Either way the operator is a disease-producer and has the mental attitude of one. To say that he is recognized by nature as such may seem absurd. But as he who really wills and pictures health, whether his own or that of some other, finally affects the nature-mind in his own body and—other things being co-ordinate—begins to move toward it: so likewise the constant willing and picture-making of disease and pain at last affects the same mind but in the contrary direction. The man moves and is moved away from health.
There are states of ill-health unattended, at any rate for a long time, by a single definite symptom. The activities of the bodily machine may maintain their relations, their general balance, yet drop as a whole to very low levels. If there is no radiance, no responsiveness to the finer forces of nature, no vital spring, there may yet be no point of actual friction, and to its human tenant the body may seem in average working order.
We say then that the preoccupations of the vivisector's mind have taken his body outside the conscious life-stream of nature, have stopped her constructive and vitalizing work. The body is not simply a living thing; it is an organized complex of living things, conscious centers, life-charged monads, far finer than any of the bacteria which the microscope has shown us or can show us. Drawn in from nature, they dwell with us a while and then return to her somewhat as the blood cells go to the lungs for aeration. It is the quality of our mental states which determines the quality of the elemental coming in and determines also the intervening history of those which leave. The circulation is constant, and if we lived ideal mental lives we could, as already said, achieve something like physical immortality. The monads would come back to us refreshed and recharged with electric vitality.
Death liberates them all. They take their ways into the nature-stream and are regenerated in nature's thought and life. The process continues during all the time between death and rebirth. Whilst the man, the soul, rests, his body (the subtler elements of it) is being refashioned and reinvigorated for him. At his rebirth his own monads, blended with those he receives from hereditary sources, are animating the infant form with which he connects himself and in which he will ultimately incarnate. So far as the thought and habit of his last life permitted—for, as said, they are absolutely sensitive to the thought-color of their owner's mind and feeling—they have been renewed.
But there will have been little renewal possible for them if that mind was filled with the color and thought of death, disease, pain, was occupied with the will to produce these—a will exactly oppositely directed to that of the worthy physician. They were untuned with nature's keynote during life and consequently return nearly unchanged—which, in medical language, will mean a case of congenital disease, ill-health, or deformity; and, as part of the penalty, the reaction of the physical defects and disease upon the mind and disposition of child and youth and man.
Nor does the penalty finish at that. The entire personality of such a child and man is in greater or less degree repellant to others, to children, to animals. The latter especially, feel him not as a friend but as enemy. Their dislike is instinctual. And all this will continue till in one or another life the man has been stung to the redress of the evil he has done, has returned kindliness for hostility year by year, has changed, freshened, and sweetened his thought and feeling and so by degrees every atom of his body.
Truly the plight of the vivisector is a thousandfold worse than that of the animal he worst outrages.
THE EKOI; Children of Nature: by H. T. Edge, B. A. (Cantab.)
