and verdant on its earths. As by room and show it gives free 
 expression, it makes the outward world candid, that is to say, repre- 
 sentative of the inner. So is space the mundane skin — all-expres- 
 sive, all-elastic, and all-continent. 
 
 24* 
 
282 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 In the realm of growth the same skin-principle has a new name, 
 and there we call it nature, the expression and limit of growth, or 
 the vegetable term. This is the end of that kingdom, which clips 
 it in and gives it bounds. The nature of trees is, to rise so high, 
 and no higher; to be fast in their places ; to be immiscible with other 
 trees; to be attached to climates and fostered by seasons; to be limit- 
 ed by each other, and to be annual or perennial, and die when their 
 vegetable space and time are passed. Their nature also is growth 
 itself; the bud transpires through the bark and unfolds into the 
 leaves, and the flowers transpire and unfold in their turn, like ver- 
 durous skies steaming out of the brown earth, and brilliant vapors 
 collecting into petals like little suns in the cope. For their nature 
 is to live in space and represent it, ranging minutely from its head 
 to its feet. Furthermore, by the nature of the vegetable kingdom, 
 the tendencies that it cannot hold, escape it, and the animal king- 
 dom is evolved on its outside, created among its unbounded parts ; 
 and this nature is the end of development. For all is developed 
 from growth as all lives from life. The animals are as apparitions 
 to the trees and herbs; they come and go out of the dead spaces 
 by no vegetable law ; and by nature the science of stiff stumps avers 
 that animals are illusions, but that birdless and beastless wilder- 
 nesses are vegetable orthodoxy and truth. 
 
 We are now upon another skin-principle, a third space and a se- 
 cond nature, namely that of animals, and the name of this principle 
 is Self, which is the limit of the love of pleasure or animal heart 
 (p. 248) ; for the beasts love only those pleasures that please them- 
 selves. They assimilate what suits themselves ; they go whither 
 they will ; they breathe for themselves ; their instincts are for them- 
 selves; in a word, wherever they run they are contracted to them- 
 selves, which is the same as to say that self bounds them, or 
 is their skin. Self, however, is the surface and slumber of every 
 animal passion; for passions, or the life that " suffers itself" to be 
 provoked, begin from the skin. Hence self-defence, in which nature 
 seconds passion, and gives shaggy hair to one, horns and hoofs to 
 another, beak and claws to a third. And as self is a faculty highly 
 jealous, it incites every part for its own, that is to say, for self-defence. 
 Again, when self is touched by pleasure, it opens and lets in the 
 
THE UNIVERSAL SKINS. 283 
 
 pleasure; when hurt, it shrinks away: in short, it is the texture of 
 superficial motives, and answers every appellant with lightning-haste. 
 And being the instigator of show, it tricks itself with the allure- 
 ments of animal art, and sees its own graces in every polished sur- 
 face ; and while it always displays itself, it conceals by hiding one 
 self under another, and putting the most feasible forward. Self 
 then is the dear " whole skin" of animality, which keeps it what it 
 is, bounds and binds it to its pleasures and pains, making it impas- 
 sive to all others, and cuts it off from the universe, but connects it 
 with similar selves. And as only a certain amount of self or animal 
 space is allowed to any creature, an equilibrium or competition 
 arises, which is the congregate self of animal tribes or the selfishness 
 of animal societies. Yet through self transpires more than self, and 
 from animality oozes forth that which it cannot keep in, a sphere of 
 wisdom, self-denials and animal virtues, as it were the first gases in 
 which moral life is respiring; — qualities whose origin we do not 
 attribute to the animals themselves, but to the Creator passing 
 through their shades, and leaving his prints among their dreams. 
 It remains to be said, that self rigorously clears out whatever is in- 
 congruous, and makes each animal more and more itself the longer 
 it lives. Anything unselfish is ghost and fantasy to self, necessa- 
 rily denied by every art, science and heart-beat of the brutes. 
 
 Consciousness is the skin of human mind ;* for at any given mo- 
 
 * Philosophers, busy with the investigation of consciousness, do not suspect 
 that they are writing- monographs on the cutaneous principles. The Ego and 
 the Me, the self, the personality, and suchlike thin things of thought, cannot help 
 being somewhat spare, and in themselves dry, for they are skinny subjects. 
 And when consciousness sets up for itself, and assumes that it is the human 
 mind, instead of the bag in which the mind lies, then the diseases of the mental 
 skin begin, and the unconscious philosophers describe their own maladies as the 
 history of the universe. Those who attach themselves to the "pure Ego" as 
 having an independent life in itself, are investigating the hairy scalp of the mind 
 more or less full of pediculi, which are " the life" that it has " in itself." Those 
 who limit themselves to personality or individuality, are all " face" in their pur- 
 suits, and study impudence in its universals. The drier studies of consciousness 
 are busied with the mental scarf-skin, and when the organic history of philoso- 
 phy is written, the limes of barren logic and method will form a chapter, headed 
 "The Age of Dandruff." For logic is an armor of little shiny scales, infinite- 
 simal flints of thought ; in a word, cuticle ; and when it is separated from 
 practical ends, scurf; though when legitimate it is the proper varnish of the 
 
284 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 merit our consciousness is ourself, the boundary of our apprehension. 
 Cogito ergo sum is this reflex power, and means that we see our 
 outline in our states of consciousness. These states are elastic robes 
 to our faculties, clothing the placid eye of thought equally with the 
 long arms of will; and where they are not, the faculties considered 
 as human possessions are not. But consciousness is an ocular tunic, 
 or a man of eye ; it sees self, nature and space without it, or per- 
 meates all the inferior extenses.* It also looks inwards, and feels 
 as if it saw the vitals of the mind. It has moreover different layers 
 whereof the one is conscious of the other ; and it is luminous in 
 various degrees, from glimmers of perception to complete thought, 
 in which it forms a tight envelope of self-knowledge that insures 
 
 mind. Again, when consciousness is sought for its own sake, it forms the 
 mental itch, which is a general and excessive self-consciousness. And when it 
 is taken for the world, as by the Berkleyans, it constitutes elephantiasis scroti 
 mentis, in which the intellect dwells in the crannies of the warts of its own 
 imagination. We might easily range the diseases of consciousness parallel to 
 those of the skin, and classify the philosophies of consciousness under vesicles, 
 papules, pustules, exanthems, and the like; but time fails, and the work would be 
 both unseemly and irritating. It is enough, however, to indicate that the idols 
 of modern philosophy, the Ego, and the Me, the personality, the self, the indivi- 
 duality, are as necessary as our skins, but that they are our surfaces and lowest 
 parts, and require brushing and combing, washing and tending; but will by no 
 means bear deifying; for whatever of dirt and ugliness, whatever private parts 
 there are in us. or come upon us, these skins catch. When we look at the phi- 
 losophies through the organon of the human body, we see that the skin of every 
 subject, the sensual part, has alone been studied ; and that speaking bodily, 
 neither brain, heart, bowels, lungs nor muscles have entered into philosophy, 
 which accordingly has been the dead plane and flatness of the human mind, the 
 coarsest texture of all, as if it were the dishcloth of the fates. 
 
 * We may notice cursorily that the various skin principles are in their own 
 way co-extensive. But the law of extension is different for each. Conscious- 
 ness reaches the stars, not by being put on the stretcher of space, but by enjoying 
 the faculty of representation. Conscience extends similarly, because duty is 
 co-equal with consciousness. The perfection and relative infiniteness of things 
 lies in their having the greatest amount of presence in the smallest space. Thus 
 it is the pre-eminence of the eye over the skin that it touches things without 
 contact, and that there is no known proportion between its size and that of its 
 objects. And thus it is the perfection of motive force to move bodies without 
 exerting any push like their own resistance. In thinking, therefore, of the 
 higher spaces and forms, we must regard each successive perfection as equiva- 
 lent to all the matter and extension that preceded it, and look within the human 
 skin, and not in the cosmos, for the image of infinity and power. 
 
TIIE UNIVERSAL SKINS. 285 
 
 our collectedness or presence of mind. The inner organs within 
 this skin, each of which has its own covering likewise, are memory, 
 imagination, thought, will, wisdom, and the parts of the mental 
 body which find their stay in consciousness, and from consciousness 
 run back into their deeps. For surface makes things doubly large, 
 and adds the height and show of the outside to the gauge and secret 
 of the inside. Consciousness too is porous, and much escapes it : 
 within it there are humanities that it does not hold, and without it, 
 minds and persons that it does not see ; but as its grain gets closer, 
 and the rays of its woof finer and more feeling, it girdles more of 
 mind, and brings new invisibles to light : thus ever and anon it puts 
 its knowing films over new worlds, folds in sciences, and gains fresh 
 wisdom for its organs. For whatever it embraces is straightway in 
 its body. Consciousness also defends the mind, for what is self- 
 evident or known is our invulnerable part, in which we travel 
 through the unknown; it holds against harm our tender and un- 
 grown wisdom and thought. This is the me of which the philoso- 
 phers inorganically speak, and which has the not me inside it for 
 its vitals, and outside it for its society; for our substantive faculties 
 are not me, and are wise in proportion as the skin of me is thin and 
 pellucid. Consciousness also is an organic sieve, and clears the 
 mind ; being the theatre of mental elimination • for the mind tends 
 to consciousness or show,* and no sooner are we conscious of any- 
 
 * From the ground of these generalizations we may give a clearer rationale 
 of some functions of the skin. For in tracking any subject into the mind, we 
 come to self-evidence, the mind being the arithmetical quantity of which other 
 things are algebraic symbols. Or, to use another figure, the mind is a banker 
 that cashes the notes of physics into its light and life, the gold currency of the 
 sciences. But then we must know the equivalence between the notes and the 
 gold, or we cannot check our receipts. 
 
 Now the skin, as the love of show and self-knowledge, is an attraction to- 
 wards the surface. This is exerted upon the body, and calculates upon a love 
 of manifestation inherent in the organs. The love of show is the heart of the 
 living skins : seemliness is their body : when the former propels any particles 
 into the latter, they are at once judged in this court, and excreted, purified, or 
 reabsorbed. This magnetism, of the love of show, or of coming to light, ex- 
 plains the determination of fluids to the skin; and as the organic light judges 
 them, we have here a self-evident account of the phenomena of perspiration and 
 excretion. If you ask further, Why? we answer, Why do you like seemly and 
 beautiful things ? Because they are pleasant. If then it be said, Why do you 
 
286 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 thing, than adoption, or rejection is involved. Consciousness, for 
 this purpose as well as others, is largely porous, or full of blanks 
 and oblivions for what is not agreeable. Sleep is its great hole or 
 mouth through which stuff is put away, and a thousand slumbers 
 to one thing and wakings to another, vacancies, forgetfulnesses, and 
 assumed ignorances, are the pores by which it rids itself of thoughts 
 and memories, and refuses them a longer footing in the mind. By 
 consciousness also we stand in the universe of mind, and feel it in 
 all forms and structures, as though mind were matter, and nature 
 the caprice and building of a grand idealism. 
 
 In the state the skin-principle is the sense of right, which implies 
 the former principles, space, nature, self and mind, and is the citi- 
 zen's motive of self-defence, for we are jealous of our rights as of 
 our skins. These rights are our social selves, our honors and shin- 
 ing parts, which make the faces of freemen lustrous, and are plain 
 manliness in the state. Courtesy and manners are the dyes of this 
 social skin. Moreover, according to his rights the citizen is mea- 
 sured, for they are his stature j where they are small he is small, 
 and where they are absent no citizen is seen. At any given period, 
 there is only a certain quantity of social space or room, whence each 
 right is compressed by its fellows, yet the world of rights is we 
 know not how elastic, and the state can expand, or make new rights, 
 as fresh worlds introduce new spaces, and as self engenders other 
 selves. This sense of right is the limit, defence, and reformer of 
 the citizen ; it sifts the state continually to eliminate old laws and 
 habitudes, and opens it to allow for new : and moreover it is sur- 
 rounded unwittingly by the rights of new eras, which it is one day 
 to embrace ; for its nature is the gradual assumption of all virile 
 togas from the wardrobes of liberty in the state. 
 
 like them because they are pleasant ? This, we reply, is not a question, but a 
 question and answer, and wants no further answer. But if it be said, Why are 
 they pleasant? that is a different matter, but involves only your account of your 
 own pleasure. The ground of the soul's doings is, because it likes to do : and 
 the ground of the body's doings is, because it qtfasi-likes, or acts as a material 
 soul : this is its intelligible magnetism. 
 
 Let us then bear in mind, that the self-knowledge of consciousness, and the 
 self-examination of conscience, are the lights of the eliminatory and purificatory 
 offices of the skin. When the figures are thus obtained, we revert to the dead 
 algebra, and find plain numbers underlying it throughout. 
 
THE UNIVERSAL SKINS. 287 
 
 The brain of the sense of right or social man is the skin-princi- 
 ple of the moral man, that is to say, the conscience, the surface upon 
 which the moral sense is felt. For conscience is the jealousy of 
 the virtues, as self is the jealous principle of animal defence. The 
 individual is an intense society in this spaceless space ; a tender 
 feeling outraged there, is a wrong to the poor and the needy; a 
 hatred is a murder ; on the other hand the virtues exerted in this 
 secret chamber toward the least of the little ones, are done in the 
 state of the state, and to him who lives within the conscience. The 
 moral faculties are defended by this sense, whose monition rouses 
 them to self-preservation ; its agonies, and its happiness, are the 
 exterior motives of the virtues. Conscience limits us to its com- 
 pass ; our right and wrong are according to it, for our morality is 
 no larger than our conscience. It individualizes and spaces the 
 virtues, for it gives to each its own grounds of action, and makes moral 
 difference among men. It expresses them, for the beauty of no good- 
 ness can shine nakedly, but through the face of the conscience. It 
 purines, for it is the essential organ of self-examination,* and the 
 supreme area of our approbations and rejections. But it is also elastic, 
 or is wisdom living in circumstances. Finally it is a point of con- 
 science, that there are degrees of its sense which it does not include, 
 and hence it is open to new experiences. And as is the case with 
 all skins, where they are not, the organs underneath them are not ; 
 but where they are, the man comes solid within them. So true it 
 is, that in giving a new conscience, a new man also is given in the 
 
 old.f 
 
 In the soul, the skin principle is identity, whose germ is the / 
 that runs along all our time, governs each human verb, and stands as 
 a focus over our actions ; but its adult body is our sense of immor- 
 tality, which binds us in all things to be and to do for ever. World 
 
 * The body is put into a sieve, which is the skin, and shaken about by the 
 mind and muscles, to clear it of dust and debris ; and the sieve itself knows the 
 dust from the gold, and keeps and rejects accordingly. The skin is therefore 
 the bodily principle of self-examination, the sieve of our daily life and death. 
 
 f Any one may be without some of his bodies if he is without their skins ; for 
 he does not possess until he comprehends them, or has their sense or skin. 
 What is not manifested or revealed, is not, so far as man's faculties are con- 
 cerned. 
 
288 THE HUMAN SKIN. 
 
 and man feel permanence when they touch this surface, which we 
 may term, the human organ of eternity; for it is a sense without 
 almanacks or clocks, which apprehends likeness with God, who is 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. It is sanity in its castle, 
 as on the other hand a lost sense of identity is the top of confusions. 
 It holds us together in a oneness that is the model of coherence ; 
 and in its going forth, it is the apostle of the unity of our know- 
 ledge. The soul is protected in nature, because its very surface is 
 a sense of living for ever ; the flux of years falls down like water 
 from the oil of such a virtue. It is limited or separated from 
 nature by the same unviolated sense. Its beauty also is represent- 
 ed on this sense, for the beauty of the soul is virtue seen under its 
 own immortal skies. This sense also purifies the soul, and causes 
 it to throw out perishable motives from its constitution. And fur- 
 thermore makes it elastic, empowering it to change without losing 
 the identity that engirds it. For the soul becomes more and more 
 immortal. In the body it is immortal for a time ; out of the body, 
 for other states ; and so on with increment. But the deeper immor- 
 talities escape it until they are at hand, and hence faith comes in. 
 
 But our senses of duty and immortality are inconclusive unless 
 tbe fact be added to the sense, or unless that which is given in love 
 and feeling be true to the letter; that is to say, unless there be a 
 letter of revelation to enfranchise conscience in a real universe of 
 God. Divine Truth in the letter is this reality, apart from which 
 our faculties would be baseless visions ; for humanity can as little 
 exist without the spiritual world, as animals can exist without space. 
 But the oflice of the latter is, to contain and manifest the spirit. 
 And in order that we may dwell within it, it is like us in its form ; 
 plain also in its Gospel face, dark with brightness round its Apoca- 
 lyptic head, vocal to all souls in its Psalms, clothed with mystery 
 in its Prophecies ; and its feet being immovable, we do not see the 
 ground on which it stands. 
 
THE HUMAN BODY. 289 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 Hitherto we have contemplated the human body in parcels and 
 fractions, and have come gradually down into the world from the 
 brain to the skin, or from the centre to the circumference. We 
 have seen that the animation of the body depends upon the brain, 
 and comprises both a living motion, and a living eradiation of spirit 
 to every part of the system. We have seen that the force of the 
 body depends upon the lungs; that the play of life is brought about 
 by the breathing; that alternation by this way enters the frame, 
 gives it motion and rest, and makes it the instrument of an ever- 
 varying progress. We have seen that the renovation of the body 
 with substances made in its own image, comes from the heart, which 
 gives the organs a population of new individuals as the old elements 
 die out. We have seen that the field of preparation whereby aspir- 
 ing substances are fitted for citizenship, that is to say, whereby food 
 is assimilated, and converted into blood, is represented in the sto- 
 mach. Finally, that this motion and busy life, constant infusion of 
 new blood, and insatiable appropriation, has a government of its 
 own, yea, that it is a common government ; and this is represented 
 in the skin, which limits everything to its uses, and connects it to 
 its fellows. 
 
 In stating thus much we have the position that the human body 
 is a living, moving, substantial, enduring, inviolable subject. The 
 brain gives it life or ends, which are the lords and masters of 
 organization. The lungs give it motion, without which life would 
 be futile. The heart gives it substance, without which motion and 
 work would be impossible. The stomach gives it supplies, without 
 which, moving substance, subject to wear and tear, could not last. 
 And the skin gives new ends, or individuality, without which the 
 25 
 
290 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 whole would evaporate. Furthermore, the mind and muscles take 
 this visceral man into their ranks, give him wholeness of progress, 
 make every grain of his organization human, and stamp it with the 
 spiritual seals. 
 
 We may now go a step farther, to a closer truism, namely, that 
 the human body is alive. This is what we have been endeavoring 
 to prove by elaborate argumentations ! For science does not know 
 this fact with which its neighbors all round are acquainted, being 
 scarcely aware that there is any difference between a corpse and a 
 gentleman, or even that " all flesh is not the same flesh, but there 
 is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts." For to say 
 that the human body is alive, excludes animal life or beast body 
 from the subject, and in this light our truism is not recognized 
 in physiology. 
 
 We must, however, proceed from one truism to another, and 
 further affirm, that the living body is a man, with nothing in him but 
 humanity. We may illustrate this in many ways, for all things 
 preach it. For example, in crystallization, a salt that is broken 
 according to its cleavage, is still a perfect salt of that species ; the 
 smallest crystal is as properly the salt as the largest. What is the 
 corresponding cleavage of the human body ? We do not here 
 enter on the question of substantial separations, but of those of 
 thought, in which the cleavage is the representation of the whole in 
 the parts, of the laws of the body in its members, of humanity in 
 the organs and their elements. Take for instance a papilla of the 
 skin — in this we see a delicate nerve — there is its brain ; a minia- 
 ture system of blood-vessels — there is its heart ; contact with the 
 air and movements communicated from the breast — there is its 
 lung; imbibition of stuff from, and discharge of matter into the 
 atmosphere — there is its stomach : finally, it is part of the covering 
 of the body, and is itself covered with a particular vesture — there 
 is its skin. In this way the parts are integers of the whole, and 
 have both complete minds and bodies, and hence the whole is the 
 microscope that reveals them. Wholes, however, are relative to 
 greater integers of which they are the parts : the individual is a 
 little whole compared to the mind or progressive individual, whose 
 whole is a lifetime ; and this too is small compared with society, 
 
LIFE. 291 
 
 which covers continents, and lives for epochs. There are then in 
 the mind's optics vitreous substances of different degrees, which 
 magnify more and more. For example, the businesses of the great 
 world, the organs of the social man, are one power of lens with 
 which we peer into those of the individual man. Anthropology, or 
 the knowledge of races, with their large types, characters and 
 functions, are a still higher power, and the body under this glass 
 shows like a world of man, and a point in universal history. 
 Under the moral glass again the body is governed by miracle and 
 prophecy, and we look through the flesh as a gallery of new forms, 
 the plastic statues of the virtues. According to our eyes, we see 
 the human frame, either as a congeries of dots and molecules, as 
 children see the stars, or as an infinitesimal mankind, constituting 
 the smallest complete humanity, which is a single human body. 
 
 We are now on another landing on the stair of truisms, and wo 
 affirm that humanity is the greatest human body, and the likest of 
 all things to the least or individual body. It has its brains in those 
 who are the presiding influences of the social universe ; its lungs 
 are in those who are the practical intellect of the ages, and the 
 voice of truth to the world ) its heart is the thousandfold love that 
 carries the races to their goals, the poets whose bold blood licks up 
 toward heaven, and talks in tongue-like alphabets to our own ; its 
 belly is the whole schooling of mankind, all the men and means 
 that have ever grown up, that hunger arid thirst to receive infants 
 and savages, and convert them into angels. Its skin is in those who 
 are the bonds of their state, which are nothing more than the lines 
 and currents of the social freedom, but looked at from without as 
 decorous beauty, or inviolable law. In this organization, each mole- 
 cule is an individual man, the account of whose functions depends 
 upon the constitution of the whole. 
 
 So far it will be perceived, that life is the main clement of our 
 wants in physiology; which accords with common sense, for who 
 does not desire to be alive, and more alive, in whatever he does and 
 thinks ? Yet nothing has so much agitated our science, as that 
 which ought to be its greatest blessing — Life ; nothing has seemed 
 so much beyond it as that life which is the first perception of in- 
 fantine reason, and the joy of even the beasts and birds; nothing 
 
292 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 has thrown it into such peevish atheism, as that great plain gift 
 which we accept every moment from the Author of our being and 
 the Founder of our faith. They cruelly say that life is mysterious, 
 hut learned ignorance alone is mysterious : how can life be myste- 
 rious, when light is truth, and light and life are one ? 
 
 Let us look at our predicament physiologically, that we may see 
 where we stand, and what we have to do. The living body is the 
 field which we are to explore. What course are we obliged to take ? 
 We are compelled to dissect the dead : but does this give the infor- 
 mation which we seek ? Evidently not, for dead organs are the 
 antipodes of our quest. What is to be done, to raise the dead man, 
 and unbind his grave clothes? What divine voice shall cry to 
 physiology, " Lazarus, come forth ?" Life must be brought from 
 the living, from the quick body and mind ; also from the great 
 forum of men, which we call life par excellence. Tell us whither 
 else can we carry it into the sciences than from the mighty reser- 
 voirs of history and humanity ? Beyond a doubt it can only come 
 from where it is, that is to say, from the land of the living. 
 
 Here the question of life loses its mystery, and shines with 
 understanding by its own inherent effulgence. There are not two 
 lives, but one; not a human life here, and a physiological life 
 totally different there. That which is life in humanity, that which 
 is life in society, that which is life in persons, and in the moral 
 soul, is also life, and the only life, in the organs of the frame. 
 Ends, motives, passions, affections, likings, loves, virtues, are 
 human vitality, and there is none other. For what is our life, and 
 the measure of it ? What is our experience thereof ? What is it 
 that sets us in motion, and opens us for sensation ? Why do we 
 do anything, or think anything, or keep ourselves awake to feel 
 anything ? Most surely because our being lies in cherished ends, 
 in which success is delight, and delight the flaming of our lives. 
 Remove these ends, and we stare without seeing, and sit in corners 
 with hideous apathy and indecorum, miserably disheveled and 
 vegetalized ; for life has nothing to do, and is taking its departure : 
 as in the Metamorphosis we are growing into trees, and the needy 
 soil shall swallow us. 
 
 Apply this to the body and its parts, and we find that the ends 
 
ENDS ARE LIFE. 293 
 
 which it subserves in the order of things, are its animating 
 principles. They are not abstractions, but spirits embodied in 
 works. They are not fluids, or solids, but human uses incarnate. 
 Above or beyond these there is no life in us ; but whatever is use- 
 ful or endful, God is with it, and that is its only life. If you look 
 for the life of friend or brother, it is the stature of himself work- 
 ing in his daily calling : no one part of him, but all parts and the 
 whole, kindling as he moves round his orbit of ends, into more 
 than the whole. Life is man and whatever is manly ; humanity 
 itself in the fire and work of development ; it is incapable of dis- 
 section, for it never can be seen but in play; whence the end of 
 anatomy is, to show that man cannot be anatomized. The desidera- 
 tum is, to see each portion of the body united with the whole in its 
 uses, when the life of the whole will come to the parts, and sum- 
 mon them to live. After which, that thing so often mentioned, 
 and so little conceived, namely, human anatomy as distinct from 
 cadaverous, will begin ; for the life of our lungs and liver is as 
 inalienably human, as the life of Shakspeare, or of the English 
 nation. And then, moreover, the science of the body will lose its 
 grossness, for the moral and spiritual powers will have their ana- 
 logues in every chamber of the organs, and cleanness and chastity 
 will be busy maids among the useful furnitures of the flesh. 
 
 If life consists in ends, there is a soul to entertain them ; and 
 wants and desires imply mankind beforehand. For we assume the 
 soul, as also the existence of an imperishable humanity. It is a 
 venerable creed, like a dawn on the peaks of thought, reddening 
 their snows from the light of another sun — the substance of imme- 
 morial religions, the comfort of brave simplicity, but the doubt of to- 
 day, and the abyss of terrified science. Let it come, however, scien- 
 tifically, in the ghastliness of hypothesis, and let us work with it, 
 and see what it is worth; and treating the question of life under that 
 formula, let us proceed to the connection between the whole and the 
 part, or between the body and the soul. 
 
 This is another branch of the same problem, which bewilders 
 speculation, because we go away from the meaning of human life, 
 thinking to attain to some indescribable life separate from our na- 
 ture. As we said when speaking of life, so we repeat in this new 
 
 9** 
 
294 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 field, that there are not two kinds of connections, one physiological, 
 the other human, but the connections that we form in our daily walks 
 are the types of those of the sciences. 
 
 The question may be divided for convenience sake into two heads; 
 namely, 1. Why is the connection between the soul and the body 
 effected? And 2. How does it take place? 
 
 First, for the Why? We answer to this, that the soul is con- 
 nected with the body for the same reason as we are connected with 
 the persons, objects, and circumstances that surround us, and which 
 answer to our wants and interests. In a similar manner the body 
 answers to the wants of the soul (p. 242 — 244), being the soul's 
 wife, the soul's friend, the soul's house, the soul's office, the soul's 
 universe. It is engaged to the service of the soul ; shapen into use- 
 fulness by the soul's ministrations. As the hand shapes the pen, 
 and then writes with it, so the soul forms the body, and then makes 
 use of the properties resulting from the form. The connection be- 
 tween the soul and the body is not more mysterious than the con- 
 nection between the pen-maker and the pen, excepting that our know- 
 ledge of the pen is so much more complete than our knowledge of 
 the body. A science of the body, had we such, that displayed its 
 uses, or its specific fitness to serve the soul, would as evidently give 
 the motives of the attachment of the soul to the body, as the capa- 
 bilities of the pen account for its connection with the fingers of the 
 ready writer. In both cases it is the bond of service, of liking, of 
 utility; for to intelligent life what other connecting principle is pos- 
 sible? If this is too simple for philosophers, still it is the ground 
 of every connection they themselves form with man or thing. 
 
 For the purpose of breaking abstruseness from the argument, let 
 us look upon the natural body as the well furnished house, the ad- 
 mirable circumstance and worldly fortune of the soul. Then, steadily 
 regarding the soul as the man, something like the following analo- 
 gical discourse may result from this point of view, in which we take 
 our stand inwards, to gain distance for the object. 
 
 The soul being the man or real body, the natural body represents 
 the appliances and arts of life, whether economic or Aesthetic. The 
 eye is its window, telescope, microscope, and answers to the series 
 of means that transparent substance lends to vision, and which arc 
 
CONNECTION OF SOUL WITH BODY. 295 
 
 as curious and exquisite for their appearance as they are excellent 
 for use: for the eye receives the finest impressions from things, and 
 gives the finest expressions from the soul. So likewise the ear is 
 the hearing-trumpet of the real body, which would otherwise be deaf 
 to the music of nature ; it embraces all the means of reverberation, 
 whether in the free air, or of cheerful voices from household ceiling 
 and walls, or of stately sounds from the long-drawn aisle and fretted 
 vault : in short, both the whole instrumentality and the whole archi- 
 tecture of sound. But the nose is to the real body the prophecy of 
 devices that have not yet entered into arts; full as it is of mem- 
 branous parterres and vacant aviaries for odors ; for hitherto, aromas 
 are but casual visitants ; they come and go in brief seasons with the 
 fitful winds, and where is the vessel that can hold them ; hence the 
 nose of flesh is deficient in circumstance, and we can only identify it 
 somewhat barbarously as the scent bottle of the real nose. To pass 
 over the other senses, we find that the legs are the outward art of 
 locomotion, from passive to active; from the nails of the toes to the 
 wheel of the knee and the globe of the hip; in short from the walk- 
 ing-stick to the railroad; the real body uses them in nature, whether 
 as the staff of its lowliness, or the means of its swiftness, or the 
 equipage of its pride ; they are the columns of movement ; the rich 
 soul's carriage, and the poor soul's crutches. But the arms and 
 hands are all the finer machineries or inventions that are wielded 
 directly by the arms and hands of the soul; they are the pen and 
 the sword; the instrument of many strings; strength and manipu- 
 lation in their bearings; in short, the mechanics of intelligence, 
 whereby nice conveniences of truth are gathered in the dwelling of 
 the soul. Then the abdomen is its kitchen, preparing from all 
 things in its indefinite stores one universal dish — even the blood of 
 life, to be served in repasts for the spiritual man ; the viand of viands, 
 varying from hour to hour, and suited with more than mathematic 
 truth to the appetite and constitution of the eater. Then again the 
 chest distributes with a power of wisdom dictated from the halls 
 above, this blood, the daily bread and wine of the body of the soul, 
 and the wisdom that ordained, enters the feast, and it becomes a 
 living entertainment. And the brain is the steward and keeper of 
 the animated house, receiving order and law from the soul or brain- 
 
296 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 rnan, and transplanting them into its mundane economy. Yea, and 
 " the brain is its natural universe, its wide spread landscapes, its illi- 
 mitable ocean, its royal library, studio, theatre, church, and what- 
 ever else is a place of universal light and contemplation. And lastly, 
 the skin is the dress of the soul in every kind, convenient, beautiful, 
 official; and it is also the very mansion itself; for our houses are 
 but the largest suits, admitting our domestic movements. 
 
 By this artifice of holding out our bodies before us, we illustrate 
 in a plain way, the connection or correspondence between the soul 
 and the body; and though there be other motives of connection, it is 
 sufficient to remark for the present, that by the foregoing signs, it 
 is because the body is so replete with exquisite convenience, that it 
 is the domestic establishment of the soul. Given a tenement of 
 the kind, so royal with apparatus, and it is impossible that the soul 
 to whose wants it answers, should not live in it, and use, that is to 
 say, animate it. If the soul were not a tenant on such invitation, 
 it would be stupider than the birds and beasts, which are drawn by 
 far lesser affinities to their own convenient lairs. 
 
 Let us now reverse the picture, and suppose for the argument's 
 sake, that a savage is introduced for the first time into one of our 
 convenient mansions, and knows the use of neither table or chair, 
 knife or fork, bed or carriage, washing or lodging; but his naked 
 body and unarmed hand have been accustomed to rude fellowship or 
 direct fight with nature. Can he account for the connection of the 
 civilized man with his house ? By no means. Unhoused body that 
 he is, we see in him a type of those who cannot conceive the bond 
 between spirit and nature, because they know nothing of the wants 
 of spirit, or of the uses of nature to spirit. At first, then, the 
 savage cannot divine why his civilized brother limits himself to a 
 house, because he is uninformed of the good of a house, and not 
 prepared for information. As, however, his wants grow, and he 
 learns the uses of the furniture, and the proper mode of employing 
 it, the motives and points of connection come forth one by one ; 
 and when all the uses are understood, then for the first time he 
 understands both the reason and mode of the permanent act of in- 
 habitation. 
 
 So it is with the body and the soul. The physiological savage 
 
CONNECTION OF SOUL WITH BODY. 297 
 
 (we beg his pardon) knows nothing of the body as a correspondent 
 or furnished abode, but only as a strange looking exception to wild 
 nature, an affront to the wilderness, and how then should he see its 
 connection with an owner or a soul ? For the uses of things are 
 the reasons why they are used. And hence the perception of the 
 connection of nature with spirit, is the exact counterpart of the 
 perception of the spiritual uses of nature. To see the one is to see 
 the other, as to miss the one is to miss the other also. 
 
 A word now respecting the second point, or the mode in which 
 the connection is effected. 
 
 When we speak of the connection between the body and the soul, 
 we are apt at first to think, that it is a single link or act; but this 
 is an insufficient conception. There are as many different modes of 
 connection as there are wants in the soul, and organs, parts and par- 
 ticles in the body. There are as many different modes as there are 
 possible species of contact in the great and the little creation. The 
 soul is connected in one way with the brain, in another with the 
 lungs, in another with the heart, in another with the belly, again 
 in another with the skin. To make this clear, recur to the house 
 and its furniture. The inhabitant owns everything contained in it. 
 Upon one piece of furniture he reclines, upon another he sits, at 
 another he writes, upon others he treads ; some contain his viands, 
 some delight him with harmonious sounds, and some look down from 
 his walls, and gratify him by arts and proportions ; and with all 
 these, and many more, he is connected. Now in each case it is the 
 shape, make, form, or properties whereby the thing serves its pur- 
 pose, that is the means of his connection with it. If he sits at his 
 desk, it is because it is such or such a structure, and serves him for 
 reading and writing ; he never makes a mistake of sitting for these 
 purposes at his coal-skuttle. Apply this to the body, and we find 
 that its dweller uses every implement there also according to its 
 form. The reverent soul kneels in the knees, because they are 
 natural kneelers. The inquiring soul peers through the eyes, for 
 they are born windows. The make of the organ is the handle 
 whereby the inner man grasps and uses it. Our business therefore 
 is, to show the motives for which the soul affects the body, by de- 
 monstrating the deeds that the body performs for the soul; and it 
 
298 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 is our further province to show the manner in which the soul lays 
 hold of the body in different parts, by explaining the precise me- 
 chanism whereby the useful deeds are done. The whole is a matter 
 of facts, too full for speculation. 
 
 This connection of soul with body is no chaining of the living to 
 the dead, like the horrid punishments of old times, but it is the live 
 man freely working with the finest tools of nature, the chief musician 
 in continual play upon the choicest instrument of music. Moreover 
 as the soul goes beyond the circumference, and returns into itself, 
 so it includes the body, and takes it back with it alive; the immortal 
 confers his own life upon his mortal bride : there is a reciprocal con- 
 nection of the body and the soul, and that wondrous house is the 
 model faery-land : the bells ring of their own accord at the time of 
 the master's volition; the chairs dance into their places for the 
 guests; the harp and the player understand each other, and sweet 
 touches of no violence are simultaneous with delicious sounds rising 
 upwards to the listening soul. There is not only connection but 
 consent. As to freedom, the relation is permanent, but liberal. 
 There is ample space between soul and body, as between friend and 
 friend, and yet the ever- varying bond is all the closer, being founded 
 upon the interests of each, which have room for play in the wide 
 interval between them. 
 
 This same problem of connection occurs wherever a higher system 
 is united to a lower. The connection of nerve with muscle, or with 
 vessel, is as inscrutable to the physiologist, as that of the soul with 
 the body, to the philosopher. A sight immersed in the muscle would 
 as little find the nerve, as our incarnate eyes can see the spirit land. 
 Here, as in the larger case, it is the dependence of uses and forms 
 that makes the connection : the body is a whole, because its parts 
 are chains of correspondencies. There is no glue between the 
 organs, but they are always loving each other, and always using 
 each other. No wonder they cohere. Birds of a feather flock to- 
 gether, and likeness and liking are the gold wedding ring of the 
 universe. 
 
 The cosmical relations of the body proceed upon the law, that 
 the body is the form of the soul, according to the order of the uni- 
 
COSMICAL RELATIONS OF THE BODY. 299 
 
 verse. That is to say, as the plant grows by the unfolding of the 
 seed, according to the climate and soil, so the body grows from its 
 own ensouled seed, according to its soil and clime, which are the 
 mundane system. The soul commences with the commencement of 
 nature, and flies down, weaving and constructing, through all her 
 kingdoms. The brain is the home that it makes on its own plan, 
 of the solar fires, and the brain is the soul of the body anew, and 
 the sun of the microcosm; the principles of the world are the beams 
 of its chambers, and it lives like the eagle unharmed in the glory 
 of its native pavilion. The nerves are the next construction of the 
 dramatic soul, where it brings the imponderable forces and fluids 
 into a beaten highroad of human life, making ether and magnetism 
 into pathways for the processions of thought and will; for the 
 nerves are the horses of the sun, which carry out the decrees of the 
 revolving brain from the east to the west, and from the morning to 
 the evening, of the microcosm. Next the soul is victor of the air, and 
 poised amid the whirling winds, she knits their filmy stuffs into obe- 
 dience; and lo ! a fabric huge rises like an exhalation — it is the lungs, 
 the temple of xEolus, the shrine of the powers of the air. There 
 is the first house of liberty, the free place of elections, the Campus 
 Martins of the understanding. Accordingly the breathing lungs 
 are the barometer that indicate the peace, or the power, or the storm, 
 of the soul : all the passions swing and swim, and find their golden 
 liberty, in that aerial sea : there they rock, and waft, and sail, in 
 gilded barge, or pompous balloon, or happy skiff, or dark boats of 
 Erebus. But the progress continues. The work of ensoulment is 
 carried on through the animal, the vegetable and the mineral. The 
 heart and viscera are the stations of the soul in these uttermost 
 regions. The abdominal organs are the garden with its trees and 
 inhabitants, where bread and salt, fruit and flesh, are presented to 
 the soul; and the heart is the animal man himself, the sovereign of 
 the tribes, appropriating their tributes, and making the body an as- 
 semblage of the universals of the earth. Then, as nature moves by 
 immense attractions from space to space, or is always making new 
 spaces, and worlds to populate them, so the soul will do the like; 
 and out of the moving mechanism of things she builds the limbs of 
 human kind, which are as a new liberty; and the legs are the be- 
 
300 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 ginning of all progress, and the arms, of all secondary creations 
 or arts. But from the extreme of nature — from the boundaries of 
 death, there is something to come that nature can never bestow, and 
 that something is sensation — the vital hoop which girdles the body, 
 and separates it for a season from the universe. Hence at the outer 
 gate of nature life again breaks forth in joyful resurrection; unab- 
 sorbed, unextinguished, the Maker is not exhausted, but is greater 
 for his work. For the soul running downwards from the brain to 
 the skin, never ending in the end begins anew, and reattaches death 
 to life by the standing wonder of the fivefold senses. So where the 
 formative soul ends, the conscious soul or the man begins — viz., 
 with the senses, as the basis, clothing and incentive of the will and 
 understanding. And as the soul descended, the senses reascend, the 
 same grand staircase of kingdoms. Touch, taste and smell are the 
 living mineral, vegetable and animal; and hearing is a new-born 
 palace of the air, whose shakes are music, and its winds are speech. 
 And the eye, round like the world, and rolling on its axis, communes 
 afresh with the whole possessions of light, and sees all from the sun 
 to the landscape in the gloss of that glory which is an image of the 
 truth. 
 
 We now come directly to the human form, the stature of our souls, 
 and the vessel of our lives; and here we quit the anatomical, and 
 enter upon the integral sciences; nay, we also quit the body, so far 
 as it is material, and additional to the form. 
 
 The human form is the image of God; for "God made man in 
 his own image, in the image of God created He him," and man is 
 a living human form. And the Creator Himself, as the archetype 
 of the creature, is a divine man, or a divinely human form. Ac- 
 cordingly God's revealed faces are such as man apprehends by his 
 own mind and likeness; as it is said, the Maker of all is "King of 
 kings, and Lord of lords j" and again in the new covenant, God is 
 "our Father in the heavens." And this way of speaking, accom- 
 modated to our nature, involves no compromise, but the divine truth 
 that man, the image of God, can know God by his constitution. 
 
 The Word, in which God comes to man, or makes human revela- 
 tion of himself, reveals man to his real body, or shows the manhood 
 
THE IMAGE OF GOD. 301 
 
 of the soul. For angels and spirits, who are souls, are brought to 
 us by the Bible in the human form. Heaven also, the holy city, 
 which lieth four-square, has the same stamp, being "according to 
 the measure of a man, that is, of the angel." By this apocalypse 
 we are among brethren in every world, and we know that their hu- 
 manity is distinct according to the eminence of their form. 
 
 Here occurs another field of subsidiary revelations ; for the world 
 (not the skeptical but the real world) is complete in cases wherein 
 parted souls reappear to us, and show us that the human form is 
 not meet for death : and even when intangible to the grosser man, 
 still the form stands before his eyes, because its very colors are im- 
 mortal. 
 
 To turn from what is revealed to what is perceived, the eye opened 
 by revelation is the eye also of reason, which now sees the same om- 
 niprevalence of the human form divine. Our thoughts of God are 
 thoughts of an infinite humanity : the love and wisdom counted for 
 all manliness, are attributed to our Creator by the very brightness 
 of our minds. Whenever reason shines and becomes half angelic 
 it talks humanities of the living God. The mind is constructed for 
 revelation, and its functions of loving and thinking, once opened, 
 flow according to the truth of divine things, as the body when launch- 
 ed into the world in breathing, falls in with the laws of the world in 
 rearing its own constitution. It is not easy to discriminate between 
 the gift and the giver, but in the better faculty, perception is re- 
 vealed, and revelation is perceived, and our powers are properly our 
 own, v>hcn we own that they are of God; for in the soul the claim 
 of private property abrogates the possibility of possession. The re- 
 sult is that thought is necessarily directed to the God of Revelation, 
 whom understanding and affection meet; i. c, to a divine human- 
 ity : in the case of our fellows, to a soul of which the body is the 
 counterpart, i. e., to a soul in the human form : and with those who 
 have left our world, still to human souls and shapes, to whom " he' 7 
 and " she," and the like pronouns of our love apply. 
 
 Let us register here, that the body of man is the anchor of these 
 
 perceptions, and attaches to every contemplation of the human form. 
 
 For body is the exigence of spirit, the partner of its love and the 
 
 throne of its power. And though God be not as we, it is not our 
 
 26 
 
302 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 form that we cast to view him, but the imperfections of our form, 
 which as we put them off, the form becomes more sincerely human, 
 and likens nearer to the truth. Hence the way to a divine percep- 
 tion is the rejection of our inhumanity. Moreover by a connection 
 that none can repeal, the man of the senses is married to him of the 
 soul, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. In thought also, 
 every idea has a form, every form has a shape, every shape has a 
 body, every body is a substance; and to sum up all by the same 
 fact, human truth is incarnate. Thus the human form implies the 
 shape of the body, but ninefold flexible, or drawn into perfections 
 of which flesh and blood are but the footstool. 
 
 On this subject we say further, that disembodiment is hateful to 
 man, and the fear of death itself, apart from the love of life, arises 
 from our ignorance that the dead are men. No wonder that we 
 shudder with all our life beside a brink where philosophers teach 
 us that the human form is wrecked. It were weakness not to shrink 
 from the loss of that which is the instrument of all our power. For 
 whatever is strong tends to incarnation. An energetic purpose is 
 at once in the arms and hands, and emboldens their play : whoso 
 crosses it, finds that its missionary is never such tough matter as 
 when his spirit is behind him and within him. A lively thought 
 calls up image after image, and is embodied at once; if the images 
 will not come, there is an end of the thought. A will not only 
 rushes into the muscular system, which is a battalion of arms and 
 limbs, but it rifles resistance for hardness, and plucks out the teeth 
 from steel and stone, to make fresh bellies of strength. A high 
 contemplation in the soul, begins to see heaven only with the up- 
 turned eyes, and to pray in the body as soon as the contemplation 
 is full. A soul is no sooner projected than it begins to build a body 
 for itself. Thus strength clasps and presses body, to beget works 
 as children. Impotence on the other hand engenders with abstrac- 
 tion, and prating philosophies come. 
 
 In returning from this digression, we next meet that activity of 
 mind which begins to work upon the two worlds of spirit and mat- 
 ter with native conceptions of its own. This is the poesy of know- 
 ledge, the sense of nature and things which is born of human reli- 
 gions. And it affirms the personality of its objects ; not only of men 
 
HUMANITY RULES THE SCIENCES. 303 
 
 and women, but of flowers and horses, stars and streams : and dwells 
 upon them fondly, as if they were in its own sense alive. The 
 childhood of races as well as individuals is so vital and full-blooded 
 that it looks on the world and all it contains as a land of the living. 
 With no permission of afterthought, it deems and imagines struc- 
 turally, and its organization is the mould in which every conception 
 runs. It believes that it is enfranchized, not limited by brains; 
 and it knows that departure from these leads to nothing but folly 
 and confusion ; space and matter, irrespective of man, are silly mon- 
 sters which it does not heed ; so flimsy that thought goes through 
 them as if there was nothing there. For the rest, the prime method 
 of humanity is, trust to the topness of the human head. Those 
 who belong to this method, send forth words that feed on time, 
 which feeds on all other things : words which already play with 
 everlasting flowers over the grave of many philosophies that have 
 been impertinent to the human form. 
 
 We note then, among the first natures of our minds, the concep- 
 tion that there is an architectural human life among the beams and 
 rafters of the world; which conception is the ancester of science; 
 the natural loins of truth out of which come all the families of the 
 adult understanding : and we hold, that to repulse this nature is to 
 be brutal to the mighty mother, to bastardize knowledge, to begin 
 the sciences nowhere, to expect to find by starting without looking, 
 and, in fine, to select impossibility as the arena of our struggles. 
 The attempt has been made in the inductive sciences, and with what 
 success is known. Phenomena and their laws are the recognized 
 objects of these sciences; substances and causes are reckoned spuri- 
 ous : hollowness and superficiality are thus become the postulates 
 of knowledge. Yet causes are past exorcism, and science runs into 
 chronic " goose-skin" before these, its self-constituted foes. But 
 why has science been so successful ? In the first place, it only half 
 succeeds when it sees nothing but the matter and none of the mind 
 of nature, for in this case, its use is culinary, and not educational. 
 For what can a world of shadows, and rules of shadows, have to do 
 with God who is a substance, and with man who is a substance too? 
 There is no real instruction in formulas, however well they answer 
 to facts, unless one knows why the facts come under the formulas : 
 
304 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 otherwise man is a child in a despotic father's house, who never 
 knows the wisdom or rationale of the father's actions : the actions 
 go on with blind strokes like toothed wheels in a factory; and the 
 only lesson is, to keep out of the way of this ponderous and remorse- 
 less nature. On the other hand, instruction, such as heart can love, 
 and memory remember, arises in proportion as we see that the ex- 
 ternal world is nothing but humane ordinances, and that suns are 
 central, systems revolve, plants grow and fire burns, in the interest, 
 and as the vehicles, of a Divine Mind, which is the archetype of our 
 own. To explore God's purposes is the first thought of man ; and 
 to find why God acts in such ways, shapes and properties, is equiva- 
 lent to finding the wisdom of the world. The laws and formulas 
 of things are but new spelling books of this deeper and earlier con- 
 sideration. 
 
 But in the second place, where science succeeds, it is because it 
 cannot throw away its heirlooms — its instincts of the humanity of 
 nature — but applies them to the enucleation of natural truth. For 
 law, rule, phenomena, order and succession, are cerebral humanities, 
 which we get from things and give to things, because we have brains. 
 Where would law be in our conceptions, if no legislator or lawyer 
 had existed among mankind? Where would phenomena be found, 
 if there were no eyes ? Where is our order, when the mind is deli- 
 rious or in disorder ? And where succession, unless time be ticking 
 in ourselves? These dim ideas as much imply humanity as the 
 most carnal Sagas of the mythologies. We equally palm ourselves 
 upon things in averring that they obey law, as when we imagine, in 
 prattling childhood, that the flowers hold speeeh with each other, or 
 that falling waters are moulded into veils and scarfs by the limbs of 
 the Naiads. A Franklin, bottling electricity with the knowing air 
 of a butler, and " calculating" how many dozen the skyey tun will 
 run, is as little emancipated from mannerisms as the poor Norseman 
 of fifteen centuries back, who hears Thor hammering in the thunder- 
 clap, and sees the brightness of the vengeance of the same God when 
 lightning stripes the night with terror. The axioms of Euclid are 
 as incurably human as the fairies and elves. So the difference be- 
 tween modern science and old Myth is not that the one is disem- 
 bodied and absolute, and the other fettered to the flesh; but that in 
 
THE MIND IS A MAN. 305 
 
 science some cerebral dot, according to the age, sets up for monarch, 
 whereas in myth the whole man, all dots included, is tremblingly 
 alive to the existence in nature of some living God or Gods, whom 
 he approaches according to his revelations. 
 
 Let us, then, rid ourselves of the blur, that man is limited by 
 being a man; when the reverse is true, that what cramps him is, 
 that he is not a man. The human form is emancipation from the 
 prison-house of the inferior creatures. Each man is indeed limited 
 as a man, but manhood itself is a ladder of infinites. 
 
 The mind, as we have anticipated, is in the human form. For 
 it is in every part of the body, co-extensive and co-intensive with 
 the organism. This is only to say that we are conscious of our- 
 selves. As the eye sees the human form of its owner, the mind sees 
 and feels its own human form, though in its own peculiar way. We 
 are solid statues of consciousness of just the size of the bodily frame. 
 This is self-evident when it is not dwelt upon too much. For as 
 there are objects that the eye is meant to see very seldom — viz., the 
 face and person of him who carries the eye, so there are truths which 
 the mind, unless full of the looking-glass, regards but for a moment, 
 and then leaves them — viz., self-consciousness and its bodily form. 
 Each cursory glance of- this kind finds the mind in the human shape. 
 Whence we know that the sciences and subjects of the mind are 
 part and parcel of the same constitution.* 
 
 As for the passions, poetry embodies them in personal lives, but 
 not before experience has well concluded that they are the humani- 
 ties of their own order. Passions are men, women, or children. 
 Imagine rage, if you can, without starting eye-balls ; or love of 
 power, without commanding eyes and hands. Think of eagerness 
 without legs. Fancy the repose of a being who has nothing to sit 
 upon; the intelligence of one without an eye; the joy of one with- 
 out a face ; the tenderness of one without heart or bowels. The 
 residuum, after every conceivable amputation of the kind, is a philoso- 
 
 * If, however, the vanity of reflection be indulged in too much, philosophy at 
 first sees nothing but its own pretty face in the mirror, and then as it is an intel- 
 lectual person, it concentrates itself on its own obverse eyes, and falling (by the 
 laws of hypnotism) into reverie, it finds plainly enough, from the ground of its 
 own state, that the mind (i, e., its mind) is nothing at all. 
 
 26* 
 
306 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 phical angel. "A footless stocking without a leg," was the Irish- 
 man's definition of nothing : it is the metaphysicians' definition of 
 the soul. On the other hand, to common sense, every passion has 
 all our parts. If the painter delineates love, it is by a beaming coun- 
 tenance, by clasping hands, by open arms, by beating heart, by flush- 
 ing cheeks, by a bending and inclining form : or if the sculptor will 
 show you duty, its white marble is a cheerful severity of brow, hand 
 and frame, and a steadfastness as of limbs in the axis of the poles of 
 the heavens. Moreover, the typical features which the imagination 
 summons, run like light to fetch the rest ; they have a creative call 
 to form the remainder of the body. So that when the mind sees 
 the sparkling eye and elevating smile of joy, it next, from these foci, 
 sees the face as their radiant firmament ; and the lifted arms and 
 lifting legs, and the jocund body, come after more slowly, until the 
 stature is there, and the joy, like its artist, is a man. But if any 
 part of the body is missing, a letter is left out of the word, and the 
 creative power has not spelt it. All this shows that the mind 
 imagines the passions structurally, according to the form that they 
 have when in play.* 
 
 The same applies to the intellect, when described not in its effects 
 but in itself. To the mind's eye, it at once assumes the lofty brow 
 and high conversing glance, and thereafter its incarnation proceeds 
 by rapid stages. Here again the central features are first struck; 
 but no sooner are brow and eye on the disk, than they call forth their 
 brethren of the frame and mood, for they all belong to intelligence 
 — the clever nose, the receptive fastidious mouth, the slanted open 
 ear, the considering vibrative head, the awaiting arms, the balancing 
 body, the movable feet, stationary but changeful. All these come 
 part by part from the land of the human form, drawn thither by in- 
 telligence itself with the magnet of the eye. In this case, what we 
 take for abstraction is the centre separated from the rest of the 
 body, and held forcibly apart ; for violence is needed to hold asunder 
 
 * On this subject see further, An Essay upon the Ghost-Belief of Shalspeare, 
 by Alfred Rofle, 8vo., London, 1851. In this admirable performance we have 
 the first beginning of a study of Shakspeare, not according to reasoning and criti- 
 cism, but according to fact and nature. It cheers me to have such a mind as this 
 courageous author's with me, in these untrodden paths. 
 
THE MIND IS A MAN. 307 
 
 elements which so love each other, and rush together, as do the parts 
 of man. Pale philosophy, indeed, has attempted to draw a sharp 
 cut of spells between the round pellucid intellect, and the face of 
 which it is the jewel. But as it sits in its dissecting-room with plate- 
 fuls of human eyes before it, we recognize in the amount of its 
 victims the exact number of its failures. 
 
 We might pursue this thread of truth through every other faculty ; 
 and we should then record, that goodness, virtue, honor, bravery, 
 industry, and all the names that we revere, are man and the organs 
 of man, and that out of him and his they are nothing. But it is 
 enough to indicate one or two cases, for these, as the eyes and fore- 
 head of the rest, bring with them the predicates entire of the human 
 world, and marshal them into its form. We now, then, pass on to 
 the sciences, to notice their impartial teaching in spheres where man 
 seems to cease, and to be environed by apparently intractable, that 
 is to say, inhuman forms. 
 
 It is not necessary to have recourse to any ideal state of the 
 sciences; but their present condition serves to show, that humanity 
 by its principles extends through the realms of beasts and fishes, 
 herbs and stones, and even through winds and the fluid worlds. For 
 the instinct of science in all these departments, drills their subjects 
 with reference to order, the ends of which order are, mind in the one 
 case and matter in the other — mind, the intellectual plenum of the 
 human form — and matter, the stages of nature that lead from her 
 deadness up to that life which is the perfect man. The schemes of 
 the atheists are obedient to this roll-call, for otherwise they would 
 not cohere into schemes ; their vile scientific cunning can exist on 
 no other terms. The difference between them and the religious 
 world is, that they have the task of making man out of the ground 
 by their own dust-strife, whereas the others hold that he is ready 
 made out of that very dust by the breath of Jehovah God : but in 
 both cases the dust is recognized as a fit material for building into 
 the plan of the human form. There is then an admitted reference 
 of the dust to man, and this, when put by experience through its 
 degrees, constitutes the order of the sciences. 
 
 With regard to the organic sciences, the case is clear : their aim 
 
308 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 is, to range living beings in a scale of which man is the head, and 
 to set down the lower animals as extended cases of the human 
 type. "The animal kingdom/' says Oken, "is man disintegrated." 
 Comparative anatomy is the anatomy of the beasts compared to that 
 of man. Take the animal forms one by one, and their likeness 
 does not perhaps clearly shine inwards to their chief, but group 
 them severally upon the order of the mind, which is science; and 
 unlikeness travels into likeness as they approach the human goal. 
 As in languages a word shall seem alien to its root, but track it 
 through a number of kindreds and tongues, and the links are sup- 
 plied that connect it with its source, and draw it from its parental 
 stem. So man is the word to which this social science of compara- 
 tive anatomy leads up the forms of animal life, and Adam still in 
 this way gives all living things their names. 
 
 This is better the case with natural history, which leaves dead 
 bones and ghoul sciences to become acquainted with animals at home 
 in their gayeties and enjoyments. The portraits of man are so close 
 here, that the naturalist associates with his pets, and a White of 
 Selbourne can spend a long day with his swallows, Huber with his 
 bees, Wilson with his acarus fotticulorum, and Swammerdam with 
 his snails. Moreover, we judge the animals by our own standards 
 of pleasure and pain, attribute to them a part of our metaphysics 
 (would they took them all) ; and assign them natural virtues and 
 vices for which they are responsible with their lives. We also 
 reverse the case, and feel no inappropriateness in giving our brethern 
 animal names, making a comparative natural history out of the 
 eccentricities of man; for we have human asses, geese, pigs, foxes, 
 tigers, monkeys, peacocks; nay, in some cases we qualify humanity 
 by an animal color; as when we say that an innocent person is a 
 lamb; a gentle beauty, a dove; or a heroic man, a lion: which 
 shows well the sliding scale from man to nature, in the easy projec- 
 tion of ideals into these distant but beautiful types. The symbol- 
 ism of the Bible makes animals thus expressive. It is impossible 
 not to interpret them by our own faculties, though reason knows 
 that the faculties between the two are not the same but analogous. 
 But the interpretation holds all the better; for it embraces the 
 animal fact, plus an intellect that enlightens it. This is one fnnc- 
 
HUMANITY IN THE ANIMALS. 309 
 
 tion of man in his social universe — to give his life away to beast, 
 plant and stone, and raise them into company for his mind : a func- 
 tion like the Creator's, who makes all quasi-ihmgs into substances, 
 mere substances into minds, and unites the world and men to him- 
 self by nothing peculiar to them, but by the golden links of his 
 own merciful attributions. Imputing the higher to the lower is 
 therefore hearty truth running Godwards, or the process by which 
 universes are made and kept. Hence it is our duty to give the 
 stones a tongue, and to cover it with all the runes of our own elo- 
 quence and wisdom. . . . Furthermore, there is common companion- 
 ship of men with animals, and duties from him to them, which 
 duties have the significant name of humanity, as though the humane 
 man recognized his species wherever life was seen. And according 
 to the materialist, this is true to the very mire ; for they deem that 
 there is no difference between men and beasts but the want of speech 
 in the latter, and the absence of tails in the former; which shows 
 a strong dirty perception on their part of the oneness of principle 
 prevading life : a principle which if sought at the head — for in the 
 matter of the tail they admit unlikeness — resolves itself into the 
 prevalence of man. Again, man never falls below himself, but 
 animality receives him with open arms : " nemo unquam repente fuit 
 turpissimus :" on the road to moral death, before the descender is 
 as dead as a stone, he runs through the beast properties, transmut- 
 ing form and feature right down the devil's ark, and at last crawls, 
 serpentwise and toadwise, into his chasm and block of a thousand 
 years. And lastly the animals, to conclude their manly participa- 
 tions, are many of them direct and even domestic servants of man- 
 kind: they share our lot, of poverty and riches, good and evil, 
 civilization and savagery: they become honest, or sly, according to 
 the rule of their master's house; showing that they are willing 
 fellows. And as the domestication decreases by degrees, and 
 embraces main generic heads, the whole animal kingdom may be 
 grouped about us from this principle, either in the way of friends 
 or foes; and thus approve a human reference of this close kind, co- 
 extensive with natural history. 
 
 The science of plants falls under humanity for similar but lower 
 reasons to that of the animals. For their natural history is di- 
 
310 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 gested into botany, in which they assume order, classes, species, and 
 families; and the order is subject to that of the kingdoms them- 
 selves, and included within it. But being a vegetative or growing 
 order, and not an animal or moving order, it does not travel to man, 
 but enters into him by his own choice. Hence the uses of the plants 
 are their chief human relations. For the plants, like factory men, 
 begin to feed and clothe us; they spin our cottons in vegetable 
 Manchesters, and are the looms of looms, in which the Arkwrights 
 of the sap and pod herald and provoke the Arkwrights of the mill. 
 In this kingdom there are all things not made with hands, in pre- 
 paration for all similars to be made with hands, and this again in 
 earnest of a new growth in heaven, where all things not made with 
 hands again appear. And the more good science we bring to bear, 
 the more humane do the plants become ; in other words, we find 
 that they are altogether useful, that is to say, grow towards us; 
 until at length we see all the trees as one tree, whose fruits are good 
 for food, and its leaves for medicine. More remotely, plants are 
 our anatomical brethren ; they have sap like blood, and leaves like 
 lungs, skin and limbs, and roots of stomachs also, each of their own 
 order. They also have seed and progency, and in their green ambi- 
 tion, they tend to people all earths, and to build airy castles like 
 our own, raising up the soil on their hods in wooden galleries to the 
 clouds. Moreover they are symbolical, or humane to our sentiments, 
 with which they easily tremble and glow ; and in the same light 
 they are biblical, or humane to the divine, leading him from para- 
 dise, the harmonious garden, to that city in the midst of whose 
 street there was still the tree of life. And as the domesticated ani- 
 mals stand at the head of the animal kingdom according to one mode 
 of classification, so the useful plants occupy the first ranks in the 
 vegetable kingdom : and constituting the beginnings of series, sum- 
 mon the rest about them, and group their whole realm around man. 
 Again, the mineral kingdom is humane, because it is included in 
 the scheme of order, or the mental humanity ; and because it sup- 
 ports the vegetable, which grows up to the animal, which travels 
 towards man. And here be it observed, that each realm has its own 
 approach to us. The animal makes its way thither by a scale of 
 likening forms and functions ; it looks and acts as if it were human, 
 
HYPOTHESES OF THE WORLD. 311 
 
 to a certain extent. The vegetable, on the other hand, bears no 
 resemblance to the whole man, nor does it act at all; it likens to us 
 in being of use ; and whether it be as fruit and flavor to our bodies, 
 or as beauty and symbolism to our minds and souls, this same law 
 holds : the law, namely, not of progression to man, but of use en- 
 tering into progression. This use is the making up of substances 
 into new forms to serve us. Support, however, is the human pro- 
 perty of the mineral kingdom, and in all cases terra jlrma is its 
 kindness to us. It stands under all things, and bears their burdens; 
 and in all things it still stands under them, and makes them real. 
 For it not only supports the stems of trees, and the feet of animals 
 and men, but it supports the vegetative process in the one case, and 
 the animal life in the other ; so that without it the trees would be 
 but plans of trees, and the animals but illusions. Its gold, unlike 
 paper, is the earth of credit, by which solidity enters into commerce. 
 Its salts are the earth of the blood, without which that soulful or- 
 ganism would be footless, or without a base. Its rocks are the 
 surety of foundations for houses, otherwise than sand and mould. 
 Its jewels are stern flowers that shine in spite of the seasons. Its 
 stones make our palaces and prisons, which are the ultimo ratio of 
 our arts and laws. It also supports the soul as well as the body, 
 and give our ideas a terrene base, of resistance, hardness, perma- 
 nence, steadiness, and much else which is low, moral and strong, so 
 that to the soul the very ground is terra firma to justice and virtue. 
 Nothing of this could be, unless the earth were coordinate with 
 man, that is to say, in its own remoteness, humane. 
 
 The three kingdoms have also succeeded each other as the organa 
 of so many hypotheses of the world ; thereby attesting that they 
 themselves belong to an afliliated scale. Thus we have the idea that 
 the world is an animal ; a conception attributed to Plato, but not, 
 so far as we know, carried out in detail. A second idea of the 
 world is spiral or vegetable, and works the hypothesis of develop- 
 ment instinctively through all things : according to this conception 
 worlds grow : it has been a favorite notion with races who have 
 lost their revelations, and was set forth in that Scandinavian myth 
 of the Ash Yggdrasil, which ash was in fact the universe : it sprang 
 out of depths which no God or man knew ; beside its root was the 
 
312 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 weird or Urdar fountain where the Norns or fates abode ; its branches 
 were heavens and earths, the giant-world, the man-world, and the 
 dwarf-world : and every morning the Norns repaired its many wast- 
 ings by lading over its head from the Mimer spring the dews of im- 
 mortality. A third notion of the mundane order is, that the 
 world is dead or mineral : this belongs to the old age of hypothesis, 
 and to the youth of cold experience : accordingly, on this view, the 
 planet is hoary with immeasurable years, the stiff-kneed laws of to- 
 day presided over its cradle ; if indeed it ever had an infancy, and 
 were not senile from the beginning. The completion of this stony 
 truth takes place in geology, which is a kind of mineralogy of larger 
 growth. Yet as geology, or the science of the great crust, de- 
 tects order and mutuality in the earth, so it begins to revert by ana- 
 logy to organization j just as crystallography points its dry spicular 
 nails towards vegetation. Again, a fourth view is, that the world 
 is quasi-human, or indeed superhuman, in its parts and in the whole. 
 On this score, the planet unites with man ; the head races inhabit 
 its head countries ; in short, the human organs reappear on the sur- 
 face of the globe, and account as well as they may for its relations 
 and distributions, and for its housing of special nations. These 
 hypotheses run in a strict and mutually suggesting series, and either 
 all of them are true, or none. But we do not moot their truth, but 
 adduce them to show that hypothesis has been consistent from the 
 first ; that has always handled the world as some analogue of man; 
 and we will add, though it is beside our present object, that the 
 hypotheses deeply imbedded within modern science, are the fag- 
 ends of those which shone candidly out from the ancient mytholo- 
 gies. For ourselves, the truths of revelation are our hypothesis, 
 and we hold that the worlds, dead and living, include every attribute 
 that others have assigned to them, not as their own, but because 
 they are full of the spirit of Providence, and under Him intend 
 man in their courses. Thus we accept all analogies as tools to work 
 with, but none as a rest. 
 
 To conclude this scale, the unattached natures, waters, atmo- 
 spheres and the like, are our circumstantial relations, the support of 
 our liberties and fluids as the ground is the substance to our feet. 
 Blood and water, breath and air, light and sight, are playmates in- 
 
CONSENT OF PARTIES TO HUMANITY. 813 
 
 troduced from of old. The vitals also of nature, the nervous suns, 
 enclosed in their rib-work and grate-work of planetary masses, are 
 among outward things most kindred to us, and lend themselves to 
 joy and exhilaration for all that lives. In their other considera- 
 tions, as the mundane system, they offer us great helps of order and 
 law ) and enriching without dissipating our minds, remodel our first 
 notions upon creation, and our faculties rightly applied to the uni- 
 verse, become mightily more human for the process. 
 
 The pure sciences, the abstract truths of the rest, are themselves 
 the laws of mind transplanted into matter ; they are therefore, as 
 we said before, cerebrally human (p. 304), and indeed only true 
 within the sphere of our faculties. There is no escape anywhere 
 from humanity: there we fully agree with the subjective school; 
 but the reason is, that humanity enfolds everything, and not ex- 
 cludes us from, but lets us into, the veriest nature of the world. 
 But it is well to be observed, that there is no Kantian world of 
 " things in themselves," but the world is social to the core. 
 
 In the view we have taken, we have with us the attestations of 
 all parties. The theologians are with us, by the text and scope of 
 their revelations. The superstitious are with us, by their crouch- 
 ing anthropomorphic worship ; by their fear of eclipses, as though 
 their god's eye were black upon them ; by their tremble before all 
 places and natures, lest the . tapestry of their world should open, 
 and stiffen them with some gliding terror. The idealists, or meta- 
 physical ghosts, are with us, by their creed that man cannot travel 
 beyond himself, but that sense and its world is still within the circle 
 of our being. The materialists are with us, by their vaunted alli- 
 ance with the dust; for are they not "spouse of the worm, and 
 brother of the clay V The scientific are with us by the actual 
 order of their sciences, and because they cannot help it. And the 
 practical men, including the rest of the world, are with us, in their 
 own practical way, for not one of them cares a rush for nature ir- 
 relevant to man, and contributing in no sense either to goodness, 
 enjoyment, the pocket, or the person. We now therefore require, 
 that what all have in part, shall be corrected and completed in each, 
 and that the truth of the all-embracing humanity shall be set in 
 that matrix which opens and hungers to receive it. 
 27 
 
314 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 It is further to be observed, that impersonality is human, jus 
 like personality, the latter being the skin of which the former k 
 the substance (pp. 285, 288) \ a substance however which is no 
 substance without that skin to hold it. For the best things in us 
 are impersonal, and the more they are, the better persons we be- 
 come (p. 285). Upon this principle, physical as well as moral, 
 the impersonal in nature communes with a proportionate impersonal 
 in ourselves (p. 285). 
 
 We have already trenched somewhat upon the other side of this 
 question, namely, the relation of the arts to the human form, and 
 we have hinted that poetry, painting and sculpture always act per- 
 sonally and dramatically with their highest subjects, which are the 
 human actions and passions (p. 305). A Michael Angelo uses no 
 theory, and makes no apology, when he throngs his Sistine Chapel 
 with glorious human forms as the attributes of God and man : the 
 admiring sea of ages of hearts and heads underneath him, finds 
 no fault with such impersonations. But art extends far below these 
 regions ; and as we have noticed throughout, there is an art in science 
 itself, which blindly musters its kingdoms under the human form. 
 The useful arts again, the sisters of the material or culinary sciences, 
 aim to reconstitute nature into human images closer and more com- 
 modious than at first. The mission of these arts consists in mak- 
 ing nature into the wraith and image of history. For this purpose 
 the world underground is a mine ; its iron must not lie waste in 
 those old lockers of the veins, but it is drawn into rails, girders, 
 ribs of ships, stalwart engines and vertebral bridges; and the 
 nations look on their continents as worms full of this metal silk, out c. 
 whose bellies untold glancing cities shall be spun. The geologies of 
 the arts are new strata above-ground, inhabited tier after tier by the 
 centuries; so that nature, besides the Plutonic and diluvian, includes 
 also the humanitary formations, and is never natural until she en- 
 velopes all the arts in marriage with all the natures. The mission of 
 the husbandman and the cultivator of stock adds new varieties to exist- 
 ing species of animals and plants, and nature embraces the new with 
 the old in a tighter maternity than at first : her grandmotherly love in- 
 creases with posterity, and ascends hotter and brighter to her children's 
 children. In a word, use and cultivation by humanity are accepted 
 
HUMANIZING MISSION OF THE ARTS. 315 
 
 by nature as her own consummation of her plan. Hence, what 
 expresses all these facts, there is not a place or thing in the known 
 world but comes under the notion of property, evidently on the in- 
 sight that all things are man's, and may be of use ; and so he regis- 
 ters his claim to their reversion when he wants them. Thus the 
 planet has an intra-social existence, and the men who denounce our 
 pride in claiming all things for the race, hold their estates by title- 
 deeds of a later credit, and by weaker seals than that of this an- 
 cient faith. In evidence of this, the flag of property, either indi- 
 vidual ornational, waves over every region, from the northern to the 
 southern ice ; and gives Christian names and surnames to capes and 
 headlands, bays and islands ; mine and thine are the zenith and 
 nadir of the willing earth in the grasp of mankind. But what cul- 
 tivation and re-formation is to the ground, that is regeneration to 
 the mind, and reform to the state ; and as the mind and the state 
 become more human as the rights of the soul and the society enter 
 into and alter them, so does the world become more natural in pro- 
 portion as the cultivator stamps his humanity upon it. There is 
 more nature in that prophecied nature where the wilderness blossoms 
 as the rose, than where the sand alone extends. 
 
 We should have enough to do with objections if our intention 
 cared that way : but we will briefly consider only two. 1. The 
 " moral" objection, that there is great pride in man, a little statue 
 of dust, a crowd of pismires on a hillock, a mote in the sunbeam, 
 &c, &c, conceiting that all things are his, when yet nature is so 
 much bigger than he. But to this we say, that all men act on this 
 belief, and the more faithfully, the better it is for the world about 
 them. The savages believe it least, and give nature the greatest 
 swing of laissez /aire; the consequence is, that she is a dirty and 
 undressed female, snaky-haired, under their feet. Humility how- 
 ever consists in obeisance to the truth, and if man is nature's king, 
 he must not be too proud to wear her crown ; for pride may rise on 
 that side also. Kingship is either nothing, or the chiefest service; 
 and if all things are for man, it is because he alone can make the 
 best of them. Humanity through industry is the very dew that 
 the Norns lade every day over the good ash, Yggdrasil (p. 311). 
 For the rest, this " humble" objection is always made with a lordly 
 
316 THE HUMAN FOEM. 
 
 and exulting voice, and in abdicating nature's crown, it treads upon 
 pride with greater pride of its own. We suspect that it proceeds 
 from dislike of work, for certainly the duties of the opposite view 
 are sufficiently stupendous. The true humility then, we argue, 
 lies in man taking his hard, high place with its responsibilities — 
 the place that he has in history and property, as the lord of the 
 visible earth. Let him accept the title-deeds, and obey the declara- 
 tions, of his Genesis. The higher the station, the higher the 
 humility. 
 
 But on the other hand we will not grant, that nature is so much 
 bigger than man as to escape his handling. For if the world be 
 providentially coordinate with him, then as he is, so will it be ; 
 or in other words the threads of the mundane Noras are managed 
 in that end of them which constitutes our human nature. A world 
 made by the Word is plastic to the Word, and the Word in its 
 second projection exists in man alone. It is then a part of our 
 faith in Providence, to believe that the magnetism as well as the 
 handiworks of good men and good societies, are the first beginning 
 of the natural laws ; and that there is nothing so ponderous as to 
 outlie the power of the moral and spiritual kings (pp. 238, 239). 
 The harvests and rain- clouds of Judea were once obedient to the 
 obedience of its nation to God : how if nature now be equally 
 symbolic and ready ; and for new springing of theocratic crops, 
 only await a new Judea in which the whole earth shall be a Holy 
 Land? 
 
 2. A word also to the intellectual objection, that other creatures 
 besides man doubtless look out from their places as central points, 
 consider themselves as foci, and the universe as their subject 
 and servant. " See man for me, exclaimed a lordly goose." 
 (N. B., the sly poet puts this into the neb of a goose.) Were such 
 the fact, it would only show, that the animals are images of man 
 in these perceptions, and that in the wide madhouse of animal ity, 
 they all conceit themselves kings and potentates. But are there 
 signs that it is a fact ? Has an ass with ribs belabored, anything 
 like our perception, that we are " lords of what we survey V With 
 regard to our slaves, and even our lower classes, they do not 
 imagine that the state is for them ; on the contrary, they complain 
 
OBJECTIONS REMOVED. 317 
 
 that they are out of the social scheme, which is only for their 
 betters ; and although they build up a little hovel of content in the 
 midst of their sad inclemencies, yet they do not consider that the 
 body politic exists for their behoof. True, it ought to do so ; but 
 the fact that it does not, shows a power above theirs. So it is 
 with the animals. Those which bear our burdens either deem 
 nothing at all ; or supposing them to deem, that exonerates them 
 from the charge of stupidity which we make, when we say that the 
 cow knows nothing of the supremacy of the milkman ; the dog, of 
 the huntsman and lash • or the horse of the spurred and whip- 
 provided rider. It is however the want of deeming that makes the 
 want of the thing deemed ; and man is at the head because he 
 knows and feels it. Vice versa, the animals are subordinate partly 
 because they do not know their situation, and never can be taught it. 
 
 The argument on this score has been pushed by animals' friends, 
 to invalidate the humanity of the Divine Nature. For while it is 
 admitted that all our conceptions of God are human, it is contended 
 that if man has a God-man, a cow, could it imagine, would frame a 
 cow-god ; a dog, a dog-god ; and so forth. But imprimis, none of 
 these creatures can imagine in this direction, which terminates the 
 argument. And secondly, if they worshipped what was visibly 
 above them, they would worship man, who is in such a sense their 
 providence, that Bacon has wittily cited, that man is the god of the 
 dog. The assertion then comes again to an end, and shows that in 
 all respects the living creatures look to humanity. For ourselves, 
 had we any experience of a being transcending the human form, 
 whose mastery over us was undoubted, this, we grant, must give 
 the form by which our God would reign. But no such being has 
 intervened in history, either in the solemn night, or in the daylight 
 of religions : on the contrary, the Highest has declared that man 
 is made in his image, and that his Son is also the Son of man. In 
 short, we find the human form, divinely augmented, burning with 
 uncontrolled intensity in the thought of man, in the records of 
 inspiration, and in the religions of nature ; and this with its attri- 
 butes, though often unseen, is a real .presence in every temple. 
 
 There are indeed religions which do not accept the central sym- 
 bol ; there are animal, vegetable, and mineral religions ; for men 
 
 27* 
 
«°,18 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 bow down to wood and stone, beast and bird, in all fantastic forms. 
 There are also fossil religions, records obscure and terrifying of past 
 conditions of our race ; hieroglyphics too large to live in our petty 
 present time ; and which speak of warmth and fertility in regions 
 of the mind now cold and dead ; of great perceptions and mighty 
 propagations ; gigantic promises of the world's childhood, only to 
 be justified in her second innocency. Again, above and around 
 these solid creeds we have the philosophical religions, the sciences 
 of the atmosphere of the religious world, or the theologic wind ;* 
 pretences to regard Deity under no form, and as " neither in body 
 mankind resembling, neither in ideas." But as the reader now 
 foresees, each of these creeds has the same principle, namely, the 
 human form, which is portrayed in the atmosphere as in the earth, 
 in the vegetable as in the mineral, and in the animal as in the 
 vegetable. Abstract philosophy is the furthest of all from the 
 centre : idolatry itself falls more easily under that rank and disci- 
 pline of natures which leads to Christianity, or the Omnipotent 
 Human Form. 
 
 But the skeptical ghost still haunts us, for are there not higher 
 beings than man, whose form is consequently above the human. 
 Truly such beings there are, known from of old under the names of 
 angels and spirits; but then their form is the human. For the 
 human is a traveling form, which reaches from man to God, and 
 involves all beings as it goes. There are then men higher than man, 
 but there is none superior to the human form, which itself is supe- 
 riority advancing for ever to the supreme. Revelation declares as 
 much as this, for if the human form is the image of God, there can 
 be no more eminent form. 
 
 However, what we call the human form, is doubtless the least 
 truth and manifestation of that Divine image. For minds, souls, 
 societies, nations are themselves in this form. But time fails us to 
 attempt a flight through these second spheres, and we must leave to 
 other hands the tracing of manliness through polities and socialities, 
 
 =* The sensuality of creeds which oppose nothing but flatus and criticism to 
 the instigations of the flesh, is set forth in that hieroglyphical proverb, that " pigs 
 see the wind," which marvelously signifies the lace to face posture of stolidity 
 and abstraction. 
 
LAST RESORTS OF PHYSIOLOGY. 319 
 
 ■which are the laws of the collective human being. But in the mean- 
 time the reader easily sees that man on the greatest scale is more 
 man than he on the least. 
 
 We seem in all this to be wide of what is called physiology and 
 science; but on we go, for science cannot subsist without these 
 heights at last. What we desire added to all, is a divine physiology, 
 flowing according to the channels of the divine form into which we 
 men are born. For there is no life in science unless it communi- 
 cates with the fountains of its subjects; no resource in art or healing, 
 except from the draw and gush of the same living waters. There- 
 fore we have done our best to show, what the contents of the human 
 body are, and what pressures of life it stands under. For it is the 
 form of God; as it said in Psalms, we are His temples: and so it is 
 the native land of hope, and the arena of miracles and providences : 
 there is nothing which it cannot do, and nothing that cannot be done 
 with it, according to its correspondence with the Most High. It is 
 also the form of spirit and heaven, and the heights of Zion and the 
 abysses of hell are within it, circumpressing and acting upon it, ac- 
 cording to its correspondence with good and bad, and the other roots 
 of man, his body and his mind. It is therefore a pipe which runs 
 with every wine, angelic or demonic. Again, it is the centre of 
 history, and the life of the world plays upon it from without, and 
 brings forth tones which are myth and song, strife and triumph, the 
 fullness of the eras. Moreover it is the parliament of the natural 
 sciences, and the executive and army of the arts, into which know- 
 ledge arises and speaks, and from which power goes forth. Thus 
 what it finally does and can is by these rules alone — that it is like a 
 god among other things, like a heaven or a hell in its radiations, 
 like all history in its scope, like all science in its laws, unlikest of 
 all things to death, most inscient of impossibilities, most untrue to 
 itself in meanness, and most immeasurable by lies and materialisms. 
 
 We will conclude this argument with two glorious scientific songs, 
 which say as we cannot hope to do, the mere truth on this matter. 
 George Herbert On Man remarks: — 
 
 " Man is all symmetry ; 
 Full of proportions, one limb to another, 
 And to all the world besides. 
 
320 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 Each part ma}' call Ihe farthest brother, 
 For head with foot hath private amity, 
 And both with moons and tides. 
 
 " Nothing hath got so far 
 But man hath caught and kept it as his prey ; , 
 
 His eyes dismount the highest star, 
 
 He is, in little, all the sphere. 
 Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 
 
 Find their acquaintance there. 
 
 " For us the winds do blow, 
 
 The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow. 
 Nothing we see but means our good, 
 As our delight, or as our treasure ; 
 
 The whole is either our cupboard of food, 
 Or cabinet of pleasure. 
 
 " The stars have us to bed; 
 Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws, 
 
 Music and light attend our head. 
 
 All things unto our flesh are kind 
 In their descent and being ; to our mind 
 
 In their ascent and cause. 
 
 " More servants wait on man 
 Than he'll take notice of. In every path 
 
 He treads down that which doth befriend him 
 When sickness makes him pale and wan. 
 O ! mighty love ! Man is one world, and hath 
 Another to attend him." 
 
 William Blake on the Human Form also observes: — 
 
 " To mercy, pity, peace, and love, 
 
 All pray in their distress; 
 
 And to these virtues of delight, 
 
 Return their thankfulness. 
 
 "For mercy, pity, peace and love, 
 Is God, our Father dear ; 
 And mercy, pity, peace, and love, 
 Is man, his child and care. 
 
 "For mercy has a human heart, 
 Pity, a human face, 
 And love, the human form divine, 
 And peace, the human dress. 
 
 " Then every man, of every clime, 
 That prays in his distress, 
 Prays to the Human Form Divine, 
 Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. 
 
FUNCTIONS OF THE HUMAN FORM. 321 
 
 "And all must love the Human Form, 
 In heathen, Turk, or Jew : 
 Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, 
 There God is dwelling too." 
 
 But if the parts of the human form have functions, the whole has 
 functions too. A new problem therefore occurs, and we now ask 
 what is the physiology, not of brain, heart, or skin, but of the human 
 form as an organ? 
 
 In order to answer this question, we must know what the human 
 form is; for its functions cannot be told until we have it before us. 
 In the lowest consideration then it is life, Icing or substance. For 
 in fact it is the end of creation, and the end is also the beginning, 
 and supports the means, or lifts them into standing. The end also 
 justifies the means, or gives them solidity. The human form* is 
 therefore the living Caryatides of the world; or more properly, in 
 revelation it is the I am, Who not was but is in all time and nature. 
 Its function accordingly is the gift of substantial life to those whom 
 it includes; ay! and of comparative life and substance to all its 
 images and types. In the lap of this sustaining form, we receive 
 the seals of fact, and are bound to be real : we have no escape into 
 nothingness any more, but existence is our fate. Herein then we 
 are in the essential organ of life; and as the body in the form re- 
 ceives life, so its function or necessity is, to make life. 
 
 In the second place the human form is use. For man in fact is 
 the creature who can surmount himself, and elect the universal use. 
 He has a spirit above his nature, or can breathe for the common- 
 wealth of heaven. Born into this human form, it presses its indus- 
 tries upon him, and commands him to good works. Its signal before 
 all his battles is, "The Lord of the universe expects every man to 
 do his duty." "Thou shalt eat bread in the sweat of thy brow all 
 
 * That Indian myth, that the world rests upon a tortoise, and the tortoise 
 upon an elephant, though deficient in ground for the elephant, involves a deeper 
 thought than the metaphysical conception of substance, and stands many degrees 
 nearer to a true answer than the barren pantheism of Spinosa. For elephant and 
 tortoise have good broad backs of their own, unlike metaphysical abstractions ; 
 and moreover they are analogues in the series of humanity, and in this degree 
 approach the true answer. The conception of substance belongs to the skin, 
 principles of thought (p. 287), and is the epidermis of the conception of support 
 whose inner parts, as we have given them above, are, 1. Being; and 2. Life. 
 
322 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 the days of thy life." Man's work is universal; in laying bricks 
 to the hovels of his plans, he is working at other plans veiled; rear- 
 ing far and future states; the basements of ages to come; the limbs 
 and wills of his posterities; the strength, or weakness, of his own 
 soul, and by reversion, of his societies: buildings, good and bad, 
 high, and low, and broad. This is according to his incessant form, 
 which is the essential organ of activity. And if he will not work 
 but drone, his waste is universal. The ground supports him in 
 vain, and his feet kill its purpose ; herbs feed and beasts clothe him 
 for disgrace; his frame puts costliest energy in play, to be manu- 
 factured into sloth; and his soul hovers uninhabiting over his slime. 
 This is the final shape of unhappiness, the lot of apoplexed men and 
 societies, whose curse it becomes that they are lashed to the halberds 
 of use upside down, which cleaves with poison to their human forms. 
 For the human form is the divinity either of Nemesis, or of God. 
 
 The third human form surrounding and entering into the former 
 two, is wisdom or divine light, whose care it is to make us wise. 
 And because we are shapes in which wisdom may dwell, it presses 
 us with ought and must, and throngs us with duties through our 
 eyes; for by the magnetism of our likeness it is at our side, to show 
 us the way, the truth, and the life. We can therefore no more 
 escape existence than elude the necessity to be wise, or foolish. In 
 the latter case we founder upon the human form, or stumble blind- 
 fold through a world of posts and pitfalls : for our world is even as 
 ourselves, and if we are wounded within, all things chase and gore 
 us, as the herd, a bleeding deer. But the form of wisdom is, first, 
 the understanding mind; hence its earliest pressure incites us to 
 know; and heaven known, man known, God known, the world 
 known, is its mission : the second form is the spiritual mind, which 
 elects the noblest causes from the rest, and has ears from that scrip- 
 ture : "If ye will do the works, ye shall know of the doctrine. " 
 Thus as our bodies of sense oblige us to see, work and exist, to eat, 
 drink and generate, or to pay the penalties of refusal, so our bodies 
 of understanding and wisdom bind us to answerable courses, or mulct 
 us in equal retributions. In this light we are organs of new pro- 
 ducts again, and necessity forces us to increase the wisdom, or the 
 folly, of the world. 
 
FUNCTIONS OF THE HUMAN FORM. 823 
 
 The fourth human form is love, the substance of substance, the 
 use of use, and the wisdom of wisdom, which takes the names of 
 the rest, and completes the circle of all in all. There is no such 
 incumbence as this, of loving, for love is not only God's image but 
 his likeness, and comes from the highest of the Highest. Its organ 
 is the will, which is motive in all acts and apathies — a man who 
 neither slumbers nor sleeps. This is he that ceaseless love solicits; 
 and it stands around him in all the shapes that touch him, as child 
 and parent, spouse and country; and by irresistible drawing, it welds 
 him to his objects, and assembles each world under its banners. 
 But union begets being, or love is the parent of substance. Hence 
 love is increased by existence, as flame by fuel. And being born 
 into the form of love, which is the human, we are bound not only 
 to our adopted will, but to its increases. In this form then we stand 
 under an almighty pressure towards union and generation ; and are 
 compelled to be at one with our companions; and by ever similar 
 progeny from the loins of our love to augment the society we have 
 chosen. 
 
 This organic consideration presents old facts in a new discourse, 
 and we come to a functional root of the happiness and unhappiness 
 of man, and of his manifold healths and diseases. For life and 
 wisdom, love and action, are in his blood and spirit, and he must 
 either produce and secrete them aright, or fall into maladies innu- 
 merable. The form which he bears, being the essential organ of 
 happiness, wails over its own loss in tones which are essential pain ; 
 for joy and sorrow, strange in the world, are native here, and Omni- 
 potence itself seconds every monition and delight of the human form. 
 For the rest we have to observe, that to this physiological shape all 
 science, art, morals and spirituals revert; for substance is the quest 
 of science; use, including beauty, is the compass of art; wisdom is 
 for moral philosophy; and love and its universe for the spiritual man : 
 whence the human form is the future grammar of every school which 
 gives real instructions to mankind. 
 
 Here too the problem of life receives its present last illustrations. 
 For though already we have shown that the inner man is " the vital 
 principle" of the outer, yet a new vitality is demanded for him 
 again; tortoise and elephant (p. 321), by themselves, though they 
 
324 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 seem to support, only increase the weight to be supported; in short, 
 the inner man drops into metaphysical dust as the outer man into 
 physical, unless his parts are coherent through some self-sustaining 
 life. That latter is evidently the living God, the end of problems 
 and the font of certainties, who makes us not of cells and molecules, 
 but of humanities because He is human. Therefore the last office 
 of science is, to cease to make, and to accept a Maker. 
 
 We have frequently adverted before to the principle of Corre- 
 spondence (pp. 225, 226, 242-244, &c), and we again remark, that 
 the above functions take place by its necessity. As spirit and soul 
 are present with body because creation is a band of like superiors 
 with like inferiors, so God is present to man when the same reason 
 holds. The spiritual world also plays upon us by this law of like- 
 ness, sameness or assembling : all the angels rest on our good parts 
 and deeds, and all the devils urge down into our mischievous fibres; 
 so that correspondence is the union of things, and harmony has ex- 
 istence in its arms. Think then of what jets the passions and vir- 
 tues are the springs; and what it is to be born into the human 
 shape, with its celestial and infernal hydraulics ! But this too is 
 under direction; for unstop our souls as we may, their wells are 
 supervised; for there is one "openeth and no man shutteth, and 
 shutteth and no man openeth." 
 
 These also are things of which we spoke under other names 
 when treating of the anatomical organs. And we find by the 
 spiritual telescope, that the same fallacy has clouded our eyes 
 here as that which resolved the stars of heaven into a doctrine of 
 glittering dust (p. 290). For as those molecules of the universe 
 are universes, so the molecules of man are men. That which 
 seems little by distance is not little, but mighty ; and that which 
 seems little by nearness is, perchance, greater still. If the king- 
 dom of God is within us, then have we roominess indeed. The 
 little chariots of blood, seed and spirit are magnified into eternal 
 processions; and judgments, thrones and principalities, horses, 
 white and pale and red, move in awful cycles through our human 
 forms. If we are of the dust, well ! There is an end of us. 
 But if we are images of the Most High, there is no end of us : 
 but our breeding, educating, and healing are according to this pat- 
 tern and rule — no less, and no other. 
 
FUNCTIONS OF THE HUMAN FORM. 325 
 
 But lastly, to shut out unreality, and bolt its door, if we are in 
 the image of God, Who — not what — is that God whose image we 
 are to wear ? The answer in fact is Christ. Of other gods we 
 speculate, but none other do we know. It is his love, wisdom, 
 works and body that clothe us with our second forms, and enable 
 us to fulfil the end of our being in making our lives and acts co- 
 human with our shapes. Christianity, it is obvious, is the only 
 human religion : other religions are mineral, vegetable, animal, or 
 anthropomorphic ; but this is theomorphic ; the revelation of no 
 Man- God, but of the God-Man. Henceforth, therefore, there are 
 no problems of God, but a history of Christ. Christianity ac- 
 cordingly works to the redemption of the physical man and hum in 
 body, that it may be like to his glorious body. And among its 
 other miracles is the connection of grace with nature, or of divinity 
 with physiology } so that by the harmonies of this connection, 
 Christ is to be Lord of the sciences, as well as High Priest of the 
 churches. For it is very obvious that the laws of love, wisdom, 
 and use, which are the health or functions of the body, are the 
 obedience of its atoms to His new commandment, and that in this 
 way the formulas of Christianity are all prevalent in physics. From 
 the moment that this is seen, the modern polytheism is ended, for 
 the Creator and Redeemer are the same, and the God of nature is 
 also the God of revelation.* For be it remembered that the divine 
 empire and pressure of Christ upon his subjects takes place by 
 revelation : it is not left to straggle down through history, through 
 journalists and scribes, but the book which is God's with us, is the 
 continuation of the Man who is God with us. Whence -again our 
 human form is according to our correspondence with the Word of 
 God. 
 
 All this belongs strictly to the sciences, and especially to those 
 that relate to the body as the casket of the life of man. For the 
 great Incarnation is the model of the rest. And moreover it is not 
 this or that man that concerns physiology, but the problems of cor- 
 poreal humanity in its scope. But this matter of religion, in which 
 Christ's incarnation is part of experience, necessarily takes rank in 
 
 * See these points considered in my " Address on a late work on the Philoso- 
 phy of Religion." 1849. 
 
 28 
 
326 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 its way as the leading instance of all, and can never be banished 
 from the cases upon which fair induction works. It is not the 
 average man, but the archetypal and typical man, who is the sub- 
 ject of anthropological science, according to that plain rule, that 
 cardinal and representative instances, and not extrinsic and adven- 
 titious ones, are those in which knowledge seeks for principles. 
 Indeed there is no doctrine of man, who is a variable and fluid 
 term, unless it be in the doctrine of Christ. The average man is 
 unattainable; every fresh birth alters his number and figure : it is 
 only the God-Man who can be known (p. 241). Hence the neces- 
 sity of turning the telescopes of physiology and anthropology in 
 this direction, that around the variable we may see the constant, or 
 that science may become divine by admitting him who is the light 
 of the world. This will give both dignity and facility to our stu- 
 dies ; for the revealed divine perfections are the tacit axioms of all 
 truth ; and consequently in the working of these remote problems 
 of physiology, we find here the principles that lead us on by imper- 
 ceptible stages, each easy as the first, to ends where the first in all 
 its brightness reappears. In nature's dark mines, this is a circle 
 from light to light, in which light is the way. 
 
 We may here obviate an objection to these general views ; for it 
 may be urged that we have forgotten throughout that the original 
 human form is defaced, and cannot now be called the image of God. 
 To this we reply that we so designate it, in reference to what it 
 may be, not to what it is ; and claim that thought shall live upon 
 our future health, and not upon our present diseases. For man 
 still retains his prerogative so far, that he is capable of reconversion 
 into the primeval image, as all religion knows. The human form 
 has never been abolished : it has a divine strength of conservation 
 (p. 288); so that even the poor Bushmen and Australians, nay, all 
 criminals, are still men, and we dare not cease to say that they are 
 in the image of God ; for that same emancipative form which is 
 the immensity of righteousness, is also the dungeon of sin. By 
 this conservation it is that the children of those who are bending to 
 death under all guilts and plagues, are born infants as the rest ; 
 they too begin from heaven, by whose elasticity the liberated seed 
 recovers itself with a spring from the pressure and abuse of 
 
CAUSE OF DEATH. 327 
 
 generations. An earnest that evil cannot triumph, or build through 
 the world, because there is this almighty arm nursing babes in the 
 wrestle. For the like cause every day is born afresh, and the load 
 of life is lightened in sleep, which lets out an ever new man through 
 the merciful gates of the morning. Thus though the divine image 
 be defaced, yet as its features may be won again, we still recognize 
 in man the remoteness of his archetype; just as we call reason, 
 reason, despite of unreason ; and leave to love its ideal meaning, 
 though that substance, as such, is seldom patent upon earth. 
 
 We conclude here by reverting one stage back, to speak of the 
 meaning and cause of death ; because this background will perchance 
 throw forth into relief the image and emblems of life. For as life 
 comes by correspondence, so death comes by non-correspondence 
 between the soul and the body; just as deadness in these sciences 
 comes from non-perception of correspondence. Thus when the 
 heart has no longer any heartiness towards the man, and no more 
 likeness to the soul's heart, which is love (pp. 194 — 213, 247 — 
 251), when the blood grows callous to the formation of relations, 
 and feels no warmth and joy in begetting, educating, marrying or 
 advancing the children of the body, then the soul ceases to care for 
 it, and begins by slow degrees to leave it; in other words, disease 
 and disability prey upon it; organic vice besets it; and the inner 
 man ceases to keep company with it; for it is a hard heart, already 
 dead to suggestion and obedience. So when the lungs begin no 
 more to play for thought, or to draw animation and faculty forth, 
 the soul and they have to separate, as persons estranged from each 
 other ; for breath exists that soul may breathe, and when this is no 
 longer possible, mortal breath stops. And when the brain no 
 longer elects light and virtue from matter, and communes no more 
 by vibratory states with the genii of the cosmos, then the soul quits 
 this effete spiritualist, now a materialist ; and the brain dies from 
 the separation, just as it dies spiritually from the denial of the soul. 
 So also, when the muscles have lost their imaginations of power, the 
 will of the soul quits them as broken tools. Then the body falls to 
 pieces by its own degrees of decay. After this it belongs to no 
 soul, but to the world, whose first artisans with it are the chemistries 
 of nature, and the anatomical worms. 
 
328 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 But the natural decay and death of the body image those of the 
 mind ; for this it is that, after its culmination, is dying by degrees. 
 The loves which come by nature are gradually extinct as age pro- 
 ceeds: the intelligence also ceases, and the sense. Thus we care 
 much for objects at first, but gradually less, and nothing at last : 
 that care or love is then dead. The child's dolls, and the man's, 
 follow this curricle. So with intelligence: its objects are brightest 
 at first perceiving; in their adult state they are active ideas; after 
 this they become repetitions, and sit in easy chairs of twaddle ; and 
 in the end the mind dies to them, and they to it. And so with the 
 senses also ; the eye has at first much pleasure in seeing, and at last 
 none : the whole of the five are ultimately tired to death. This is 
 the course of nature in the natural or perishable mind for the ob- 
 jects of nature; and the body follows it paribus passibus. For the 
 natural is a feeder to the spiritual mind — the stomach which the 
 soul has for nature; and after a sufficiency of her ways and informa- 
 tions has been assimilated, and the spirit is of age, its old guardian 
 mind and memory are deciduous, and the body drops off with them. 
 The motives of separation between the soul and spiritual mind, and 
 the body and natural mind, are therefore motives of common sense : 
 and are parallel with those for which we cement, or dissever, our 
 connections with our fellow men. For we cannot too often repeat, 
 that the soul is a vast society, and the body a society, and that all 
 our relations and utilities are in their focal union there. 
 
 The materialists are therefore right, when they speak of the death 
 of the mind ; for die it must, or entrance to spiritual life would be 
 impossible. The case is like that of the proper foetal organs, the ductus 
 arteriosus, ductus venosus,* and the like, which unless they died to 
 
 * With regard to apparitions, or physiological re-appearances of the soul in 
 nature (which by a law easily expounded are numerous in proportion as the state 
 of man is low, and exercise a compensatory function for the defect of angelic 
 communion, and faith in revelation), they are according to the analogies of the 
 change from foetal to personal life. For as birth may be incomplete so far as 
 that the bodily changes which it implies have not properly occurred, so death 
 may be imperfect, and the proper spiritual changes may not have ensued; and 
 as " the blue disease" is the oscillation after birth between embryonic and infant 
 life, so haunting is the oscillation between the mundane and supermundane states. 
 
THE MATERIALISTS AT WORK. 829 
 
 their embryonic functions, the life after birth could not proceed. 
 And so, unless our old fixed ways of wanting-, deeming and cogitat- 
 ing, the channels of nature's thoughts and loves, were dried up, and 
 rendered inert, the life after death would be impossible : and in that 
 case, having given up one life by inevitable stages, and yet not at- 
 tained to the next, we should stick in death, and be lost to progress; 
 which last, however, is provided by the successive dying of our aged 
 minds. We therefore claim materialism as not only the cause of 
 death, but by poetical justice, as the undertaker and burier of the 
 dead ; and we leave it with sadness to its " black work/' of caring 
 for that for which no soul can care. And as we leave it shoveling 
 away — ashes to ashes and dust to dust — we meet our brother, the 
 Man, again, with all his virilities and appointments intact; an eye 
 which is mind, and a mind which is spirit, the risen person and new 
 born infant of the second life. 
 
 Having now dwelt upon the functions of the human form, and 
 seen that they repose upon the functions of the body, and that the 
 one is never without the other, we conclude the present Chapter 
 with a few words on some of the functions of the doctrine of the hu- 
 man form, which doctrine is to knowledge what the human form is 
 to existence. 
 
 With regard to the sciences of the body, we have found that this 
 doctrine opens up the sluices of all life, and determines its tide into 
 physiology. We can no longer think of our vitals, or molecules,* 
 
 There is the same God on both sides of the grave, yet the state is according to 
 the materials. 
 
 * In stating this, we know that we disagree with the prevailing views, which 
 powder the human body into cells, and regard them as the elements of mankind. 
 But, as we before stated (pp. 174 — 177), only that is essential to any subject, 
 ■which is peculiar to it, and contradistinguishes it from others, whereas nucleated 
 cells and cell-germs are common to all organization as the chaos out of which 
 it arises. To think of them in connection with anything human, is to think of 
 man in and from chaos. But it has required a divine hand fo win the human form 
 out of matter, and science has no prospect of gaining it, unless by accepting it as 
 il i^. without attempting to construct it out of cells. For our own part we are 
 conscious that we can make nothing of cells, and we bless God every day that 
 his works come to us ready made, and can neither be taken to pieces, nor put 
 together — save by his own hand. Our ceils are not the pieces, but the fragments 
 
 28* 
 
330 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 as objects which have ever been seen by microscope or anatomy ; 
 for the more we attribute to their life and integrity, the less are 
 their dead bodies themselves. The effect of this upon the eyes with 
 which the body and its prospects are seen, is hope and expansion. 
 Blood, nerve and bone are the walls of the present sciences, and 
 
 and ruins of his works. The pieces of humanity are men, women, and children, 
 and by the deepest analysis there are no lesser pieces than these. It is the syn- 
 thesis of these, and not of cells, that constitutes fresh men and women. Every 
 particle of the body involves the whole, or it is dead, and not within our subject : 
 thus as a living thing it is the entire human form. 
 
 While upon this subject, we will say a few words on the vexata qucestio of 
 cell-germs, the first of which is supposed to contain the whole forces of the or- 
 ganism in potency. For the primordial cell appears as the beginning of the body. 
 But it is thought absurd that within this delicate vesicle forces should reside 
 that build the frame, and continue it while life endures. In order to see how 
 the case is, let us apply the human lens to it, and look at it from man, who is the 
 atom or cell of the fabric of Society. Under this glass we see that the cell is a 
 man big with a new idea. Let us call that primal cell by the name of Mahomet. 
 This man is the cell-germ of a new religion and polity in the world. What is 
 the case with him ? He receives his mission complete as a germ in his own 
 person ; whatever Mahometanism in its purity will be, is involved in the idea 
 of that molecular- person — Mahomet. He does not know it, for who knows 
 the contents and consequences of himself? But there it is — a logic of great 
 events folded into that deceptively minute form. By degrees he infects new 
 matter, that is to say, disciples, with his idea, whose life they receive, and to 
 which they add their own life ; expanding the original idea, as it was capable of 
 being expanded from the beginning. And one such idea might range upon it 
 the populations of all continents, and be less exhausted than when its assimila- 
 tions began ; for in conquering ideas, it is not extension, but want and failure of 
 extension, that is exhaustive. It is therefore clear, that as a spiritual architec- 
 tonic thing, all Mahometanism lay in the cell-germ — Mahomet ; but as a phy- 
 sical force each new molecule or disciple contributed to it his body and powers. 
 And had he not, from the beginning, been such a cell as Mahomet, only wanting 
 conception or the active idea, no force could have made him an efficient part in 
 the body of Mahometanism. 
 
 Just so, there is a spiritual architectonic force lying in the cell-germs of or- 
 ganization, and a material, obeisant, correspondential, bricklaying force in the 
 materials which lie ready to be infected by the cell-germs. 
 
 A word also with regard to the doctrine of controvertibility of forces, now 
 popular among the learned, and according to which heat has only to pass 
 through a cell-germ to be converted into vitality. This doctrine ends in fire- 
 worshiping, for it makes the light and heat of the material sun to be the fountains 
 of the force of organization : and deems that these pass through vegetables, and 
 become vegetable life; through animals, and become animal life ; through brains, 
 and become mind, and so forth. Therefore a fine day, poured into its vessel, man, 
 
CELL-GERMS. 331 
 
 their poor languid life is the rescource of the corresponding arts ; 
 but Man, the hierarchy, is the presence before whom these limits 
 disappear, and the reservoir out of which wholeness and vitality well 
 from perennial springs. For as the parts rise to the stature of the 
 whole, our knowledge of them is the physiological double of our 
 knowledge of man; and the arts of their cure and conservation, are 
 the religions and virtues of the human race, represented under their 
 healing forms. 
 
 All this means, that under the pressure of these views, the body 
 begins to have a spirit. But also by the same doctrine, the spirit 
 begins to have a body. For as the present world, like a battle field 
 in which the armies both of truth and error have been slain, is strewed 
 with the dead corses of the sciences, so there is a melancholy array 
 of spectres called philosophies, fighting over again in the air the 
 same old cause which was hopeless on the earth. But the sciences 
 
 becomes transmogrified into virtues; dark nights are converted into felonies; 
 dull November days into suicides; and Lot suns into love. This is materialism 
 with spiritualism in its pocket. The creed is an old one, and not untrue of ani- 
 mality; for the beasts love in summer because the sun bids them, and their 
 hearts are cold in winter because winter is cold. But it is false of man, and 
 false of his very atoms, excepting in so far as he degrades himself into an animal. 
 As it has been said of the true man, 
 
 " The sun to others writeth laws, and is their virtue ; 
 Virtue is his sun." 
 
 For though he requires heat to love, yet he requires to love at all times, and that 
 is the root of the art by which he procures a constant temperature that makes his 
 body capable. The prior fact is his human determination to beat winter and 
 summer; and though he must have climates, to pick and choose them at his 
 will. 
 
 There is no convertibility of forces between life and nature ; there are no cells 
 by which heat can be filtered into vitality. The doctrine of Correspondence 
 must be substituted for that of convertibility. It is because love and life them- 
 selves are live fire (p. 89), that they come forth by the law of invitation, when 
 the organism which they affect by the same principle of correspondence (pp. 225, 
 226, 242 — 244) is immersed in the dead heat of the sun. All circumstance is ne- 
 cessarily haunted, because there are spirits akin to the circumstance, which co- 
 habit with it, as the soul cohabits with the body. But the soul is not porous to 
 the body, though the body is porous to the soul ; and by no art can camels pass 
 through needles' eyes ; death get into life ; gross heat penetrate living heat ; or 
 dead doctrines of convertibility procure admission to the distinct and fastidious 
 truths which conserve the empire of the world. 
 
332 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 once upon their legs again, the philosophies get into them as their 
 proper souls. The first corse to be re-animated is physiology; psy- 
 chology is the first of the ghosts which will be incarnate in a human 
 habitation. The doctrine of the structural human soul is the basis 
 of philosophy, as that of the organic body is the foundation of phy- 
 siology. And this doctrine of the psychical man is threefold ; first, 
 what he does : second, what he is: and third, where he comes from. 
 "With regard to the first point, every house and every history is its 
 answer: practical psychology is therefore the knowledge of the entire 
 works of the soul. With regard to the second, it involves the human 
 form in its brightest robes of consciousness, with all its actions poured 
 back into it as powers, and seen not in effects, but in causes. And 
 for the third point, as touching the origin of the soul, it is as the 
 origin of the impression from the seal, or of the child from the 
 parent; for the archetype by its terms is the accoun t of the type. 
 Psychology is therefore the science of assumptions with regard to 
 the real soul ; for it is bound to make nothing, but to assume or take 
 up what is given in experience ; and fact shows what our souls are 
 by what they do and feel, and completes the substance of the know- 
 ledge by embracing the facts of revelation. In short psychology 
 accepts the inner man, with all the motives, senses, and form of the 
 outer; and its problems refer either to his associates, or if they are 
 deeper than that world, to inner men again in a new manly orbit; 
 and so on through benches and choirs of manliness until the answer 
 comes from the human mouth somewhere. The knowledge of the 
 world is therefore the analogue, as it is the beginning, of all the 
 knowledge of the soul. And men, women and children are our only 
 faculties, the actors in all, and the accountants of all, up to the very 
 throne of God. Psychology is thus not abstract, but dramatic and 
 allegorical. 
 
 Mental philosophy under the same aspect becomes equally tangi- 
 ble, for mind impersonated (and there is no other) is its object. 
 Mental philosophy is always some man endeavoring to see his image 
 either in himself, or in his fellows. The disciples of the schools 
 look for it in the masters, and the masters either in their own con- 
 sciousness, or in the works of their fellow men. That is to say, it 
 is men of mind who are the study of the philosopher. Abstractions 
 
PSYCHOLOGY. 333 
 
 have indeed an empire here, because words, which are airy men, like 
 other men beget children, which are words of words : but the first 
 words of the mind fit to things, which are either human, or the parts 
 of humanity. Hence in its centres every idea is uttered according 
 to the human form. 
 
 We have shown in the foregoing pages that the faculties, powers 
 and causes in man are referable to the types of the organization, and 
 that by correspondence these inner men inhabit the outer body; 
 thus, for example, that consciousness is the mind of skin because 
 consciousness itself is the skin of the mind (p. 283). At present, 
 we do not enter further upon this general subject, which for its com- 
 pletion would require us to trace the whole outline of the mental 
 body, as it runs parallel with the organs of the physical frame. But 
 yet we will select one or two metaphysical ideas, in order to show 
 their fitness to the human form. 
 
 And first we select that of power, which has caused terrible star- 
 ing to eyes philosophic, for they have been trying to identify power 
 with nothing at all, and to see it notwithstanding. From Locke to 
 Brown, through the exhausted receiver of David Hume, the essence 
 of power has been spilt, for want of the vessel of the form. And 
 what is the form of power but the human arm with the will in its 
 muscles? The metaphysicians have asked whence they got the idea 
 of power, but the prior question is, Whether they have got it, or 
 not? Certainly if ever they had it, they have lost it, and their 
 chains of causes and effects are ropes of sand or sequences of weak- 
 ness. On the other hand, it is plain to common sense, that power 
 is shown by deeds, and that the idea of power comes from the show- 
 ing; also that the arm of man is the central executive of experience. 
 All other carriage of causes through effects is but the comparative 
 anatomy of that prime organ. But the central form is the main 
 symbol, or the essential body of the idea. And by the laws of cor- 
 respondence, the idea has that body with it, either consciously, or 
 unconsciously, whenever it is used with force. And moreover from 
 the richness of that body it draws out imagery which is the sharpness 
 of the occasion. 
 
 The controversy about power could not fail to lead to the conclu- 
 sion, that there was no such thing ; which was quite true of the 
 
334 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 systems of the disputants, but not of the industrious world. The 
 consequence was, that power was beyond experience, and disap- 
 peared out of philosophy ; though to avoid the shame of avowal, 
 its name was kept for a cloak. Power, however, becomes again an 
 object of study when it enters its own proper form. Let us run 
 along the arm, from shoulder to fingers, to notice how the emblem 
 offers a true habitation to the idea. First, man is a living force, a 
 lake of energy, from which the arm pushes forth as a river of 
 waters of works ; for force is the trunk and body which urges at 
 the back of power. Next, the shoulder is proper power, the place 
 where will meets force, and where power is born. Again, the arm 
 is strength, where the biceps and triceps which are the blacksmiths 
 of action live ; the men of iron know where their iron lies. The 
 forearm is toughness, or the home of sinewy power. The wrist is 
 flexibility, where sleight of hand begins. The palm of the hand 
 is possession, or the power of having; it itches for the finger tips, 
 which give it the power of holding. The grave thumb is firmness 
 or steadiness, and it stands short and sullen among the fingers, 
 which are of the rapid temperament of skill. In the closed fist again 
 the emblem of force comes forth, and completes the circle of this 
 series of powers. This, for the one-sided view : there are however 
 two arms ; the left for all passive powers ; the right for the active ; 
 and the two are married and sometimes clasped, when the most 
 important works are to issue. It is fortunate that the thought of 
 power inhabits such an engine as its proper loord, for as we said 
 before, a wealth of suggestion arises out of the natural language of 
 things, such as could not proceed from artificial symbols ; for the 
 etymology of this language is the whole nature and anatomy of the 
 arm as the exponent of the idea which dwells in it : hence it intro- 
 duces us into an infinite field in the study of power. But if we 
 study it in words or conceptions first, we get no more than the 
 word or conception involves, and we leave the nature of the case 
 out. It must surely be evident that a child working as well as he 
 can with divine forms, in which his mind too is native, is better 
 circumstanced for truth, than a sage fumbling ever so cleverly with 
 notions of his own, into which no creation, but his own laborious 
 conceit has induced him. Experience itself declares, that a thou- 
 
INCARNATIONS. 335 
 
 sand ideas arise when nature is the source, for one that can come 
 from the closet-cudgeled brain. Hence the mercy that has still 
 incarnated our poor metaphysical minds in dresses of such everlast- 
 ing suggestions. 
 
 We will try to illustrate one other philosophical idea — to embody 
 another of the ghosts in which philosophers believe — and it shall 
 be the idea of progress, of which the limbs of man are the essential 
 emblem. Here first the feet are proper progress, to which the 
 ankles are speed, the emblem of which is the talare or winged 
 sandal ; for the feet are the measure of advance, and they twinkle 
 with swiftness as they run, by virtue of the nimble ankles. The 
 legs are straightness, the shaft of direction, keeping the line of the 
 object in the midst of the rush of joints and muscles. The thighs 
 are effort, or the brawniness of progress ; and the hips are motion 
 itself, globe-jointed ; while the trunk which they bear is weight, 
 pressure, or necessity, the incumbence of all man's vitals and wants 
 to generate his progress ; as the same trunk determined to the arms 
 is the by-play of all to produce his skill ; and carried to the head, 
 is the coronation of all in his will and intelligence. If now it be 
 asked, What is progress ? we say it is all advancement, upon this 
 model : walking and running are in its definitions in every sphere. 
 No writer has ever talked of it for many sentences together, without 
 falling into the symbolism of the legs. Such an one " makes a 
 stride in advance" of his age ; such another is a rearward spirit, 
 and slow in the movements of his mind : this one leaps to a conclu- 
 sion, and that other goes rather backwards than forwards. If these 
 terms are metaphors, it is because the soul inhabits a metaphor in 
 dwelling in the human body (p. 21:2 — 244). 
 
 It may be evident from these sketches, that our organization (con- 
 taining us, as it does) has the power to take up, and arrange on its 
 plan, the various abstract terms which hover over the philosophical 
 world. For intuitions may be put into eyes, and reason into brains; 
 and philosophers may become seers, when they get these organs of 
 which they have mutilated themselves so long. In common human- 
 ity let us pray for this consummation. For the cripples of thought 
 are painful objects to us. It is sad to see the philosophers of pro- 
 gress leaving their own good legs behind, and hobbling along 
 
336 THE nUMAN FORM. 
 
 through the learned world on wooden pegs of abstractions ! To see 
 the reasoners on cause and effect ordering automaton arms of their 
 surgeons, and stowing their own arms away in the closet under- 
 neath their libraries ! To watch the Kants putting off their brains, 
 volume by volume, that their "reasons" may be "pure," and filling 
 their skulls with pure bran instead ! These curtailments are too 
 lamentable for laughter, for we are all maimed in our brethren of 
 the schools. We can only hope that they will henceforth conde- 
 scend to the human form, and not make damnable imitations of it, 
 in words of " leather and prunella." 
 
 The immediate mission of the doctrine of the human form in 
 philosphy, lies in the constitution of analogy as the method of 
 reason in this department of experience. For when the mind is 
 consciously in its moulds, it becomes allied to all existence j like 
 God and like nature ; and philosophy is assimilated to theology on 
 the one hand, and to science on the other ; nay, and as the middle 
 term, to the life of man in the world. Hitherto analogical reason- 
 ing has had no proper place in thought, that is to say, knowledge 
 has been deficient in the principle of association j each branch was 
 afraid of foreigners, not knowing that their races have the common 
 stem cf humanity ; but this once seen, the principle of analogy or 
 friendship begets intercourse, and the mental kingdoms begin to 
 communicate. In this case the analogy falls into no stereotyped 
 methods, but corrected and fortified by an abundant appeal to facts, 
 it touches that infinity which relatively to us is one of the first 
 lessons which existence has to give. 
 
 The first object, therefore, whether in questions of mind, or body, 
 is to find the fact, that is to say, the prime form, or shape, of the 
 thing in hand ; the second requisite is, to see its illustrations, or in 
 other words, to view it in connection with its universe ; and the 
 third thing, or the end, is, to see its universe over again within it, 
 but according to the facts of its own being. The method here is 
 analogical, running from the form of the thing, through the forms of 
 its circumstances, and back from these again to the starting point, 
 which is thenceforth no speck, but a full-sized world. We have 
 already illustrated this in speaking of the idea of power : in discuss- 
 ing which we first find the form and the body of power, which is 
 
UNIVERSAL ANALOGY AND SYMBOLISM. 337 
 
 the arm ; next we move down the rails of this through compa- 
 rative powers in nature, and engines and machineries in art, and 
 complete the circumstantial empire of power j and thirdly, we see 
 in the will itself, with its own distinct facts, the arm of arm and 
 the mechanism of mechanism ; and one limb of the inner man is 
 rescued from nothingness or abstraction. In a similar way the 
 analogy of the human form makes the circuit of the world in the 
 interest of every other faculty, and brings back for each a portion 
 of the reality which belongs to man in experience. Nor does it 
 matter whether it be a psychological problem, or a problem of causes, 
 or of ethics ; for the mould of man embodies the latter just as the 
 former, and accounts of the nature of things, and theories of duty, 
 take shape and order with the same facility under the banners of 
 the human form. Social theories also are incarnate there j for it 
 has been known from of old of the human body, that its parts are 
 the exemplars of a perfect commonwealth, intelligence and morality ; 
 in other words, that it is Christianity practical to very matter, built 
 into its own shape of a man. 
 
 But if the principle of analogy be thus coextensive with just 
 thought, it cannot fail at the top to suggest the more living princi- 
 ple of universal symbolism ; for if the mind be like the body, and 
 actuates the body, the latter becomes expressive through means of 
 the likeness and the action ; and in that case the series of existences 
 in the world becomes similarly expressive, that is to say, symbolical 
 of the mind. The face of man thus travels throughout the uni- 
 verse, and love and intelligence look out from things with an infi- 
 nite variety according to their capacities. Nature and form are 
 therefore full of meaning to the true philosopher ; that is to say, 
 they always signify something in the mind and soul of man, and 
 the last account which can be given of them is, to trace out what 
 that something is. For as the arm means power, and the eye sight, 
 (though we could not guess as much unless our own potency and 
 vision were therein,) and as power and sight seem different from 
 these tools, so the horse and the ass, gold and silver, the rose and the 
 lily, have also meanings just as apparently remote from their forms ; 
 and these meanings are inner functions from which they come and 
 to which they return. Without such meanings these things have 
 29 
 
338 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 no communion with the soul of things, just as without power and 
 sight the eye and arm do not partake of the animation of the body. 
 Philosophy therefore has hard work, and a glorious mission before it, 
 in hearing what all forms say ; so much indeed to do, that we fore- 
 see a good time coming, when it will throw down its luggage of 
 classified faculties, empty its pockets of its bad money of " objective 
 and subjective cognitions," and anxious for labor, like blind Barti- 
 masus, cry out exceedingly, " Lord, that I might receive my sight." 
 Then will it find that there are not only more things in heaven and 
 earth than it dreamt of; but that there are also more heavens and 
 earths. For if there is an inner man, there is also his experimental 
 circumstance, his comparative anatomy, botany, mineralogy, cosmolo- 
 gy ; in short, an inner world like this world in its form, though built 
 of spirit and life : and to learn about this will be the last privilege of 
 philosophy, when it becomes teachable, as a little child. 
 
 Having indicated that the symbolism of things is the soul of the 
 comparative scale of nature, and that the knowledge of correspondence 
 is the punctum saliens of the sciences, and if we may be pardoned 
 the thought, a stream from that divine expression, the creative Word, 
 we pass on to one or two other points connected with our subject. 
 And first let us glance at the application of the human form to 
 the doctrine of history. 
 
 In this field the idea has been steadily but tacitly growing up, 
 that there is an organic connection of races and affiliation of ages, 
 so that what seems to be a world of men, is also but One Man. 
 The doctrine of association, admitted of the mind on the one hand, 
 and of social interchange on the other, helps us to conceive that we 
 are all members of one body. The method of thought which runs 
 from the great to the small, and magnifies our parts into humanities, 
 in its other curve from the small to the great, brings mankind to- 
 gether in a single human body. What may be the ultimate tri- 
 umphs of this idea — what sciences may come out of its mighty loins, 
 we dare not venture to predict ; but one thing is clear, that it will 
 purge history of much occasional matter, and aim constantly at that 
 which is the sublime part of all annals, the history of Providence in 
 the world. For though we may think that we shape our own courses 
 as isolated parts, yet if an architectonic whole be admitted, the 
 
THE GRAND MAN. 339 
 
 scheme is necessarily God's. Do we not foresee, that history from 
 this point of view will unwrite itself, and proceeding by the wisdom 
 of erasures, find that its grand task is done for it, and that Old and 
 New Testaments are its truth. For when all is said, the complica- 
 tion returns at last to simple pieces of good and evil. Paradise lost, 
 missed, and regained, are the main concerns. This is the upshot of 
 the birth, education, career and end of the "Grand Man" upon 
 earth ; and writing has to show, that this is already written, for this 
 among other reasons, that there is no man could write it. And so 
 from the garrulity of old experience, and after the fag of unroll- 
 ings and discoveries, we find that we are right exactly where God 
 says to us : "I told ye so from the beginning/' 
 
 But if the doctrine of the human form brings unity to our con- 
 ceptions of mankind, and sees the terrene man as a globe of socie- 
 ties and churches, its effects upon moral philosophy are not less 
 important, for it embraces kindreds and tongues in one fraternal 
 whole. The human is the form of function, and function is diver- 
 sity of act founded upon aptitude. If the race be indeed a man, 
 what vast differences are needed in parts and individuals, to make 
 up his body of such various wants ! The members must consent to 
 differ, as the head differs from the feet, or the liver from the fingers. 
 They must also consent to agree and succor, as closely and quickly 
 as the bodily commonwealth itself. They must further know that 
 they are bound together in a common lot of health or disease, and that 
 there is no wholeness until the entire system is well. In this light 
 the doctrine of the human form is a standing policy of regeneration 
 to man, and sends out the sound to bring in the sick, that their evil 
 spread not to the frame. Here, in short, we have the doctrine of 
 fraternity, sympathy, help, or the foundation of ethics. 
 
 I also deem that the mystery of Christ comes more home to the 
 scientific mind through consideration of the same doctrine, though 
 far be it from me to attempt to base Christianity upon inductions, 
 when it stands on a divine rock of truth. But the mind, which does 
 not know its claims, seems a little advanced towards them, by find- 
 ing that the human form is no accident among things, but is the 
 ruling soul of the world, and that to enter it by divine means 
 amounts on these principles to a reconstruction of the universes of 
 
340 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 spirit and matter by virtue of such Incarnation. For if the end be 
 changed, and a divine humanity substituted in nature for our per- 
 verted manhood, then the means leading to the end are altered also, 
 and the kingdoms of nature and science advance thenceforth to no 
 man but Christ, who takes all power, or is the First and the Last, 
 who was, and is, and is to come. It were easy to say more on this 
 theme, but the hint must now be sufficient, that a science resembling 
 Christianity is possible, based upon the divinity, humanity, and omni- 
 prevalence of the human form. 
 
 The doctrine also of immortality is not untouched by these con- 
 siderations. The belief in a personal immortality, is a belief in the 
 never-dying perfections of the human form. The hope of a social 
 immortality, or a state in which the spirit is no lone existence, rests 
 upon the foundation of a permanence of true brotherhood in a 
 grander human form. Ultimately it presupposes, that all races 
 under the natural skies, and that majority who have passed away, 
 are one stupendous humanity whose life is God. But we may not 
 dwell upon the overpowering vision. Let us be content with declar- 
 ing, that the more of God there dwells in society, and the more of 
 society in the individual, and the more of the individual in the 
 body, and the more of the body in its members, the more living is 
 our life, and the truer the science that represents it. For of one 
 thing we may be very sure, that our proudest knowledge is either 
 nothing, or a rill from the cataracts of heaven. 
 
 We have now, kind reader, endeavored to travel together over 
 some portions of that garden of the Divine Wisdom and Love, the 
 human body, where the tender paternity of God is so very manifest 
 to all his children, and I trust we have found as we proceeded, that 
 what He does is actual as well as perfect; that His works like 
 Himself are positive substance, and meant for our positive know- 
 ledge. In the course of our journey we have conversed repeatedly 
 on our common sense, regarding it as the foundation of our dis- 
 courses. And once more, what is this common sense? It is the 
 active light which follows whatever is largely experienced and rightly 
 done; the mundane version of that scripture, "If ye will do the 
 works, ye shall know of the doctrine." It is not common opinion 
 or thought, both of which may be wrong, or vague ; nay, it is not 
 
ADDITIONAL NOTES. 341 
 
 opinion or thought at all ; but it is the whole living present hour, 
 standing on the pier of the whole past, and about to embark with 
 cheerful courage upon the unknown welcome future. This is the 
 fortune of life and action, and the price of the sciences ; nay, the 
 reaper of which science is the gleaner. This is the bond of times 
 and the principle of toleration. This makes learning humble, and 
 simple natures great. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTES. 
 
 p. 300. 
 The reverse of the biblical revelation of God as a Divine Man, is the philoso- 
 pher's notion of God from physical immensity, as an indistinct being whose 
 sensorium is space. " Jupiter est quodcunqne vides^ &c, &c. The modern 
 astronomical sublime, in which the greatness of the Creator is deduced from 
 the mileage of the universe, and God is increased by naughts according to quad- 
 rillions, quintillions, and sextillions, is like the child's notion of a great man or a 
 great book, which amounts of course to a giant, or an imperial folio. It is not, 
 however, by piling Ossa upon Pelion, that divine size is gained : the way to it is 
 by common sense following Scripture, and recognizing the intenseness of those 
 human qualities which are the greatness of man, and to which matter is a ser- 
 vant, for they say to it, " Go, and it goeth ; Come, and it eometh." So likewise 
 omnipresence is purely divine, and has not to do with space, but with wisdom ; 
 in which latter space itself is but a nook. The biblical or human view is then 
 according to the uprightness of reason ; whereas the notion of the Godhead from 
 space is an infinite sprawl, reason down wallowing on its knees and nose. 
 
 p. 301. 
 We here take occasion to warn the reader against the fallacy of the notion 
 that man is an infinite who has been degraded to the human form, when the fact 
 is that he is dust, which is ever being raised by God through and in the human 
 tbrm. For as we show in the text, the human form is mind, life, and infinity. 
 
 p. 314. 
 The humanizing function of the arts is indeed a phrase which admits and suc- 
 cinctly conveys the whole of this argument. 
 
 p. 319. 
 We may regard this view of the human frame as the doctrine of the freedom 
 of man,, for it opens avenues into all expanses, and sinks its shaft into liberty, 
 which is the principle of sufficient space. The dead microscopic view, on the 
 other hand, is the doctrine of cells or prisons, not indeed unfit for a limit below, 
 but which ought to be kept below, lest the mind, tied to what it contemplates, 
 should become a scientific bottle imp in the cases of its own museum. 
 
 29* 
 
342 THE HUMAN FORM. 
 
 p. 33S. 
 By virtue of the human form all the ages of thought reappear upon the scene 
 together; the mythologic and the scientific; both of them contained in that 
 which is the first and the last, or the theologic epoch: but by inhumanity and 
 atheism man is a perpetual bastard, always vilifying father and mother; like an 
 enemy burning the bridge of time behind him as he runs ; and those who come 
 after him being of the like mind, of course his days are short in the land which 
 his own conceit gives him. 
 
 p. 339. 
 The human is the form of originality, or of special gifts and activities to each 
 member of the body ; for its perfection lies in the unlikeness, yet accordance, of 
 the uses which each part ministers to every other. Agreeably to this form, every 
 man has a genius of his own (p. 80), or he would have no function in his com- 
 monwealth. The animal form is the reverse of this, for animality limited to 
 self, works for no commonwealth, but aims to put itself in the room of others, 
 and thus to engender universal sameness of functions, each animal striving to 
 have all advantage, and to be everything in its sphere. There are, then, two 
 opposite forms in man, and out of him, viz., the human form divine, and the 
 monkey form infernal. And there are two classifications of nature correspond- 
 ing with these unlike principles. See our tract published some years since, on 
 The Groztping of Animals. 
 
ANIMAL AND HUMAN HEALTH, 343 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 HEALTH. 
 
 Among the functions of human life, the presentation of ideals 
 in mind, body and estate, is one which influences all motion and 
 sensation, and gives faculty its direction and play. It seems as if 
 inertia were so tied to motion, pain to pleasure, and imperfection 
 to perfection, that they tend to run out of themselves, and to seek 
 something beyond them to which we give the general name of health. 
 How we come to think that we have a right to be healthy — at least 
 that this is our proper nature, is a problem admitting different solu- 
 tions ; but that our bodies feel disease as a grievance, admits of no 
 doubt whatever. Shall we say, according to the last Chapter, that 
 it is one of the functions of the human form (p. 322), to subject 
 us to ideals, and to put us under this air-pump of wholeness and 
 happiness, that we may gasp to fill its limits ? However this may 
 be, the fact remains, that through all disease we look wistfully after 
 soundness; from the depth of incompetency aspire to strength, and 
 long to be icell through our little day, that duty and pleasure may 
 not be stunted in our hands, but enjoy their legitimate proportions. 
 
 We seem to know sentimentally what that general health would 
 be which we desire. To fill our places in the world, and to love to 
 fill them, are the best ends of our aspirations : to be so organized, 
 or so minded, which you will, as to be spontaneously able and cheer- 
 ful in our labors, at the same time that those labors are not only 
 our choice, but the wants of the time. This includes the rapid di- 
 rection of every muscle to the private in the public service; the 
 bending of sense straight to the objects in hand ; the limitation of 
 sensibilities to the occasion, or the running of life in the pipes of 
 duty ; and finally the control of the all-controlling mind under a 
 
344 HEALTH. 
 
 genius which is called felicity when its works come forth with com- 
 plete adaptation to the time and space which they are to fill. 
 
 Health, in short, by the old definition (and we know of no better), 
 is harmony in its most considerable meaning — harmony of the parts 
 of the body with themselves — harmony of the mind with the body 
 — and harmony of both with the circumstances and ordinances into 
 which we are born : harmony also of the human frame with the 
 climate that it inhabits, and with external nature in its variety. 
 The science of health, then, is ideal physiology and psychology, and 
 the art of healing embraces the means that may conduct us from 
 the present or any state of unhealth, to that picture in the clouds 
 which we cannot give up if we cannot reach it — the means which 
 may gradually make some part of our ideals real. 
 
 There is, of course, a dark side observe to health, in the exist- 
 ence of innumerable maladies and diseases, which beset human 
 nature ; otherwise health would not have been heard of, but instead 
 of it existence full of the play of power, and of the power of play : 
 but upon our present experience as a background, pain, which is the 
 writhing and restiveness of the human form away from, and against 
 disease, sketches out with the pencils of hope and desire the linea- 
 ments of a bright possibility. In this light we look at health from 
 disease, which is perhaps its only point of view. For, as we said 
 before, if that ground be left,* the name of health becomes too nega- 
 tive, and perishes ; and in its place other substances arise, such as 
 joy, love, activity, and all those states which are blessings irrespec- 
 tive of bans. In that case we do not think of state but contemplate 
 action, and valetudinarianism ceasing out of mind and body, leaves 
 us free and fearless for our business. 
 
 Health is therefore only the beginning of a just consideration of 
 the human being, as it were the birth of man into the realms of 
 humanity ; and yet as he is ever beginning afresh, it pursues him 
 with new exigencies along the stages of his journey. To be well 
 with the world of this hour, and equal to the existing situation, is 
 a demand which is always changing, and health must be flexible to 
 meet it; especially so, in a being, who is a child to-day, a youth to- 
 morrow, and an old man in time, and who has no experience of these, 
 his eras, until they come upon him. For health implies a perpe- 
 
ANIMAL AND HUMAN HEALTH. 345 
 
 tual self-adjustment of a new needle to a new pole. And thus, 
 however high we rise, the problem of health, or some difficulty of 
 being well, may be expected to recur to us. The beasts are better 
 off, and worse. They are acclimated from the first, or if they need 
 change of air or season, they are naturally bi-climatic, and run along 
 the magnetic streams to light and warmth, caring little for earth, 
 but very constant to summer. Then again the cup of their heart's 
 blood is measured to objects, and they are drunk with no desires but 
 those which nature prospers. Their muscles also are full of spirit, 
 and do not tear from contrariety of minds. And even if instinct 
 be wrong on one track, and disorder them, animal magnetism is 
 their physician, and like clairvoyants they run to grass and herb, 
 and nibble their healing leaves out of the pharmacy of things. In 
 a word, their potent life burns up sickliness, and makes medicine of 
 little avail; excepting indeed in those cases where a false domestica- 
 tion denaturalizes them. So far they have a superior lot, and earth 
 is their heaven. But on the other hand, brute life and health are 
 not enviable for us. The beasts are nature's simpletons who are 
 pleased with a little, and that little, of the lowest order. They are 
 well with their world, because it is so single and small. Could they 
 have another shown them, by those other eyes which we possess, 
 they would pant and struggle as we do to the ever new adjustment. 
 Instead of living on the bare surface, they would dig in the mines, 
 and build up their palaces of sanity. Such is undoubtedly the cause 
 and object of human diseases — to carry us deeper and higher than 
 brute health can go ; or to make the health of soul, mind and body 
 inseparable and coordinate. For this reason, there is no joyous in- 
 habitation of the earth for man, unless the inner man also be right 
 with his world, and the social with his ; or unless wholeness be 
 fulfilled. Our maladies therefore are warnings and signs of a lost 
 integrity, which is to be sought, and found again ; and where cure 
 does not come, it is an evidence that the problem has been stated 
 and worked on some partial ground, and that a further view and a 
 higher sacrifice are asked. We may terminate the comparison be- 
 tween man and beasts by saying, that the health of the latter is 
 already complete and natural, while the human can never be com- 
 pleted, but is always integral and progressive. If reason shows un- 
 
346 HEALTH. 
 
 wholeness, the pain of the proof* is contemporaneous with the jour- 
 neying of a star from the east, which stands at last as a heraldic 
 sky-point over a new born health. 
 
 In the few remarks which we have to offer in this Chapter upon the 
 subject of health, we shall follow that division which is generally 
 admitted, and consider the individual from two points of view ; first- 
 ly, as containing within himself the grounds of a certain stock of 
 health or disease, which falls under the ordinary department of me- 
 dicine : and secondly, as being surrounded by circumstances favor- 
 able, or otherwise, to health; which constitutes the field of what is 
 termed public health, or as we might name it, social health. It is 
 however no part of our, design to contribute directly to either of the 
 branches of practice which are busied with these two walks ; but 
 rather to complete and conclude the physiological and psychological 
 subjects that have already occupied us in the foregoing Chapters. 
 A popular education on these themes, is very near our aim; and 
 general notions only can therefore enter into our pages : yet we feel 
 that if the eye can be opened to the compass of the subject, we shall 
 not fail in the long run to have brought to practice those first helps 
 which depend upon the insights and expectations of the learner. 
 There are abundance of good books, and zealous men, engaged upon 
 details and sciences : be it our endeavor to elicit some little of the 
 order and light in which they are working, and to present it to me- 
 mory under an organic form. In the first place, therefore, to pro- 
 ceed from the great to the small, we shall consider the subjects and 
 method of social health ; and in the next place, we shall speak, not 
 of individual diseases, but of the various systems of medical treat- 
 ment which are applied to disease, and follow its fashions and moulds. 
 I do not know that our design can be likened to anything more apt- 
 ly than to a map, in which the fewness of places, the smallness of 
 size, and the poorness of outline, are themselves valuable for giving 
 a first view to that public which does not travel. There will be 
 tracts of terra incoc/nita also, for which the excuse shall be, that 
 they are left blank, and not completed for deception. 
 
 And first a few words on the difference between the private, and 
 the public or social health. 
 
 The science of private health is of individual concern, and lies in 
 
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE HEALTH. 347 
 
 making the best of our own circumstances, for the strength, im- 
 provement and enjoyment of the organism. It chooses a healthful 
 place to live in; keeps clean the person and the house; superintends 
 diet and clothing, and all that belongs to cheer; and aims also to 
 keep the mind easy. In short, it is the analysis and perfection of 
 boclykeeping and housekeeping. But it stops for the most part with 
 the front door. It gives you the best of everything, but without 
 insuring the goodness of the best. You can have excellent meat 
 and wine on this principle, if the town supplies them; good air, if 
 the neighborhood be favorable; good drainage, if there is a natural 
 outfall, and the sea washes up conveniently to carry away your 
 refuse. This private health is the property of the strong, the vigor- 
 ous, the wealthy and the fortunate, who have the pick of circum- 
 stances, and are the favorites of the hour; but even with them it 
 is casual and impure, not the maximum of the public health, but the 
 minimum of the public inconvenience and disease. It is like a high 
 hill at whose base the fever-vapors curl and steam, and whose top 
 they threaten to invade, and by subtle fears do invade, and some 
 one or other of its inhabitants drops down ever and anon, shot by 
 invisible arrows from beneath. That superior vigor of mankind 
 which seems to need no tending, and to burn like fine wax without 
 scientific trimming, is the subject of this private health, which is no 
 system or doctrine, but a resource of carnal virtue and goodness 
 above, and in spite of, the elements. Nature has done what she 
 can in producing the robust individuals who belong to this class, but 
 it is committed to ourselves to enlarge the class until it embraces 
 everybody. 
 
 The science of public health undertakes this task, and aims to do 
 for everybody what it seems nobody's vocation to do for himself. 
 Private weakness and impotence is its field of operations ; the want 
 of virtue in persons is what it has to compensate. It knows of 
 houses only as little dots in streets, and streets only as fine lines in 
 towns. In short it looks from the community at individuals, and 
 is necessarily tyrannous until its work is done, after which freedom 
 of a new kind breathes everywhere. It washes the foulest faces 
 first, strikes at the Stygian neighborhoods, keeps company with 
 publicans and sinners, and always begins where it left off, with the 
 
348 HEALTH. 
 
 remaining dirtiest man. Soap and towels from the toes upwards; 
 11 he who would be clean, needs only to wash his feet." Yet the 
 problem grows up street after street, until we find that it is the 
 whole metropolis that is stated. In good faith, there is no such 
 thing as private health ; health is the Saxon for wholeness, and whole- 
 ness is the public health. "YVe shall further illustrate this presently. 
 
 Public health is either an autocrat, or nothing. Independence is 
 its aversion, for it has to trace and cleanse the dependence of man 
 upon his circumstances and his fellows. When it has driven its 
 ploughshare through a foul neighborhood, sown with salt the founda- 
 tions of sin, and carried rivers of water under the new streets, it 
 then knocks at the house-doors, from the worst to the best, and 
 rummages privacy with a curiosity most detestable and proper. It 
 insists that the public fountain shall have a squirt in every room; 
 that the pure air outside shall widen the windows and space the 
 rooms; that the underground kitchen shall be plucked up, and set 
 in the sunshine; that the chimneys shall burn their smoke; and 
 the sewers have their decorum thought of in their beginnings in the 
 chamber. Thus it ordains that the anatomy of the house shall 
 spring by a fibril of propriety from that of the street: and this, by 
 a fibre from that of the town ; and that every one shall know what 
 his neighbor's income of health is, that pretension may die, and the 
 easy manners of a common stock of sanity and consequence arise. 
 Such is public in contradistinction to private health; the latter is 
 the vis medicatrix naturae, which takes stock of the existing health, 
 and sums it up, for life or death, by a balance of figures: the former 
 is the vis medicatrix hominis, which enlarges the stock, and pro- 
 mises to make it all-sufficient. The business of public health is 
 prevention, but that of private health is cure. 
 
 We shall now speak a little more in detail of the exacting nature 
 of this new duty, and for this purpose we shall group the various 
 branches of it upon the bodily organs. Fop it will be evident to 
 the reader of the former Chapters, that our method of considering 
 the world and the society as the procession of the principles of the 
 human frame, offers facilities for the treatment of this question, and 
 throws it into an order parrallel with that of the body itself, (pp. 
 107, 155—157, 165, 229, 230, 289—300.) 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE STOMACH. 349 
 
 Like babies on the subject, let us begin with the stomach, which 
 is the most interesting thing in all our early considerations. And 
 what are the demands of the stomach and the alimentary tube as 
 regards the public service? Evidently they require that cultivated 
 nature shall be conducted into them, and their own rejections be 
 cleanly drawn off into nature again : that is to say, that the world 
 shall be an alimentary tube leading to them from the one side, and 
 a hidden intestine or rectum of drains passing from them on the 
 other. Health immediately, and existence soon, demand that the 
 stomach shall not be isolated, but that the earth shall be cut into 
 ways that correspond to, and converge into, it. Wherever there is 
 a break in the tube of functions that conducts from the earth to the 
 mouth, a corresponding inanition takes place in the latter; and 
 wherever there is a stoppage in that other tube that should run from 
 the belly to the ground, a constipation is created somewhere in the 
 upper parts. Our towns are in a state of permanent inanition and 
 constipation, owing to the fact that markets, and drainage, are not 
 laid down to, and from, every mouth or inhabitant. The violation 
 of the calls of the frame, which is satisfied with nothing but the 
 conquest of the external world, leads to loss of health, public and 
 therefore private. And here we observe a second time, that public 
 and private health are inseparable, and only exist apart in excep- 
 tions that prove the rule of their union. 
 
 But how much is involved in that single reconstruction of circum- 
 stances of which the alimentary tube is the missionary : how much 
 wise industry in the creation of food, and honesty in delivering it 
 from hand to hand; and on the other part, how complete a belief in 
 the interest of the commonwealth in cleanness and order. This 
 lowest department of sanitary duties, begins to demand virtues and 
 faculties which are not yet real ; in fact, the universal kindness of a 
 higher polity than exists on earth. But what then ? shall we give 
 up effort; or shall we not rather be grateful, that past our powers to 
 attain, the wants of the body are prophetic? 
 
 There is no organ, however, which stops with the material ques- 
 tion, but all flesh has psychical inhabitants, who make their own 
 fearful demands. The public peace, prosperity and ease constitute 
 30 
 
350 HEALTH. 
 
 an atmosphere of circumstance around the stomach, which allows our 
 food to do us good, or causes the reverse effect. Health is like the 
 funds, and digestion and indigestion have their daily quotations, if 
 we could but read them. Low anxieties and love of money for its 
 own sake, neglect of the Divine truth, " sufficient unto the day is 
 the evil thereof/' make whole ages dyspeptic; and neglect of the 
 republic of other men than ourselves, creates stoppage in that which 
 should be a unanimous society. Hence the public health of the 
 stomach embraces even these considerations ; and indeed as the lower 
 parts of its duties are fulfilled, these higher ones come out only the 
 more prominently in their claims. 
 
 On our lips, the alimentary tube changes to the skin, and the next 
 realm of public health which we mention, is that which concerns the 
 latter organ. The skin is as exacting upon us as the rest of the 
 body. A polity of healthy skins can be maintained by only the most 
 vast demands upon our industry and sciences. Everything about us 
 must be clean-skinned, or half our personal washing is wasted. The 
 skin leads outwards by forceful channels, and will not be stopped 
 even at great distances, without its emanations recoiling upon the 
 health ; it allures surrounding influences inwards from equal lengths, 
 and will not be deprived of them, or supplied with them in a malig- 
 nant form, without withering, or diseasing, the organization. 
 
 The effects of climate and circumstances upon the skin, are not 
 less remarkable than obvious : for it sympathizes directly with the 
 places and spaces around it, and takes its complexion from them. 
 The inhabitants of the regions of gusty winds have weather-beaten 
 faces, and lines as of the tempests blown howling into their skins. 
 Mountain races have stony or granitic features, as of rocks abandoned 
 to the barren air. The people of moist and marshy places look 
 watery and lymphatic. Those where extremes of temperature pre- 
 vail for long periods, are leathern and shriveled, as though their 
 skins had given up the contest with nature, and died upon their 
 faces. And so forth. These events show how much the skin is 
 influenced by the circumstances about it. 
 
 It is equally certain that the surfaces of the body, represented by 
 the skin, are the medium of contagion, which is the railway of the 
 public disease. For this organ, which compasses all our parts 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE SKIN. 351 
 
 until they form one, true to itself, offers a sympathetic plane on 
 which the health and disease of the community also tend to universal 
 oneness or diffusion. There is no breach of continuity on the sur- 
 face of mankind, but the skin of the poor joins to that of the rich, 
 and epidemics run without ceremony from the one to the other; only 
 more sparse as they spot the palaces, because cleanness is more 
 studied there. 
 
 After the stomach has taken care of our nourishment, and the 
 lungs have looked to our breath, the skin has to provide for both in 
 a kind of infinitesimal sense. For it supplies us with food, and dis- 
 burdens us of excretions; though both its aliments and rejections 
 are for the most part invisible : it also washes itself in air, and keeps 
 itself in motion ; the former, by itself; the latter, under the super- 
 intendence of the lungs. The skin is the theatre of influences; the 
 other organs we have mentioned deal with more palpable stuff. There 
 is a corresponding delicacy in the question of the public and private 
 health of the skin. 
 
 Great, however, is the plainness, and equally great the mystery 
 of cleanliness. It is one of those terms that will hardly be chained 
 to a physical sense ; we no sooner begin to treat it, than it buds like 
 Aaron's rod, and blossoms into morals. Frequent ablutions wash 
 away the sordes of our bodies, open our pores, enable us to emanate 
 with freedom, and with freedom to take in what the atmosphere can 
 yield us. The model and mirror of these effects is presented in 
 our daily washings, which make us feel clean* This clean feeling 
 
 * In speaking of the saliva we took occasion to say a few words on the emo- 
 tional nature of the secretions and excretions (pp. 152 — 154). The field is a wide 
 one, and embraces all the living processes. Feelings are changing in our bodies 
 with every transport of the animated fluids from place to place. The current of 
 blood above is the signal of one set of feelings, and its rush below produces an- 
 other; for it carries soul with it, and its sentiments are according to the parts 
 from and to which it is sent. The same is the case with the perspirations ; they 
 carry away old feelings, the perspirations of the soul, and remove them from the 
 person. So also do the dejections of a grosser kind. Hence the exhilaration con- 
 sequent upon the latter functions when satisfactorily performed. In washing, 
 especially, an effect is produced which we may term material-psychical, and which 
 everyone must have experienced ; a sentiment of new vigor, as though the mind 
 itself were washed in the skin. We do not know " how we are" in the mornings, 
 or what is the promised complexion of our day, until our ablutions have taken 
 
352 HEALTH. 
 
 is the basis of correct perceptions. It gives self-respect, which marks 
 us out from the things about us (pp. 282 — 285) ; makes us judicial 
 among our associates ; establishes a ring of healthy sentiment around 
 us, and between us and other things ; and enables us to discriminate 
 between clean and unclean in whatever seeks to enter our feelings, 
 or aspires to stay there. In short, it places a cordon of pure life 
 around our bodies, as a troop of angels around the bed and before 
 the path of the faithful. Between the life, thus whitely washen, and 
 its objects, nothing intervenes to hinder immediate judgment and 
 action so far as the surface is concerned. The light of the sky and 
 the vigor of the man, kiss upon his skin, and cement a covenant of 
 justice, in which every predominance is conceded to the lordly organ- 
 ization. 
 
 On the other hand, dirt upon the skin is not merely dirt but 
 dirty feeling; and the latter is no sooner set up than it travels soul- 
 wards. The skin is given, among other ends, as a vivacious sentinel 
 to prevent the entrance into us of whatever is alien and impure. 
 The purity of the sentinel is of the greatest value to this exercise 
 of his functions. Dirty feeling does not know dirt when it comes, 
 but is bribed by it, and lets it pass the barrier. Hence an un- 
 clean skin, besides adulterating the feelings, admits a material 
 adulteration to the organs. Furthermore, by clogging the pores, it 
 prevents the beloved dirt from escaping outwards; until at length 
 the body, crusted over with itself, abrogates the skin functions, and 
 finds another and violent eruption in disease. For nobody can stop 
 long in himself; he must go forth as a messenger of life, or death, 
 to those about him. And when he ceases to transpire health, spe- 
 cific sickness is conceived in the struggle ; the system makes new 
 
 place. The result is often quite different from what we feared before these pro- 
 cesses were undergone. 
 
 The generative process, with its sheddings, is the head of the material-psychical 
 acts, and as it secretes the germ of man himself, it affords a light as to the force 
 and function of the other living secretions. What a quantity of imaginations the 
 seed at once carries out of the mind and body; and what an architectural effect 
 it produces on its matrix ! Now, likewise, in their places and degrees, the other 
 excretions export emotion from the organism ; and when they have come out, 
 and reached a suitable nidus, they show that they are seeds, and after their own 
 fa>hion germinate. In this way the world is sown broadcast by the natures of 
 all men, animals and plants. See our Chapter on the Skin, pp. 261 — 268. 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OP THE SKIN. 353 
 
 terms between itself and nature; a part of the privileges of life is 
 ceded, and the various maladies appear. This is the history of one 
 class of physical evils, engendered by the neglected cleanliness, not 
 of years alone, but of generations. 
 
 The private health of the skin subsists in the public health, pri- 
 vate cleanliness also in public, as a man in his society. There may 
 be excellent citizens in a debased community, and cleanly persons 
 in a dirty town; but the surrounding influences arc against them; 
 and they are good and clean in spite of example, by mere manhood 
 and as it were miracle. The labors of cleanliness, though cheerfully 
 undertaken, are Herculean and incessant. Often too they are un- 
 successful, for the laws of nature work in masses, and public neglect 
 is visited not unfrequently upon the just as well as upon the unjust. 
 Hence the necessity of treating these questions from the public side. 
 A clean house in a sooty town ; a well ventilated room with an ad- 
 jacent swamp or churchyard ; a chastened appetite with unwhole- 
 some provisions — these are the impossibilities which the prudent 
 ones are laboring to establish in the city and in the country. It is 
 plain, however, that things move all at once; that house and town, 
 room and sky, dietetics and food, are the same essence in different 
 quantities ; that the large is the continuation of the little, and vice 
 versa — the little the pensioner of the large; in short, that health 
 has two ends — the health of the man, and the health of the people; 
 which must be treated as one by doctors and clergy, because they 
 are tied into one by the Great Physician. 
 
 But if a clean skin supposes in postscript a clean habitation, and 
 this a cleanly location; and if the skin functions preach to us to 
 cultivate purity in every field ; they also enjoin another lesson, of 
 warmth and clothing. The skin, as we have observed, is the gar- 
 ment of the organs (p. 278.) It has wonderful powers of keeping 
 us warm, and of moderating temperature (p. 270). Nakedly, how- 
 ever, it cannot stand against the extremes of heat and cold, but it 
 beseeches to be fenced with coats of other skins, derived by textile 
 skill from plant, worm, and fleecy animal. These too must con- 
 tinue the skin, have pores like the skin's, and be clean as the skin. 
 The duties of cleanliness recur in the clothes; the necessity of 
 warmth — in a word other clothes, is also broadly stated. The clothes 
 
 30* 
 
354 HEALTH. 
 
 must be clad by the walls of a comfortable house, and the hearth 
 fire artificially elongate the brightness which the life fire commences. 
 Only thus can warmth become solid. For it is here as in space and 
 logic : there must be three terms or dimensions; viz., the man in a 
 whole skin, the skin in a decency or wholeness of garments, and 
 the man in a house of comfort, in order to make the substance of 
 a citizen. And again the skin of the circumjacent earth must be 
 washed and dressed, as the double of our own, in order that the 
 reservoirs of outward cleanness may be filled; and lastly, our minds 
 in their skins (pp. 281 — 288) must be clean and whole, lest erup- 
 tions worse than can come from without, should break forth from 
 within. Such is the logic of duties, easier to say than do, which 
 deduces itself by sanitary necessity from the skin. 
 
 The lungs cry aloud for still another public science; and as they 
 provide us with air and motion, they claim circumstances around us 
 convenient for the supply of these two demands. Had we no lungs, 
 or lungs that had not begun to breathe, we might then, so far as 
 these organs are concerned, live like embryos, closely surrounded by 
 walls. But the lungs require both space and atmosphere. These 
 are easily procured as a raw material ; we need only walk abroad to 
 breathe freely enough. Other agencies however intervene ; the 
 fields are cold and the ground is damp, and we need shelter as much 
 as space, and warmth as much as air. Thus the problem arises ; 
 for the world is too big and too windy for our constant lungs. The 
 first size and air which we have to manage is that of the house. 
 For we soon find that we cannot live in nature, but only in art; and 
 are constrained to carry out the lungs in the mansion ; to raise to 
 the second power the air which they contain, and to have an airy 
 room without us, answering to and supplying the air chamber within 
 us. So too with the free motion of the lungs ; it requires to be 
 taken up and continued by a liberality in the dress, and this, by a 
 space in the house, which admits the corresponding free motion of 
 the body. Our apartments must be large enough to enable us to do 
 with our whole frames the duties by which we live, as the body by 
 its chest is large enough for the play of its organs (pp. 100 — 104). 
 
 Nay, but the lungs are bigger missionaries still, and they not 
 only supervise chambers and chimneys, and love ventilation, but 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE LUNGS. 355 
 
 also stand on the Acropolis of all towns, and preach their sermons 
 there. The rooms are but air-cells, and the chimney shafts bron- 
 chial twigs, but the streets are the branches, and the main streets 
 the trachea, of the outward social lung. Breathing comes down 
 from the larger into the lesser, and all the windpipes depend upon 
 the greatest tube. Hence the tyranny of this organic doctrine, 
 which detests individual smallness when public size is concerned. 
 It is plain that building itself has its diseases — its phthisis pulmo- 
 nalis, and the rest — which ought to be cured by direct prescriptions 
 from the state. In the vastness of nature, when our windpipes 
 lead thither, impurity dies by extreme dilution; our sordes perishes 
 in the great sea and the fleckless ether. Nay, take dirt far enough 
 away from its generators, and it becomes the pabulum of some other 
 set of natures, as the noxious breath of animals is transmuted into 
 life, glossy green, for the plants. We have, therefore, to make the 
 lungs continuous with the grand atmosphere. The management of 
 streets and cities,* and the cultivation of the earth's surface 7 so far 
 
 * The providing of places of exercise, where pure air and pleasant sights can 
 be found in or around large towns, has naturally claimed attention. London, 
 Manchester, Liverpool, &c, &c, have their " people's parks," formed either by- 
 private or public munificence. This is well ; but a park, at best, is somewhat 
 formal and valetudinarian. It does not invite walking so much as strolling, 
 which is a very different tension of mind and muscle. The country adjacent to 
 the town is more inspiring generally than the park. We cannot but think that 
 the subject of footpaths belongs to the care of the sanitary men, and if properly 
 considered would open new energies of health to the people. Your footpath has 
 a refreshment distinct from either the park or the highway. But alas ! the foot- 
 paths of the kingdom, and even those around the metropolis, are gradually vanish- 
 ing under the encroachments of the proprietors. We propose to the reformers 
 to have a statutory registration and map constructed at once of all those still ex- 
 tant ; and to make them an inalienable possession of the people, which each 
 parish shall at all times be bound to claim with fines on the mere showing of 
 their registration. And we would also have them maintained, within a given 
 number of miles of the towns, in a passable state during all seasons, winter as 
 well as summer. This would be easily done by means of asphalt laid upon a 
 good foundation ; whereby also trespassing would be discouraged. We claim 
 no new right, for the paths belong to the people; nor could the first expense of 
 winning them from the seasons be considerable. On the other hand, this is one 
 of the most ready means of drawing the population out into circumstances of 
 vigorous exercise, and enjoyment of nature. The whole neighborhood of towns 
 is a public park ready made, if only the paths were duly administered. We 
 
356 HEALTH. 
 
 improves the expirations of all, that they grow lighter, and sail 
 away into the blue places where impurity is at a constant minimum. 
 After which, no doubt, the prayers of congregations go up more 
 readily to heaven, because they have no longer to fight a passage 
 through a putrid roof of vapors overhanging the church, and of 
 which the steeple is the pillar. They are not skunked by vested 
 interests, reminding them of the dead, or tied like coffins to their 
 flowing robes. 
 
 But the psychical office of the lungs is the true and the major 
 problem. How to carry out every breath through the society, so 
 that man shall inspire, expire and conspire ! It is the problem of 
 the production of a common understanding of what is to be thought 
 and done — of how all the men at the same windlass shall heave in 
 tune (pp. 121-122). Truth here is the sky in which all breaths 
 must be received and purified, and successive aspirations thither are 
 these second social windpipes. Moreover, the due sectarizing of 
 mankind is required; unanimity or one-breathingness in masses; no 
 skepticism from one man straitening the breasts of his fellows; for 
 skepticism is social asthma, in which the age forgets how to breathe. 
 The conspiring of the efforts of many to one end, is then a deside- 
 ratum for the public health, enjoyment or integrity of the lungs; and 
 when it has place, each effort pervades a society, and self-breathing 
 is the most attenuated possible. But we do not know the length of 
 the public vibration of the lungs; the size of any chest when it has 
 the truth of Man in it; or the delight of expanding and contracting 
 for a commonweal. Still, this is the problem. 
 
 Our exactions rise as we enter more deeply into the human frame, 
 to ask it what it wants for a world. We are almost afraid to inter- 
 rogate the heart upon the point; if we open its mouth, and encourage 
 it, the organ may prove too voluble for any good purpose. But re- 
 membering that the brain has to speak after it, we shall allow it a 
 voice, trusting to correction some day from that sequel. 
 
 commit the subject to Prince Albert, as worthy of his patronage, and as one 
 that would add another lustre to that diadem of national services which he is 
 determined to wear. The people will never forget the framer of an Albert 
 Charter, if it make the scenes of our fair islands accessible to the poor as to 
 the rich. 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE HEART. 357 
 
 What then is the public health of the heart? We do not now 
 speak of that food which allows us to make blood, further than to 
 say, that the public health of the stomach lies at the foundation of 
 the rest, and that bread and wine require to be heartily conceded by 
 the community to its members, on the principle that the laborer is 
 worthy of his hire. It does our hearts good to eat the bread of toil, 
 because it comes charged with the votes of God and man. But we 
 now canvass the heart in its popular and living sense, in which there 
 are three points to be noticed, all bearing upon the question of hap- 
 piness, that river on which health with its white streamers floats. 
 A man is healthy in this sense, 1. When his heart is in his work. 
 2. When the relations of the heart are carried out for him. 3. When 
 there is an atmosphere of cordiality about him, supplying the indi- 
 vidual affections from the social, as the lungs are supplied from the 
 air, or the thought of the writer from his age. These three things 
 are one in the proposition, that the man shall exist con amove. It 
 is indeed useless to treat of this matter, excepting in so far as it 
 may show, that the highest relations belong to the human frame, 
 and come as prophecies out of its study. This however is motive 
 sufficient, and therefore we dare go on. 
 
 I. A man's heart is the muscle of his muscles, the lion of his 
 strength. But muscles work together by balances and cooperations; 
 in a dance, for instance, there is a marvelous association and change 
 of powers to make the rhythm which answers to the music and unity 
 of the soul. If a muscle or a fibre in one leg be out of tune, it will 
 either be torn, or make a limp of the dance. And when the main 
 muscle of all stands out, and will not enter the quadrille, as in ill- 
 assorted tasks, the fire of industry expires, and legs and arms move 
 languidly enough. The joint of joints is out of joint, and the in- 
 ferior limbs are but crutches on which painful duty carries the 
 cripple about. On the contrary, in happy moments, when the man 
 and his work are at one, each muscle comes parallel with the heart, 
 true to its rank, file and moment, and the strokes of the man are 
 constant and imaginative as his heart beats. Heart and hand then 
 grasp the same thing, and are working in united pulsations. So 
 much for the first requisite of carrying out the bosom, namely, that 
 the man's heart shall be in his work. 
 
358 HEALTH. 
 
 II. The happy carrying out of the heart's relations. Home, 
 friends, children, country, are the immediate world of the heart; 
 and when its love can reckon them over as its own, its every beat 
 against the breast is answered from without, and the heart eddies 
 through the society in widening concentric circulations. The blood 
 is made under the auspices of feelings which are the sweetest en- 
 joyments and the dearest bonds, and the body is tinctured with a 
 stately fire, larger than its individual life. On the contrary, where 
 there is no issue for the feelings, or no proper objects to love, the 
 breast is shut, and probably the senses absorb the soul, and carry it 
 out to death through their vicious doors. The disappointments of 
 the heart may either break it, or wither up countenance and frame, 
 showing the picture of a man whose blood carries no live motives in 
 its current. Moral freedom is the formula of this kind of health, 
 which imports that the walls of nature and circumstance — of heart, 
 ribs, manners and laws, shall be no hindrances to the structural af- 
 fections of mankind. We have got now to labor con amove, plus 
 life con amove. What next? 
 
 III. The supply of heartiness to the heart from without. Man 
 is a being who lives forever upon grounds, forever breathes atmo- 
 spheres, sees suns, is gladdened by light and heat, chafed by electri- 
 cities, and pulled by magnetisms. No wonder; for all forms are 
 Pan-anthropal. But the planet which is ordered to accompany him 
 forever, puts off its exuviae at every stage, and shows a fresh core 
 or surface. The heart-man does not live on mineral, but on social 
 grounds, breathes not airs but thoughts, is warmed by blood heat, 
 or aifection, and drawn by living magnetism, which is love. And 
 this set of circumstances is a true universe which environs us, and 
 whence we get life ah extva, as we get nature from the world. Ac- 
 cording to the constitution then of the social world, is the supply of 
 the air, sunshine and waters of our existence, and we can no more 
 live out of the one world than out of the other. As we have all 
 from nature being nature's subjects, so we have all from life as we 
 are the subjects of life; ourselves alone being free, a germ of man- 
 hood plunged through and into all things, to grow through, and to 
 outgrow, the more limited planets. When man is all in all in the 
 secondary sense ; he will be in the image and likeness of God, who 
 
THE SOCIAL MAP. 359 
 
 is all in all in the primary. The fitness of society to every man, is 
 the condition of this last demand of the heart for health. It is a 
 mad claim : worse perhaps than that of those sanitary reformers who 
 would grasp the winds and wash them clean, sweeten Leeds and 
 purify Sierra Leone, abolish ague or typhus from the rural districts, 
 or drunkenness from all classes. We believe however that it is 
 only the same problem as theirs, but stated for a very exacting 
 organ, the heart. 
 
 How shall any of this be secured? If we cannot manage common 
 nature, and lead it as health into our dwellings, how can we sweeten 
 this vast and terrible life, which gives and takes our moral diseases, 
 and whistles its comedies through our ruined affections; which ac- 
 cepts the pollutions of bad hearts, and the wail of broken ones, and 
 mixes them in its columns to press us more heavily into the king- 
 dom of pain? All that we can say in reply is, that the heart must 
 deserve its universe before it gets it; the present world is the fatal 
 logic of its diseases, the other, which we have described, must be the 
 logic of its healths. It is. an untieable knot, excepting on the prin- 
 ciple of a religious alteration of man, or a Deus intersit. For if 
 already the community depends on the individual, and vice vend, 
 then they are equated, and without the intervention of some third 
 power, there is no hope of improvement. But still, under the 
 guidance of God, both the man and the society step out of the fatal 
 circle, and acquire new duties again : and hence we cannot doubt 
 that in the public cause the community must be worked upon by 
 communal means, and the individual by private means, and that both 
 these will be reformatory, entering into the spirit of Providence. 
 
 But let us reassert our claim to be map-makers, and not travelers 
 or colonizers. It is allowable to exhibit an organic geography, like 
 the physical, though on a glance at the result, it is seen to be rather 
 a mighty blank of desiderata than a habitable globe. Here, we say, 
 are ten thousand square leagues on which no grass grows, no rain 
 falls, whence no rivers issue, where the oases have dangers of their 
 own, and where a few sparse lions haunt with horrible hunger the 
 white bones of old camels and travelers. Here are regions where 
 man's greatest works and his smallest pests, fleas and pyramids, 
 come together. Here are the verdurous shores of pestilence, invit- 
 
360 HEALTH. 
 
 ing as sin, apples of Sodom whose rind is half a continent. Here 
 are the chilblains of the frozen zones, which cool down the love of 
 the sun to a senile moonlight and night-heat for the poles as they 
 creak and grind in their ice. Here are the islands where elemental 
 anger begins, and infant hurricanes spin their tops. So much for 
 the inhuman map, and then for the human. Here are the savages, 
 and here the barbarians; here man is in the fulness of his present 
 stature, in the manufacturing heaven of Manchester, in the Arcady 
 of Ireland, or in the holy cities of Paris and London. If the map 
 has no other purpose, it shows that the world is still round, vast and 
 habitable; capable of intercommunication; it enlarges our ideas of 
 the field that duty has before it. In defect of maps founded on the 
 spherical whole, the ancients regarded the tropics as mystical fiery 
 lands where man could not live; and in defect of the psychical map, 
 we are become afraid, not without a show of prudence, of the richest 
 heats of the heart, which we regard as the realm of phantasmagoria 
 and monsters. Yet if tigers and snakes abound there, men also 
 may be found; moreover the sugars and spices and gold of both 
 kinds, moral as well as physical, can come from no other than those 
 sunniest rings. 
 
 But in the meantime we are sure of one thing — that man must 
 work at his post, and not desert it, if he is to find health for his 
 heart. Want fools us, unless we drive it through our daily works. 
 Present circumstance is the top of desert, and the means of happi- 
 ness ; and it is in the reformation of our own fields, and no others, 
 that our future is to come. The statesman does not emigrate to 
 carry out his plans. And so, in like manner, it is not new but old 
 industry that is to become attractive, by a new heart given by hea- 
 ven during fair toil : it is not altered social relations that will make 
 us contented, but a better love in those which exist ; and it is not a 
 new world of men that we expect, but a conversion of the old to the 
 types of the commandments. The heart, as we have stated it, 
 prophesies how newly, under these circumstances, all things will 
 appear. 
 
 We now pass on to the public health of the brain, which has two 
 parts; firstly, the mental and spiritual culture of the time, and 
 secondly, the national education. 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OF THE BRAIN. 6bl 
 
 With respect to the first point, or culture, it embraces the pro- 
 gressive state of religious and other knowledge, but under a form 
 established and recognized by government for the time being. The 
 beginning of it is an established church, under which comes an 
 established or sanctioned literature, to give the tone to the secular 
 thought of the year. Private churches and literatures may exist in 
 any numbers, and they belong to the department of the freedom or 
 private health of the brain ; but over them, in the order of things, 
 there ought to be public encouragement of the admitted best among 
 them, both to gain a temporary rule of thinking, and to stimulate 
 the individual to the greatest possible degree. A government loses 
 its chief handle when it ceases to dispense the prizes of thought ; it 
 cedes the courage with which dissoluteness of mind and morals is 
 to be repressed, when it no longer grasps the chief literature of an 
 age. The thing to be guarded against is the supposition, that the 
 highest reach of thought can ever come under patronage at the time 
 of its attainment; that is not the point sought; it is the best 
 average which alone any state machinery can be expected to select. 
 The prizes of a state will be the leading points by which the next 
 ages decide upon its own condition; and progress will be marked 
 chiefly by the successive adoption of works and thoughts which 
 have been rejected, but are at length received. Nevertheless, in 
 this department, religion must ever claim the first place; that is to 
 say, the Christian religion through the Bible; and we regard it as 
 a fundamental to take no thought of infidelities in the council-cham- 
 bers of culture, but to proceed as if they did not exist. Let them 
 have their private range, according to the freedom of the age ; still, 
 they can enter into no general plan, but must be discouraged, 
 though not violated, by the state. By means of this laudable 
 supervision, the governments of free nations will begin to operate 
 upon the general thought, and with various success, according to 
 their own wisdom, will stimulate knowledge, both natural and 
 divine. Much, indeed, is done in this respect already, by numerous 
 corporations addicted to special walks of art and science ; but it 
 remains to crown the heights of the possibility by a State adoption 
 of what, from time to time, seems the best. 
 
 It will be borne in mind that we recognize two modes in all these 
 31 
 
362 HEALTH. 
 
 fields, the private and the public. We do not desire that the one 
 should usurp the place of the other, or that freedom should be lost 
 by any direct action of government upon matters not strictly 
 required by the commonwealth. No censorships of the press are 
 needed : the laurel given from above is a more effectual means of 
 command than any leg-locks which absolutism has devised. And 
 where public opinion presses, as in England, the average best men 
 of thought and art will be the prize-men of their year or decade ; 
 and more could not be expected. Those who are before the age, can 
 wait until their age arrives. 
 
 We must, however, guard against the supposition, that one 
 establishment will have anything to do with the choice of another, 
 or that the clergy of the church will nominate the clergy of 
 literature. On the contrary, all these public organs must spring 
 directly from the head of the commonwealth, or they will not 
 possess their own souls, or be taken as they are found. In the 
 contrariety between the best products of an age, lies often the 
 balance and safety of the state; and the church and literature will 
 never be more mutually corrective than when they meet with the 
 rights of an equal origin around the person of the supreme magis- 
 trate. Hence in treating of the second point, or national educa- 
 tion, we are in nowise tied to the order of the first, or culture ; but 
 we begin our course afresh with existing possibilities. It is as in 
 cultivating an estate, we offer prizes for the best fruits, vegetables 
 and stock ; and by that means, we hope to stimulate all the labors 
 of the various tenants ; but when we come to feed our people, we 
 can only give to each the best that can be had ; and if their 
 stomachs are full of fancies and indigestions, we must take them at 
 their word, and supply them with such food as they desire. The 
 point however is, that the state is bound to give them mental food, 
 and this, by a system, not of coercions, but of encouragements. 
 And if like Hindoo castes, they cannot eat anything that has been 
 touched by those of another sect, this, too, must be respected ; yet 
 not so as to render the main object impossible. The first thing is 
 to make the knowledge so general and public, that no complaint 
 shall arise from the jealous persons — that the waters shall not come 
 through our neighbors' houses, but in pipes down the middle of 
 
PUBLIC HEALTH OF TEE MUSCLES. 363 
 
 the streets. The people will then feel that this is knowledge direct 
 from the reservoir of the age, and that if it is not good, they can- 
 not complain of it. We therefore regard secular education as the 
 only public education which is possible ; and the public school- 
 masters consequently as a clericy of which the Queen is the head, 
 and which must emanate, coequally with the church itself, from the 
 progressive State. 
 
 But the great brain-builder is action, or industry directed by 
 knowledge ; for real doctrine is the brilliance of good works. The 
 encouragement of action is therefore a department of public health, 
 and indeed the chiefest of all. This occurs by the stimulation of 
 examples, great pieces of art, or model actions ; and the prizes of 
 the workers have no proper source, lower than the hand which 
 grasps the sceptre. For if the cradles of the land hold the dew 
 which is ascending into private existence, the throne, or mountain of 
 the State, is the altitude whence the public rivers must flow. The 
 clergy of industry, which is Grod's church in the muscles, in England, 
 in 1851, receive their first ordination. It is fortunate that we write 
 in a year when the throne is the centre of the arts : when a great 
 prince, faithful to the height where Providence sets him, dispenses 
 the provocatives of new achievements to bless the nations of the 
 earth; when private selfishness and laissez faire have been brought 
 to their knees, and old inactions have yielded under a royal lash of 
 shame. It is mere desert to say, that Albert is the victor in this 
 social battle, and that the standard which he has planted in his 
 crystal camp will not be plucked down again, because it belongs to 
 the nature of man to take the fire of his industry from his chiefs. 
 
 The conception of public health implies the reconstruction of all 
 the circumstances with which the organism is surrounded, upon the 
 model of its natural and spiritual wants, and the presumption is, 
 that many diseases and vices will die which circumstances, and not 
 the choice of individuals, have engendered. This result itself, how- 
 ever, can only run pari passu with the increase of private virtue, 
 and hence, as we said before, the throne to which the whole pro- 
 blem perpetually refers itself, is the regeneration of man. After any 
 given circumstantial operation has been effected, an intractable mass 
 of evil will still be left, which requires new circumstances of cure, 
 
364 HEALTH. 
 
 originated by new physicians of good. Thus the private circulates 
 into the public, and vice versa, and to dream of any Owenite reform, 
 is to postulate a state which is desirable, but by that means, unat- 
 tainable. The " best possible circumstances" mean the best possi- 
 ble brain and heart, sent by God to the occasion. But again, on 
 the other hand, without new circumstances there is no new hope for 
 man. 
 
 Were it worth while (which it is not) we might follow out the 
 other organs in their exactions ; and group the production of man 
 around the generative parts ; his first endowments around the 
 organs of the senses ; and so forth. But enough has now been 
 said, to show that the human frame is a natural method of thought, 
 even in the social and political spheres. Indeed, to the eye of faith 
 it is a great sanitary prophecy, unfilled by the mind, as the world is 
 unfilled by the race. And in this respect also it is an urgence of 
 immortality. For health, or the whole inhabitation of man in 
 the body and the world, is an expansion and a deed so great, 
 that no time can exhaust it, or work out any final equation of the 
 correspondence : the fitting may go on for ever, not for the race 
 alone, but for each individual. We repeat also that each end of the 
 chain of health is contagious in a universal sense ; that a renewed 
 man and society are not only consciously, but organically also, work- 
 ing for the perfection of every climate, for the unfreezing of every 
 ice-lock, for the fertilization of every soil ; for the extinction of mon- 
 sters and the increment of creations ; and for the birth of more 
 men, and new men, who come as cultivators in their seasons. The 
 greatest problems (pp. 338, 239, 316) are not intangible; but it is 
 ordained that our little frames shall give nature the signals of 
 change, and ring the bells of new eras. 
 
 This body corporeal then, when the light is set shining through 
 it, projects into our space new social and political bodies, one after 
 another ; the desiderata of health call about them the planets of 
 health, and geography and astronomy are its satellites. It is none 
 of our doing that the subject has this shape ', the sanitary reformers 
 have to answer for it ; for it is they that have shown, in their first 
 days of existence, that man, in his body equally as in his brain, is 
 by nature a factory of Utopias. 
 
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE. 365 
 
 Iii the meantime, the community of things is proved by evil, if not 
 by good ; and in bringing this to light, the pioneers of health have 
 already great merits. They have shown that nothing is lost, but 
 that disease springs from neglected social duties. The map of dirti- 
 ness is also the map of disease ; the map of intemperance, ditto ; 
 the map of pauperism, ditto. They have afforded new force to the 
 truth, that all things are in the effort to be promoted into man. 
 Swamps and ditches, in their new rank and honors, are fevers, 
 choleras, and the like. If we have not dwelt upon these subjects 
 more in detail, it is because our vocation here leads us to illustrate 
 organization, as a means of opening the mind itself by a just educa- 
 tion. But for all present purposes, we concede the palm of useful- 
 ness to these brave sanitary inquirers. 
 
 So much for the curing of societies, which the public health-doc- 
 tors have undertaken to superintend : we now come to medicine in 
 the more ordinary sense, as it proffers aid to individuals in their 
 maladies, according to certain rules and methods, new and old. 
 
 The earth appears to be netted over with a traditional healing 
 power ; for some knowledge of herbs and simples belongs perhaps 
 to every race, to enable it to apply the products of the soil to the 
 cure of its own immediate distresses. As each land has its national 
 music, and in some countries almost every dale has its melodies, so 
 each seems also to have its national medicine, derived from imme- 
 morial times. How the places came by the knowledge is not often 
 asked. We cannot but think that in this fact also, we have traces 
 of an ancient state of man of which history has not brought us the 
 records. If in the earliest national myths there be evidence of a 
 condition in which the faculties and imaginations were more full 
 of tact and grasp than now; if the first bards loved, and were 
 loved by, nature, with a fondling intimacy to which we are strangers, 
 there is reason to suppose that this intimacy extended to every 
 walk of life, and that there was a primitive shine of knowledge 
 anticipating the arts and sciences, and in which medicine, and the 
 skill of herbs, would partake. If newness of powers is still so 
 great a gift, that infancy is a delight through the livelong day 
 because the world is fresh and sense unworn, what must have been 
 
 31* 
 
3GQ HEALTH. 
 
 the newness of those first senses which opened upon the morning of 
 time ? And if delight is the bed of genius, what must have been 
 the brightness of the insights that went penetrating forth from the 
 eyes of the children of happiness in the beginning? The word hap- 
 piness, in its human propriety, contains it all. Such races would 
 happen on the needful laws of the world, and its harmonies with 
 their frames, and when the first stings of sin tore them with their 
 first physical pangs, they would aim at cunning evasions of con- 
 sequences by arts and herbs with which they had been familiar 
 under other auspices. The speed of their reasons would be like reve- 
 lations compared to the slowness of ours. And thus if we choose 
 to call the mythologies, revelations, we must also call medicine by 
 the same name, so far as it has come down from the original stem. 
 The thought of harmony corroborates this view. For primeval man 
 was in harmony with his circumstances, and his mind had a fair 
 start : he had his own native version of physiologies, botanies and 
 the rest, though unlike ours; and when he swerved to our tree of 
 knowledge, his child-genius, like all natural things, could only desert 
 him by degrees. Doubtless it hovered over him, until it created for 
 him the heads of that observation which is still traditive with man. 
 There is another version of this, but it is hardly worth our notice : 
 criticism, as the art of picking things to pieces, is its parent. For 
 they say that man was at first a savage (or according to learned Ves- 
 tiges, an ape), who by dint of a toilette of some thousands of years 
 before the mirror of philosophy, has " titivated" himself into civiliza- 
 tion. This contradicts experience. The savages* are not infantile 
 but senile races, with no loins left; they tend not to pro-creation, 
 but extinction. They have no power of imitating the models of 
 their betters, but where the white man comes they die out. If the 
 Creator had planted the earth with such, he would have been like a 
 Colonial Secretary peopling a new continent with scum. Pretty 
 babes these to have appeared so soon after the morning stars con- 
 gratulatively sung together and the sons of God shouted for joy ! 
 
 * We do not reckon the negro races as savages ; they are evidently still infan- 
 tine, capable of propagation and education: nay, capable of passive conquest, by 
 the very destinies which have enslaved them, and which are insuring to their 
 posterity many spacious kingdoms on the lace of the earth. 
 
TRADITIONAL MEDICINE. 367 
 
 The tradition of such a crew of darkness must have been a Botany 
 Bay and Norfolk Island reeking through all myth and song : the 
 arts and sciences must have smelt like dogs and monkeys from these 
 kennels. Let alone Eden — I do not see where Egypt and Babylon 
 could have come from, if skulking aborigines, and hide-dried canni- 
 bals eating their own heads off, had been our Adams. Long before 
 this, not a baby would have been left to hope, but the human form, 
 like a boat launched with a hole in its bottom, would have foundered 
 on the brink of the year 1. It is according to all analogies, to stick 
 to the paradise of Genesis, which gives a divine and redundant youth 
 to man where he so wanted it, that otherwise no human race could 
 have grown up. And if we know not how to reconcile every petty 
 circumstance to this piece of God's common sense, let us know that 
 it is only because our winter cannot comprehend the spring in which 
 His creations blossom : and let us wait until the second human spring 
 enables us better to commune with the first. We can easily receive 
 any science, without letting it meddle with the divine proprieties. 
 
 As then it is so much easier to fall than to rise, we have first to 
 chronicle the descent of medicine from old times, when the race, like 
 a woman's heart, had feeling and insight full, and when also the 
 schools of healing originated, in the persons of those who in the well- 
 distributed humanity had greater gifts in this kind than their fellows. 
 These were the gods, from which medicine was said to be descended, 
 and whose powers might well appear to be miraculous to their suc- 
 cessors, who had lost the insight upon which the tutum, citum and 
 jucundum of healing depends. 
 
 But we do not profess to sketch the history of this interesting 
 subject; it is sufficient to know, that there are two great classes of 
 healers, namely, 1. The medical schools, and their disciples ; and, 
 2. The people itself as a depositary of mere traditive medicine. 
 With respect to the schools, they also contain two elements; in the 
 first place, their own traditional lore, the history of medicine gradu- 
 ally purifying itself towards modern science ; and in the second, the 
 cumulative experience and induction of that science itself. As for 
 the first of these elements, it has grown weaker and weaker with each 
 generation, so that one might say that each age of doctors never had 
 a grandfather ; the family likeness vanishes more and more out of 
 
868 HEALTH. 
 
 the race. Orthodox medicine in this century is a substitution and 
 not a continuation of the science of the last: it has no right to be 
 offended with upstarts, for it is not more than fifty years since itself 
 arose out of the crucibles and dissecting rooms. In a word, it has 
 many experiments, but almost no traditions. Each fresh version of 
 our Pharmacopoeia carefully weeds out old simples, and fills their 
 places with chemicals, exterminating this and that to make room for 
 the last new compounds. 
 
 With regard to the second, or scientific clement, we do not find 
 that it has placed physic upon any basis but that of experimenta- 
 tion; and that not integral, but chemical experimentation. If the 
 body were a pure acid, or alkali, housing nothing but affinities, it 
 could hardly be more industriously tested by all the new products 
 of the laboratory, to see what they will do with it. And when the 
 perilous experiments have been made, no law comes out of them, 
 excepting that mankind, " having suffered many things of many phy- 
 sicians, and spent all, and being rather worse than better," is wearied 
 in the end and worn out in the process. This is to be expected, 
 where the most acrid substances which art can wring from nature, 
 are put in large quantities into the living frame, on nothing more 
 than an experimental hope. It is furthermore to be expected from 
 the course which physiology has taken in the rearing and breeding 
 of medical men. For it teaches them to think chemically of man 
 himself; to imagine him not as a human being with a spirit inside, 
 but as a plaster-statue of nucleated cells, whose life is manifested 
 in composition and decomposition. There can be no common sense 
 in treatment, where thought wanders into this chaos of petty prisons : 
 indeed one feels that if man is such a compost, blue pills and black 
 draughts are fit stuff, not only to medicine, but to feed him. In the 
 meantime, however, what becomes of the treatment of disease ? 
 
 The consequences of this system, in which nearly all but the 
 chemical side is neglected, have been seen by its orthodox adherents, 
 and if we remember aright there is even a school calling itself 
 " Young Physic," which recognizes the probability that medicine 
 does more harm than good, and that the secret of the superior suc- 
 cess of parties to be mentioned presently, depends upon their good 
 fortune in "doing nothing." This protestantism of theirs demands a 
 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DISEASE. 369 
 
 few words from us, for really the thought occurs, Whether, experi- 
 mentally, we know how soon diseases would cure themselves, if they 
 were left to nature ? No observations have been made upon sick 
 people visited by the physician, who has made up his mind to have 
 nothing to do with them, but only to use his gray eyes. 
 
 It is a mistake to think that there is such a thing as the natural 
 history of disease ; it has none but a human history — either benig- 
 nant or terrible. Man as he lies stretched on his pallet, is still both 
 a soul and a body; he does not grow, or show, like insensate wood 
 or bark, in any direction. If you are there to heal him, he takes 
 good out of your frame, sympathy and skill, even though you pour 
 bad out of your bottles ; he feels the warmth of a brother, present as 
 the envoy of one of the arts of heaven. And if you give placebos, 
 you are still acting upon him by the inevitable medication of your 
 person. But if he finds you at his bedside, to watch him for cold 
 experiments' sake, that his life, death, or throes may figure in your 
 statistics, do not suppose that you are innocuous, for you are a potent 
 poisonous drug, calling forth sorrow, despair, fear, and other de- 
 stroyers, and aggravating the sensibilities of his organs. The best 
 feeling that you can cause under these circumstances, is indignation, 
 which, as it rouses the life, may be remedial in your teeth. But 
 there is an absurdity involved in the question, What would be the 
 course of disease if left to itself ? — because it never can be left to 
 itself without a breach of manhood ) and even if it occurred on a 
 desert island, the mind of the sufferer would play an important part 
 in determining the illness towards either death or recovery. The 
 brutes know better than to resign themselves to doing nothing under 
 natural afflictions : they lick their sores, and seek their herbs ; and 
 the domestic animals bring their sorrows of this kind to man, and 
 assume a kind of patience under the treatment that he enjoins. The 
 record of cases requiring care, and yet to which no care was given, 
 would constitute, so far as it could exist, the unnatural and inhuman 
 history of disease. 
 
 We therefore reckon that any medical practice which has had a 
 few precedents to correct it, is better than that profession of nothing, 
 to which some of our brethren have directed their hopes. Yet it is 
 equally true that many cases would have recovered better by simple 
 
370 HEALTH. 
 
 watching, and the application of a few obvious means mostly sug- 
 gested by the patient's feelings, than where a large apparatus of 
 drugs has been employed. Nevertheless, in every social state, the 
 physician, in some form or other, is indispensable, whether he be 
 called priest, magician, friend, mother, or by whatever name that 
 has authority over our mind and matter. 
 
 But after all there is great necessity to do nothing relatively to 
 what has been done ; for we have been on a wrong track, and must 
 change it ; and by a common law of our nature, the new will seem 
 nothing to the old, so long as the old has new eyes to see it. 
 Buried, as the existing medicine is, among fuming acids, sharp 
 stimuli, chemicals and caustics, it cannot believe in the power of 
 gentleness, or the first smallness of good causes. Widely extended 
 though it be, we must pass it by ; but not without the recognition, 
 that it is the chaotic mother of children fairer than itself, and on 
 their account deserves to be respected. But now that these have 
 come, it only keeps them out of their fortunes by lingering too long 
 above ground, and cumbering the earth with its age and infirmities. 
 
 The first considerable child which it has born,, is that science 
 which Hahnemann delivered — we mean Homceopathy, or the 
 treatment of "likes by likes," which was a legitimate fruit of the 
 previous drug medication. For in the whole, the idea of medicine 
 itself is homoeopathic ; it does not give health-producing agents to 
 engender health, but poisons which would issue in disease : it is, 
 therefore, the general application of the law, by which like is to be 
 cured by like. It is in the particulars that medicine does not re- 
 cognize the application of the Hahnemannian formula ; and thence, 
 whenever it comes into details, it is in contradiction with its own 
 idea. It is homoeopathic in theory, and allopathic in application — 
 a house divided against itself. And in the matter of doses, it is 
 subject to the like remarks ; for no one gives physic in the same 
 quantities as food, but a few grains of calomel, or a few fractions of 
 a grain of arsenic, are considered sufficient even by " heroic prac- 
 titioners" of the old school. Why is this, but that there is a 
 working in these poisons, which takes them out of the category of 
 the ordinary materials which we put into our mouths? And if a 
 grain will produce results upon a man of fourteen stone weight, 
 
HOMOEOPATHY. 371 
 
 where is the absurdity to end, without experiment, which may 
 choose to show that the millionth or decillionth of a grain will 
 have even better results ? I marvel how men who lift fourteen 
 stone by the equipoise of a skillful grain, can sneer at other men, 
 who do the same nice balance by incalculably lesser weights. For 
 it is evident that all medicine is on this railway of smallness, and 
 is more perfect and harmless for every fcesh terminus that it reaches. 
 If the allopathists were accustomed to give calomel porridges, their 
 wrath against small doses would be consistent ; but when they are 
 themselves reduced to grains, why should they cavil at other healers, 
 who, by experiment, have found out the value of grains of grains. 
 
 It was Hahnemann to whom all the world is indebted for the 
 scientific deepening of medicine in both these fields. He, first of 
 men, saw that if poison in gcnere is given to disease in genere, 
 the aim will be more neatly hit if poison in particulari be admin- 
 istered to disease in particulari. This conception of his, involved 
 the working of a very peculiar " science of correspondences" be- 
 tween the effects of drugs and the symptoms of diseases, so as to 
 discover exactly what poisons, and what order of them, would an- 
 swer to the symptoms and flux of special maladies. In the ideal 
 of this great sportsman, each shot in the gun was cognizant of its 
 own part of the prey, and the line of sight was the science which 
 brought poison level with disease. May we not extend the meta- 
 phor, and say, that man in sickness is like two men, each wrestling 
 with the other ; and that the physician comes to shoot the worser 
 man to death, without a grain of the charge touching the better : 
 in this case the homoeopathic dose will not hit the struggling health, 
 because the shot can wound nothing but disease ; whereas the 
 allopathic bullet, having no scientific speciality in its projection, 
 generally riddles both the men, and leaves mere death, or its ante- 
 cedents on the field. 
 
 The matter of doses depends upon the fineness of the aim. In 
 everything there is npunctum saliens so small, that if we could find 
 it out, a pin's point would cover it as with a sky. What is the 
 meaning of that invisible world which is especially versed about 
 organization, if there be not forces and substances whose minute- 
 ness excludes them from our vision ? We have not to batter the 
 
6VL HEALTH. 
 
 human body to pieces in order to destroy it, but an artistic prick — 
 a bare bodkin — under the fifth rib, lets out the life entire. Nay, 
 had we neater skill of deadliness, a word would do it. The sum of 
 force brought to bear depends upon precision, and a single shot true 
 to its aim, or at most a succession of a few shots, would terminate 
 any battle that ever was fought, by picking off the chiefs. If our 
 gunnery be unscientific, the two armies must pound each other, 
 until chance produces the effects of science, by hitting the leaders ; 
 and in this case a prodigious expenditure of ammunition may be 
 requisite ; but when the balls are charmed, a handful will finish a 
 war. It is not fair to count weight of metal when science is on 
 the one side, and brute stuff on the other ; or to suppose that there 
 is any parallel of well- skilled smallness with ignorance of the most 
 portentous size. The allopathic school is therefore wrong in sup- 
 posing that our " littles" are the fractions of their " mickles ;" the 
 exactness of aim, in giving the former a new direction, takes them 
 out of all comparison with the unwieldy stones which the orthodox 
 throw from their catapults. 
 
 But again, there is another consideration. Fact shows that the 
 attenuation of medicines may go on to such a point, and yet their 
 curative properties be preserved, nay, heightened, that we are 
 obliged to desert the hypothesis of their material action, and to 
 presume that they take rank as dynamical things. A drop of 
 aconite may be put into a glass of spirit, a drop of this latter into 
 another glass of spirit, and so on, to the hundredth or the thou- 
 sandth time, and still the aconite-property shall be available for cure. 
 Here then we enter another field, and deal with the spirits of things, 
 which are their potential forms, gradually refining massy drugs, 
 until they are likened to those sightless agents which we know to 
 be the roots of nature, and feel as the most powerful in ourselves. 
 How can such delicate monitors be looked at from the old point of 
 view, or assimilated to the violence that is exercised by material- 
 istic physic ? If the latter would stir the man, it does it by as 
 much main force as it dares to use; whereas the former moves him 
 by a word, through the affinities and likings of his organization. * 
 
 * There is something unfair in the manner in which the public criticises cases 
 that do not recover under homoeopathic treatment. None oi our systems will 
 
HOMCEOPATHY. 373 
 
 It would be curious to consider how it is that medicinal substances 
 so attenuated are still true to themselves, and exert their properties 
 upon the body ; for the fact is beyond question. Although we can- 
 not resolve this enigma, yet there are analogies which somewhat 
 domesticate it in our understandings. In the body, for instance, a 
 grain of any substance, or a spot of any feeling, is participatively 
 present throughout; a dose of calomel influences the frame, and if 
 we may use the expression, calomelizes it ; the wound inflicted by a 
 needle point gives a sensation to the man, or hurts the great body 
 itself. It is not that the agent is materially everywhere ; but the 
 patient is set in the attitude of the effect, and feels it universally. 
 We may therfore look on organisms as universes that vibrate from 
 one end to the other with every force that assails them ; and thus in 
 their own way become the magnitudes and propagations of the force. 
 This is plainly shown in contagions, which engrafted upon the smallest 
 part of the body at first, in the next place run morbidly through it, 
 and ferment the frame into a new but greater vesicle of a morbid 
 kind ; after which the social propagation begins, and a continent 
 may be infected from that first grain of disease, thus shaken and 
 dynamized in human body after human body, and not diminished 
 but aggravated by its propagation. In this we have a clear image 
 of the dynamization of medicinal powers, which received in any ve- 
 hicle (e. g., alcohol), and properly vibrated, seem to convert it into 
 their own likeness, just as if it were an organism capable of trans- 
 mission of effects or community of feelings. But let our explana- 
 tion stand for no more than it is worth, and be considered as a word 
 
 cure every disorder. Nor is to be expected that an art which is in its infancy, 
 can do more than greatly surpass in safety and virtue the Hippocratic medicine 
 of 2,000 years' standing. Yet, whenever a death occurs under homoeopathy, the 
 neighborhood argues and acts as though homoeopathy had invented death, which 
 was a phenomenon unknown until Hahnemann brought it from the infernal re- 
 gions ! Why ! the bills of mortality since Hippocrates are the bills of allopathy. 
 And in most cases, let the worst that can occur, it is no worse, and no more, 
 than happens daily under that practice. But if the patient dies under allopathy, 
 he dies by precedent, and there is no responsibility ; if homoeopathy is at his bed- 
 side, he departs unsanctioned, and the survivors have to answer for him to 
 public opinion. This must be borne until the battle is further fought, and those 
 who are not prepared to endure it had better not dabble in homoeopathy. 
 
 32 
 
374 HEALTH. 
 
 to those only who like to see, not merely that the fact is so, but that 
 besides being true, it is also not improbable. 
 
 Whatever be the hypothesis of the properties of drugs in in- 
 finitesimal doses, the fact remains the same, and Hahnemann has 
 the credit of testing pharmaceutical substances with a rigor of which 
 his predecessors had no conception. The vagueness of medical 
 practice disgusted him, offending intellect and conscience alike, and 
 for a time he retired from a profession in which he had so little 
 faith. His own discovery — that like is to be cured by like — then 
 came forth, and by an easy process the whole strangeness of homoeo- 
 pathy developed itself. The diminution of the doses took place by 
 degrees along a road of linked facts, in which there was little room 
 for fallacy : there is no case in inductive science in which experi- 
 ment was more minutely perfect. Cures followed, and have ever 
 since followed, on a scale to which the orthodox medicine was a 
 stranger : the statistics of homoeopathy, taken in Government hos- 
 pitals, and under military strictness, show a lessened, mortality as 
 compared with the tables of its rival. And wherever it is fairly 
 practiced, the same average results occur ; so that in spite of much 
 opposition, it spreads from the healed to the sick, and the rumor of 
 its beneficence is stronger with a sensible public than the diatribes 
 of a very active and influential profession arrayed against it. 
 
 The practical blessings of the New Medicine are dependent, as 
 we conceive, firstly upon the science of correspondence, which bring- 
 ing poison and disease together with a completer fitness, poisons 
 the disease, and kills it ; and secondly, upon the smallness of the 
 doses, or we would rather say, the use of the spirit and not the body 
 of the drugs; which use gains its cause by no destruction of our 
 tissues, but by giving the body an attitude that neutralizes the dis- 
 ease, and then itself ceases after a certain duration of effects. Drugs 
 given in the latter way are more like ideas than material bodies, and 
 when they have served their purpose, they either vanish of them- 
 selves, or may be countermanded by their appropriate antidotes. 
 
 I suppose it is impossible to overrate the consequences of Hahne- 
 mann's life. Even the negative results are vast for our future well- 
 being. How different, for example, from the pale faces that we 
 note in every street, will be those which belong some day to un- 
 
HOM(EOPATHY. 375 
 
 drugged generations ! What vigor may we not expect from the 
 later posterities of those who have not hurt mind and body by sup- 
 ping on material poisons ? How much better those childhoods will 
 be, whose parents and grandparents have neither been bled nor sali- 
 vated secundum artem, but who have kept their own current in their 
 veins, and given it entire to their race ? And on the positive side, 
 what another gain it will be, when hereditary maladies begin to be 
 displaced, and the crust that hides man drops down from his skin by 
 degrees ! What virtues may we not expect, when with all higher 
 helps to good, the body itself seconds the monitions of the soul ! 
 What talents also, and what happiness, when the frame is set in 
 parallelism with the order of things ! For though we do not attri- 
 ute everything to body, yet a sound body has consequences which 
 make it needful to speculate upon it in all views that concern the 
 advancement of our species. 
 
 On the theoretical side, Hahnemann has approximated drug-heal- 
 ing to the pure sciences ; and by instituting experiments on the 
 healthy body, he has expanded the properties of each medicine to a 
 human form of symptoms, naturally, by that form, applicable to 
 man. I think of medicines now as curative personalities, who take 
 our shape upon them to battle in us with our ills. The testing of 
 their characters is also capable of being carried to the utmost ex- 
 actitude; for drugs may be "proved" upon many persons in differ- 
 ent places and at different times, and their symptoms curtailed, sifted, 
 and if we may use the phrase, pared and sculptured down, until only 
 their essential and nude form is left. When we get these heroes on 
 their feet, they, and not their discoverers, will be the great men of 
 an ever-young physic. 
 
 It is hard to imagine how any profession can disregard the service 
 that Hahnemann has begun, in the constitution of a rational phar- 
 macopoeia. When we look to what was known of medicinal pro- 
 perties before his time, and then compare it with the state in which 
 he left the subject, the difference is like that between light and 
 darkness. No one had imagined that each drug ran through the 
 frame, and evoked fresh symptoms from organ after organ ; nor in- 
 deed without the similia similibus curantur would any application 
 come from the fact. But it is an attestation of that formula, that 
 
376 HEALTH. 
 
 it leads to a knowledge of drugs infinitely special and diversified 
 compared with the science that preceded it. 
 
 The number of superstitions also that Hahnemann slew, entitles 
 him to the gratitude of all those who dislike to be frightened by- 
 unreal shapes which a strong man can walk through. He made 
 the true experiment of doing relatively nothing in medicine (p. 369), 
 and found that it was abundantly successful and humane. Purga- 
 tives were one nasty superstition which he banished. Bleeding was 
 another of these vampires. Long before we met with homoeopathy, 
 we wondered why we bled our patients in inflammations, according 
 to the common practice, when yet the attack struck in a moment, 
 and there was no more blood in the body after than before it oc- 
 curred ; and we thought that it was but a wrong distribution which 
 caused this rapid assault upon life, and not a plethora of blood ; and 
 that skill would lie, not in butchering the disease, but in restoring 
 the harmony which was lost. We had seen some of our best be- 
 loved friends sacrificed to the murderous lancet, and our's was the 
 hand which let out their life — though under the legalizing sanction 
 of the most accredited physicians. Would that we could recall the 
 dead; but they sleep well! Who has not had similar experiences? 
 And who, in the long run, will not reproach himself, if he does not 
 accede in an inquiring spirit to the New Medicine, which has availed 
 to exorcise this host of killing superstitions? 
 
 Among the other benefits of homoeopathy, we reckon this also — 
 that it tends to make us think more worthily of our bodies. I defy 
 any man to be a physiologist who is in the habit of bleeding, purg- 
 ing, and poisoning the human frame. The body abhors him, and 
 dies rather than tell him its secrets. What idea can a man have of 
 life, if he is accustomed to take blood, which is the soul's house, in 
 pint basins from the frame ; and to think that he is doing nothing 
 extraordinary? What notion of living cause and effect can any one 
 entertain, if he deems that such an abstraction of our essences can 
 ever be recovered from so long as we are on this side the grave ? 
 What imagination can be felt of the music of man, by one who or- 
 ders purgative pills pro re nata to play upon our intestine strings, 
 in the delusion that their operation is temporary, and confined to 
 the first effects. I see in the whole physiological science the large 
 
HOMOEOPATHY. 377 
 
 written evidence of these stupid sanguinary methods ; the doctrine 
 has followed the works with a vengeance, and the science has been 
 purged and bled away until nothing is left but chemical dust on the 
 one hand, or germ-cells on the other. This has gone so far that it 
 is doubtful now, whether the medical profession has any further 
 power of pursuing human physiology ; doubtful whether that great 
 knowledge must not pass to the laity and the gentiles, and become 
 a non-medical science. Certainly, the hands that have least been 
 crimsoned in the bowels of the living man, seem by nature most fit 
 to receive his tender and amazing secrets. 
 
 Another department also is that of mental effects, in which 
 homoeopathy stands preeminent. If each drug evokes symptoms 
 throughout the body, it also affects the mind wherever it touches the 
 organs; and hence the new pharmacopoeia groups around it mental 
 and moral states so far as they depend upon the body. In this re- 
 spect homoeopathy opens a field which was untouched before, and in- 
 cludes the healing of moods, minds and tempers under the action of 
 medicines. How valuable this is as an adjunct of education, will 
 suggest itself at once to all fathers and mothers; and how new a 
 power it is, those best know who have become converts to homoe- 
 opathy after practicing the old system of medicine. 
 
 It is, however, in the eradication of chronic diseases and heredi- 
 tary taints, that homoeopathy promises perhaps the greatest of its 
 benefits. On this subject the views of Hahnemann deserve the at- 
 tention of philanthropists of every degree, whilst at the same time 
 they are highly interesting to the medical philosopher. Nay, there 
 is a touch of the sublime about them, such as only comes into the 
 scientific spirit in its happiest moods. As Hahnemann teaches us 
 of the trine contagions that have come down with man from early 
 days, we seem to hear echoes of every mythos that has struck us 
 with significance before, from the Parsee dualism of Ahriman and 
 Ormuzd, to the blue-white Hela of Scandinavian faith; nay also we 
 are let into the understrata of that evil which throws out sulphurs 
 and geysers in the human and inhuman worlds : and we cease to 
 wonder that no cure comes, when the pit of disease is so deep. What 
 a chasteness of genius too in Hahnemann, that instead of swerving 
 to speculation, he forced these conceptions through the outlets of 
 
 32* 
 
378 HEALTH. 
 
 his method of cure, and thought nothing sacred enough for his at- 
 tention, but the recovery of the body from its ancient pests. If there 
 be such a thing as bodily disease distinct from psychical, then he 
 was right in his devotion, and is rewarded already in contributing to 
 the whole sanity of his kind. 
 
 In a strictly medical point of view the Hahnemannian theory of 
 chronic disease comports with principles which are beginning to 
 be admitted on all hands. The multiplicity of diseases and epidem- 
 ics is suspected to be the mask of a unity of which so-called distinct 
 maladies are but symptoms : just as on a large range, different lan- 
 guages are but dialects of some common stem. Whether Hahne- 
 mann has hit the central forms of malady of which the rest are the 
 procession, it would be presumptuous in us to say; but at least he 
 has put us upon the search, and indicated that the confirmation of 
 what he has deemed, or the suggestion of something truer, will 
 grow, as his own views did, out of the bosom of practical healing. 
 Moreover, his science of medicine has the advantage of springing 
 from both the roots of the past (p. 367), for as we said before, it 
 germinated from the scholastic side ; and as it grew, it took in, and 
 retains, the traditional medicine which is found among the people. 
 In fact, the homoeopathic law gives specific justification of the popu- 
 lar usage of many herbs and simples, which accordingly now reap- 
 pear as parts of a scientific system, affording new evidence of the 
 probability that should be acceded to practices which are immemo- 
 rial and of world-wide acceptation. And in another respect it unites 
 with the instincts of animals, as well as with the pharmacy of the 
 " old wives," in prescribing simples and not compounds, in order 
 that pure operations may ensue, and causation or cure touch the 
 ailment with a finger-end of tact, and not with a rude indiscrimi- 
 nate hand of confusions. The homoeopathic law also accounts for 
 the cures that have taken place under the other practice, and shows 
 that they are owing to a latency of homoeopathy in the common 
 sense of its predecessor. 
 
 We are indeed convinced that the law of treating like with like, 
 is the one intellectual formula to which the healing art has attained. 
 Nevertheless, we do not assert that at a given time any art is pre- 
 pared to stake itself completely upon practice dictated by science. 
 
HOMOEOPATHY. 879 
 
 The genius of man walks willingly with positive knowledge, but 
 there come times and eases, when he falls back upon the unknown 
 chaos, and trusts for instinctive revelations there. We would not 
 therefore cut connection with allopathy; because there will be a 
 certain number of instances where there is no knowledge, and where 
 chaos is a resource. When these arise, it is a comfort that they can 
 be committed to that respectable body, the old medical profession, 
 which to do it justice, has its own stars in its own night. We think 
 however that it is a mistake to call its art, allopathy ; it should be 
 termed chaopatliy, because it is without a formula, and welters down 
 time by that set of falls which are vulgarly known as good and bad 
 luck. 
 
 Homoeopathy requires many changes, and new brains of the Hah- 
 nemannian order, before it will do itself justice according to the 
 conception of its founder. I know no set of problems which would 
 better repay severe thought founded upon observation, than the pro- 
 perties of the drugs quoad the human body. It is not routine 
 practice, but penetrating investigation, which will introduce the next 
 highly necessary improvements. New views of the human frame 
 are requisite before the science of pathogenesy can attain to any 
 degree of perfection. Among the first of these, we reckon that 
 natural pathogenesis which the powers intrinsic to the body daily 
 exercise upon it: viz., the powers of the mind, soul, and the inner 
 man. By eliciting this, we shall get at the leading idea of patho- 
 genesis, and also obtain rules for the succession of symptoms and 
 states as welling from a single fountain head. Otherwise, unless 
 our eyes be thus armed by these greater knowledges, the various 
 symptoms that drugs evoke in different parts of the frame, will seem 
 to have no connection with each other, and the memory will be 
 unable to retain them, at the same time that they will lie as so much 
 incoherent dust in the way of the intellectual powers. The subject 
 is so important that we must take leave to illustrate our remarks in 
 a few words. 
 
 If the effects of medicines should be decided upon the healthy 
 body, it will be conceded, that the knowledge of the healthy body 
 itself is the canvas upon which our medicinal science must be drawn. 
 But the body is tenanted by various lives, each of which pervades 
 
380 HEALTH. 
 
 it; and hence these also come to be the subjects of any physiological 
 investigation which seeks wholeness as its aim. We may liken the 
 powers of man to drugs that produce symptoms all through his frame. 
 These symptoms are the basis of the science of health, and of the 
 corresponding art of healing. But who has ever studied so much 
 as one of them ? Where is the natural pathogenesy which is the 
 foundation of the morbid pathogenesy in the body itself? It is not 
 yet extant in science. But we must strive after it, or verily we do 
 not know the human subject to whom medicine is to be applied. 
 There is a brilliant mine to be worked here, and one which in giving 
 a deeper basis to our art, will also constitute a knowledge of psych- 
 ology such as the world will be glad to receive. 
 
 In our Chapter on the Heart we took occasion to trace the passion 
 of Fear through some of its pathogenetic states. Let us explain 
 our present meaning by following some of the symptoms of Grief 
 in the same way. First, what is the index-symptom here, of which 
 the bodily state is the sequence? Weeping from the eyes is the 
 finger that points to all the other signs : the falling tear is the be- 
 ginning of the propositions of grief. The voice wails, and the sen- 
 tences fall out of the mouth through plaintive lowering cadences 
 which end in sobs. The head is depressed, and the hair weeps over 
 the face. The chin falls, and the lips melt as if they were big drops 
 of sorrow; the saliva also trickles forth as though the mouth cried. 
 In children the mouth does cry, and sobs, like tears of tone, roll 
 heavily forth; the lungs weep out both words and breaths. The 
 blood and excretions are wept away, and pallor and loss of bodily 
 spirit are manifest; and in long grief, the body itself pines or falls 
 away. The arms hang at the side, the knees totter as though they 
 would trickle down, and the frame droops with willowy sadness. In 
 extreme effects, no tears flow, but the spirit weeps itself out; just 
 as in the last cases of fear, the man runs away not outwardly but 
 inwardly (p. 192). Now the points to be noted in this slight out- 
 line of the pathogenesy of fear, are twofold : in the first place, the 
 mind, the body and the organs are each affected in their own manner 
 by the emotion : in the second place, the cardinal phenomenon gives 
 the cue to the other signs, and we find that in grief the whole man 
 weeps. We have, therefore, the best known term of all to interpret 
 
HOMCEOPATHY. 381 
 
 for us the kingdom of grief. The like is attainable with regard to 
 the bodily train that accompanies every other passion, and in each 
 case the head sign will run through the entire phenomena that be- 
 long to it. This is what we mean by the pathogenesy of the inner 
 man.* 
 
 Now apply this to the action of drugs, and observe that it de- 
 mands two conditions, only one of which is at present fulfilled. For 
 not only are all the symptoms to be recorded and grouped in their 
 places round the organs, but a head symptom must be found which 
 is their common denominator; a principal fact from which the re- 
 mainder flow. When this is done, you will have in your mind a 
 portrait of the drug, as the painter has with him an instinctive 
 limning of the faces of the intellects and passions ; and you will 
 then become acquainted with your pharmacy, be enabled to divine 
 symptoms by insight without cumbersome catalogues of them im- 
 possible to remember, and to apply them with something like genius 
 to the moving facts of each case as it arises. Until this be accom- 
 plished the heart of our drugs is unrevealed to us. First, however, 
 we repeat, it will be better to begin with the study of the healthy 
 body and mind, and with the effects of healthy agents, not only 
 because this is the preesuppositiim of a knowledge of diseased mani- 
 festations, but because the mind's actions are so much more intelli- 
 gible than those of drugs, and the easiest lesson should be learned 
 first. Afterwards, when we have accustomed ourselves to the new 
 mode of working, we may approach the drug problems with a little 
 more chance of success. 
 
 By this means we hope to see that difficulty of practice which is 
 the chief opprobrium of homoeopathy removed, and the handles of 
 the instruments of cure placed in the hands of medical men. This 
 is the more imperative upon us, because our morbid states of mind 
 have the effects of true poisons upon the body, and must be regarded 
 as spiritual drugs, each having a pathological history of its own. 
 Can we doubt, for example, if ignalia or any other medicament be 
 
 =# Perhaps our meaning will be best explained, if we say that we desiderate 
 a new Jahr to give the symptoms of health instead of those of disease ; in other 
 words, a pathogenetic psychology and physiology, which shall stand to homoeo- 
 pathy, as the existing chaotic physiology stands to the old system of medicine. 
 
382 HEALTH. 
 
 homoeopathic to the effects of grief, that were the pathogenesy of 
 grief itself worked out by a law of order, the application of the 
 drugs allied to the state, would become infinitely more precise than 
 at present? What form the science will take under this develop- 
 ment, we cannot prophecy; but that it will hold more light and 
 more readiness, we very much foresee. 
 
 Here we close our remarks on homoeopathy, as the basis of the 
 medical sciences. It is the intestine system of medicine in its finest 
 form, and cures as it were by touching the beginning of the body in 
 taste and the mouth. The law, however, is not confined to drugs, 
 but has an application we do not know how extensive. Some 
 glimpses of it will still be seen as we proceed to speak of other 
 organa of the healing art. 
 
 We have said nothing on the vexed question of the doses, for very 
 little is known about it. The effect of a millionth differs so little 
 from that of a trillion th, that in the existing state of the science 
 we cannot make any available distinction. Fine points are the last 
 to be settled in any department. In a contagious disease, which 
 spreads from a single person to a town, we know almost nothing of 
 the differences that are caused by the transmission, or of any altered 
 manner in which the last occurring cases radiate their effects upon 
 susceptible people. Nor in infecting new portions of spirit with a 
 drug, have we the wit to see what the several dilutions* signify. It 
 is sufficient for this time, that acute and temporary disorders are 
 most amenable to the dilutions that are nearest to the matter of the 
 drug, while chronic maladies are chiefly touched by those high " po- 
 tencies" in which only the spirit seems to be present. 
 
 Very different from homoeopathy, or the cure by specific drugs, 
 is Hydropathy, or the cure by water as a general element. The 
 former appears to contend with bodily diseases in their material 
 strongholds, searching them, and forcing them to quit their poison- 
 ous grasp of the organization. The latter, or hydropathy, is not 
 medicinal but hygienic, and operates by stimulating or depressing 
 the natural processes of the system. Fluid, either in the shape of 
 vapor or water, exists everywhere in the active organism; whatever 
 
 * In preference to dilutions of drugs, we would rather term the higher po- 
 tencies, transmissions. 
 
HYDROPATHY. 383 
 
 part was dry, would be also dead. And temperature accompanies 
 the frame in the fluids as vehicles. Now the water cure is allied to 
 the natural moisture everywhere, and applies itself specially to the 
 universal skin-system (p. 271). Whatever relief can be obtained 
 for suffering, by means of the perspirations, is carried to the great- 
 est degree by those parts of the water treatment which so powerfully 
 favor perspiration. Whatever benefit can come from the tone which 
 cold water so instantaneously arouses, is heightened in the plunge 
 bath, the wet sheet, and the douche. Whatever calmness and cool- 
 ness can do for the irritations and heats of the body, is brought about 
 in an extraordinary degree by the cold quietude of the sitz bath. 
 In short, the water cure is the exaggeration of the hygienic pro- 
 cesses, until they come to be powerful agents for changing morbid 
 conditions. There is nothing like the action of specific medicines 
 in this method of healing; for though the actions and reactions of 
 the body are quickened and strengthened, they remain true to them- 
 selves, and assume no toxicological phase. Water is not a poison 
 any more than alcohol (pp. 159, 160), though both of them stimu- 
 late and depress to an alarming degree, if their use is abused. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to enter the lists in defence of the water 
 cure : the public has derived from it so much benefit, and withal 
 has acquired so much knowledge of the subject, and caution in the 
 knowledge, that the art and science of Preissnitz may be considered 
 as established things. The water cure takes a capital stand among 
 the bases of a common-sense hygiene, and while fountains bubble 
 and rivers run, it will not be abandoned by those who love the 
 welfare of their bodies. 
 
 Though hydropathy be not medical in the drug sense, yet it is 
 impossible to say without experiment what number of diseases it 
 can cure. We have no certain discrimination of those maladies 
 which arise from stoppage of the natural processes, or from over or 
 under stimulation of the frame. And although every loss of the 
 balance of health depends upon defect of the whole organism, 
 which is too weak to protect itself against circumstances, yet the 
 symptoms of that loss may be combated by circumstantial means. 
 Cure is another thing, if by cure be meant that restoration which 
 provides against relapse : such cures are unhappily rare. But for 
 
384 HEALTH. 
 
 the curation of present ills, the water treatment is often singularly 
 prompt and apt; and as we said just now, experience alone can show 
 how wide, or how limited, its powers in this kind are. 
 
 We incline to consider energizing as the formula under which its 
 effects come. Of course we are now speaking of the cold water 
 cure; for the formula of the hot is the very reverse. It is true 
 that the application of cold produces by reaction, glow and heat, 
 but this is an energetic glow, and its perspirations break out with 
 force. On the other hand, the warm bath leaves a sense of cold- 
 ness, and its sweats are languid and profuse; the chilliness that is 
 in them proves that they trickle out of the weakness of the contain- 
 ing parts. The energizing of the cold treatment proves itself in 
 two ways — firstly, by bracing the body itself; and secondly, by 
 bracing, that is to say, increasing in power and quantity, the secre- 
 tions. Both these effects depend upon reaction ; whence, if the 
 energies be not excited, depression is the result ; and^ of this latter 
 state, which is desirable where excitement already exists, the water- 
 cure doctors have made great use. The drinking of cold water in 
 considerable quantities, operates upon the internal organs somewhat 
 as douches and wet sheets upon the skin; but with this difference, 
 that the viscera are more constant in their reactions, and under the 
 direction of life, are more able to recover their tone than the skin. 
 
 The water cure is invaluable for those persons who are the slaves 
 of long habits of ease and indulgence, and whose constitutions are 
 breaking down from the sheer repetition of these imprudent courses. 
 They go to Malvern, and the axe is laid to the root of their tree of 
 evils. Their impossibilities are made possible for them by the 
 rigorous physician, who endures no remonstrances in his house. In 
 an hour they throw down the accumulated baggage of years, and 
 determine to do penance for having carried it so long. Early 
 hours, long walks, long-forgotten beauties of nature, reacquaintance 
 with the crystal springs whose Naiads had been neglected for " old 
 port," sweet sleep hours before midnight, and the sense that they 
 are clean human beings, or on the way to such — all these means 
 carry health to the men who are jaded with business or pleasure, 
 but not yet struck for death. The cold water is the central morti- 
 fication of the flesh; it has caught them buried in care or luxu- 
 
HYDROPATHY. 385 
 
 riousness, and like the " cold pig" which their schoolfellows once 
 emptied over them in their boyish beds, it makes them start to 
 their feet, and touch the ground of realities once more. We attri- 
 bute much of the water power to the frigid morality which it in- 
 culcates; to the shock which it gives to the dreaming man, and his 
 lazy organs. For it tells him very plainly that there is to be no 
 comfort in bed or board, but that warmth must be moral and come 
 out of work. 
 
 But if this be so, then the capacity which the body possesses, to 
 be shocked into its functions, will depend upon the resource of morale 
 in the patient, or, in a word, upon the capabilities of his faith. All 
 that I have seen or read of the water cure, strengthens me in this 
 conviction. It appears to me, that humanly speaking, there is a 
 certain amount of life and reaction in the upper parts of every man, 
 which may be drawn upon as occasion requires. How much there 
 is, we have probably but little idea; for each means of calling it 
 down — each syphon that we put into the reservoir — only runs its 
 own kind of life. The quantity of this fluid spirit is therefore 
 practically limited enough, though perchance other means might 
 open a new vein when the old sources dry. But so it is with the 
 water cure ; it taps the life and morale in its own direction, and 
 obtains wonderful supplies. "We think it is not well to exhaust 
 these, or to allow them to flow until their lees mix with the current; 
 for when they are once gone, there is no more to be had from that 
 tube of arts. It must not, therefore, be supposed, that the second 
 and third resorts to the water cure will have the like success with 
 the first; the life which was obedient then, has been partially or 
 perhaps wholly spent. And if the penances are kept up, they become 
 severe macerations; the faculties are not roused but chilled, and the 
 lamp which might have lasted for a quiet while, is besieged by cold 
 to death. In one word, the limits of the water cure are the limits 
 of personal vigor, which, after a certain point, is wasted in the 
 struggle of this treatment for health. 
 
 It is necessary to bear this in mind when we are dealing with an 
 agent whose effects are so powerful and immediate. However, our 
 reading on this subject convinces us that the prudences which be- 
 long to the water cure are well attended to by its best advocates in 
 33 
 
386 HEALTH. 
 
 this country; and what we have said applies rather to the public, 
 who require to know that this treatment, so often valuable, is 
 limited in its results ; and that in diseases proceeding from irregular 
 habits, the first cure is likely to be more satisfactory and innocent 
 than any subsequent one. As moral imbecility grows, from what- 
 ever cause, the physical benefits of the water cure will become less 
 and less. 
 
 The system of Preissnitz belongs to a group of sciences which 
 include the whole of the four elements of the ancients, and apply 
 them to the healing art. Earth, air, fire and water are the basis of 
 outward hygiene, and are all represented in some sort under the 
 notion of climate. The acclimation of patients resembles the water 
 cure in many respects ; only that it produces the desired elevations 
 and depressions of the body by influences which are less visible, 
 though not less striking in their effects. To be bathed in the light 
 and heat of a new sun, and washed with the winds of a fresh sky ; 
 to feel the steam of an unwonted surface of earth, and the tension 
 of a different magnetism and electricity to that to which we are 
 accustomed, are important elements in the recovery of health, 
 particularly where moral circumstances also are favorable. The hy- 
 gienic map of countries, gathered, as it might be, from the physical 
 character of the inhabitants, or from susceptible temperaments on 
 the spot, would be a guide worth having in the direction of patients 
 to localities of specific benefit. In this respect we require some- 
 thing more precise than the guide books which have been written 
 by the climatic physicians. 
 
 But medical systems, like the departments of public health (pp. 
 347 — 364), follow the organs and faculties of man, and in the 
 nature of things are as numerous as the latter. The intestinal 
 system of drugs or homoeopathy, is the basis (p. 382), and belongs 
 to the alimentary tube : hydropathy and its kindred appertain to 
 the general circumstantial system, and specifically to the skin as 
 the organ of tone and continence : we have now to turn our atten- 
 tion to the muscles of medicine, or to that method of cure which 
 only lately has appeared among us, under the designation of kinesi- 
 pathy, or the Swedish Medical Gymnastics, and which already 
 
KINESIPATHY. — LING. 387 
 
 ranks among the most important means of removing chronic symp- 
 toms of disease. 
 
 For the modern development of artificial analytical exercise, as 
 applied to the treatment of disease, we are indebted to Ling, the 
 Swedish poet, whose system has now been practised with success 
 for more than thirty years in his own country. This Ling was a 
 stern but versatile genius, worthy of the Scandinavian name — 
 worthy of the land of Eddas, Sagas, Gustavuses, the world's best 
 iron, and its Swedenborg. He had read in the ancient lore of his 
 country the record of a mental and bodily prowess of uncommon 
 virtue ; the doings of kings, Jarls and vikings in the olden time, 
 when the sea rovers sallied forth with the summer, and astonished 
 the effeminacy of the known world with their strong arms. And 
 the thought occurred to him, that it was possible by knowledge well 
 directed in practice, to combine the muscles of ancient heroism 
 with the civilization of to-day, and in the physical frames of his 
 Swedes, to re-enact the days of Snorro and Hakon Jarl in those of 
 the fourteenth Charles. In short, taking his cue from classic 
 Greece, he sought, by gymnastic exercises, to compensate for the 
 bent backs and dwindled muscles that modern pursuits and com- 
 mon-place existence have produced. He stood in the age like a 
 kind of human Hecla, reminiscent of the valor of a thousand years, 
 and pouring forth a flood of incentives to his race, to emulate the 
 strength of their sires. His verse breathes with a Homeric spirit 
 of combat, with a delight in the good science of the strokes, as well 
 as in the death of the foe. It has the harshness and boldness of a 
 muscular rhyme. His harp was " strung with bears' sinews/' 
 But it is not with his gymnastics in general that we can meddle, 
 but only with their medical part : we have touched on the other, 
 because the subject is less known than it deserves to be in England, 
 and our sign post may direct the curious on its way. 
 
 It is told of Ling that, when a youth, on one occasion he was 
 weary of life, and like a bad boy he wandered slowly on a biting 
 winter day, as thinly clad as possible, half a Swedish mile into the 
 country, in the hope of catching a chill which would terminate his 
 existence, without his being guilty of the immediate sin of suicide. 
 He, however, only took a common cold in the head, which led him 
 
388 HEALTH. 
 
 to his first reflections on the human frame, and the means of render- 
 ing it hardy.* On another occasion, when suffering from rheuma- 
 tism in the arm, he instinctively rapped the part with a ruler 
 which he held in his hand, and found that he cured the pain : this 
 natural experiment, it is said, was the occasion of Kinesipathy. 
 
 This art consists in applying external motions, passive and active 
 exercise, to the body; and in rendering these so special as to operate 
 on the various inward organs, or on parts of them specifically. Pos- 
 ture, friction, percussion, motion, are all made use of; and already 
 as many as two thousand different movements have been devised for 
 the purpose of operating upon the failing powers within. There are 
 languages of nudges, to remind brain, liver, spleen, and all, of their 
 neglected duties. The effects produced approve the plan, and stamp 
 it as an art and science. It is admonition, contact, exercise, pur- 
 sued into details, whereby disease is literally handled. 
 
 Perhaps there is no malady but tends in some way to alter the 
 bearing, posture or general status of the body. In acute cases this 
 is plain. We groan, writhe, wriggle, wince, shake, crawl, creep, 
 dance, and so forth, with our agonies and discomforts, showing that 
 disease ,is a complete posture master and very good serjeant, whose 
 drill is for the purpose of relief and cure. Very small areas of dis- 
 ease have corresponding to them large movements in the system; 
 and if we understood the movements, we could by reaction play upon 
 the parts and particles of the organs. If a special wince or twist 
 arises primarily out of some one place, then by comprehending the 
 twist, and producing it artificially, we get at that place exactly, were 
 it no bigger than a pin's head. Here is precise gunnery — hitting 
 disease with a fine arrow. Again there are instinctive movements 
 of the hands towards afflicted parts of our frames. We rub ourselves 
 with organic pity like dumb animals where the deep flesh is ill. 
 This is nature working for us, and showing us the beginning of a 
 manual science of soothing, traction, nudging, and so forth, the detail 
 of which is Mnesipathy . 
 
 We have been greatly struck with the common sense which dic- 
 tated the Lingian art, and with the excellent unexpected results 
 
 * Allerbom : Intrudes Tal i Svenska Ai-ademien, p. 21. 
 
KINESIPATHY. 389 
 
 which flow from such simple means. Exercise is often demanded, 
 not so much for the whole frame, as for particular organs. For in- 
 stance a sluggish liver may refuse to resume its functions under the 
 general stimulus of a walk. The kinesipathist exercises the liver 
 itself: by his jerks and suggestive poking, he commands it to make 
 bile ; and sure enough the liver does make it. By a like precise- 
 ness of application he cures sluggish bowels. He exerts the physical 
 force of cure with the gentleness of art and science. He strengthens 
 special muscles by adequate ingenious exercises. He cures hot 
 heads and cold feet, by briskly rotating the feet upon the ankles, 
 steadying the limb by grasping its lower part. And so forth. This 
 is evidently the ultima ratio of treatment in chronic diseases. 
 
 In paralytic cases, where the nervous derangement is only func- 
 tional, kinesipathy is found to be an effective mode of cure. Its 
 doctrine here, as we read it, commends itself to our acceptance. 
 Where a power has been lost, but its potency is left, it is as though 
 the power had never been developed. A palsied man of this kind 
 has forgotten the art of the use of his limbs, and has to learn it afresh. 
 He is an adult in those parts where his power lies; a baby in the 
 paralyzed tracts. The medical gymnast undertakes to teach the 
 latter, first how to creep, and then how to go. He commences 
 by passive movements — nursing, fumbling, and so stimulating, the 
 helpless large infant limb ; and by degrees a little reaction against 
 him is perceived. He then makes more extensive movements, 
 stretching the muscles, and producing further reaction; and finally 
 he commands the resistance of the patient, and then by his superior 
 force slowly overcomes it : in all these processes steadily keeping in 
 view the end, of educating the limb into self-reliance, or as we term 
 it, sense of power (p. 238). Many an old paralytic is cured by these 
 apparently trivial means ; the mind and will which had alienated 
 themselves, are coaxed back into his arms and legs. 
 
 Like all real agents, kinesipathy is capable of abuse. It appears to 
 be contraindicated in nearly all acute diseases, and we should also say, 
 in those where rest, and not motion, is demanded. But it seems 
 probable, from the obviousness of the method, that neither the gym- 
 nast nor the patient would be likely to persevere to any great mis- 
 chief with the treatment, 
 
 83* 
 
390 HEALTH. 
 
 The results which have followed this art, are so great as compared 
 with the slightness of the causes set at work, that some have sus- 
 pected a mesmeric effect from the operator to the patient. It may 
 be so; but at any rate there is a moral cause involved which we 
 think is to be taken into account in all such procedures. The patient 
 feels that something is being done for him ; that another human 
 being is active and anxious on his behalf, and does not disdain to 
 toil for his bodily restoration. To many a sick man this is an ele- 
 ment of health ; so that the bad pun by which I have heard Kinesi- 
 pathy changed into kindly sympathy, conveys a serious truth. I 
 even deem that the dumb hidden organs know the touches of a 
 brother's hand and heart, and are organically comforted by them; 
 for they all have feelings of their own, and spirits ; as we have 
 shown in many places in these Chapters (pp. 226 — 228, 233 — 236). 
 This points to a defect in mere drug medicining : a physician writes 
 a prescription and leaves it : he has done nothing ostensible to the 
 sufferer, still less to the viscera and vitals of his patient; and the 
 rapport between the two persons is very feeble, and by no means of 
 that fraternal warmth which is curative wherever it is truly expe- 
 rienced.* 
 
 Ling's system has the merit, a great one in our eyes, of continu- 
 ing practices that have existed in nearly all nations, from India to 
 Sweden; for rubbing, shampooing, and various forms of gymnastics 
 are almost as widely diffused as language itself. Nor until of late 
 ages has gymnastics disappeared from formal medicine. Kinesipathyf 
 
 * The following works give a general notion of the Swedish Medical Gym- 
 nastics, though specific movements are difficult to describe, and should be wit- 
 nessed in order to be comprehended. 
 
 Ling, Gymnastiken 's Almanna Grunder. Upsala, 1834, 1840. 
 
 De Betou, Therapeutic Manipulation. London, 1846. 
 
 Georgii, Kinesitherapie, oti Traitement des Maladies par le Mouvement, selon 
 la Methode de Ling. Paris, 1847. 
 
 ■ Kinesipathy, or the Cure of Diseases by specific active and passive 
 
 Movements. London, 1850. 
 
 H. Doherty, Rinesipathy, or Medical Gymnastics for the Cure of Chronic 
 Disease. London, 1851. 
 
 | Ling's aim was nothing less than the physical education of man correspond- 
 ing to the mental. This branch is deserving of an attention which it has not 
 
MESMERISM OR ANTIIROPOPATIIY. 391 
 
 replaces it there, and in such a shape that we are emboldened to 
 hope from what we know of itself and its advocates, that it will never 
 cede its place again. 
 
 We now come to another part in the organism of healing, namely, 
 Mesmerism, or what we might term Anthvopopathy, as it cures by 
 the application of man to man. Of its virtues in cases that have 
 resisted all other means, there cannot be a question : its facts are 
 established not alone by rigid experiment, but by deeds worthy of a 
 mural crown, because they have saved the lives of many citizens. 
 It is for this reason, and also because our organic philosophy, which 
 knows no fear, demands it, that we pass on to Mesmerism, although 
 a storm of hatred rages about it, and every step of its advance is a 
 fight. 
 
 It would be interesting in the history of science to canvass the 
 reasons why certain large classes of facts have been rejected from 
 time to time : why, for instance, the Church of Rome felt peculiarly 
 aggrieved that the earth should go round the sun, and not vice versa ; 
 why certain moderns dislike to live on a planet which took more 
 than seven days for its creation; why skeptics have a call to blink 
 all evidence for spiritual communications, and afterwards opening 
 their sockets widely, complain of the absence of facts; and lastly, 
 why the medical profession fumes and shivers whenever mesmerism 
 is brought forward. In all these cases, as we deem, it is the instinct 
 of self-preservation that like a skin (p. 282) defends the parties 
 against the reception of the facts. They know instinctively that the 
 limitation and eggshell of their state is in danger, and that if the 
 obnoxious point be admitted, they will have the trouble of building 
 a new house on a larger scale. At present the pill-boxes are arranged 
 in pretty rows; but allow this mesmerism and its consequences, and 
 
 received. To our mind, no school ought to be without a physical inspector; it" 
 official, so much the better. In the plastic period of youth, physical defects and 
 awkwardnesses may be corrected, which are past relief at a later time. The 
 bodies of boys and girls ought to be developed by inspection, instruction, andemu- 
 lation, and especially by the universal means of dancing, fencing, and the politer 
 movements. Nor should such trifling matters as biting nails and picking noses 
 be tolerated. Greek and Latin are of less importance to youth than a corpus 
 senium out of which all manifest unseemliness has been weeded. 
 
392 HEALTH. 
 
 Low they would rattle and dance — what a long period of confusion 
 and elimination they must pass, before any second order as neat as 
 the first could be established ! It is the dread of death, that shab- 
 biest of fears, that everlastingly hates truth, because truth leads to 
 death, future states, or integral enlargements, of which there is no 
 end. Such is the motive of this very poor kind of conservatism, 
 though there are as many pretexts as there are ingenious lazy minds 
 who fancy that they have an interest in a well-arranged stagnation 
 of the arts. 
 
 As we have said already, mesmerism stands upon its facts, which, 
 in proportion to time, are as numerous and rigorous as those of any 
 other science. But the facts appear so strange, and so little in the 
 order of our knowledge, that they want at least the support which 
 association of principles gives. Those who cure and are cured ob- 
 tain a grasp of the facts from mere gratitude and service ; but the 
 public require also something like a rationale in order to steady 
 their minds. Hence, though the facts are the main thing for those 
 intimately concerned, yet a view of the facts is quite necessary for 
 the fixation of mesmerism in the scientific sky. 
 
 Nor on the principles of this Book do we find much difficulty in 
 tracing the mesmeric mechanism and its results. If herbs, waters, 
 airs, fire and motion, which are such remote kindred to us (p. 310), 
 will cure our ills, surely man himself, who is comparatively own 
 brother to every man, will go home to disease with a directer rela- 
 tionship of beneficence. If ever it has been good to be under a 
 course of mercury, shall it not be better still to be under a course 
 of humanity ? We have seen throughout, on disintegrating man, 
 that he is full of human fluids which no more cease with his surface, 
 than his voice ceases with his lips : that his influence is a combined 
 physical and moral fact whose lengths and durations can hardly be 
 measured. We also find that he subsists in an equilibrium of which 
 his own will is the centre, and that his sphere of radiance, and 
 swoop of powers, depend on the pulsations of his will. According 
 as this heart (pp. 251 — 287) is little, or large, his world is a nut- 
 shell, or an empire. In mesmerism the equilibrium is voluntarily 
 ceded, a human vacuum or obeisance is created, and the radiance 
 of the mesmerizer or active power rushes in to fill the space. A 
 
MESMERISM. 393 
 
 pressure of fresh spiritual air goes right through the frame. This 
 alone is the greatest of alteratives — more than traveling, more than 
 the difference between hot and cold, clear and misty, winter and 
 summer. The organism breathes with another life in all its parts. 
 For the time, every sense, in stomach, spleen, liver, heart and brain 
 and every idea that travels in the fluids (pp. 55, 152 — 154, 200 — 
 224, 351), is changed; self is voluntarily absent; and the functions 
 go on minus their old routine of habits. The nerves and arteries 
 which are secreting a morbid growth, a tumor, for example, and 
 which have got to think that they must lay stone to stone of this 
 vice, and build a fresh piece of it every day, suddenly lose their habit- 
 ude in the interest of a new spirit, change their minds, set the absorb- 
 ents to work to remove the architecture of evil, and pursue their 
 daily course for their legitimate objects. The better man, in short, 
 is persuasive upon the worser, inside just as outside : it is no sense- 
 less odyle or fluid that causes the effect, but a human although 
 molecular operation. Fluids, unless they are men also, illustrate 
 nothing, nor will any explanation satisfy, unless it be a rest, and 
 exclude the call for a second explanation. 
 
 Mesmerism emphatically gives new or other life to those who 
 need it ; and it does this by the mere form and attitude which the 
 agent and patient assume relatively to each other. The human 
 world is full of powers in a state of balance and indifference. 
 Change the posture of anything therein, and the whole has to re- 
 adjust itself to a new balance — a rush of forces takes place, and 
 currents pass to and fro until the equilibrium is recovered. The 
 moral and the physical are both under this statical law. Hence, if 
 you desire to produce forces, you have only to find the neighborhood 
 of the fluids or spirit powers, and by creating a low level on the one 
 hand, you also make relative height, and have a deeper fall for your 
 forceful waters to descend. 
 
 These remarks are too brief to be called a theory of mesmeric 
 cure, nor do they touch manifestly upon those parts of mesmerism 
 that are most liable to be discredited. We labor however under 
 want of space to develop the subject as it deserves, and we can now 
 only say, that out of the same law of Correspondence which is the 
 master-principle of science, it is easy to deduce the explanation of 
 
394 HEALTH. 
 
 the marvels of clairvoyance and transmission of thought, and in 
 short the psychical phenomena of mesmerism. But then under 
 this view, our world and our matter so change, that we are count- 
 ing upon admissions which few readers can make, but without which 
 we cannot proceed many steps. Let it suffice then to say, that man 
 in the posture of giving up himself, becomes a bodily representative 
 of the powers of unselfishness for the time being; that miracle 
 haunts him, because unselfishness is a miracle j that he enters upon 
 universal sight, second sight, third sight, and more sights than you 
 please, because unselfing is the core of all wide vision. That he 
 dips his body into vigors and cures by the same abnegation, because 
 unselfishness is the tree whose leaves are for the healing of all men. 
 This comes just as the soul comes to the body : the due circumstance 
 or posture of affairs is there, and by the law of correspondence, 
 whereby the equilibrium of creation is maintained, its spirit is " in 
 the midst of it" (pp. 242—244, 294—300). The very theatricism 
 of what is good, true and unselfish, is healing to the scenework of 
 the body. 
 
 We have no certain knowledge of the limits of mesmerism as a 
 curative agent, nor of the conditions which should exclude cases 
 from this treatment. In functional disorders of the nervous system 
 it is especially indicated, and, as a number of diseases even seem- 
 ingly organic spring from this root, it appears that it has a large 
 field of applications here. Hysteria, epilepsy, catalepsy, and those 
 other maladies in which the visceral motions predominate over the 
 rhythmical or rational motions of the lungs, come very markedly 
 under its benefits. But it is not in our power to lay down any rule 
 for the distribution to it of cases generally j and therefore we wait 
 upon experiment, which shows that the utilities to be derived from 
 its employment are very extensive. 
 
 Like drugs, cold water, movements, and stimulants, mesmerism 
 is capable of abuse in many ways. Ill-disposed persons may use it 
 to acquire an influence for bad ends. It is however probably more 
 often abused by the patients than by the agents, being resorted to 
 as a kind of opiate to compensate for the want of moral determina- 
 tion. In this case it keeps up a pernicious valetudinarianism that 
 saps the foundations of resolve in the patient, by causing him to 
 
MESMERISM. 395 
 
 rely upon others where there is strength sufficient, were it exerted, 
 in his own organization. A fatal mistake is made whenever we treat 
 with petting and coddling, in our own minds, or in others, states 
 which we ought to discipline with a moral lash ; and this mistake, 
 I fear, is often committed by mesmeric patients. They must know 
 that there is no patent outward means that can be a substitute for 
 sanity of will j that sooner or later they must exert themselves, and 
 waken from their delusions j and that every dose of their mesmeric 
 opium over and above what was required, is the vehicle of a weak- 
 ness which it will cost them a fresh struggle to conquer, whenever 
 the time when they must arise shall come. 
 
 "We had almost forgotten to place to the credit of mesmerism its 
 introduction of a painless surgery, which is among the most brilliant 
 discoveries of the age. The doctors were totally incredulous of this 
 matter, until ether and chloroform came and did the same thing in a 
 grosser shape. If there were shame in the world they must have felt 
 it, when they found how easy their impossibilities of a fortnight be- 
 fore had become. They doubted the testimony of honest men where 
 mesmerism was concerned; they accepted the same facts when 
 chloroform produced them. It was like them to believe in bottles 
 and to disbelieve in man. But let them pass. This discovery of 
 extinction of pain has no end of results, moral as well as physical. 
 The least it does is to annihilate severe material sufferings; its next 
 fruit is in time to strike out their dread, which is the great body 
 killer. It is plain also to see, that as an idea it is very penetrating, 
 and suggests a painless moral surgery among the ends of man : that 
 all operations in which our dear properties are taken from us, shall 
 be, like the first abstraction of Adam's rib, performed upon us in 
 mercy's "deep sleep." 
 
 In quitting mesmerism we notice of it, as we also observed of the 
 Lingian movements, that it gathers up under its banner a number 
 of practices that have existed from time immemorial in most parts 
 of the earth. This is to say, that it communicates with a wide 
 common sense. And although we do not choose to call everything 
 mesmerism which is strange or mysterious looking, yet we recognize 
 a certain family likeness between it and many things which are 
 even venerable. There is however nothing divine in it, and it has 
 
396 HEALTH. 
 
 no relation to miracles and revelations, excepting that it imitates 
 them afar off, and, like all other things in the world, has a common 
 connection with God.* 
 
 Very different from mesmerism, and yet suggested by it, is the 
 process discovered by James Braid of Manchester, and by him 
 called hypnotism. This is probably but one of a number of arts 
 to which we shall give the generic name of phrenopathy, for it 
 produces its effects principally as actions of mind upon mind. 
 
 Being unsatisfied with the pretensions of mesmerism, and skepti- 
 cal of its truth, Mr. Braid entered the field as a disprover, but soon 
 witnessed phenomena which appeared to him to be real, though 
 susceptible of another explanation than the mesmeric. It struck 
 him that the facts were the result of abstraction or attention carried 
 to excess, and he accordingly tried the experiment of causing pa- 
 tients to stare at any object secured or held above their foreheads, 
 so as to make the stare assume the attitude of intense contemplation. 
 Success attended this mode in many instances, and sleep was induced 
 in a few minutes. Mr. B. usually selects some bright object, as a 
 silver lancet case, held in the mid-line between the eyes, and the 
 patient gazes thereat with fixed stare until the effects are produced 
 — the "double internal squint" upwards being the most potential 
 direction of the eyes for the purpose. Soon the eyes shut, and a 
 state is produced, varying in depth from mere somnolency to double 
 consciousness, or catalepsy. 
 
 The preliminary state is that of abstraction, produced by fixed 
 gaze upon some unexciting and empty thing (for poverty of object 
 engenders abstraction), and this abstraction is the logical premise of 
 what follows. Abstraction tends to become more and more abstract, 
 narrower and narrower; it tends to unity, and afterwards to nullity. 
 There then the patient is, at the summit of attention, with no object 
 left — a mere statue of attention — a listening, expectant life ; a per- 
 fectly undistracted faculty, dreaming of a lessening and lessening 
 mathematical point; the end of his mind sharpened away to nothing. 
 
 * The Zoist, a quarterly journal, in its ninth year's existence, affords the best 
 history of the progress of mesmerism as a branch of the healing art. We refer 
 our readers to it as an evidence of what mesmerism is good for. 
 
PHRENOPATHY. 397 
 
 What happens ? Any sensation that appeals, is met by this bril- 
 liant attention, and receives its diamond glare, being perceived with 
 a force of leisure of which our distracted life affords only the rudi- 
 ments. External influences are sensated, sympathized with, to an 
 extraordinary degree : harmonious music sways the body into graces 
 the most affecting; discords jar it as though they would tear it limb 
 from limb. Cold and heat are perceived with similar exaltation; so 
 also smells and touches. In short, the whole man appears to be 
 given to each perception. The body trembles like down with the 
 wafts of the atmosphere ; the world plays upon it as upon a spiritual 
 instrument finely attuned. 
 
 This is the natural hypnotic state, but it may be modified arti- 
 ficially. The power of suggestions over the patient is excessive. 
 If you say, What animal is it ? the patient will tell you it is a lamb, 
 or a rabbit, or any other. Does he see it ? Yes. What animal 
 is it now ? putting depth and gloom into the tone of noiVj and 
 thereby suggesting a difference. "Oh," with a shudder, "it is a 
 wolf." What color is it? still glooming the phrase. "Black." 
 What color is it now ? giving the now a cheerful air. " Oh, a 
 beautiful blue" — spoken with the utmost delight. And so you 
 lead the subject through any dreams you please, by variation of 
 questions, and of inflections of the voice ; and he sees and feels all 
 as real. 
 
 Another curious study is the influence of the patient's postures 
 on his mind in this state. Double his fist, and put up his arm, if 
 you dare, for you will have the strength of your ribs rudely tested. 
 Put him on his knees and clasp his hands, and the saints and devo- 
 tees of the artists will pale before the trueness of his devout act- 
 ings. Raise his head while in prayer, and his lips pour forth exult- 
 ing glorifications, as he sees heaven opened, and the Majesty of 
 God raising him to his place ; then in a moment depress the head, 
 and he is dust and ashes, an unworthy sinner, with the pit of hell 
 yawning at his feet. Or compress the forehead so as to wrinkle it 
 vertically, and this little attitude of gloom, glooms the whole mind, 
 and thorny-toothed clouds contract in from the very horizon ; and 
 what is remarkable, the smallest pinch and wrinkle, such as will lie 
 between your nipping nails, is sufficient nucleus to crystalize the 
 34 
 
398 HEALTH. 
 
 man into that shape, and to make him all foreboding ; as again the 
 smallest expansion, in a moment, brings the opposite state, with a 
 full breathing of delight. Raise the head next, and ask, if it be a 
 young lady, whether she or some other is the prettier : and observe 
 the inexpressible hauteur, and the puff sneers let off from the lips, 
 which indicate a conclusion too certain to need utterance ; depress 
 the head, and repeat the question ; and mark the self-abasement 
 with which she now says, " She is," as hardly worthy to make the 
 comparison. In this state, whatever posture of any passion is 
 induced, the passion comes into it at once, and dramatizes the body 
 accordingly. 
 
 Moreover, the patient's mind directed to his own body, does phy- 
 sical marvels. He can do in a manner what he thinks he can. 
 Place a handkerchief on a table, and beg him to try to lift it, ob- 
 serving, however, that you know it to be impossible, and he will 
 groan and sweat over the cambric as though it were the anchor of 
 a man-of-war ) on the other hand, tell him that a fifty-six pound 
 weight is a light cork, to be held out at arm's length on his little 
 finger, and he will hold it out with ease. Tell him that a tumor 
 on his body is about to disappear, and his mind will often realize 
 your prophecy. Of the following case Mr. B. himself informed 
 me. A lady who was leaving off nursing from defect of milk, the 
 baby being thirteen months old, was hypnotized by him. He made 
 passes over her right breast to call her attention to it, and in a few 
 moments her gestures showed that she dreamt the baby was suck- 
 ing. In two minutes, the breast was distended with milk. She 
 was awoke, and on being questioned whether any part of her frame 
 felt differently from the rest, she perceived the state of her bosom, 
 and mentioned it ; to which Mr. B. replied that the baby would 
 soon settle that. The infant was nearly choked with the rush of 
 milk. In three days she came back to Mr. B. and complained that 
 he had disfigured her, for she was protuberant on one side. He 
 promised to take the swelling down ; hypnotized her ; but drew the 
 other side also by the like means ; and she nursed her child from 
 an overflowing bosom for twenty-two months; being nine after 
 the hypnotism. 
 
 A patient in the full state obeys all motives in the most natural 
 
PHRENOPATHY. 399 
 
 direction. If the arm is placed up, there it will stay : but a waft 
 of air will cause it to fall down. Why ? Because it is already up, 
 and the new motive changes the direction. If the arm be down, 
 another waft will raise it. If down, and prevented from moving 
 up, the impression will send it sideways. When the frame is erect, 
 a touch behind in the bend of the knees, will send it into genuflexion, 
 which will at once suggest prayer, as noticed before, &c. 
 
 An interesting question arises : In what does hypnotism differ 
 from mesmerism, and from common sleep ? Are the two former 
 identical ? We think not. We recognize the three as the main 
 trine of sleep, each depending on its first principle. The atom of 
 sleep is diffusion : the mind and body are dissolved in unconscious- 
 ness ; they go off into nothing through the fine powder of infinite 
 variety, and die of no attention j common sleep is impersonal. 
 The unit of hypnotism is intense attention, abstraction, the personal 
 ego pushed to nonentity. The unit of mesmerism is the common 
 state of the patient, caught as he stands, and subjected to the radi- 
 ant ideas of another person : it is mediate ; or both personal and 
 impersonal. Neither sleep nor hypnotism can exist in the presence 
 of a second person, without partaking more or less of mesmerism. 
 The sleep-brain is fluid, the hypnotic brain movable-pointed, and the 
 mesmeric brain elastic. Sleep=influx; hypnotism = efflux ; mes- 
 merism = afflux. 
 
 Patients can produce the hypnotic effects, upon themselves with- 
 out any second party • although a second will oftentimes strengthen 
 the result by his acts or presence ; just as one who stood by, and 
 told you that you were to succeed in a certain work, would nerve 
 your arm with fresh confidence. 
 
 We presume it is evident to the reader, what a power Mr. Braid 
 has methodized and called into play for the treatment of diseases. 
 As a curative agent, hypnotism contains two elements — each valua- 
 ble of its kind: 1. Where it produces trance, it has the benefits 
 of the mesmeric sleep, or furnishes so strong a dose of rest, that 
 many cases are cured by that alone. But 2. The suggestion of 
 ideas of health, tone, duty, hope, which produce dreams influential 
 upon the organization, enables the operator by this means to fulfil 
 the indication of directly ministering to that mind diseased, which 
 
400 HEALTH. 
 
 always accompanies and aggravates physical disorders. "We have 
 a direct proof of the continuation of the mind through the body, in 
 the way in which suggestions directed to the mind respecting the 
 organs, operate upon the latter. By touching the abdomen over the 
 colon, and suggesting the effect, we can, in susceptible persons, pro- 
 duce the results of aperient medicines, and abolish constipation for 
 years. This order of facts has an important bearing upon the origin 
 as well as cure of disease, rendering it probable that a large num- 
 of ills come directly out of the patient's mind ; for if alteration of 
 fancy heals, this suggests that fancy first engenders, the complaint. 
 Viewed in this light, many physical changes of structure may be 
 regarded as organic insanities or spells, which only require the right 
 word from the physician to dissipate them j and although, if they 
 went on, they would kill by their virulence, yet they are curable 
 by a simple impression from without. Next to the self-control of 
 the patient, which is the top of the mortal medicines, we may justly 
 reckon this control of the doctor, who makes use of his own health 
 and knowledge to give faith in the moments when it can be received.* 
 
 * Mr. Braid's process consists in fixing the eyes, or rather the attention, 
 which itself fixes the eyes. After the patient has gazed steadily for one or two 
 minutes, the lids are closed by the fingers of the operator, should they not pre- 
 viously close by themselves. This is to prevent straining, which might produce 
 headache, or cerebral disturbance. In case the sleep is not produced, Mr. B. 
 still keeps the attention awake by bending the patient's arm and setting it up- 
 right, and also by putting out the legs at right angles to the body. The effort 
 to maintain these positions energizes the will, and fixes the patient's mind upon 
 the operation. Where volition is weakened, this is sometimes an excellent 
 means of again bringing it into the organism. In cases of paralysis, patients 
 can frequently move in this state where they have no power in the ordinary one. 
 It is known that the emotions will move limbs that are palsied, although the will 
 has no effect upon them ; and that afterwards the will frequently retains the 
 powers thus conferred. In the hypnotic state, the operator can play upon the 
 emotions by a variety of suggestive means ; and in this way give power to im- 
 potent parts, and hand them over to the will. Mr. Braid's devices for these ends 
 stamp him as a man of inventive genius, and we are surprised that such a piece 
 of combined intellectual and scientific sagacity as hypnotism, has not placed him 
 long ago in the first rank of metropolitan physicians. 
 
 The titles of Mr. Braid's works are as follow : — 
 
 Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep. London, 1843. 
 
 The Power of the Mind over the Body. London, 1846. 
 
 Observations on Trance, or Hitman Hybernation. London, 1850. 
 
PHRENOPATHY. 401 
 
 Shall we then say that here we have a stream from the ancients' 
 arts of phrenopathy or putopathy* and a dawning recognition of 
 the spirituality of disease and of cure ? I do not think that loss of 
 faith and the other inward graces is the tap root of bodily sickness ; 
 and that fears, apathies, hatreds, and self-seekings are the sowers 
 who go forth to sow poison through our frames. On the other 
 hand, the renewal of faith,f even when impressed from without, 
 
 * rno-Tic, faith. 
 
 t With respect to the operation of medicines upon and through the imagina- 
 tion, and to the operation of charms, this belongs to the personal side of the art 
 of healing, and medicine cannot relinquish it without quitting its hold upon 
 some of the principal departments of man. When incantation ceased, and was 
 exploded by newer thoughts, its principle should have been carefully investigated, 
 and the virtue and goodness, if any, which lay at the core, should have been 
 retained. But in acting upon the imagination, one objection may be noticed, 
 which has a large, perhaps the principal share in banishing this kind of hygiene 
 from practice ; and yet, which rightly considered, is no objection at all. The 
 patients, so the doctors tell us, no longer believe in imagination-treatment; 
 and because they do not believe, the treatment will have no efficacy. We reply, 
 it makes little matter whether they believe or not. And the reason is clear. 
 For belief is two-fold : first, educational or scientific, but second, fundamental 
 or organic. To illustrate my meaning, I will relate an anecdote which happened 
 to myself with a friend who was a person of strong faculties, and deeply imbued 
 with current modes of philosophizing. We were discussing the reality of 
 ghosts and apparitions, and my friend argued with honest stoutness that they 
 were flimsy illusions, and had no claim on the attention of strong-minded peo- 
 ple. But being as candid as he was strong, he presently added : " I don't know 
 how it is, but when I talk of such things, I feel a cold stream down the back." 
 Here was a case in which the same good man was plaintiff in one part of 
 his body, and defendant in another : he denied ghosts with his lips and be- 
 lieved them with his back-bone : and fortified as he was by such arguments 
 negative as could be had, he was still, by witness of the " Coldstream," as capa- 
 ble of receiving a dose of fright as if he had been "a sick girl." His body, which 
 is substantial, credited more than his soul : Balaam's ass saw the spirits which 
 Balaam could not see. This is merely an illustration of the existence of a cor- 
 poreal faith, when the mental faith is deficient; and of the efficacy of the corpo- 
 real faith in producing bodily alterations. Thus it is that charms, personal 
 suggestions, mesmerism, minute doses of medicine, &c. &c, act upon the con- 
 scious man without the active concurrrence of his reason, nay, often in spite of 
 it. For the body itself knows bodily what is true and influential, whether the 
 mind knows it mentally or not. We have therefore every ground, despite the 
 absence of faith in the higher sense, to persevere in the remedies of faith, which 
 will not cease to cure though we be unfaithful. Thus it is well known that 
 warts can be charmed away where their owner has no faitli in the process ; and 
 for this reason ; that though he has no educational belief in the charm, his imag- 
 
 34* 
 
402 HEALTH. 
 
 handles the organism as the will handles the muscles, and, if we 
 may use the expression, converts and Christianizes the body, that is 
 to say, heals it. The virtue of hypnotism, where it succeeds, is 
 just this, that for the moment it unweeds the human soil so com- 
 pletely, that whatever faith is impressed, can work and grow. It 
 surely points to human agency all through disease, when we find 
 that monomanias can be given, or removed, in a moment, by the 
 suggestion of another from without j it points to a scientific theory 
 of the influx of ideas from other men, visible and invisible, as an 
 account of the outward supplies of life. 
 
 We regard hypnotism as the most intellectual phenomenon 
 which has yet been produced by the phrenopathists, as suggestive of 
 a new personnel in the bearing of the physician. It seems to show 
 that there is scarcely a case in which the latter should not do some- 
 thing actual besides the administration of drugs ; for the sick organ- 
 ism expects to be handled. It also proclaims to us what an artistry 
 should be cultivated by those who practice medicine ) what tact 
 should electrify their fingers, what resolve should vertebrate their 
 words, what cordials should drop from their mouths, what airs of 
 reassurance should surround them, and how ease and cheerfulness 
 should radiate from their presence, as they move from bed to bed. 
 To simplify all this to them, they must verily believe that medicine 
 is the daughter of heaven, and that they live to be inspired, and to 
 inspire. 
 
 We do not mean that the character of the good physician should 
 be the corollary of any juggle, however useful for a time, or that he 
 
 ination, as a body and a structure, is capable of being influenced by it, and of 
 operating its own lordly removals and avaunts upon the warts : for in imagina- 
 tion, what you seem to have, you have ; and the body is, among other things, full 
 of imagination. Nevertheless, where the two faiths coincide, the effect will be 
 more rapid; and they are always tending to coincide, either by the conversion 
 of the mind to the catholicity of the body, or of the body to the principles of the 
 mind. A good instance of this is seen in Nicolai's ghost-case, where, in spite of 
 seeing and hearing, Nicolai, being a considerable philosopher, discredited his 
 ghosts, and cured them by the application of leeches : his body became as philo- 
 sophical as his mind, as much bent upon seeing nothing, and was emptied of its 
 spiritual instincts. In this case Balaam and his beast were both orthodoxly one- 
 sighted, and trudged the common high-road of the bookselling business, each as 
 wise as the other. 
 
THE PHYSICIAN. 403 
 
 should cure ultimately by impressing imaginations upon his flock. 
 We only use these as signs pointing to a truth. What the physi- 
 cian should be, I dare not attempt to sketch. But I see that already 
 he is called out of the ranks as the most humane man of his time. 
 I see that he wants the largest faith, in addition to the largest science ; 
 gentleness and sternness also moulded together, as the lamb with the 
 lion. Nor can heroism using all the rest as a resource, be dispensed 
 with, to the very brink of death ; for while there is life there is 
 hope. Perhaps without attempting more, we may sum him up in 
 saying that he should be the model of the health of the age. 
 
 We use the pronoun " he," leaving it to progress to say, whether 
 our own sex has exclusive rights in the healing art. We cannot settle 
 that question ; but at all events we know, that the better half of the 
 health of the world depends upon the partners of our toil. It is clear 
 to us, that in no long time, the various organic systems of medicine, 
 (many of which have still to appear, being due to the organs of the 
 frame,) will necessitate the constitution of a tribunal for distributing 
 cases under their proper treatments. Perhaps it may then be found 
 that there is a female side to this as well as to the other arts. Cer- 
 tainly many of the qualities of the physician seem to belong pre- 
 eminently to woman. Instant presence of mind, fine tact, obser- 
 vation quick and subtle, instinctive promptings often surpassing 
 science, might, it seems, sit at the bedside in a female form. Or is 
 it that the nurse-function is to be so far educated and elevated, as 
 at length, without trenching upon professional titles, to touch the 
 heights of the physician's skill ? The urn of events must speak 
 for us, for here we are at fault.* 
 
 But after all our systems of health, public and private, many in 
 number as they are, though not enough, there is one means remain- 
 ing, which we should be guilty of much base terror, as well as histori- 
 cal neglect, if we did not dare to bring forth. In all the branches of 
 the New Medicine, we have seen the united principle of faith and 
 works assuming an additional importance, as we have risen from the 
 
 =* In the meantime our brave friend, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, has run the 
 gauntlet of the world's prejudices, and taken perhaps the first medical degree 
 bestowed upon a woman. May success go with her in her attempt to open up 
 a fresh avenue of occupations to- her sex ! 
 
404 HEALTH. 
 
 administration of drugs stage by stage to the phrenopathic art. In 
 the means to which we have alluded, and which is linked with our 
 common faith, this principle becomes all in all. Of course we 
 allude to the healing powers exerted by Christ and His apostles, and 
 by Him bequeathed to the race of man. As we read the Gospels, 
 we see how the Divine Man was also the great Physician ; how he 
 went about healing all manner of sickness and all manner of dis- 
 ease among the people ; and how as many as touched the hem of 
 his garments were made whole, every one. He also commanded 
 his followers to do the like, and founded cure as the grand evidence 
 of the Christian religion. His proofs of his mission were sound 
 bodies; the deaf hearing; the dumb speaking; lepers cleansed; 
 the dead raised ; those who before were blind, now they see. The 
 channel of this was no learned science, but a simple command in 
 His name who has all the power in heaven and on earth. Where 
 is the lineal priesthood of this great restoration? Where are the 
 claimants for this substantial apostolical successorship 1 Where are 
 the layers on of hands who give man to himself by casting out his 
 devils, and increase the prime wealth of the earth as the sign and 
 seal of the advent of the kingdom of heaven ? Where is the clergy 
 to whom sickness makes its last appeal for health, when doctors 
 have pronounced the death words, No hope ? We find them among 
 the fishermen of the first century, but not among the prelates of the 
 nineteenth : in mean-clad Peter and Paul, James and John, but not 
 under the lawn of any right reverend bench. Our pontiffs say that 
 the age of miracles is past ; but no New Testament ever told them 
 so ; Christianity, as we read it, was the institution of miracle as in 
 the order of nature ; and if the age of miracles is gone, it is because 
 the age of Christianity is gone. The age of mathematics would be 
 past, if no man cultivated them. On the other hand we aver, by 
 all our honesty to our faith, that for every reason we can perceive, a 
 duty is neglected here which is a main cause of irreligion and 
 skepticism among men. As in the sciences, which are the kings 
 of these late days, let this mode and matter of healing be fairly ex- 
 perimented. It belongs to the priesthood. Let them turn out into 
 the inclemencies of society, and try their adjurations against the 
 storm of physical evil that exasperates the nations to their core. 
 
CHRISTOPATHY. 405 
 
 Let them put on the proofs of the apostolic power. Let them 
 peril all in this great attempt. Let the weak excuse of their 
 age of virtue being past, be exchanged for a godly resolve to bring 
 it back again. If they fail, it will be because they are not Christ- 
 ian, or else because Christianity cannot bide its own proofs. If 
 they succeed, there will be no need of missionaries any more, but 
 mankind will sit in a right mind under them, and bless their privi- 
 lege, and their Master's name. The vis medicatrix Christi will be 
 the physical demonstration of the life of a Christian church. 
 
 Under all these means, co-working for good, shall not the body 
 be redeemed, and evil begin to lose the footing that sickness gives 
 it? By heaven's law the sick have claims which the healthy have 
 not, and there is more joy over one man cured, that over ninety and 
 nine who are sound. This is a test of every society — how it speeds, 
 or how it lags, in administering to its sick. They are the weakest 
 parts of our common body, and care and thought turn to them with 
 longings that are the flesh of the physician's heart. And the more 
 that are healed, the more concentrate is the love upon those who 
 suffer still; so that at length the world's whole skill and tenderness 
 shall surround with arts and healing tears the bed of the last sick 
 man. 
 
 Yet we are all to die, though in time neither by the sword of war, 
 nor by the violence of disease. The embryo passes without fear into 
 a larger world, which is meant to be kinder than the mother's womb. 
 The man is to be born again, with as little pain of sense and thought, 
 into the next expansion of the spirit. Death is the angel to the 
 irremediable. prseclarum ilium diem! Let us set our houses 
 in order, make our wills, and take our leave of all things every day : 
 we shall be wanted among our fathers afar off on the morrow. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Note to p. 112. 
 
 Throughout this work we have been anxious to register the 
 cases in which the body expresses the soul ; for we have a conviction 
 that such effects go deep into the nature and theory of our corporeal 
 incarnation. If the outward universe be a manifestation of spirit, 
 it is a fair question whether in the human sphere the realm of ex- 
 pression be not the essence of manifestation. And as expression is 
 either self-evidently intelligible, or nothing, so it amounts when 
 fully traced, to a complete exposition of nature in its universal prin- 
 ciples. It is but another name for symbolism and correspondency. 
 Hence to our mind the importance of the gestures of the body, in 
 expounding the functions, and the ultimate structure, of the organs. 
 For example, if the liver, as bile maker, be the wise organic anger 
 of the frame, then the whole personality of anger, traced through 
 every part, from the furies of the face, to the violences of the arms, 
 and the stampings of the feet, come to be put back into the liver, 
 and indeed into the bile, which is thus a wrath full of human signi- 
 ficance, and thence capable of acting, with due terror-strikings, upon 
 the society of the body. So too the manifestation or gestures of love 
 go into the heart, and show what it and the blood are doing in their 
 auricular privacies, &c, &c, &c. We therefore deem that there is 
 no more important subject in psychology, than this of expression, or 
 organic Words. And as we indicated before (p. 380), it is the 
 plainest symptom of all that gives the clue to the expression, all 
 whose parts follow that bell-wether as its flock. 
 
408 APPENDIX. 
 
 Note top. 166. 
 
 Trace whatever department we will, we find that association is 
 the new world of this century, whose symptoms have been long pre- 
 paring; growing up, like little coral apices, the germinating points 
 of future islands and continents. One early dot of this kind which 
 arose from the ocean of vagueness, was the doctrine of the associa- 
 tion of ideas, seized by the strong common sense of Hobbes, and 
 afterwards methodized and mechanized by the genius of Hartley. 
 
 That the human mind stimulates itself into action in certain lines 
 of ideas, and that there are trains, regiments and bands of thoughts; 
 that pleasures and pains determine the formation of these intellectual 
 cohorts, is a fact in which there is but little novelty; and yet when 
 it is seized, and taken as a stand-point, it leads by these very regi- 
 ments, into new kinds of operation. It gives militariness, and 
 march, and in high cases music to the soul, preparing for conquest 
 under strategical principles; for the discipline of thought, whether 
 discovered as nature's, or commanded by man, has the same results 
 upon science, as the drill of armies upon material warfare. We 
 therefore lay it down, that the doctrine of the association of ideas, 
 when set in motion, invades every subject with fresh force, and with 
 the new element of breadth of attack. This is not indeed a depart- 
 ment important in practice : we cite it rather from its smallness, as 
 showing that the associative air has permeated even into the minute 
 sphere of individual thought. 
 
 One step larger, and we come to the material sciences : and what 
 has been the process here ? Every victory has been gained by look- 
 ing at subjects not in themselves alone, but as connected with their 
 neighbors. How barren each thing is while it stands upon its own 
 individuality; how its properties one by one die down, as we cut it 
 off from the influences of the surrounding natures ! The association 
 of single things with each other in a common knowledge, is what 
 brings them under the grasp of a particular science; which is no 
 sooner constituted, than we feel that it too is unfruitful in itself; 
 and that it begins to yearn, like a young maiden, with strange de- 
 sires for conjunction with some other whole science. The two to- 
 gether are more than twice either; they are three at the very first; 
 
APPENDIX. 409 
 
 they have a progeny which may rise to any numbers. At the points 
 where they unite, they must of course fit; to fit, they must be of 
 cup and ball construction; in other words, there must be a likeness 
 or likingness between them, and this likeness, when studied, becomes 
 a science of analogies. When the marriages of a dozen sciences 
 have been observed, they all begin to group upon each other, and 
 the thought strikes us that all the sciences fit to each, or that analogy 
 is universal. Everything likes everything. This sends our curiosity 
 abroad, and we come upon the thought of universal organization, 
 and then we find that certain parts of nature, as vegetables, beasts, 
 and men, are shining lights of organization; that flesh, for instance, 
 loves its parts so well, and that they embrace so closely, that no- 
 thing can come between them without pain, or destruction. Thus 
 we only get to individuality as the result of a compact of sentient 
 beings whom God has so closely linked in liking, that they cannot 
 be sundered without mischief. The scientific individuality thus ob- 
 tained, illustrates our common individuality, and we are constrained 
 to think is a true statement of one part of its ground. 
 
 From this point our thoughts become organic, and we are sure to 
 make organization or association into a rule of judgment, and a 
 method of discovery; insisting, by faith and science, that the whole 
 world is covertly what the highest things in it are manifestly. We 
 have found that the best and most speaking bodies are disposed in 
 mutual order and helpfulness; we dictate downwards, from the 
 heights of nature, that this is the case with the other parts; and 
 that their imperfection consists in nothing else, than the fact that 
 they do not so openly express the everlasting order. The plants are 
 poor timid things which cannot tell us what they have in them ; the 
 beasts have better voices; and mankind are different over again, pre- 
 cisely according as they can display that association and organization 
 which is the lesson of the whole. The best men indeed are still 
 markedly individual ; but why ? Only because they are the general 
 officers of regiments or armies, and not because they have no world 
 under them. They are dependent on much larger and broader bases 
 than other people. The apex of the pyramid has a free point, but 
 of all the parts, it rests at last the most heavily upon the ground. 
 
 Knowledge displays the associative power in its width not less 
 35 
 
410 APPENDIX. 
 
 than in its height. Observe the new light that comes simply and 
 solely by putting things together! This act constitutes the strength 
 of modern attainments. A remarkable instance of it is presented 
 in the law of storms, as developed by Mr. Redfield and Colonel Eeid. 
 In our incoherent days storms were thought to be gusts more capri- 
 cious than our tempers are now thought to be. They pitched one 
 ship on its beam ends to the south, swooped another to the east, and 
 sucked down a third into a perpendicular grave. At length came a 
 man, who entertained the notion, of putting the bits of a storm to- 
 gether; and he soon found that the pieces fitted; that one side of 
 the cup of windy wrath looked east; others, north, west and south; 
 and that there was a hollow in this, as in other cups. The man 
 found practically that a whole storm was quite different from the 
 conception of separated parts, and that it was made up of associated 
 parts. He began to think that storms "obey regular laws." The 
 world is now beginning to think that all things do the same; and 
 will henceforth look down from that summit which this one hardy 
 man, by strong efforts, gained. 
 
 So too, in physical geography — a science consisting purely of the 
 association of our observations of the world into one globe of obser- 
 vations. How differently intelligible does the planet become simply 
 by being all represented, and with its parts in harmony with them- 
 selves. And here another blessing of associative over isolated 
 thought may be characterized; the former is pictorial; the latter 
 invisible, and made only of wandering points. So soon as you get 
 fine surface knowledge, picture is painted thereupon; the white 
 memory then puts itself down on nature's press, and the soul 
 pulls an impression, which is durable, nay, everlasting, like other 
 print. The imagination is the sharp type of this very memory; and 
 man becomes thereby an everlasting possessor of the world; he takes 
 it with him wherever he goes; and from its plans, in the portfolios 
 of his own nature, he can govern the old estate, let him be roaming 
 among the fixed stars, or safely moored in his final kingdom of the 
 heavens. We may surely deny that the isolated thought has any 
 pretty pictures to show ; has anything in it to remember, or can last 
 through successive hours; much less, after death has thrown the 
 lumber away forever. Not so, however, the organic and colored 
 
APPENDIX. 411 
 
 thought which is shelled off by every thing when once we see how 
 much all things love each other. 
 
 And is not this to be applied to practice, and to higher thought? 
 Will not man, when put together, be found to be the variegated 
 landscape of a new earth ? Will not his chances then first be deve- 
 loped? Will not his problems become parts of a pictorial human 
 life, which in point of reality, and unquestionableness, will take 
 rank with land and sea, with the skies, and the verdurous earth? 
 We dare not answer the question in the negative, until the experi- 
 ment of association, successful, so far, in every other sphere, has 
 been tried in this crowning matter of human development and hap- 
 piness. Observe, however, that the putting together of man, is not 
 a mechanical, but a human or religious act. 
 
 Note to p. 378. 
 It seems very evident that disease has as many centres in the 
 human organism, as there are great spheres of its powers. There 
 are diseases which spring from the body, and others that emanate 
 from the mind. In short, as there are hepatic, pulmonary and ce- 
 rebral complaints, both idiopathic and sympathetic, so there are 
 others of the reason, imagination, senses, equally following this two. 
 fold distribution. It is probable that disease can only be cured by 
 attacking it in its own centres : bodily disease by drugs and bodily 
 means, and spiritual diseases by their appropriate administrations. 
 Thus where a disease from the mind is sympathetically felt in the 
 body considered as the extremity of the mind, phrenopathic means 
 will cure it: but these can only relieve the mental symptoms, not 
 the root of the mischief, if the malady be primary in the body 
 itself. 
 
 
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 instruction, and may <'<c used as a companion to the Comprehensive or any other Commentary, or the 
 Holy Bible. 
 
 THE ENGRAVINGS 
 
 tn this volume, it is believed, will form no small part of its attractions. No pains have been spared 
 to procure such as should embellish the work, and, at the same time, illustrate the text. Objec- 
 tions that have been made to the pictures commonly introduced into the Bible, as being mere crea- 
 tions of fancy and the imagination, ollen unlike nature, and frequently conveying false impressions, 
 cannot be urged against the pictorial illustrations of this volume Here the fine arts are made 
 subservient to utility, the landscape views being, without an exception, matter-of-fact views of places 
 mentioned in Scripture, as they appear at the present day , thus m many instances exhibiting, in the 
 most forcible manner, to the eye, the strict and literal fulfilment of the remarkable prophecies; "the 
 present ruined and desolate condition of the cities of Babylon, Nineveh, Selah. Ac, and the coun- 
 tries of Echini and Egypt, are astonishing examples, and no completely exemplify, in the most 
 minute particulars, every thing which was foretold of them in the height of their prosperity, that 
 no »»etter description can now t«j given of them than a simple quotation from a chapter and verse 
 of the Bible written nearly two or three thousand years ago " The publishers are enabled to select 
 from several collections lately published in London, the proprietor of one of which says that "seve- 
 ral distinguished travellers have afforded him the use of nearly Three Hundred Original Sketches'" 
 of Scripture places, made upon the spot. " The land of Palestine, it is well known, abounds in 
 scenes of the most picturesque beauty. Syria comprehends the snowy heights of Lebanon, and the 
 majestic ruins of Tadmor and Baalbec." 
 The above work can be had in various styles of binding. 
 
 Price from $1 50 to $5 00. 
 
 THE ILLUSTRATED CONCORDANCE, 
 
 In one volume, royal 8vo. 
 
 A new, full, and complete Concordance ; illustrated with monumental, traditional, and oriental 
 engravings, founded on Butterworth's, with Cruden's definitions; forming, it is believed, on many 
 accounts, a more valuable work than either Butterworth, Cruden, or any other similar book in the 
 language. 
 
 The value of a Concordance is now generally understood ; and those who have used one, con- 
 sider it indispensable in connection with the Bible Some of the many advantages the Illustrated 
 Concordance has over all the others, are. that it <N«iit;uiis near two hundred appropriate engravings \ 
 it is printed on line white paper, with beautiful large type. 
 
 Price One Dollar. 
 
 \ 4 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 LIPPINCOTT'S EDITION OF 
 
 BAGSTER'S COMPREHENSIVE BIBLE. 
 
 In order to develope the peculiar nature of the Comprehensive Bible, it will only be necessary 
 to embrace its more prominent features. 
 
 1st. The SACRED TEXT is that of the Authorized Version, and is printed from the edition cor- 
 rected and improved by Dr. Blaney, which, from its accuracy, is considered the standard edition. 
 
 2d. The VARIOUS READINGS are faithfully printed from the edition of Dr. Blaney, inclusive 
 of the translation of the proper names, without the addition or diminution of one. 
 
 3d. In the CHRONOLOGY, great care has been taken to fix the date of the particular transao 
 tions, which has seldom been done with any degree of exactness in any former edition of the Bible. 
 
 4th. The NOTES are exclusively philological and explanatory, and are not tinctured with senti- 
 ments of any sect or party. They are selected from the most eminent Biblical critics and com- 
 mentators. 
 
 It is hoped that this edition of the Holy Bible will be found to contain the essence of Biblical 
 research and criticism, that lies dispersed through an immense number of volumes. 
 
 Such is the nature and design of this edition of the Sacred Volume, which, from the various 
 objects it embraces, the freedom of its pages from all sectarian peculiarities, and the beauty, plain- 
 ness, and correctness of the typography, that it cannot fail of proving acceptable and useful to 
 Christians of every denomination. 
 
 In addition to the usual references to parallel passages, which are quite full and numerous, the 
 Btudent has all the marginal readings, together with a rich selection of Philological, Critical, Histo- 
 rical, Geographical, and ether valuable notes and remarks, which explain and illustrate the sacred 
 text. Besides the general introduction, containing valuable essays on the genuineness, authenticity, 
 and inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, and other topics of interest, there are introductory and con- 
 cluding remarks to each book— a table of the contents of the Bible, by which the different portions 
 are so arranged as to read in an historical order. 
 
 Arranged at the top of each page is the period in which the prominent events of sacred history 
 took place. The calculations are made for the year of the world before and after Christ, Julian 
 Period, the year of the Olympiad, the year of the building of Rome, and other notations of time. 
 At the close is inserted a Chronological Index of the Bible, according to the computation of Arch- 
 bishop Ussher. Also, a full and valuable index of the subjects contained in the Old and New Testa- 
 ments, with a careful analysis and arrangement of texts under their appropriate subjects. 
 
 Mr. Greenfield, the editor of this work, and for some time previous to his death the superintend- 
 ent of the editorial department of the British and Foreign Bible Society, was a most extraordinary 
 man. In editing the Comprehensive Bible, his varied and extensive learning was called into suc- 
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 of it as a work of " prodigious labour and research, at once exhibiting his varied talents and pro- 
 found erudition." 
 
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 what is needed in every family — 'the unsophisticated word of God.' 
 
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 and most beautiful surface. The publishers seem to have been solicitous to make a perfectly 
 unique book, and they have ai lie object very successfully. V\"e trust that a liberal 
 
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 LIPPINCOTT'S EDITIONS OF 
 
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 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE; 
 
 OL, DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE, THEOLOGY, RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY, ALL RELIGIONS, 
 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, AND MISSIONS. 
 Designed as a complete Book of Reference on all Religions Subjects, and Companion to the Bible; 
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 Illustrated by wood-cuts, maps, and engravings on copper and steel. In one volume, royal 8vo. 
 Price, S-4 00. 
 
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LIPPINCOTT, GHAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
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 The Errors of Modern Infidelity Illustrated and Refuted. 
 
 BY S. BS. SCHr»IUCKZR, A. 2VL 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. ; cloth. Just published. 
 
 We cannot but regard this work. ::■ * we view it in reference to its design, as one 
 
 of the must masterly productions .>!' the aire, and fitted to npfool oae of the mnsl fondly cherished 
 and dangerous of all ancient or modern errors. God must bless snch" a work, armed with his own 
 truth, and doing fierce and successful battle against black infidelity, which would bring His Majesty 
 and Word down to the tribunal of human reason, for condemnation and annihilation.— Alb. Spectator 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GEAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Chrgi] of Simmra: 
 
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 ANECDOTES ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE CHARACTER OF MINISTERS OF RELI- 
 GION IN THE UNITED STATES, 
 BY JOSEPH BELCHER, D.D., 
 Editor of "The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller," "Robert Hall," &c. 
 
 "This very interesting and instructive collection of pleasing and solemn remembrances of many 
 pious men, illustrates the character of the day in which they lived, and defines the men more 
 clearly than very elaborate essays." — Baltimore American. 
 
 " We regard the collection as highly interesting, and judiciously made."— Presbyterian. 
 
 JQSEPHUS'S (FLAVIUS) WORKS, 
 
 FAMILY EDITION. 
 BIT THE LATE WZIiLJAXKE WHISTON, A. I¥l. 
 
 FROM THE LAST LONDON EDITION, COMPLETE. 
 
 One volume, beautifully illustrated with Steel Plates, and the only readable edition 
 
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 As a matter of course, every family in our country has a copy of the Holy Bible ; and as the pre- 
 sumption is that the greater portion often consult its pages, we take the liberty of saying to all those 
 that do. that the perusal of the writings of Josephus will be found very interesting and instructive. 
 
 All those who wish to possess a beautiful and correct copy of this valuable work, would do well 
 to purchase this edition. It is for sale at all the principal bookstores in the United States, and by 
 country merchants generally in the Southern and Western States. 
 
 Also, the above work in two volumes. 
 
 BURDER'S VILLAGE SERMONS; 
 
 Or, 101 Plain and Short Discourses on the Principal Doctrines of the Gospel. 
 
 INTENDED FOR THE USE OP FAMILIES, SUNDAY-SCHOOLS, OR COMPANIES ASSEM- 
 BLED FOR RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN COUNTRY VILLAGES. 
 
 BY GEORGE BURDER. 
 To which is added to each Sermon, a Short Prayer, with some General Prayers for Families, 
 Schools, &.C., at the end of the work. 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 These sermons, which are characterized by a beautiful simplicity, the entire absence of contro- 
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 converting many individuals, but also of introducing the Gospel iuto districts, and even into parish 
 churches, where before it was comparatively unknown." 
 "This work fully deserves the immortality it has attained." 
 
 This is a fine library edition of this invaluable work ; and when we say that it should be found in 
 the possession of every family, we only reiterate the sentiments and sincere wishes of all m vho take 
 a deep interest in the eternal welfare of mankind. 
 
 FAMILY PRAYEUS AND HYMNS, 
 
 ADAPTED TO FAMILY WORSHIP, 
 
 TABLES FOR THE REGULAR READIN6 OF THE SCRIPTURES. 
 
 By Rev. S. C. Winchester, A. M., 
 
 Late Pastor of the Sixth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia ; and the Presbyterian Church at 
 v Natchez, Miss. 
 
 One volume, 12mo. 
 
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LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
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 ILLUSTRATED STANDARD POETS. 
 
 ELEGANTLY PRINTED, ON FINE PAPER, AND UNIFORM IN SIZE AND 
 
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 The following Editions of Standard British Poets are illustrated with numerous Sieel 
 Engravings, and may be had in all varieties of binding. 
 
 BYRON'S WORKS. 
 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 
 INCLUDING ALL HIS SUPPRESSED AND ATTRIBUTED POEMS ; WITH SIX BEAUTIFUL 
 ENGRAVINGS. 
 This edition has been carefully compared with the recent London edition of Mr. Murray, and 
 made complete by the addition of more than fifty pages of poems heretofore unpublished in Eng- 
 land. Among these there are a number that have never appeared in any American edition ; and 
 the publishers believe they are warranted in saying that this is the most complete edition of Lord 
 Byron's Poetical Works ever published in the United States. 
 
 t fmllml tBorfe of Mw. Mimm, 
 
 Complete in one volume, octavo ; with seven beautiful Engravings. 
 
 This is a new and complete edition, with a splendid engraved likeness of Mrs. Hemans, on steeL 
 and contains all the Poems in the last London and American editions. With a Critical Preface by 
 Mr. Thatcher, of Boston. 
 
 "As no work in the English language can be commended with more confidence, it will argue bad 
 taste in a female in this country to be without a complete edition of the writings of one who was 
 an honour to her sex and to humanity, and whose productions, from first to last, contain no syllable 
 calculated to call a blush to the cheek of modesty and virtue. There is, moreover, in Mrs. Hemans's 
 poetry, a moral purity and a religious feeling which commend it, in an especial manner, to the dis- 
 criminating reader. No parent or guardian will be under the necessity of imposing restrictions 
 with regard to the free perusal of every production emanating from this gifted woman. There 
 breathes throughout the whole a most eminent exemption from impropriety of thought or diction ; 
 and there is at times a pensiveness of tone, a winning sadness in her more serious compositions, 
 which tells of a soul which has been lifted from the contemplation of terrestrial things, to dTvine 
 Bommunings with beings of a purer world." 
 
 MILTON, YOUNG, GRAY, BEATTIE, AND COLLINS'S 
 POETICAL WORKS. 
 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 WITH SIX BEAUTIFUL ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 
 Including two hundred and fifty Letters, and sundry Poems of Cowper, never before published in 
 
 this country ; and of Thomson a new and interesting Memoir, and upwards of twenty 
 
 new Poems, for the first time printed from his own Manuscripts, taken from 
 
 a late Edition of the Aldine Poets, now publishing in London. 
 WITH SEVEN BEAUTIFUL ENGRAVINGS. 
 The distinguished Professor Silliman, speaking of this edition, observes : "lam as much gratified 
 by the elegance and fine taste of your edition, as by the noble tribute of genius and moral excel- 
 lence which these delightful authors have left for all future generations ; and Cowper, especially, 
 is not less conspicuous as a true Christian, moralist and teacher, than as a poet of great power and 
 exquisite taste." 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OF ROGERS, CAMPBELL, MONTGOMERY, 
 LAMB, AND KIRKE WHITE. 
 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 WITH SIX BEAUTIFUL ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 The beauty, correctness, and convenience of this favourite edition of these standard authors are 
 so well known, that it is scarcely necessary to add a word in its favour. It is only necessary to say, 
 that the publishers have now issued an illustrated edition, which greatly enhances its former value. 
 The engravings are excellent and well selected. It is the best library edition extant. 
 
 CKABBE, HEBER, AND POLLOK'S POETICAL WORKS. 
 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 WITH SIX BEAUTIFUL ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 A writer in the Boston Traveller holds the following language with reference to these valuable 
 editions : — 
 
 "Mr. Editor: — I wish, without any idea of puffing, to say a word or two upon the 'Library of 
 English Poets' that is now published at Philadelphia, by Lippincott, Grambo & Co. It is certainly, 
 takm? into consideration the elegant manner in which it is printed, and the reasonable price at 
 winch it is afforded to purchasers, the best edition of the modern British Poets that has ever been 
 published in this country. Each volume is an octavo of about 500 pages, double columns, stereo- 
 typed, and accompanied with fine engravings and biographical sketches ; and most of them are 
 reprinted from Galignani's French edition. As to its value, we need only mention that it contains 
 the entire works of Montgomery, Gray, Beattie, Collins, Byron, Cowper, Thomson, Milton, Young, 
 Rogers, Campbell, Lamb, Hemans, Heber, Kirke White, Crabbe, the Miscellaneous Works of Gold- 
 smith, and other masters of the lyre. The publishers are doing a great service by their publication, 
 and their volumes are almost in as great demand as the fashionable novels of the day; and they 
 deserve to be so : for they are certainly printed in a style superior to that in which we have before 
 had the works of the English Poets." 
 
 No library can be considered complete without a copy of the above beautiful and cheap editions 
 of the English Poets ; and persons ordering all or any of them, will please say Lippincott, Grambo 
 &. Co.'s illustrated editions. 
 
 A COMPLETE 
 
 lirfionnrt] of |kftrnl tofafinrm: 
 
 COMPRISING THE MOST EXCELLENT AND APPROPRIATE PASSAGES IN 
 THE OLD BRITISH POETS; WITH CHOICE AND COPIOUS SELEC- 
 TIONS FROM THE BEST MODERN BRITISH AND 
 AMERICAN POETS. 
 EDITED BY SARAH JOSEPHA HALE. 
 As nightingales do upon glow-worms feed, 
 So poets live upon the living light 
 Of Nature and of Beauty. 
 
 Bailey's Festus. 
 
 Beautifully illustrated with Engravings. In one super-royal octavo volume, in various 
 
 bindings. 
 
 The publishers extract, from the many highly complimentary notices of the above valuable and 
 beautiful work, the following: 
 
 " We have at last a volume of Poetical Quotations worthy of the name. It contains nearly six 
 hundred octavo pases, carefully and tastefully selected from all the home end foreign authors of 
 celebrity. It is invaluable to a writer, while to the ordinary reader it presents every subject at a 
 glance." — Godej/'s Lady's Book. 
 
 "The plan or idea of Mrs Hide's work is felicitous. It is one for which her fine taste, her orderly 
 habits of muni, and her lone: occupation with literature, has given her peculiar facilities; and tho- 
 roughly has she accomplished her task in the work before us." — Sartain's Magazine. 
 
 "It is a choice collection of poetical extracts from every English and American author worth 
 perusing, from the days of Chaucer to the present time." — Washington Union. 
 
 " There is nothing negative about this work ; it is positively good."— Evening Bulletin. 
 
 10 
 
LIPHNCOTT, GKAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE DIAMOND EDITION OF BYRON. 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OF LORD BYRON, 
 
 "WITH A SKETCH OF KIS LIFE. 
 COMPLETE IN ONE NEAT DUODECIMO VOLUME, WITH STEEL PLATES. 
 
 The type of this edition is so perfect, and it is printed with so much care, on fine white paper, 
 that it can be read with as much ease as most of the larger editions. This work is to be had in 
 plain and superb binding, making a beautiful volume for a gift. 
 
 " The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, complete in one volume ; published by L., G. & Co.. Phila- 
 delphia. We hazard nothing in saying that, take it altogether, this is the most elegant work ever 
 issued from the American press. 
 
 "' In a single volume, not larger than an ordinary duodecimo, the publishers have embraced the 
 whole of Lord Byron's Poems, usually printed in ten or twelve volumes; and, what is more remark- 
 able, have done it with a type so clear and distinct, that, notwithstanding its necessarily small size, 
 it may be read with the utmost facility, even by failing eyes. The book is stereotyped ; and never 
 have we seen a finer specimen of that art. Everything about it is perfect — the paper, the print- 
 ing, the binding, all correspond with each other ; and it is embellished with two fine engravings, 
 well worthy the companionship in which they are placed. 
 
 "•This will make a beautiful Christmas present.' 
 
 " We extract the above from Gudey's Lady's Book. The notice itself, we are given to understand, 
 is written by Mrs. Hale. 
 
 " We have to add our commendation in favour of this beautiful volume, a copv of which has 
 been sent us by the publishers. The admirers of the noble hard will feel obliged to the enterprise 
 winch has prompted the publishers to dare a competition with the numerous editions of his works 
 already m circulation; and we shall be surprised if this convenient travelling edition does not in a 
 great degree supersede the use of the large octavo works, which have little advantage in size ami 
 openness of type, and are much inferior in the qualities of portability and lightness." — Intelligencer. 
 
 THE DIAMOND EDITION OF MOORE. 
 
 (CORRESPONDING WITH BYRON.) 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OF THOMAS MOORE, 
 
 COLLECTED BY HIMSELF. 
 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. 
 
 This work is published uniform with Byron, from the last London edition, and is the most com- 
 plete printed in the country. 
 
 THE DIAMOND EDITION OF SHAKSPEARE, 
 
 (COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME,) 
 
 XCTCXiUDXCTG A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 
 
 UNIFORM WITH BYRON AND MOORE. 
 
 THE ABOVE WORKS CAN BE HAD IN SEVERAL VARIETIES OF BINDING. 
 
 GOLDSMITH'S ANIMATED NATURE. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES, OCTAVO. 
 BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED WITH 385 PLATES. 
 
 CONTAINING A HISTORY OF THE EARTH, ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND FISHES; FORMING 
 THE MOST COMPLETE NATURAL HISTORY EVER PUBLISHED. 
 
 This is a work that should be in the library of every family, having been written by one of the 
 most talented authors in the English language. 
 
 " Goldsmith can never be made obsolete while delicate genius, exquisite feeling, fine invention, 
 the most harmonious metre, and the happiest diction, are at all valued." 
 
 BIGLA^D'S NATURAL HISTORY 
 
 Of Animals, Birds. Fishes, Reptiles, and Insects. Illustrated with numerous and beautiful Engrav- 
 ings. By JOHN BIGLAND, author of a " View of the World," " Letters on 
 Universal History," <tc. Complete in 1 vol., 12mo. 
 
 11 
 
LXPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE POWER AND PROGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 THE UNITED STATES; Its Power and Progress. 
 
 BY GUILLAinOTE TELL POUSSIH, 
 
 LATE MINISTER OF THE REPUBLIC OF FRANCE TO THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 FIRST AMERICAN, FROM THE THIRD PARIS EDITION. 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY EDMOND L. DU BARRY, M. D., 
 
 SURGEON U. S. NAVY. 
 
 In one large octavo volume. 
 
 SCHOOLCRAFT'S GREAT NATIONAL WORK ON THE INDIAN TRIBES OF 
 THE UNITED STATES, 
 
 WITH BEAUTIFUL AND ACCURATE COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 HISTORICAL M STATISTICAL INFORMATION 
 
 RESPECTING THE 
 
 HISTORY, CONDITION AND PROSPECTS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 % notnn Cribs of tf;t itnifeo $tatts. 
 
 COLLECTED AND PREPARED UNDFJK THE DIRECTION OF THE BUREAU OF INDIAN 
 AFFAIRS, PER ACT OF MARCH 3, 1847, 
 
 B¥ HEETRir H. SCEOOLCIl^PT, Xili-D. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED EY S. EASTMAN, Caft. U. S. A. 
 PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 THE AMERICAN GARDENER'S CALENDAR, 
 
 ADAPTED TO THE CLIMATE AND SEASONS OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 Containing: a complete account of all the work necessary to he done in the Kitchen Garden, Fruit 
 Garden, Orchard, Vineyard, Nursery, Pleasure-Ground, Flower Garden, Green-house, Hot-house, 
 and Forcing; Frames, for every month in the year ; with ample Practical Directions for performing 
 the same. 
 
 Also, general as well as minute instructions for laying out or erecting each and every of the above 
 departments, according to modern taste and the most approved plans; the Ornamental Planting of 
 Pleasure Grounds, in the ancient and modern style; the cultivation of Thorn Quicks, and other 
 plants suitable for Live Hedges, with the best methods of making them.ic. To which are annexed 
 catalogues of Kitchen Garden Plants and Herbs; Aromatic. Pot. and Sweet Herbs; Medicinal 
 Plants, and the most important Grapes, i.c, used in rural economy; with the soil best adapted to 
 their cultivation. Together with a copious Index to the body of the work. 
 
 BY BERNARD M'MAHON. 
 Tenth Edition, greatly improved. In one volume, octavo. 
 
 THE USEFUL AND THE BEAUTIFUL; 
 
 OH, DOMESTIC AMD MORAL DUTIES NSCESSABY TQ^QChAL MAT 
 
 12 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE FARMER'S AND PLANTER'S ENCYCLOP/EDIA. 
 
 CJje- /iirmrr's anil planter's (Ennjrlrijiititia nf Rural ffisxa. 
 
 BY CUTHBERT W. JOHNSON. 
 ADAPTED TO THE UNITED STATES BY GOUVERNEUR EMERSON. 
 
 Illustrated by seventeen beautiful Engravings of Cattle, Horses, Sheep, the varieties of Wheat, 
 Barley, Oats, Grasses, the Weeds of Agriculture. <kc. ; besides numerous Engrav- 
 ings on wood of the most important implements of Agriculture, &c. 
 This standard work contains the latest and best information upon all subjects connected with 
 farming, and appertaining to the country ; treating of the great crops of gram, hay, cotton, hemp, 
 tobacco, rice, sugar, &c. &c. ; of horses and mules ; of cattle, with minute particulars relating to 
 cheese and butter-making; of fowls, including a description of capon-making, with drawings of the 
 instruments employed ; of bees, and the Russian and other systems of managing bees and con- 
 structing hives. Long articles on the uses and preparation of bones, lime, guano, and all sorts of 
 annual, mineral, and vegetable substances employed as manures. Descriptions of the most approved 
 ploughs, harrows, threshers, and every other agricultural machine and implement; of fruit and 
 shade trees, forest trees, and shrubs ; of weeds, and all kinds of flies, and destructive worms and 
 insects, and the best means of getting rid of them ; together with a thousand other matters relating 
 to rural life, about which information is so constantly desired by all residents of the country. 
 IN ONE LARGE OCTAVO VOLUME. 
 
 MASON'S FARRIER-FARMERS' EDITION. 
 
 Price, 6 2 cents. 
 
 THE PRACTICAL FARRIER, FOR FARMERS: 
 
 COMPRISING A GENERAL DESCRIPTION OP THE NOELE AND USEFUL ANIMAL, 
 
 THE HORSE; 
 
 WITH MODES OF MANAGEMENT IN ALL CASES, AND TREATMENT IN DISEASE. 
 TO WHICH IS ADDED, 
 
 A PRIZE ESSAY ON MULES ■ AND AN APPENDIX, 
 
 Containing Recipes for Diseases of Horses, Oxen, Cows, Calves, Sheep, Dogs, Swine, <tc. &c. 
 
 BIT RICHARD MASON, 2&. D., 
 
 Formerly of Surry County, Virginia. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo.; bound in cloth, gilt. 
 
 MASON'S FARRIER AND STUD-BOOK-NEW EDITION. 
 THE GENTLEMAN'S NEW POCKET FARRIER: 
 
 COMPRISING A GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE NOBLE AND USEFUL ANIMAL, 
 
 THE HORSE; 
 
 WITH MODES OF MANAGEMENT IN ALL CASES, AND TREATMENT LN DISEASE. 
 
 B¥ KIGI2A21D MiLSOST, M. D., 
 
 Formerly of Surry County, Virginia. 
 
 ^o which is added, A PRIZE ESSAY ON MULES; and AN APPENDIX, containing Recipes for 
 
 , Diseases of Horses, Oxen, Cows, Calves, Sheep, Dogs, Swine, <fec. <kc. ; with Annals 
 
 of the Turf, American Stud- Book, Rules for Training, Racing, &c. 
 
 WITH A SUPPLEMENT, 
 
 Comprising an Essay on Domestic Animals, especially the Hor^e ; with Remarks on Treatment and 
 
 Breeding; together with Trotting and Racing Tables, show ;ng the best time on record at one 
 
 two, three and four mile heats ; Pedigrees of Winning Horses, since 1839, and of the most 
 
 celebrated Stallions and Mares; with useM Calving and Lambing Tables. By 
 
 J. S. SKINNER, Editor now of the Farmer's Library, New York, ice. &c. 
 
 13 
 
LXPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 HINDS'S FARRIERY AND STUD-BOOK-NEW EDITION. 
 FARMERY, 
 
 TAUGHT ON A NEW AND EASY PLAN: 
 
 BEING 
 
 51 €xmtm m tip t)imm unit 5lrritottf3 nf ijp ISnm; 
 
 With Instructions to the Shoeing Smith, Farrier, and Groom ; preceded by a Popular Description of 
 the Animal Functions in Health, and how these are to be restored when disordered. 
 
 BY JOHN HINDS, VETERINARY SURGEON. 
 
 With considerable Additions and Improvements, partioulnrly adapted to this country, 
 
 BY THOMAS M. SMITH, 
 
 Veterinary Surgeon, and Member of the London Veterinary Medical Society. 
 
 The publishers have received numerous flattering notices of the great practical value of these 
 works. The distinguished editor of the American Farmer, speaking of them, observes: — " We 
 cannot too highly recommend these books, and therefore advise every owner of a horse to obtain 
 them." 
 
 "There are receipts in those books that show how Founder may be cured, and the traveller pur- 
 sue his journey the next dav, by giving a tablespoonful nf alum. This was got from Dr. P. ThornU-n. 
 of Montpelier, Rappahannock county, Virginia, as founded on his own observation in several cases." 
 
 " The constant demand for Mason's and Hinds's Farrier has induced the publishers, Messrs. Lip- 
 pincott, Grambo & Co., to put forth new editions, with a ' Supplement' of 100pas;es, by J. S. Skinner, 
 Esq. We should have sought to render an acceptable service to our agricultural readers, by giving 
 a chapter from the Supplement, 'On the Relations between Man and the Domestic Animals, espe- 
 cially the Horse, and the Obligations they impose ;' or the one on 'The Form of Animals;' but that 
 either one of them would overrun the space here allotted to such subjects." 
 
 " Lists of Medicines, and other articles which ought to be at hand about every training and livery 
 stable, and every Fanner's and Breeder's establishment, will be found in these valuable works." 
 
 TG CARPENTERS AND MECHANICS 
 
 Just Published. 
 
 A NEW AND IMPROVED EDITION OF 
 
 THE CARPENTER'S NEW GUIDE, 
 
 BEING A COMPLETE BOOK OF LINES FOR 
 
 ARPENTHY AND JOINERY; 
 
 Treating fully on Practical Geometry, Saffifs Brick and Plaster Groins, Niches of every description, 
 
 Sky-lights, Lines for Roofs and Domes: with a great variety of Designs for Roofs, 
 
 Trussed Gilders, Floors, Domes, Bridges, &c, Angle Bars for Shop 
 
 Fronts, &c, and Raking Mouldings. 
 
 ALSO, 
 
 Additional Plans for various Stair-Cases, with the Lines for producing the Face and Falling Moulds. 
 
 never before published, and greatly superior to those given in a former edition of this work. 
 
 BY WILLIAM JOHNSON, ARCHITECT, 
 
 OF PHILADELPHIA. 
 
 The whole founded on true Geometrical Principles; the Theory and Practice well explained and 
 fully exemplified, on eighty-three copper plates, including some Observations and Calculations on 
 the Strength of Timber. 
 
 BY PETER NICHOLSON, 
 
 Author of "The Carpenter and Jouer's Assistant," "The Student's Instructor to the Fiva 
 
 Orders," &c. 
 
 Thirteenth Edition. One volume, 4to., well bound. 
 11 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 A DICTIONARY OF SELECT AND POPULAR QUOTATIONS, 
 
 WHICH ARE IN DAILY USE. 
 
 TAKEN FROM THE LATIN, FRENCH, GREEK, SPANISH AND ITALIAN LANGUAGES. 
 
 Together with a copious Collection of Law Maxims and Law Terms, translated into 
 
 English, with Illustrations, Historical and Idiomatic. 
 
 NEW AMERICAN EDITION, CORRECTED, WITH ADDITIONS, 
 
 One volume, 12mo. 
 
 This volume comprises a copious collection of legal and other terms which are in common use, 
 with English translations anil historical illustrations; and we should judge its author had surely 
 been to a great "Feast of Languages," and stole all the scraps. A work of this character should 
 have an extensive sale, as it entirely obviates a serious difficulty in which most readers are involved 
 by the frequent occurrence of Latin, Greek, and French passages, which we suppose are introduced 
 by authors for a mere show of learning — a difficulty very perplexing to renders in general. This 
 " Dictionary of Quotations," concerning which too much cannot be said in its favour, effectually 
 removes the difficulty, and gives the reader an advantage over the author; for we helieve a majority 
 are themselves ignorant, of the meaning of the terms they employ. Very few truly learned authors 
 will insult their readers by introducing Latin or French quotations in their writings, when "plain 
 English" will do as well ; but we will not enlarge on this point. 
 
 If the book is useful to those unacquainted with other languages, it is no less valuable to the 
 classically educated as a book of reference, and answers all the purposes of a Lexicon — indeed, on 
 many accounts, it is better. It saves the trouble of tumbling over the larger volumes, to which 
 every one. and especially those engaged in the legal profession, are verv often subjected. It should 
 have a place in every library in the country. 
 
 RUSCHENBERGER'S NATURAL HISTORY 
 
 COMPLETE, WITH NEW GLOSSARY. 
 
 €\)i (BUminls of Hatural W\shn\, 
 
 EMBRACING ZOOLOGY, BOTANY AND GEOLOGY: 
 
 FOR SCHOOLS, COLLEGES AND FAMILIES. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 
 WITH NEARLY ONE THOUSAND ILLUSTRATIONS, AND A COPIOUS GLOSSARY. 
 
 Vol. 1. contains Vertebrate Animals. Vol. II. contains Intervertebrate Animals, Botany, and Geology. 
 
 A Beautiful and Valuable Presentation Book. 
 
 THE POET'S OFFERING. 
 
 EDITED BY MRS. HALE. 
 With a Portrait of the Editress, a Splendid Illuminated Title-Page, and Twelve Beautiful Engrav- 
 ings by Sartain. Bound in rich Turkey Morocco, and Extra Cloth, Gilt Edge. 
 To those who wish to make a present that will never lose its value, this will be found the most 
 desirable Gift- Book ever published. 
 
 " We commend it to all who desire to present a friend with a volume not only verv beautiful, but 
 of solid intrinsic value." — Washington Union. 
 
 "A perfect treasury of the thoughts and fancies of the best English and American Poets. The 
 paper and printing are. beautiful, and the binding rich, elegant, and substantial; Hie most sensible 
 and attractive of all the elegant gift-books we have seen." — Evening Bulletin. 
 
 •'The publishers deserve the thanks of the public for so happy a thought, so well executed. The 
 engravings are bv ihe best artists, and the otiier portions of the work correspond in ele-ance " — 
 Public Ltrtffi r 
 
 ■• There is no hook of selections so diversified and appropriate within our knowledge." — Pennsylv'71. 
 
 " It is one of the most valuable as well as elegant books ever published in this country." — Gudey's 
 Lady's Book. 
 
 " it is the most beautiful and the most useful offering ever bestowed on the public. No individual 
 of literary taste will venture to be without it."— Tfve City Item. 
 
 15 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE YOUNG DOMINICAN; 
 OR, THE MYSTERIES OF THE INQUISITION, 
 
 AND OTHER SECRET SOCIETIES OF SPAIN. 
 BY M. V. DE FEREAL. 
 
 WITH HISTORICAL NOTES, BY M, MANUEL DE CUENDIAS, 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH. 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH TWENTY SPLENDID ENGRAVINGS BY FRENCH ARTISTS 
 
 One volume, octavo. 
 
 SAY'S POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
 
 A TREATISE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY; 
 Or, The Production, Distribution and Consumption of Wealth. 
 
 BIT JE.&.XT BAPTISTS SA1T. 
 
 FIFTH AMERICAN EDITION, WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES, 
 BY C. C. BIDDLE, Esq. 
 
 In one volume, octavo. 
 
 It would be beneficial to our country if all those who are aspiring to office, were required by their 
 constituents to be familiar with the pages of Say. 
 
 The distinguished biographer of the author, in noticing this work, observes : " Happily for science, 
 he commenced that study which forms the basis of his admirable Treatise on Political Economy ; a 
 work which not only improved under his hand with every successive edition, but has been translated 
 into most of the European languages." 
 
 The Editor of the North American Review, speaking of Say, observes, that "he is the most 
 popular, and perhaps the most able writer on Political Economy, since the time of Smith." 
 
 LAURENCE STERNE'S WORKS, 
 
 WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR: 
 
 WRITTEN BY HIMSELF. 
 
 WITH SEVEN BEAUTIFUL ILLUSTRATIONS, ENGRAVED BY GILBERT AND GIHON, 
 FROM DESIGNS BY DARLEY. 
 
 One volume, octavo; cloth, gilt. 
 
 To commend or to criticise Sterne's Works, in this age of the world, would be all " wasteful and 
 extravagant excess." Uncle Toby — Corporal Trim — the Widow — Le Fevre — Poor Maria — the 
 Captive — even the Dead Ass, — this is all we have to say of Sterne ; and in the memory of these 
 characters, histories, and sketches, a thousand follies and worse than follies are forgotten. The 
 volume is a very handsome one. 
 
 THE MEXICAN WAR n AH0 IIS HEROES; 
 
 A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MEXICAN WAR, 
 
 EMBRACING ALL THE OPERATIONS UNDER GENERALS TAYLOR AND SCOTT. 
 
 WITH A BIOGRAPHY OF THE OFFICERS. 
 
 ALSO, 
 
 AN ACCOUNT OF THE CONQUEST OF CALIFORNIA AND NEW MEXICO, 
 
 Under Gen. Kearny, Cols. Doniphan and Fremont. Together with Numerous Anecdotes of the 
 
 War, and Personal Adventures of the Officers. Illustrated with Accurate 
 
 Portraits, and other Beautiful Engravings. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 16 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 NEW AND COMPLETE COOK-BOOK, 
 
 THE PRACTICAL COOK-BOOK, 
 
 CONTAINING UPWARDS OF 
 
 OHE THOUSAND RECEIPTS, 
 
 Consisting of Directions for Selecting, Preparing, and Cooking all kinds of Meats, Fish, Poultry, and 
 Game; Soups, Broths, Vegetables, and Salads. Also, for making all kinds of Plain and 
 Fancy Breads, Pastes, Puddings, Cakes, Creams, Ices, Jellies, Preserves, Marma- 
 lades, <tc. &c. &.c. Together with various Miscellaneous Recipes, 
 and numerous Preparations for Invalids. 
 
 BY MRS. BLISS. 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 €\i (City 3Kmjjirat ; nr, €\)t Mplnimx /utter*. 
 
 BY J. B. JOITES, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "WILD WESTERN SCENES," "THE WESTERN MERCHANT," &C. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED WITH TEN ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 EL PUCIIERO ; or, A Mixed Dish from Mexico. 
 
 EMBRACING GENERAL SCOTT'S CAMPAIGN, WITH SKETCHES OF MILITARY LIFE IN 
 
 FIELD AND CAMP; OF THE CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY, MANNERS 
 
 AND WAYS OF THE PEOPLE, &o. 
 
 BY RICHARD M 'SHERRY, M. D., U. S. N„ 
 
 LATE ACTING SURGEON OF REGIMENT OF MARINES. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 MONiir-BAes and titles -. 
 
 A HIT AT THE FOLLIES OF THE AGE. 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF JULES SANDEAU. 
 
 BY LEONARD MYERS. 
 
 One volume, 12mo. 
 "'Money-Bags and Tines' is quite a remarkable work, amounts to a kindly exposure of the folly 
 of human pride, and also presents at once the evil and the remedy. If good-natured ridicule of 
 the impostures practised by a set of self styled reformers, who have nothing to lose, and to whom 
 change must be gain — if, in short, a delineation of the mistaken ideas which prevent, and the 
 means which conduce to happiness.be traits deserving of commendation,— the reader will find 
 much to enlist his attention and win his approbation in the pages of this unpretending, but truly 
 meritorious publication." 
 
 WHAT IS CHURCH HISTORY? 
 
 A VINDICATION OF THE IDEA OF HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS. 
 
 BY PHILIP SCHAF. 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 17 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 DODD'S LECTURES. 
 
 DISCOURSES TO YOUNG MEN. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY NUMEROUS HIGHLY INTERESTING ANECDOTES. 
 
 BY WILLIAM DODD, LL.D., 
 
 CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO HIS MAJESTY GEORGE THE THIRD. 
 
 FIRST AMERICAN EDITION, WITH ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 One volume, 18mo. 
 
 THE IRIS: 
 
 AN ORIGINAL SOUVENIR. 
 "With Contributions from the First Writers in the Country. 
 
 EDITED BY PROF. JOHN S. HART. 
 
 With Splendid Illuminations and Steel Engraving. Bound in Turkey Morocco and rich Papier 
 
 Mache Binding. 
 
 IN ONE VOLUME, OCTAVO. 
 
 Its contents are entirely original. Among the contributors are names well known in the republic 
 
 of letters ; such as Mr. Boker, Mr. Stoddard, Prof. Moffat, Edith May, Mrs. Sigourney, Caroline May, 
 
 Mrs. Kinney, .Mrs Butler, Mrs. Pease, Mrs. Swift, Mr. Van Bibber, Rev. Charles T. Brooks, Mrs. 
 
 Dorr, Erast.us W. Ellsworth, Miss E. W. Barnes, Mrs. Williams, Mary Young, Dr. Gardette, Alice 
 
 Carey, Phebe Carey, Augusta Browne, Hamilton Browne, Caroline Eustis, Margaret Junkin, Maria 
 
 J. B. Browne, Miss Starr. Mrs. Brotherson, Kate Campbell, &c. 
 
 $wb from ftje |amit Mini] 
 
 OK, HOLY THOUGHTS UPON SACRED SUBJECTS. 
 
 BY CLERGYMEN OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH. 
 EDITED BY THOMAS WYATT, A.M. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 WITH SEVEN BEAUTIFUL STEEL ENGRAVINGS. 
 
 The contents of this work are chiefly by clergymen of the Episcopal Church. Among the con- 
 tributors will be found the names of the Right Rev. Bishop Potter, Bishop Hopkins, Bishop Smith, 
 Bishop Johns, and Bishop Doane ; and the Rev. Drs. H. V. D. Johns, Coleman, and Butler ; Rev. G. 
 T. Bedell, M'Cabe, Ogilsby, &c. The illustrations are rich and exquisitely wrought engravings upon 
 t,ie following subjects :—" Samuel before Eli," "Peter and John healing the Lame Man," "The 
 Resurrection of Christ,"' " Joseph sold by his Brethren," " The Tables of the Law." " Christ's 
 Agony in the Garden," and "The Flight into Egypt." These subjects, with many others in prose 
 and verse, are ably treated throughout the work. 
 
 HAW-HO-NQO: 
 
 OR, THE RECORDS OF A TOURIST. 
 
 BY CHARLES LAWMAN, 
 Author of " A Summer in the Wilderness," &c. In one volume, 12mo. 
 " In the present book, 'Haw-ho-voo, 1 (an Indian name, by the way, for America,) the author has 
 gathered up some of the relics of his former tours, and added to them other interesting matter. It 
 contains a number of carefully written and instructive articles upon the various kinds offish in our 
 country, whose capture affords sport for anglers ; reminiscences of unique incidents, manners, and 
 customs in different parts of the country ; and other articles, narrative, descriptive, and sentimental. 
 In a supplement are gathered many curious Indian legends. They are related with great simplicity 
 and clearness, and will be of service hereafter to the poem makers of America. Many of th-em are 
 rjuite beautiful." — National Intelligencer. 
 
 18 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GUAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 LONZ POWERS; Or, The Regulators. 
 A ROMANCE OF KENTUCKY. 
 
 FOUNDED ON FACTS. 
 
 BY JAIVIES WEIR, ESQ. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 
 The scenes, characters, and incidents in these volumes have been copied from nature, and from 
 
 real life. They are represented as taking place at that period in the history of Kentucky, when 
 
 the Indian, driven, after many a hard-fought field, from his favourite hunting-ground, was succeeded 
 
 by a rude and unlettered population, interspersed with organized bands of desperadoes, scarcely 
 
 less savage than the red men they had displaced. The author possesses a vigorous and graphic 
 
 pen, and has produced a very interesting romance, which gives us a striking portrait of the times 
 
 he describes. 
 
 THE WESTERN MERCHANT. 
 
 A NARRATIVE, 
 
 Containing useful Instruction for the Western Man of Business, who makes his Purchases in the 
 East. Also, Information for the Eastern Man, whose Customers are in the West. 
 Likewise, Hints for those who design emigrating to the West. De- 
 duced from actual experience. 
 
 BY LUKE SKORTFIELD, A WESTERN MERCHANT. 
 
 One volume, 12 mo. 
 
 This is a new work, and will be found very interesting to the Country Merchant, <tc. <kc. 
 
 A sprightly, pleasant book, with a vast amount of information in a very agreeable shape. Busi- 
 ness, Love, and Religion are all discussed, and many proper sentiments expressed in regard to each. 
 The "moral" of the work is summed up in the following concluding sentences: "Adhere stead- 
 fastly to your busmess ; adhere steadfastly to your first love ; adhere steadfastly to the church." 
 
 A MANUAL OF POLITENESS, 
 
 COMPRISING THE 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF ETIQUETTE AND RULES OF BEHAVIOUR 
 
 EN GENTEEL SOCIETY, FOR PERSONS OF BOTH SEXES. 
 
 18mo., with Plates. 
 
 Book of Politeness. 
 
 THE GENTLEMAN AND LADY'S 
 
 BOOK OF POLITENESS AND PROPRIETY OF DEPORTMENT 
 
 DEDICATED TO THE YOUTH OF BOTH SEXES. 
 
 BY EIADA3SE CELNART. 
 
 Translated from the Sixth Paris Edition, Enlarged and Improved. 
 
 Fifth. American Edition. 
 
 One volume, 18mo. 
 
 THE ANTEDILUVIANS; 0r ? The World Destroyed. 
 
 A NARRATIVE POEM, IN TEN BOOKS. 
 
 BY JAMES M'HEJJRY, M.D. 
 
 One volume, 18mo. 
 
 19 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO. '3 PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Bennett's (Rev. John) Letters to a Young Lady, 
 
 ON A VARIETY OF SUBJECTS CALCULATED TO IMPROVE THE HEART, 
 TO FORM THE MANNERS, AND ENLIGHTEN THE UNDERSTANDING. 
 
 " That our daughters may be as polished corners of the temple." 
 The publishers sincerely hope (for the happiness of mankind) that a copy of this valuable little 
 work will be found the companion of every young lady, as much of the happiness of every family 
 Is on the proper cultivation of the female mind. 
 
 THE DAUGHTER'S OWN BOOK: 
 
 OR, PRACTICAL HINiS FROM A FATHER TO HIS DAUGHTER. 
 
 One volume, 18mo. 
 
 This is one of the most practical and truly valuable treatises on the culture and discipline of the 
 female mind, which has hitherto been publibhed in this country ; and the publishers are very confi- 
 dent, from the great demand for this invaluable little work, that ere long: it will be found in the 
 library of every young lady. 
 
 THE AMERICAN CHESTERFIELD : 
 
 Or, "Youth's Guide to the Way to Wealth, Honour, and Distinction/' k. 18mo. 
 
 CONTAINING ALSO A COMPLETE TREATISE ON THE ART OF CARVING. 
 
 "We most cordially recommend the American Chesterfield to general attention; but to young 
 persons particularly, as one of the best works of the kind that has ever been published in this 
 country. It cannot be too highly appreciated, nor its perusal be unproductive of satisfaction and 
 Usefulness." 
 
 SENECA'S MORALS. 
 
 BY WAY OF ABSTRACT TO WHICH IS ADDED, A DISCOURSE UNDER 
 
 THE TITLE OF AN AFTER-THOUGHT. 
 
 BYSIR ROGER L'ESTRANGE, KNT. 
 
 A new, fine edition ; one volume, 18mo. 
 A copy of this valuable little work should be found in every family library. 
 
 NEW SONG-BOOK. 
 
 dlrigp $0ui[rtm tmu Wulnn irmgsfer; 
 
 BEING A CHOICE COLLECTION OF THE MOST FASHIONABLE SONGS, MANY OF WHICH 
 ARE ORIGINAL. 
 
 In one volume, 18mo. 
 
 Great care was taken, in the selection, to admit no song that contained, in the slightest degree, 
 any indelicate or improper allusions; and with great propriety it may claim the title of " The Pai' 
 lour Song-Book, or Songster." The immortal Shakspeare observes — 
 " The man that hath not music in himself, 
 Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
 Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils." 
 
 ROBOTHAM'S POCKET FRENCH DICTIONARY, 
 
 CAREFULLY REVISED, 
 
 AND THE PRONUNCIATION OF ALL THE DIFFICULT WORDS ADDED. 
 
 20 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN. 
 
 COMPRISING THE HUMOROUS ADVENTURES OF 
 
 UNCLE TOBY AND CORPORAL TRIM. 
 
 BIT I*. STEHNE. 
 Beautifully Illustrated by Darley. Stitched. 
 
 A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY. 
 
 BY L. STERNS. 
 
 Illustrated as above by Darley. Stitched. 
 
 The beauties of this author are so well known, and his errors in style and expression so few ; 
 far between, that one reads with renewed delight his delicate turns, &c. 
 
 THE LIFE OF GENERAL JACKSON, 
 
 WITH A LIKENESS OF TIIE OLD HERO. 
 One volume, 1 8rno. 
 
 LIFE OF PAUL JONES. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 WITH ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 BY JAMES HAMILTON. 
 The work is compiled from his original journals and correspondence, and includes an account of 
 his services in the American Revolution, and in the war between the Russians and Turks m the 
 Black Sea. There is scarcely any Naval Hero, of any age, who combined in his character so much 
 of the adventurous, skilful and daring, as Paul Jones. The incidents of his life are almost as start 
 Img and absorbing as those of romance. His achievements during the American Revolution — the 
 fight between the Bon Homme Richard and Serapis, the most desperate naval action on record — 
 and the alarm into which, with so small a force, he threw the coasts of England and Scotland — are 
 matters comparatively well known to Americans ; but the incidents of his subsequent career have 
 been veiled in obscurity, which is dissipated by this biography. A book like this, narrating the 
 actions of such a man, ought to meet with an extensive sale, and become as popular as Robinson 
 Crusoe in fiction, or Weems's Life of Marion and Washington, and similar books, in fact. It con- 
 tains 400 pages, has a handsome portrait and medallion likeness of Jones, and is illustrated with 
 numerous original wood engravings of naval scenes and distuiguished men with whom he was 
 familiar. 
 
 THE 6REIK EXILEf 
 
 Or, A Narrative of the Captivity and Escape of Christophoms Plato Castanis, 
 
 DURING THE MASS ACHE ON THE ISLAND OF SGIO BY THE TURKS. 
 TOGETHER WITH VARIOUS ADVENTURES IN GREECE AND AMERICA. 
 
 WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, 
 
 Author of an Essay on the Ancient and Modern Greek Languages; Interpretation of the Attributes 
 
 of the Principal Fabulous Deities ; The Jewish Maiden of Scio's Citadel; and 
 
 the Greek Boy in the Sunday-School. 
 
 One volume, 12mo. 
 
 THE YOUNG CHORISTER; 
 
 A. Collection of New and Beautiful Tunes, adapted to the use of Sabbath-Schools, from some of the 
 most distinguished composers ; together with many of the author's compositions. 
 
 EDITED BY MINARD W. WILSON. 
 21 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & COYS PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 CAMP LIFE OF A VOLUNTEER. 
 
 A Campaign in Mexico; Or, A Glimpse at Life in Camp. 
 
 BY "ONE WHO HAS SEEN THE ELEPHANT." 
 
 %\U nf (§?tural 3 at [tan] Cnrjlor, 
 
 COMPRISING A NARRATIVE OF EVENTS CONNECTED WITH HIS PROFESSIONAL 
 CAREER, AND AUTHENTIC INCIDENTS OF HIS EARLY YEARS. 
 
 BY J. REESE FRY AND R. T. CONRAD. 
 
 With an original and accurate Portrait, and eleven elegant Illustrations, by Darley. 
 In one handsome 12mo. volume. 
 
 "It is by far the fullest and most interesting biography of General Taylor that we have ever seen." 
 —Richmond ( Whig) Ckrwncle. 
 
 "On the whole, we are satisfied that this volume is the most correct and comprehensive one yet 
 published." — Hani's Merchants' Magazine. 
 
 "The superiority of this edition over the ephemeral publications of the day consists in fuller and 
 more authentic accounts of Ins family. Ins early life, and Indian wars. The narrative of his pro- 
 ceedings in Mexico is drawn partly from reliable private letters, but clnelly from his own official 
 correspondence." 
 
 "It forms a cheap, substantial, and attractive volume, and one which should be read at the fire- 
 side of every family who desire a faitliiul and true hie of the Old General." 
 
 GENERAL TAYLOR AND HIS STAFF: 
 
 Comprising Memoirs of Generals Taylor, Worth, Wool, and Butler; Cols. May, Cross, Clay, Hardin, 
 
 Yelk Hays, and other distinguished Officers attached to General Taylor's 
 
 Army. Interspersed with 
 
 NUMEROUS ANECDOTES OF THE MEXICAN WAR, 
 
 Mid Personal Adventures of the Officers. Compiled from Public Documents and Private Corre- 
 spondence. With 
 
 ACCURATE PORTRAITS, AND OTHER BEAUTIFUL ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 GENERAL SCOTT AND HIS STAFF ; 
 
 Comprising Memoirs of Generals Scott, Twiggs, Smith, Quitman, Shields, Pillow, Lane, Cadwalader 
 
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 distinguished officers attached to General Scott's Army. 
 
 TOGETHER WITH 
 
 Notices of General Kearny, Col. Doniphan, Col. Fremont, and other officers distinguished in the 
 Conquest of California and New Mexico ; and Personal Adventures of the Officers. Com- 
 piled from Public Documents and Private Correspondence. With 
 
 ACCURATE PORTRAITS, AND OTHER BEAUTIFUL ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 THE FAMILY DENTIST, 
 
 INCLUDING THE SURGICAL, MEDICAL AND MECHANICAL TREATMENT 
 
 OF THE TEETH. 
 
 Illustrated with, thirty-one Engravings. 
 
 By CHARLES A. DU BOUCHET, M. D., Dental Surgeon. 
 
 In one volume, 18mo. 
 
 22 
 
LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 MECHANICS FOR THE MILLWRIGHT, ENGINEER AND MACHINIST, 
 CIVIL ENGINEER, AND ARCHITECT: 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MECHANICS APPLIED TO MACHINERY 
 
 Of American models, Steam- Engines, Water- Works, Navigation, Bridge-building, <kc. <tc By 
 FREDERICK OVERMAN, * 
 
 Author of " The Manufacture of Iron," and other scientific treatises. 
 
 Illustrated by 150 Engravings. In one large 12mo. volume. 
 
 WILLIAMS'S TRAVELLER'S AMD TOURIST'S GUIDE 
 Through the United States, Canada, &c. 
 
 This hook will he found replete with information, not only to the traveller, but likewise to the 
 man of business. In its preparation, an entirely new plan has been adopted, winch, we are con- 
 vinced, needs only a trial to he fully appreciate/!. 
 
 Anions? its many valuable features, are tables showing at a glance the distance, fare, and time 
 occupied in travel lint? from 'he principal cities to the most important places in the Union ; so that 
 the question frequently asked, without obtaining a satisfactory reply, is here answered m full. 
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 also, by way of comparison, from New York and Liverpool to the principal ports beyond and around 
 Cape Horn, ic, as well as via the Isthmus of Panama. Accompanied by a large and accurate Map 
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 a Map of the Island of Cuba, and Plan of the City and Harbor of Havana; and a Map of Niagara 
 River and Falls 
 
 THE LEGISLATIVE GUIDE: 
 
 Containing directions for conducting business in the House of Representatives; the Senate of the 
 United States; the Joint Rules of both Houses , a Synopsis of Jefferson's Manual, and copious 
 Indices; together with a concise system of Rules of Order, based on the regulations of the 
 V. S. Congress. Designed to economise time, secure uniformity and despatch in con- 
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 BY JOSEPH BARTLETT BURLEIGH, LL. D. 
 In one volume, 12mo. 
 
 This is considered by our Judges and Congressmen as decidedly the best work of the kind extant. 
 Every young man in the country should have a copy of this book. 
 
 THE INITIALS; A Story of MoJern Life. 
 
 THREE VOLUMES OF THE LONDON EDITION COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME 12MO. 
 A new novel, equal to "Jane Eyre." 
 
 WILT) WESTERN SCENES: 
 
 A NARRATIVE OF ADVENTURES IN THE WESTERN WILDERNESS. 
 
 Wherein the Exploits of Daniel Boone, the Great American Pioneer, are particularly described 
 
 Also, Minute Accounts of Bear, Deer, and Buffalo Hunts — Desperate Conflicts with the 
 
 Savages — Fishing and Fowling Adventures — Encounters with Serpents, Mc. 
 
 By Luke Siiortfield, Author of " The Western Merchant." 
 
 BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED. One volume, 12mo. 
 
 POEMS OF THE PLEASURES: 
 
 Consisting of the PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION, by Akenside ; the PLEASURES OF MEMORY 
 
 by Samuel Rogers; the PLEASURES OF HOPE, by Campbell; and the PLEASURES OP 
 
 FRIENDSHIP, by M* Henry. With a Memoir cf each Author, prepared expressly 
 
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 28 
 
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 BALDWIN'S PRONOUNCING GAZETTEER. 
 
 A PRONOUNCING GAZETTEER:' 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 TOPOGRAPHICAL, STATISTICAL, AND OTHER INFORMATION", OF ALL THE MORE IM- 
 PORTANT PLACES IN THE KNOWN WORLD, FROM THE MOST 
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 Assisted by several other Gentlemen. 
 
 To which is added an APPENDIX, containing more than TEN THOUSAND ADDITIONAL NAMES, 
 chiefly of the small Towns and Villages, &c, of the United States and of Mexico. 
 
 NINTH EDITION, WITH A SUPPLEMENT, 
 
 Giving the Pronunciation of near two thousand names, besides those pronounced in the Original 
 Work : Forming in itself a Complete Vocabulary of Geographical Pronunciation. 
 
 ONE VOLUME 12lIO. — PRICE, $1.50. 
 
 Sttjtsl'fl librim] far fyt Ihttstjjalu. 
 
 Complete in Twelve handsome 18mo. Volumes, bound in Scarlet Cloth. 
 
 1. WOMAN'S TRIALS; OR. TALES AND SKETCHES FROM THE LIFE AROUND US: 
 
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 4. THE WAYS OF PROVIDENCE ; OR. " HE DOETH ALL THINGS WELL." 
 
 5. HOME SCENES AND HOME INFLUENCES. 
 
 6. STORIES FOR YOUNG HOUSEKEEPERS. 
 
 7. LESSONS IN LIFE. FOR ALL WHO WILL READ THEM. 
 
 8. SEED-TIME AND HARVEST; OR, WHATSOEVER A MAN SOWETH THAT SHALL HE 
 
 ALSO REAP. 
 
 9. STORIES FOR PARENTS. 
 
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 11. WORDS FOR THE WISE. 
 
 12. THE TRIED AND THE TEMPTED. 
 
 The above Series are sold together or separate, as each work is complete in itself. No Family should 
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 FIELD'S SCRAP BOOK.— New Edition. 
 
 Jihrnrtj itttii Bferrliarao Irritp 3tok\ 
 
 Consisting of Tales and Anecdotes— Biographical, Historical, Patriotic, Moral, Religious, and Senti- 
 mental Pieces, in Prose and Poetry. 
 
 Compiled by WILLIAM FIELDS. 
 
 SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND IMPROVED. 
 
 In one handsome 8vo. Volume. Price, $2 00. 
 
 THE ARKANSAW DOCTOR. 
 
 THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF AN ARKANSAW DOCTOR. 
 
 BY DAVID RATTLEHEAD, M. D. 
 
 " The Man of Scrapes." 
 WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. PRICE FIFTY CENTS. 
 
 THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS CONNEXION WITH MAN. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY THE PRINCIPAL ORGANS. 
 BY JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON, 
 
 Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. 
 IN ONE VOLUME, 1 2 M — PRICE $1 25. 
 
 24 
 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES 
 
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