Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other EssaysCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
Carpenter, Edward
Civilization; Crime; Evolution; Science
And when I speak thus separately of the mind and body, it must be
remembered, as already said, that there is no strict line between them;
but probably every affection or passion of the mind has its correlative
in the condition of the body--though this latter may or may not be
easily observable. Gluttony _is_ a fever of the digestive apparatus.
What is a taint in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has
started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human
system. The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct
threats, menaces made against the central authority--against the Man
himself. For the man must rule or disappear; it is impossible to imagine
a man presided over by a Stomach--a walking Stomach, using hands, feet,
and all other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve
its assimilative mania. We call such a one an Hog. [And thus in the
theory of Evolution we see the place of the hog, and all other animals,
as fore-runners or off-shoots of special faculties in Man, and why the
true man, and rightly, has authority over all animals, and can alone
give them their place in creation.]
So of the Brain, or any other organ; for the Man is no organ, resides in
no organ, but is the central life ruling and radiating among all
organs, and assigning them their arts to play.
Disease then, in body or mind, is from this point of view the break-up
of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity. It is the abeyance of a
central power, and the growth of insubordinate centres--life in each
creature being conceived of as a continual exercise of energy or
conquest, by which external or antagonistic forces (and organisms) are
brought into subjection and compelled into the service of the creature,
or are thrown off as harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we
find that plants or animals, when in good health, have a remarkable
power of throwing off the attacks of any parasites which incline to
infest them; while those that are weakly are very soon eaten up by the
same. A rose-tree, for instance, brought indoors, will soon fall a prey
to the aphis--though when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to
no impression on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in the
fields are weakly from want of water the entire crop is sometimes
destroyed by the turnip fly, which then multiplies enormously; but if a
shower or two of rain come before much damage is done the plant will
then grow vigorously, its tissues become more robust and resist the
attacks of the fly, which in its turn dies. Late investigations seem to
show that one of the functions of the white corpuscles in the blood is
to devour disease-germs and bacteria present in the circulation--thus
absorbing these organisms into subjection to the central life of the
body--and that with this object they congregate in numbers toward any
part of the body which is wounded or diseased. Or to take an example
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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