Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,--in one word, it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker[136] of the fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation, not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their powers. I go further and say outright, beforehand,--by way of contradicting two errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain kind. The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and without a _second_ organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole material universe as a heavier one. My first assertion was, one should not say the _perceptive_, but the _perceived_ organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the brain are only _objects_ of sensation, not _instruments_ thereof, nor in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?--