Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/60

 pulse—longing; the outpouring of gall, anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every picture, every thought,—a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe, and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,—shame, none to the cheek-imprisoned blood,—wit, none to champagne,—the idea of this valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God, hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one; how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology, should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by principles,—how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs but to will (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds again without help from the body."

Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself." "There must always be some perpetuum mobile," I said, "for all things have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject. If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these ideas and moral tendencies