S 2.--Organism of the Operations of the Soul--of its Maintenance and
Support--of Generation.
All those conditions which we accept as requisite to the perfection of
man in the moral and material world may be included in one fundamental
sentence: The perfection of man consists in his ability to exercise his
powers in the observation of the plan of the world; and since between the
measure of the power and the end towards which it works there must exist
the completest harmony, perfection will consist in the highest possible
activity of his powers, and, at the same time, in their mutual
subordination. But the action of the human soul is--from a necessity
which I do not understand--bound fast to the action of matter. The
changes in the world of matter must be modified and, so to speak, refined
by a peculiar class of secondary powers--I mean the senses--before they
can produce in me any corresponding ideas; while, on the other hand, a
fresh set of organic powers, the agents of voluntary movements must come
into play between the inner spirit and the outward world in order to make
the changes of the former tell upon the latter; thus must the operations
of thinking and sensation alike correspond to certain movements of the
internal sensorium. All this goes to make up the organism of the soul's
activities.
But matter is spoil stolen from the eternal change, and wears itself
away, even as it works; in its movement its very element is driven from
its grooves, chased away and lost. Because now, on the contrary, that
simple essence, the soul, possesses in itself permanence and stability,
and in its essence neither gains nor loses aught,--matter cannot keep
step with the activity of the spirit, and there would thus soon be an end
of the organism of spiritual life, and therewith of all action of the
soul. To prevent which there must be added to the first system or
organic powers a second one, which shall make good the losses sustained,
and sustain the decay by a chain of new creations ready to take the place
of those that have gone. This is the organism of maintenance.
Still further. After a short period of activity, when the equal balance
of loss and reparation is once removed, man quits the stage of life, and
the law of mortality depopulates the earth. There is not room enough for
the multitude of sentient beings, whom eternal love and wisdom seemed to
have called to a happy existence, to live side by side within the narrow
boundaries of our world, and the life of one generation shuts out the
life of another. Therefore was it necessary that new men should appear,
to take the place of those who had departed, and that life should be kept
up in unbroken succession. But of creation there is no longer any trace;
what now becomes new becomes so only by development. The development of
man must come to pass through man, if it is to bear a proportion to the
original number, if man is to be cultivated into man. On this account a
new system of organic powers was added to the two that had preceded it,
which had for its object to quicken and to develop the seed of humanity.
This is the organism of generation.
These three organisms, brought into the most thorough connection, local
and real, go to form the human body.
S 3.--The Body.
The organic powers of the human body naturally divide themselves into two
principal classes. The first class embraces those which no known laws
and phenomena of the physical world enable us to comprehend; and to these
belong the sensibility of the nerves and the irritability of the muscles.
Inasmuch as it has hitherto been impossible to penetrate the economy of
the invisible, men have sought to interpret this unknown mechanism
through that with which they were already familiar, and have considered
the nerves as a canal conducting an excessively fine, volatile, and
active fluid, which in rapidity of motion and fineness was held to excel
ether and the electric spark. This fluid was held to be the principle
and author of our sensibility and power of motion, and hence received the
name of the spirit of life. Further, the irritability of the muscles was
held to consist, in a certain effort to contract themselves on the touch
of some external provocation. These two principles go to form the
specific character of animal organism.
The second class of powers embraces those which we can account for by the
universally-known laws of physics. Among these I reckon the mechanism of
motion, and the chemistry of the human body, the source of vegetable
life. Vegetation, then, and animal mechanism, thoroughly mingled, form
the proper physical life of the human body.
S 4.-Animal Life.
This is not yet all. Since loss or misfortune, when it occurs, falls
more or less within the will-power of the spirit, the spirit must be
able to make some compensation for it. Further, since the body is
subjected to all the consequences of this connection, and in the circle
of circumstances is exposed to countless hostile forces, it must be
within the power of the soul to protect the body against these harmful
influences, and to bring it into such relations with the physical
world as shall tend most to its preservation. The soul must therefore
be conscious of the present evil or good state of its organs; from a
bad state it must draw dissatisfaction, from a good state satisfaction,
so that it may either retain or remove the condition, seek it or fly
from it. Here then we have the organism at once and closely linked to
the sensational capacity, and the soul drawn into the service of the
body. We have now something more than vegetation, something more than a
dead model and the mechanism of nerves and muscles. Now we have animal
life. [1]
A healthy condition of our animal life is, as we know, most important for
the healthy condition of our spiritual life; and we dare never ignore the
animal life so long as we are not quit of it. It must therefore possess
a firm foundation, not easily moved; that is, the soul must be fitted and
prepared for the actions of our bodily life by an irresistible power.
Were then the sensations of our animal loss or well-being to become
spiritual perceptions, and had they to be created by thought, how often
would the soul be obscured by the overwhelming blaze of passion; how
often stifled by laziness and stupidity; how often overlooked in the
absorptions and distractions of business! Further, would not, in this
case, the most perfect knowledge of his economy be demanded of the animal
man--would not the child need to be a master in a branch of knowledge in
which, after fifty years of investigation, Harvey, Boerhaave, and Haller
were only beginners? The soul could thus have positively no idea of the
condition she was called upon to alter. How shall she become acquainted
with it? how shall she begin to act at all?
[1] But we have something more than the animal life of the animal
(beast). A beast lives an animal life in order that it may experience
pleasant sensations. It experiences pleasant sensations that it may
preserve the animal life. It lives now, therefore, in order that it may
live again tomorrow. It is happy now that it may be happy to-morrow.
But it is a simple, an uncertain happiness, which depends upon the action
of the organism, it is a slave to luck and blind chance; because it
consists in sensation only. Man, too, lives an animal life,--is sensible
of its pleasures and suffers its pains. But why? He feels and suffers
that he may preserve his animal life. He preserves his animal life that
he may longer have the power to live a spiritual one. Here, then, the
means differ from the end; there, end and means seem to coincide. This
is one of the lines of separation between man and the animal.
S 5.--Animal Sensations.
So far we have met with such sensations only as they take their rise in
an antecedent operation of the understanding; but we have now to deal
with sensations in which the understanding bears no part. These
sensations, if they are not exactly the expression of the present state
of our organs, mark it out specifically, or, better, accompany it. These
sensations have quickly and forcibly to determine the will to aversion or
desire; but, on the other hand, they are ever to float on the surface of
the soul, and never to extend to the province of the reason. The part,
accordingly, played by thought, in the case of a mental perception, is
here taken up by that modification in the animal parts of us which either
threatens the destruction of the sensation or insures its duration: that
is, an eternal law of wisdom has combined with that condition of the
machine which confirms its welfare, a pleasant emotion of the soul; and,
on the other hand, with that condition which undermines it and threatens
ruin, an unpleasant emotion is connected; and this in such a manner that
the sensation itself has not the faintest resemblance to the state of the
organs of which it is the mark. Animal sensations have, on this showing,
a double origin: (1) in the present state of the machine; (2) in the
capacity or faculty (of sensation).
We are now able to understand how it is that the animal sensations have
the power to drive the soul with an irresistible tyranny in the direction
of passionate action, and not seldom gain the upper hand in a struggle
with those sensations which are most purely intellectual. For these last
the soul has produced by means of thought, and therefore they can by
thought be solved or even destroyed. Abstraction and philosophy have
this power over the passions, over opinions--in short, over all the
situations of life; but the animal sensations are forced upon the soul by
a blind necessity, by a stern mechanical law. The understanding, which
did not create them, likewise cannot dissolve them and make them as if
they were not, though by giving an opposite direction to our attention it
can do much to weaken their power and obscure their pretensions. The
most stubborn stoic, lying in the agony of the stone, will never be able
to boast that he did not feel its pain; but, lost in the consideration of
the end of his existence, he will be able to divide his whole power of
sensation and perception, and the preponderating pleasure of a great
achievement, which can subordinate even pain to the general welfare, will
be victorious over the present discomfort. It was neither absence of nor
annihilation of sensation that enabled Mucius, while he was roasting his
hand in the fire, to gaze upon the foe with the Roman look of proud
repose, but the thought of great Rome in admiration of his deed. This it
was that ruled in his soul, and kept it grandly self-possessed, so that
the terrible provocation of the animal pain was too slight to disturb the
equal balance of his nature. But not on this account was the pain the
Roman suffered less than it would have been in the case of the most
effeminate voluptuary. True enough, the man who is accustomed to pass
his days in a state of confused ideas will be less capable of manly
action, in the critical moment of sensuous pain, than he who lives
persistently among ideas distinct and clear; but, for all that, neither
the loftiest virtue, nor the profoundest philosophy, nor even divine
religion, can save a man from the result of a necessary law, though
religion can bless her servants even at the stake, and make them happy as
the pile gives way.
The wisest purpose is served by the power which the animal sensations
possess over the perceptive faculty of the soul. The spirit once
initiated in the mysteries of a higher pleasure would look with disdain
upon the motions of its companion, and would pay no heed to the poor
necessities of physical life, were it not that the animal feeling
compelled it to do so. The mathematician, soaring in the region of the
infinite, and dreaming away reality in a world of abstractions, is roused
by the pang of hunger from his intellectual slumber; the natural
philosopher, dismembering the solar system, accompanying through
immeasurable space the wanderings of the planets, is restored by the
prick of a needle to his mother earth; the philosopher who unfolds the
nature of the Deity, and fancies himself to have broken through the
fetters of mortality, returns to himself and everyday life when the bleak
north wind whistles through his crazy hut, and teaches him that he stands
midway between the beast and the angel.
Against an excess of the animal sensations the severest mental exertion
in the end possesses no influence; as they continue to grow stronger,
reason closes her ears, and the fettered soul moves but to subserve the
purposes of the bodily organization. To satisfy hunger or to quench
thirst man will do deeds at which humanity will shudder: against his will
he turns traitor or murderer--even cannibal:--
Tiger! in the bosom of thy mother wilt thou set thy teeth?
--so violent is the influence of the animal sensation over the mind.
Such watchful care has the Creator shown for the preservation of the
machine that the pillars on which it rests are the firmest, and
experience has taught us that it is rather the over-abundance than the
want of animal sensations that has carried destruction with it.
The animal sensations therefore may be said to further the welfare of the
animal nature, just as the moral and intellectual perceptions promote
spiritual progress or perfection. The system of animal sensations and
motions, then, comprises the conception of the animal nature. This is
the ground on which all the activities of the soul depend, and the
conformation of this fabric determines the duration of the spiritual
activity itself, and the degree of ease with which it works. Here, then,
we find ourselves in possession of the first member of the connection
between the two natures.
S 6.--Objections against the Connection of the Two Natures, drawn from
Ideas of Morality.
There is no doubt that thus much will be conceded; but the next remark
will be: "Here ends, too, any determining influence the body may possess;
beyond this point the body is but the soul's inert companion, with whom
she must sustain a constant battle, attendance on whose necessities robs
her of all leisure, whose attacks and interruptions break the thread of
the most intricate speculation, and drive the spirit from the clearest
and plainest conceptions into a chaotic complexity of the senses, whose
pleasures remove the greatest part of our fellow-creatures far from their
high original, and reduce them to the level of the beasts, which, in a
word, entangles them in a slavery from which death only can deliver them.
Is it not senseless and injust," our complainer might go on to say, "to
mix up a being, simple, necessary, that has its subsistence in itself,
with another being that moves in an eternal whirl, exposed to every
chance and change, and becomes the victim of every external necessity?"
On cooler afterthought we shall perhaps see a great beauty take its rise
out of this apparent confusion and want of plan.