The Philosophy of Health; Volume 1 (of 2) / or, an exposition of the physical and mental constitution of man

by Southwood Smith

1. The action of the apparatus of the organic life when sound is without consciousness; the object of the action of the apparatus of the animal life is the production of consciousness. The final cause of the action of the apparatus of the organic life is the maintenance of existence; the final cause of the action of the apparatus of the animal life is the production of conscious existence. What purpose would be answered by connecting consciousness with the action of the organic organs? Were we sensible of the organic processes; did we know when the heart beats, and the lung plays, and the stomach digests, and the excretory organ excretes, the consciousness could not promote, but might disturb the due and orderly course of these processes. Moreover they would so occupy and engross our minds that we should have little inclination or time to attend to other objects. Beneficently therefore are they placed equally beyond our observation and control. Nevertheless, when our consciousness of these processes may be of service; when they are going wrong; when their too feeble or too intense action is in danger of destroying existence, the animal life is made sensible of what is passing in the organic, in order that the former may take beneficial cognizance of the latter, may do what experience may have taught to be conducive to the restoration of the diseased organ to a sound state, or avoid doing what may conduce to the increase or maintenance of its morbid condition.

But while the action of the organic organs is thus kept alike from our view and feeling, the sole object of the action of the animal organs is to produce and maintain a state of varied and extended consciousness. We do not know when the heart dilates to receive the vital current, nor when it contracts to propel it with renewed impetus through the system; nor when the blood rushes to the lung to give out its useless and noxious particles; nor when the air rushes to the blood to take up those particles, to replace them by others, and thus to purify and renovate the vital fluid. Many processes of this kind are continually going on within us during every moment of our existence, but we are no more conscious of them than we are of the motion of the fluids in the blade of grass on which we tread. On the contrary when an external object produces, in a sentient nerve, that change of state which we denote by the words "an impression;" when the sentient nerve transmits this impression to the brain; when the brain is thereby brought into the state of perception, the animal life is in active operation, and percipient or conscious existence takes place. Consciousness does not belong to the organic, it is the animal life.

2. The functions of the organic life are performed with uninterrupted continuity; to those of the animal life rest is indispensable. The action of the heart is unceasing; it takes not and needs not rest. On it goes, for the space of eighty or ninety years, at the rate of a hundred thousand strokes every twenty-four hours, having at every stroke a great resistance to overcome, yet it continues this action for this length of time without intermission. Alike incessant is the action of the lung, which is always receiving and always emitting air; and the action of the skin, which is always transpiring and always absorbing; and the action of the alimentary canal, which is always compensating the loss which the system is always sustaining.

But of this continuity of action the organs and functions of the animal life are incapable. No voluntary muscle can maintain its action beyond a given time; no effort of the will can keep it in a state of uninterrupted contraction; relaxation must alternate with contraction; and even this alternate action cannot go on long without rest. No organ of sense can continue to receive impression after impression without fatigue. By protracted exertion the ear loses its sensibility to sound, the eye to light, the tongue to savour, and the touch to the qualities of bodies about which it is conversant. The brain cannot carry on its intellectual operations with vigour beyond a certain period; the trains of ideas with which it works become, after a time, indistinct and confused; nor is it capable of reacting with energy until it has remained in a state of rest proportioned to the duration of its preceding activity.

And this rest is sleep. Sleep is the repose of the senses, the rest of the muscles, their support and sustenance. What food is to the organic, sleep is to the animal life. Nutrition can no more go on without aliment, than sensation, thought, and motion without sleep.

But it is the animal life only that sleeps: death would be the consequence of the momentary slumber of the organic. If, when the brain betook itself to repose, the engine that moves the blood ceased to supply it with its vital fluid, never again would it awake. The animal life is active only during a portion of its existence; the activity of the organic life is never for a moment suspended; and in order to endow its organs with the power of continuing this uninterrupted action, they are rendered incapable of fatigue: fatigue, on the contrary, is inseparable from the action of the organs of the animal life; fatigue imposes the necessity of rest, rest is sleep, and sleep is renovation.

3. Between all the functions of the organic life there is a close relation and dependence. Without the circulation there can be no secretion; without secretion, no digestion; without digestion, no nutrition; without nutrition, no new supply of circulating matter, and so through the entire circle. But the functions of the animal life are not thus dependent on each other. One of the circle may be disordered without much disturbance of the rest; and one may cease altogether, while another continues in vigorous action. Sensation may be lost, while motion continues; and the muscle may contract though it cannot feel. One organ of sense may sleep while the rest are awake. One intellectual faculty may be in operation while others slumber. The muscle of volition may act, while there is no consciousness of will. Even the organs of the voice and of progression may perform their office while the sensorium is deeply locked in sleep.

4. The two lives are born at different periods, and the one is in active operation before the other is even in existence. The first action observable in the embryo is a minute pulsating point. It is the young heart propelling its infant stream. Before brain, or nerve, or muscle can be distinguished, the heart is in existence and in action; that is, the apparatus of the organic function of the circulation is built up and is in operation before there is any trace of an animal organ. Arteries and veins circulate blood, capillary vessels receive the vital fluid, and out of it form brain and muscle, the organs of the animal, no less than the various substances that compose the organs of the organic life. The organic is not only anterior to the animal life, but it is by the action of the organic that existence is given to the animal life. The organic life is born at the first moment of existence; the animal life not until a period comparatively distant; the epoch emphatically called the period of birth, namely, the period when the new being is detached from its mother; when it first comes into contact with external objects; when it carries on all the functions of its economy by its own organs, and consequently enjoys independent existence.

5. The functions of the organic life are perfect at once. The heart contracts as well, the arteries secrete as well, the respiratory organs work as well the first moment they begin to act as at any subsequent period. They require no teaching from experience, and they profit nothing from its lessons. On the contrary, the operations of the brain, and the actions of the voluntary muscles, feeble and uncertain at first, acquire strength by slow degrees, and attain their ultimate perfection only at the adult age. How indistinct and confused the first sensations of the infant! Before it acquire accuracy, precision, and truth, how immense the labour spent upon perception! Sensations are succeeded by ideas; sensations and ideas coalesce with sensations and ideas; combinations thus formed suggest other combinations previously formed, and these a third, and the third a fourth, and so is constituted a continuous train of thought. But the infantile associations between sensation and sensation, between idea and idea, and between sensations and ideas, are, to a certain extent, incorrect, and to a still greater extent inadequate; and the misconception necessarily resulting from this early imperfection in the intellectual operations is capable of correction only by subsequent and more extended impressions. During its making hours, a large portion of the time of the infant is spent in receiving impressions which come to it every instant from all directions, and which it stores up in its little treasury; but a large portion is also consumed in the far more serious and difficult business of discrimination and correction. Could any man, after having attained the age of manhood, reverse the order of the course through which he has passed; could he, with the power of observation, together with the experience that belong to manhood, retrace with perfect exactness every step of his sentient existence, from the age of forty to the moment that the air first came into contact with his body at the moment of his leaving his maternal dwelling, among the truths he would learn, the most interesting, if not the most surprising, would be those which relate to the manner in which he dealt with his earliest impressions; with the mode in which he combined them, recalled them, laid them by for future use; made his first general deduction; observed what subsequent experience taught to be conformable, and what not conformable, to this general inference; his emotions on detecting his first errors, and his contrasted feelings on discovering those comprehensive truths, the certainty of which became confirmed by every subsequent impression. Thus to live backwards would be, in fact, to go through the analysis of the intellectual combinations, and, consequently, to obtain a perfect insight into the constitution of the mind; and among the curious results which would then become manifest, perhaps few would appear more surprising than the true action of the senses. The eye, when first impressed by light, does not perceive the objects that reflect it; the ear, when first impressed by sound, does not distinguish the sonorous body. When the operation for cataract has been successfully performed in a person born blind, the eye immediately becomes sensible to light, but the impression of light does not immediately give information relative to the properties of bodies. It is gradually, not instantaneously; it is even by slow degrees that luminous objects are discerned with distinctness and accuracy. To see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to touch, are processes which appear to be performed instantaneously, and which actually are performed with astonishing rapidity in a person who observes them in himself; but they were not always performed thus rapidly: they are processes acquired, businesses learnt; processes and businesses acquired and learnt, not without the cost of many efforts and much labour. But the senses afford merely the materials for the intellectual operations of memory, combination, comparison, discrimination, induction, operations the progress of which is so slow, that they acquire precision, energy, and comprehensiveness only after the culture of years.

And the same is true of the muscles of volition. How many efforts are made before the power of distinct articulation is acquired! how many before the infant can stand! how many before the child can walk! The organic life is born perfect; the animal life becomes perfect only by servitude, and the aptitude which service gives.