, and gives value to, our existence; and all the wonders
of our microcosm would without it be a form only, destined immediately
to perish, and of no greater account than as a clod of the valley.

It was an important remark, suggested to me many years ago by an eminent
physiologer and anatomist, that, when I find my attention called to any
particular part or member of my body, I may be morally sure that there
is something amiss in the processes of that part or member. As long as
the whole economy of the frame goes on well and without interruption,
our attention is not called to it. The intellectual man is like a
disembodied spirit.

He is almost in the state of the dervise in the Arabian Nights, who had
the power of darting his soul into the unanimated body of another, human
or brute, while he left his own body in the condition of an insensible
carcase, till it should be revivified by the same or some other spirit.
When I am, as it is vulgarly understood, in a state of motion, I use my
limbs as the implements of my will. When, in a quiescent state of the
body, I continue to think, to reflect and to reason, I use, it may be,
the substance of the brain as the implement of my thinking, reflecting
and reasoning; though of this in fact we know nothing.

We have every reason to believe that the mind cannot subsist without the
body; at least we must be very different creatures from what we are at
present, when that shall take place. For a man to think, agreeably and
with serenity, he must be in some degree of health. The corpus sanum is
no less indispensible than the mens sana. We must eat, and drink, and
sleep. We must have a reasonably good appetite and digestion, and a
fitting temperature, neither too hot nor cold. It is desirable that we
should have air and exercise. But this is instrumental merely. All these
things are negatives, conditions without which we cannot think to the
best purpose, but which lend no active assistance to our thinking.

Man is a godlike being. We launch ourselves in conceit into illimitable
space, and take up our rest beyond the fixed stars. We proceed without
impediment from country to country, and from century to century,
through all the ages of the past, and through the vast creation of the
imaginable future. We spurn at the bounds of time and space; nor would
the thought be less futile that imagines to imprison the mind within
the limits of the body, than the attempt of the booby clown who is