THE ESSAY.
If I wrote it in Göttingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me. Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who want to transform my soul into my body.
The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and protecting bark of that tender pith.—And as all the changes of the world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of the fœtus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance, and ascends with—sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig is a tree in miniature, accordingly—for all this is not a correspondence of wit, but of nature—the nervous ganglia are fourth cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian[[135]] membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence, e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the nervous spirit, (or whatever one will assume—for after all it comes back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the two galleries of the two eyes would have to pass through the two prongs of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.
Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,—in one word, it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker[[136]] of the fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation, not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their powers.
I go further and say outright, beforehand,—by way of contradicting two errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain kind.
The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and without a second organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole material universe as a heavier one.
My first assertion was, one should not say the perceptive, but the perceived organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the brain are only objects of sensation, not instruments thereof, nor in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?—
I have more than one Therefore. A body is capable only of motion, although, to be sure, that motion is only the show of the aforementioned combination and the result of the powers concealed in simple parts. The string, the air, the auditory ossicles, the auricular nerves, vibrate; but the vibration of the latter no more explains the sensation of a tone than the vibration of the string could, if the soul were chained to that. Thus, despite all images in the eye and brain, the discernment of them is still not yet made out or explained; or will you say, perhaps, that for some such reason as this, because the senses are mirrors full of images, therefore the spiritual eye is dispensed with or made good? And does not the change of the nerve presuppose a second in a second essence, if it is to be perceived? Or does another motion in this essence represent the first motion?
This brings me to the brain. That greatest and grossest nerve—the sounding-board of all the others—shows up to the soul the delineations of those images which are introduced by the rest. Upon the whole, I am of opinion that the brain serves more the nerves of the muscles, the veins of the limbs, which meet in the hand of the soul, and all, in fact, more as nourishing root, than it serves as a case of instruments to the pictorial soul. As most of our ideas are served up on visual images, and take from them their ground color, it is probable we think more with the optic nerve than with the brain. Why is it, as Bonnet has observed, that deep-thinking wearies the eyes and sharp-seeing the brain? Why do certain excesses blunt at the same time the memory and the eyes? The fever-images playing their antics outside of the eyes of the sick and people of lively fancy, like Cardan, who saw in the dark whatever he thought vividly and glowingly, are explained in my hypothesis.
In regard to the brain there are two errors; but Heaven save my friends only from one of them. For from the other Reimarus can guard them, who has fully proved that the brain is no Æolian harp with trembling strings, nor a camera-obscura with sliding pictures, nor a barrel-organ with pins for every idea, which the spirit turns, in order of itself to play to and from itself its ideas. If now not even the pre-established harmony of the brain and the mind, nor the mutual accompaniment of the two, is conceivable, so is their identity absolutely impossible; and this is precisely the error from which the abovementioned Heaven has to keep my friends. The materialist must first set up all that which Reimarus has overthrown; he must petrify in the brain-pap the millions of picture-cabinets of seventy years, and yet again make them movable like Eidophysica,[[137]] and deal out the shuffled card-images to every second of time; he must see to it that these animated dancing images are forced into rank and file. And then, after all, and only then, does his difficulty properly begin; for now—even if we grant him that the images see themselves, the thoughts think themselves, that every imagination darkly mirrors all others, and even the conscious "I," as a monad, does the universe—now (we say) he must first get him a generalissimo who shall command and array this immeasurable, fluctuating host of ideas, a compositor who shall set up the idea-book from an unknown manuscript, and, when dreams, fevers, passions, have shaken all the letter-cases into pi, shall rearrange all the letters alphabetically. This ruling unity and power—without which the symmetry of the microcosm is as inexplicable as that of the macrocosm, that of the ideal world as that of the actual—is precisely what we call a spirit. To be sure, by this unknown power neither the origin nor the succession of ideas is mediated or explained, but, assuming only the known force of matter, motion, all that is not only incredible, but absolutely impossible; and Leibnitz can more easily explain motion by dark imaginings, than the materialist can imaginings by motions. In the former case motion is only semblance, and exists only in the second contemplating being, but in the latter the representation would be show and would exist in the second—representing substance.