Characteristics

This edition has been proof an corrected from the original hard cover edition.


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an excerpt from the beginning of the book:


THE healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape so-ever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong.


In the body, for example, as all doctors are agreed, the first condition of complete health is, that each organ perform its function unconsciously, unheeded; let but any organ announce its separate existence, were it even boastfully, and for pleasure, not for pain, then already has one of those unfortunate " false centres of sensibility " established itself, already is derangement there. The perfection of bodily well-being is, that the collective bodily activities seem one; and be manifested, moreover, not in themselves, but in the action they accomplish. If a Dr. Kitchiner boast that his system is in high order, dietetic philosophy may indeed take credit; but the true peptician was that countryman who answered that, "for his part, he had no system." In fact, unity, agreement, is always silent or soft-voiced; it i9 only discord that loudly proclaims itself. So long as the several elements of life, all fitly adjusted, can pour forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is a melody and unison; life, from its mysterious fountains, flows out as in celestial music and diapason, — which also, like that other music of the spheres, even because it is perennial and complete, without interruption and without imperfection, might be fabled to escape the ear. Thus too, in some languages, is the state of health well denoted by a term expressing unity; when we feel ourselves as we wish to be, we say that we are whole.



Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with that felicity of "having no system"; nevertheless, most of us, looking back on young years, may remember seasons of a light, aerial translucency and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled, and leapt; through eye and ear, and all avenues of sense, came clear unimpeded tidings from without, and from within issued clear victorious force; we stood as in the centre of Nature, giving and receiving, in harmony with it all; unlike Virgil's Husbandmen, "too happy because we did not know our blessedness." In those days, health and sickness were foreign traditions that did not concern us; our whole being was as yet one, the whole man like an incorporated will. Such, were rest or ever-successful labor the human lot, might our life continue to be: a pure, perpetual, unregarded music; a beam of perfect white light, rendering all things visible, but itself unseen, even because it was of that perfect whiteness, and no irregular obstruction had yet broken it into colors. The beginning of inquiry is disease: all science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but division, dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong. Thus, as was of old written, the tree of knowledge springs from a root of evil, and bears fruits of good and evil. Had Adam remained in Paradise, there had been no anatomy and no metaphysics.


But, alas, as the philosopher declares, " Life itself is a disease; a working incited by suffering"; action from passion! The memory of that first state of freedom and paradisiac unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: with knowledge, the symptom of derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding. Nevertheless, such is still the wish of Nature on our behalf; in all vital action, her manifest purpose and effort is, that we should be unconscious of it, and, like the peptic countryman, never know that we " have a system." Fur, indeed, vital action everywhere is emphatically a means, not an end; life is not given us for the mere sake of living, but always with an ulterior external aim: neither is it on the process, on the means, but rather on the result, that Nature, in any of her doings, is wont to intrust us with insight and volition. Boundless as is the domain of man, it is but a small fractional proportion of it that he rules with consciousness and by forethought: what he can contrive, nay, what he can altogether know and comprehend, is essentia