us, a sensation which embraces within its range the whole spiritual
being agitates in the same measure the whole framework of the organic
body,--heart, veins and blood, muscles and nerves, all, from those mighty
nerves that give to the heart its living impulse of motion down to the
tiny and unimportant nerves by which hairs are attached to the skin,
share equally its influence. Everything tends to a more violent motion.
If the sensation be an agreeable one, all these parts will acquire a
higher degree of harmonious activity; the heart's beat will be free,
lively, uniform, the blood will flow unchecked, gently or with fiery
speed, according as the affection is of a gentle or violent description;
digestion, secretion, and excretion will follow their natural course; the
excitable membranes will pliantly play in a gentle vapor-bath, and
excitability as well as sensitiveness will increase. Therefore the
condition of the greatest momentary mental pleasure is at the same time
the condition of the greatest bodily well-being.

As many as there may be of these partial activities (and is not every
beat of the pulse the result perhaps of thousands?) so many will be the
obscure sensations crowding upon the soul, each one of which indicates
perfection. Out of this confused complexity arises entire sensation of
the animal harmonies, that is, the highest possible combined sensation of
animal pleasure, which ranges itself, as it were, alongside of the
original intellectual or moral sensation, which this addition infinitely
increases. Thus is every agreeable affection the source of countless
bodily pleasures.

This is most evidently confirmed by the examples of sick persons who have
been cured by joy. Let one whom a terrible home-sickness has wasted to a
skeleton be brought back to his native land, and the bloom of health will
soon be his again; or let us enter a prison in which miserable men have
for ten or twenty years inhabited filthy dungeons and possess at last
barely strength to move,--and let us tell them suddenly they are free;
the single word of freedom will endow their limbs with the strength of
youth, and cause dead eyes to sparkle with life. Sailors, whom thirst
and famine have made their prey during a long voyage, are half cured by
the steersman's cry of "Land!" and he would certainly greatly err who
ascribed the whole result to a prospect of fresh food. The sight of a
dear one, whom the sufferer has long desired to see, sus