ifty years of investigation, Harvey, Boerhaave, and Haller
were only beginners? The soul could thus have positively no idea of the
condition she was called upon to alter. How shall she become acquainted
with it? how shall she begin to act at all?
[1] But we have something more than the animal life of the animal
(beast). A beast lives an animal life in order that it may experience
pleasant sensations. It experiences pleasant sensations that it may
preserve the animal life. It lives now, therefore, in order that it may
live again tomorrow. It is happy now that it may be happy to-morrow.
But it is a simple, an uncertain happiness, which depends upon the action
of the organism, it is a slave to luck and blind chance; because it
consists in sensation only. Man, too, lives an animal life,--is sensible
of its pleasures and suffers its pains. But why? He feels and suffers
that he may preserve his animal life. He preserves his animal life that
he may longer have the power to live a spiritual one. Here, then, the
means differ from the end; there, end and means seem to coincide. This
is one of the lines of separation between man and the animal.
S 5.--Animal Sensations.
So far we have met with such sensations only as they take their rise in
an antecedent operation of the understanding; but we have now to deal
with sensations in which the understanding bears no part. These
sensations, if they are not exactly the expression of the present state
of our organs, mark it out specifically, or, better, accompany it. These
sensations have quickly and forcibly to determine the will to aversion or
desire; but, on the other hand, they are ever to float on the surface of
the soul, and never to extend to the province of the reason. The part,
accordingly, played by thought, in the case of a mental perception, is
here taken up by that modification in the animal parts of us which either
threatens the destruction of the sensation or insures its duration: that
is, an eternal law of wisdom has combined with that condition of the
machine which confirms its welfare, a pleasant emotion of the soul; and,
on the other hand, with that condition which undermines it and threatens
ruin, an unpleasant emotion is connected; and this in such a manner that
the sensation itself has not the faintest resemblance to the state of the
organs of which it is the mark. Animal sensations have, on this showing,
a double origin: (1) in the present state of the mac
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