ay indeed take credit;
but the true Peptician was that Countryman who answered that, "for his
part, he had no system." In fact, unity, agreement is always silent,
or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself. So
long as the several elements of Life, all fitly adjusted, can pour
forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is a melody and
unison; Life, from its mysterious fountains, flows out as in celestial
music and diapason,--which also, like that other music of the spheres,
even because it is perennial and complete, without interruption and
without imperfection, might be fabled to escape the ear. Thus too, in
some languages, is the state of health well denoted by a term
expressing unity; when we feel ourselves as we wish to be, we say that
we are _whole_.

Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with that
felicity of "having no system;" nevertheless, most of us, looking back
on young years, may remember seasons of a light, aerial translucency
and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the
prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a
creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew
not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled and leapt: through eye
and ear, and all avenues of sense, came clear unimpeded tidings from
without, and from within issued clear victorious force; we stood as in
the centre of Nature, giving and receiving, in harmony with it all;
unlike Virgil's Husbandmen, "too happy _because_ we did not know our
blessedness." In those days, health and sickness were foreign
traditions that did not concern us; our whole being was as yet One,
the whole man like an incorporated Will. Such, were Rest or
ever-successful Labour the human lot, might our life continue to be: a
pure, perpetual, unregarded music; a beam of perfect white light,
rendering all things visible, but itself unseen, even because it was
of that perfect whiteness, and no irregular obstruction had yet broken
it into colours. The beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all Science, if
we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of
something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division,
Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong. Thus, as was of old
written, the Tree of Knowledge springs from a root of evil, and bears
fruits of good and evil. Had Adam remained in Paradise, there had been
no Anatomy and no Metaphysi