Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/256

 In classifying the above-mentioned empirical corroborations of my doctrine according to the sciences from which they come, while I take the graduated order of Nature from the highest to the lowest degree as a guiding-thread to my expositions, I must first mention a very striking confirmation lately received by my chief dogma in the physiological and pathological views of Dr. Joachim Dietrich Brandis, private physician to the King of Denmark, a veteran in science, whose Essay on Vital Force (1795) had received Reil's hearty commendation. In his two latest writings, Experiences in the Application of Cold in Disease (Berlin, 1833), and Nosology and Therapeutics of Cachexias (1834), we find him in the most emphatic and striking manner stating the primary source of all vital functions to be an unconscious will, from which he derives all processes in the machinery of the organism, in health as well as in disease, and which he represents as the primum mobile [first mover] of life. I must support this by literal quotations from these essays, since few save medical readers are likely to have them at hand.

In the first of them, p. viii., we find: "The essence of every living organism consists in the will to maintain its own existence as much as possible over against the macrocosm;" p. x. : " Only one living entity, one will, can be in an organ at the same time ; therefore if there is a diseased will in disagreement with the rest of the body in the organ of the skin, we may hold it in check by applying