However all this may be, the question immediately before us--having
established the more healthy, though more limited, condition of the
pre-civilisation peoples--is, why this lapse or fall? What is the
meaning of this manifold and intensified manifestation of
Disease--physical, social, intellectual, and moral? What is its place
and part in the great whole of human evolution?
And this involves us in a digression, which must occupy a few pages, on
the nature of Health.
When we come to analyse the conception of Disease, physical or mental,
in society or in the individual, it evidently means, as already hinted
once or twice, _loss of unity_. Health, therefore, should mean unity,
and it is curious that the history of the word entirely corroborates
this idea. As is well known, the words health, whole, holy, are from
the same stock; and they indicate to us the fact that far back in the
past those who created this group of words had a conception of the
meaning of Health very different from ours, and which they embodied
unconsciously in the word itself and its strange relatives.
These are, for instance, and among others: heal, hallow, hale, holy,
whole, wholesome; German heilig, Heiland (the Saviour); Latin salus (as
in salutation, salvation); Greek kalos; also compare hail! a salutation,
and, less certainly connected, the root _hal_, to breathe, as in inhale,
exhale--French haleine--Italian and French alma and âme (the soul);
compare the Latin spiritus, spirit or breath, and Sanskrit âtman, breath
or soul.
Wholeness, holiness ... "if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be
full of light." ... "thy faith hath made thee _whole_."
The idea seems to be a positive one--a condition of the body in which it
is an entirety, a unity--a central force maintaining that condition; and
disease being the break-up--or break-down--of that entirety into
multiplicity.
The peculiarity about our modern conception of Health is that it seems
to be a purely negative one. So impressed are we by the myriad presence
of Disease--so numerous its dangers, so sudden and unforetellable its
attacks--that we have come to look upon health as the mere absence of
the same. As a solitary spy picks his way through a hostile camp at
night, sees the enemy sitting round his fires, and trembles at the
crackling of a twig beneath his feet--so the traveller through this
world, comforter in one hand and physic-bottle in the other, must pick
his way, fearful lest at any time he disturb the sleeping legions of
death--thrice blessed if by any means, steering now to the right and now
to the left, and thinking only of his personal safety, he pass by
without discovery to the other side.
Health with us is a negative thing. It is a neutralisation of opposing
dangers. It is to be neither rheumatic nor gouty, consumptive nor
bilious, to be untroubled by head-ache, back-ache, heart-ache, or any of
the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." These are the
realities. Health is the mere negation of them.
The modern notion, and which has evidently in a very subtle way
penetrated the whole thought of to-day, is that the essential fact of
life is the existence of innumerable external forces, which, by a very
delicate balance and difficult to maintain, concur to produce Man--who
in consequence may at any moment be destroyed again by the
non-concurrence of those forces. The older notion apparently is that the
essential fact of life _is_ Man himself; and that the external forces,
so-called, are in some way subsidiary to this fact--that they may aid
his expression or manifestation, or that they may hinder it, but that
they can neither create nor annihilate the Man. Probably both ways of
looking at the subject are important; there is a man that can be
destroyed, and there is a man that cannot be destroyed. The old words,
soul and body, indicate this contrast; but like all words they are
subject to the defect that they are an attempt to draw a line where no
line can ultimately be drawn; they mark a contrast where, in fact, there
is only continuity--for between the little mortal man who dwells here
and now, and the divine and universal Man who also forms a part of our
consciousness, is there not a perfect gradation of being, and where (if
anywhere) is there a gulf fixed? Together they form a unit, and each is
necessary to the other: the first cannot do without the second, and the
second cannot get along at all without the first. To use the words of
Angelus Silesius (quoted by Schopenhauer), "Ich weiss dass ohne mich
Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben."
According then to the elder conception, and perhaps according to an
elder experience, man, to be really healthy, must be a unit, an
entirety--his more external and momentary self standing in some kind of
filial relation to his more universal and incorruptible part--so that
not only the remotest and outermost regions of the body, and all the
assimilative, secretive, and other processes belonging thereto, but even
the thoughts and passions of the mind itself, stand in direct and clear
relationship to it, the final and absolute transparency of the mortal
creature. And thus this divinity in each creature, being that which
constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was conceived of as
that creature's saviour, healer--healer of wounds of body and wounds of
heart--the Man within the man, whom it was not only possible to know,
but whom to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This, I
take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as accepted at some
elder time of human history, and by us seen as thro' a glass darkly.
And the condition of disease, and of sin, under the same view, was the
reverse of this. Enfeeblement, obscuration, duplicity--the central
radiation blocked; lesser and insubordinate centres establishing and
asserting themselves as against it; division, discord, possession by
devils.
Thus in the body, the establishment of an insubordinate centre--a boil,
a tumor, the introduction and spread of a germ with innumerable progeny
throughout the system, the enlargement out of all reason of an existing
organ--means disease. In the mind, disease begins when any passion
asserts itself as an independent centre of thought and action. The
condition of health in the mind is loyalty to the divine Man within
it.[10] But if loyalty to money become an independent centre of life, or
greed of knowledge, or of fame, or of drink; jealousy, lust, the love of
approbation; or mere following after any so-called virtue for
itself--purity, humility, consistency, or what not--these may grow to
seriously endanger the other. They are, or should be, subordinates; and
though over a long period their insubordination may be a necessary
condition of human progress, yet during all such time they are at war
with each other and with the central Will; the man is torn and
tormented, and is not happy.
And when I speak thus separately of the mind and body, it must be
remembered, as already said, that there is no strict line between them;
but probably every affection or passion of the mind has its correlative
in the condition of the body--though this latter may or may not be
easily observable. Gluttony _is_ a fever of the digestive apparatus.
What is a taint in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has
started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human
system. The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct
threats, menaces made against the central authority--against the Man
himself. For the man must rule or disappear; it is impossible to imagine
a man presided over by a Stomach--a walking Stomach, using hands, feet,
and all other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve
its assimilative mania. We call such a one an Hog. [And thus in the
theory of Evolution we see the place of the hog, and all other animals,
as fore-runners or off-shoots of special faculties in Man, and why the
true man, and rightly, has authority over all animals, and can alone
give them their place in creation.]
So of the Brain, or any other organ; for the Man is no organ, resides in
no organ, but is the central life ruling and radiating among all
organs, and assigning them their arts to play.
Disease then, in body or mind, is from this point of view the break-up
of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity. It is the abeyance of a
central power, and the growth of insubordinate centres--life in each
creature being conceived of as a continual exercise of energy or
conquest, by which external or antagonistic forces (and organisms) are
brought into subjection and compelled into the service of the creature,
or are thrown off as harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we
find that plants or animals, when in good health, have a remarkable
power of throwing off the attacks of any parasites which incline to
infest them; while those that are weakly are very soon eaten up by the
same. A rose-tree, for instance, brought indoors, will soon fall a prey
to the aphis--though when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to
no impression on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in the
fields are weakly from want of water the entire crop is sometimes
destroyed by the turnip fly, which then multiplies enormously; but if a
shower or two of rain come before much damage is done the plant will
then grow vigorously, its tissues become more robust and resist the
attacks of the fly, which in its turn dies. Late investigations seem to
show that one of the functions of the white corpuscles in the blood is
to devour disease-germs and bacteria present in the circulation--thus
absorbing these organisms into subjection to the central life of the
body--and that with this object they congregate in numbers toward any
part of the body which is wounded or diseased. Or to take an example
from society, it is clear enough that if our social life were really
vivid and healthy, such parasitic products as the idle shareholder and
the policeman above-mentioned would simply be impossible. The material
on which they prey would not exist, and they would either perish or be
transmuted into useful forms. It seems obvious in fact that life in any
organism can only be maintained by some such processes as these--by
which parasitic or infesting organisms are either thrown off or absorbed
into subjection. To define the nature of the power which thus works
towards and creates the distinctive unity of each organism may be
difficult, is probably at present impossible, but that some such power
exists we can hardly refuse to admit. Probably it is more a subject of
the growth of our consciousness, than an object of external scientific
investigation.
In this view, Death is simply the loosening and termination of the
action of this power--over certain regions of the organism; a process by
which, when these superficial parts become hardened and osseous, as in
old age, or irreparably damaged, as in cases of accident, the inward
being sloughs them off, and passes into other spheres. In the case of
man there may be noble and there may be ignoble death, as there may be
noble and ignoble life. The inward self, unable to maintain authority
over the forces committed to its charge, declining from its high
prerogative, swarmed over by parasites, and fallen partially into the
clutch of obscene foes, may at last with shame and torment be driven
forth from the temple in which it ought to have been supreme. Or, having
fulfilled a holy and wholesome time, having radiated divine life and
love through all the channels of body and mind, and as a perfect workman
uses his tools, so having with perfect mastery and nonchalance used all
the materials committed to it, it may quietly and peacefully lay these
down, and unchanged (absolutely unchanged to all but material eyes) pass
on to other spheres appointed.
And now a few words on the medical aspect of the subject. If we accept
any theory (even remotely similar to that just indicated) to the effect
that Health is a positive thing, and not a mere negation of disease, it
becomes pretty clear that no mere investigation of the latter will
enable us to find out what the former is, or bring us nearer to it. You
might as well try to create the ebb and flow of the tides by an
organised system of mops.
Turn your back upon the Sun and go forth into the wildernesses of space
till you come to those limits where the rays of light, faint with
distance, fall dim upon the confines of eternal darkness--and phantoms
and shadows in the half-light are the product of the wavering conflict
betwixt day and night--investigate these shadows, describe them,
classify them, record the changes which take place in them, erect in
vast libraries these records into a monument of human industry and
research; so shall you be at the end as near to a knowledge and
understanding of the sun itself--which all this time you have left
behind you, and on which you have turned your back--as the investigators
of disease are to a knowledge and understanding of what health is. The
solar rays illumine the outer world and give to it its unity and
entirety; so in the inner world of each individual possibly is there
another Sun, which illumines and gives unity to the man, and whose
warmth and light would permeate his system. Wait upon the shining forth
of this inward sun, give free access and welcome to its rays of love,
and free passage for them into the common world around you, and it may
be you will get to know more about health than all the books of medicine
contain, or can tell you.
Or to take the former simile: it is the central force of the Moon which
acting on the great ocean makes all its waters one, and causes them to
rise and fall in timely consent. But take your moon away; hey! now the
tide is flowing too far down this estuary! Station your thousands with
mops, but it breaks through in channel and runlet! Block it here, but it
overflows in a neighboring bay! Appoint an army of swabs there, but to
what end? The infinitest care along the fringe of this great sea can
never do, with all imaginable dirt and confusion, what the central power
does easily, and with unerring grace and providence.
And so of the great (the vast and wonderful) ocean which ebbs and flows
within a man--take away the central guide--and not 20,000 doctors, each
with 20,000 books to consult and 20,000 phials of different contents to
administer, could meet the myriad cases of disease which would ensue, or
bolster up into "wholeness" the being from whom the single radiant unity
had departed.
Probably there has never been an age, nor any country (except
Yankee-land?) in which disease has been so generally prevalent as in
England to-day; and certainly there has never (with the same exception)
been an age or country in which doctors have so swarmed, or in which
medical science has been so powerful, in apparatus, in learning, in
authority, and in actual organisation and number of adherents. How
reconcile this contradiction--if indeed a contradiction it be?
But the fact is that medical science does not contradict disease--any
more than laws abolish crime. Medical science--and doubtless for very
good reasons--makes a fetish of disease, and dances around it. It is (as
a rule) only seen where disease is; it writes enormous tomes on disease;
it induces disease in animals (and even men) for the purpose of studying
it; it knows, to a marvelous extent, the symptoms of disease, its
nature, its causes, its goings out and its comings in; its eyes are
perpetually fixed on disease, till disease (for it) becomes the main
fact of the world and the main object of its worship. Even what is so
gracefully called Hygiene does not get beyond this negative attitude.
And the world still waits for its Healer, who shall tell us--diseased
and suffering as we are--_what_ health is, where it is to be found,
whence it flows; and who having touched this wonderful power within
himself shall not rest till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men.
No, medical science does not, in the main, contradict disease. The same
cause (infidelity and decay of the central life in men) which creates
disease and makes men liable to it, creates students and a science of
the subject. The Moon[11] having gone from over the waters, the good
people rush forth with their mops; and the untimely inundations, and the
mops and the mess and the pother, are all due to the same cause.
As to the lodgment of disease, it is clear that this would take place
easily in a disorganised system--just as a seditious adventurer would
easily effect a landing, and would find insubordinate materials ready at
hand for his use, in a land where the central government was weak. And
as to the treatment of a disease so introduced there are obviously two
methods: one is to reinforce the central power till it is sufficiently
strong of itself to eject the insubordinate elements and restore order;
the other is to attack the malady from outside and if possible destroy
it--(as by doses and decoctions)--independently of the inner vitality,
and leaving that as it was before. The first method would seem the best,
most durable and effective; but it is difficult and slow. It consists in
the adoption of a healthy life, bodily and mental, and will be spoken
of later on. The second may be characterised as the medical method, and
is valuable, or rather I should be inclined to say, _will_ be valuable,
when it has found its place, which is to be subsidiary to the first. It
is too often, however, regarded as superior in importance, and in this
way, though easy of application, has come perhaps to be productive of
more harm than good. The disease may be broken down for the time being,
but, the roots of it not being destroyed, it soon springs up again in
the same or a new form, and the patient is as badly off as ever.
The great positive force of Health, and the power which it has to
_expel_ disease from its neighborhood is a thing realised, I believe, by
few persons. But it _has_ been realised on earth, and will be realised
again when the more squalid elements of our present-day civilisation
have passed away.