Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/374

362 many a century, between spiritual and corporeal strivings, though with sufficient practical compromise even in such as Simeon Stylites. Now-a-days, we all know with perfect certainty that sensations or appetites, be they ever so sensual, nevertheless form integrant parts of our unitary consciousness, and therefore belong to the ideal and not to the bodily sphere. If any of the contents of consciousness are allowed to originate in the body, it is clear that no legitimate reason can be found why all the rest should not originate in exactly the same manner. Accordingly, it is not our sensuality, but the insensible, impercipient body itself, which after all cabalistic transmutations of phenomenal occurrences into spiritual facts, is still intractably left as a caput mortuum in the hands of Transcendentalists.

How, in seriousness, are we transcendentally to dispose of this residuary appendix of our otherwise so ideally consistent being? Of what import to knowledge is this natural shadow of ours, so steadily abiding with us in light and darkness to the end of our days, an unwavering appearance, marvellously organised beyond the limits of all visibility, intensely astir with living commotion, and eloquently expressive of what thoughts we have?

We are sure that it cannot be an appearance of our spiritual organisation: for, first of all, the spiritual subject can never appear; and, moreover, how could bone, flesh and brain in any way symbolically represent such a spiritual organisation in the phenomenal world? Yet something this inalienable bulk, at all times so obstructively darkening the luminous conception of spiritual being, must undoubtedly signify to us individually, as well as to experience in general. We have a right to expect from Transcendentalists an explanation of the relation of body to spirit in some degree equivalent to the explanation which we give of the relation of conscious phenomena to our bodily organisation.

In their perplexity at the irreducible presence of the corpus delicti of our earthly being, Transcendentalists sometimes suggest that in our present existence the body is organic to the spiritual subject,—which, if it means anything, must be intended as a hint that somehow our body constitutes an instrument of inter-communication between our own and other spirits; or, more consistently, a place or station of transition between the indistinct and confused apprehension of a certain manifold of sense and its objective recognition as universally valid truth.

But, as we have already seen, a Transcendentalist cannot consistently admit anything intermediate between thinking