Page:Scientific Memoirs, Vol. 1 (1837).djvu/264

252 the fluids exist before the vessels, and that the direction of the vessels is the necessary consequence of the direction of the fluids.

Whilst through these general considerations we see how the movements of the original fluids maintain reproduction in all parts of the body, a due attention to the different polar directions of vascular activity, according to the different natures of the several parts of the body, will enable us also to perceive their differences of assimilation as well as secretion, and the laws to which they are subject; but these inquiries we cannot here pursue further. We now turn our attention to animal sensation, in order to observe the difference between it and the receptivity of the plant. The animal, containing within itself the organism of the plant, its organic functions must, like those of the plant, be liable to be modified by external influences. This property in the plant we have termed irritability, because irritation immediately causes and calls forth re-action. In the animal, however, the nervous life (as the expression and type of unity, which embraces all the parts of the organism and forms them into a whole.) stands between irritation and re-action; and as each local irritation is communicated through the nervous life to the whole organic unity, to the consciousness of the animal, the perception of the irritation rises to a sensation, and thus it depends more on the free will of the animal whether or not irritation be followed by re-action. The more intense this consciousness is, (it being the unity out of which the multiplicity of organic phænomena is developed,) the purer and more varied must the sensation be, (because a more marked individuality necessarily causes a more varied relationship with external objects,) and the more free the action toward the external world; i. e. the less it will depend on external influence, and the more it will be determined from within. We find therefore that the lower animals, and indeed even the parts of the human body which are less closely connected with the system of nerves proceeding from the brain and spine, exhibit in a greater degree the irritability of the plant; while, on the contrary, the higher nervous life of the human organism presents the flower (or perfection) of individual activity in psychical life, in self-consciousness, the manifestation of which has often been separated from the other branches of organic activity, no less erroneously than its essence (according to the notion of the materialists) has been considered as the sum or result of a certain corporeal mechanism.

We have already observed in our introductory remarks on the idea of life, that the inward unity, or the highest idea of an individual organism, is by no means the effect or the result, but the ground and cause, of external multiplicity, and this is also the case with the