clerk, the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of the message, and the
paper on which it is finally brought to him at home, are all equally
facts, all equally exist for man. A word or a thought can wound him as
acutely as a knife of steel. If he thinks he is loved, he will rise up
and glory to himself, although he be in a distant land and short of
necessary bread. Does he think he is not loved?--he may have the woman
at his beck, and there is not a joy for him in all the world. Indeed, if
we are to make any account of this figment of reason, the distinction
between material and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each
man as an individual is immaterial, although the continuation and
prospects of mankind as a race turn upon material conditions. The
physical business of each man's body is transacted for him; like a
sybarite, he has attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes, he
sweats, he digests without an effort, or so much as a consenting
volition; for the most part he even eats, not with a wakeful
consciousness, but as it were between two thoughts. His life is centred
among other and more important considerations; touch him in his honour
or his love, creatures of the imagination which attach him to mankind or
to an individual man or woman; cross him in his piety which connects his
soul with heaven; and he turns from his food, he loathes his breath, and
with a magnanimous emotion cuts the knots of his existence and frees
himself at a blow from the web of pains and pleasures.

It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and
autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other
powers, tributary but independent. If I now behold one walking in a
garden curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting his
food, with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing
himself by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand
delicate balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path, and
all the time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the
dog-star, or the attributes of God--what am I to say, or how am I to
describe the thing I see? Is that truly a man, in the rigorous meaning
of the word? or is it not a man and something else? What, then, are we
to count the centre-bit and axle of a being so variously compounded? It
is a question much debated. Some read his history in a certain intricacy
of nerve and the success o