Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.Jean Paul
General
Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.
Jean Paul
Fiction
I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good
observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least
dependence of the soul upon the body--e. g. in old age, intoxication,
&c.--they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have
even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as
I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best
of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have
special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can
hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a
single _Pas_." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.
We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads
upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being,
still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods
between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the
times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest
depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy,
are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most,
as its consequent exhaustion also gives assurance; the more
incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal
hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and
at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of
blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the
periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power
with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works
with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons
the brain against the stomach.--Add to this, that the limits and
hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be
assigned as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the
soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest
of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the
stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when
one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and
perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and
driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved
patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By
the way, without the theory of _disorganization_ which assumes negative
and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are
inexplicable;--e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine,
manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food,
perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on
the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on
the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual
enervation, also provoke it.----At most in deep sleep, when the
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