ho has just committed one, is nothing else than the horror which
agitates the feverish man, and which is felt on taking nauseous
medicines. The nightly tossings of those who are troubled by remorse,
always accompanied by a high pulse, are veritable fevers, induced by the
connection between the physical organism with the soul; and Lady Macbeth,
walking in her sleep, is an instance of brain delirium. Even the
imitation of a passion makes the actor for the moment ill; and after
Garrick had played Lear or Othello he spent some hours in convulsions on
his bed. Even the illusion of the spectator, through sympathy with acted
passion, has brought on shivering, gout, and fits of fainting.

Is not he, then, who is plagued with an evil temper, and draws gall and
bitterness from every situation in life: is not the vicious man, who
lives in a chronic state of hatred and malevolence; is not the envious
man, who finds torture in every excellence of his neighbor,--are not
these, all of them, the greatest foes to their own health? Has vice not
enough of the horrible in it, when it destroys not only happiness but
health.

S 16.-Exceptions.

But a pleasant affection has sometimes been a fatal one, and an
unpleasant one has sometimes worked a marvellous cure. Both facts rest
upon experience: should they remove the limits of the law we have
expounded?

Joy is fatal when it rises into ecstacy: nature cannot support the strain
which in one moment is thrown upon the whole nervous system. The motion
of the brain is no longer harmony, but convulsion, an extremely sudden
and momentary force which soon changes into the ruin of the organism,
since it has transgressed the boundary line of health (for into the very
idea of health there enters and is essentially interwoven the idea of a
certain moderation of all natural motions). The joy as well as the grief
of finite beings is limited, and dare not pass beyond a certain point
without ruin.

As far as the second part is concerned, we have many examples of cure,
through a moderate fit of anger, of inveterate dyspepsia; and through
fright,--as in the case of a fire--of rheumatic pains and lameness
apparently incurable. But even dysentery has sometimes resolved an
internal stoppage, and the itch has been a cure for melancholy madness
and insanity: is the itch, for this, less a disease?--is dysentery
therefore health.

S 17.--Indolence of Mind brings about greater Indolence in the Organic