The heart, we must not forget, is a mere muscle, which is no more
capable of being the seat of an emotion than our biceps or our calves.
The heart is an elaborate centripetal and centrifugal pump which, in
obedience to orders or impulses coming from elsewhere, draws the blood
out of the veins and sends it into the arteries at a varying rate of
speed.
=A Dead Heart Can Be Made to Beat.= The heart, taken out of
the body and attached to a well fitted system of pipes, thru which
an appropriate fluid is circulating, will start beating anew and
keep on beating until decay sets in, due to the fact that the proper
nourishment is lacking.
Talking of a sensitive heart, of a tender heart or of a heart of
stone means merely juggling with pretty pictures which correspond to
nothing physiologically. There may be sensitiveness, tenderness or
stony harshness somewhere in the organism and the heart may give them
expression by its fluctuating beats, but it acts on such occasions as a
mere registering apparatus.
Adrenin taken by the mouth or injected into the blood stream causes the
heart pump of a perfect indifferent man to throb as wildly as the heart
of a lovelorn swain. Strong doses of the nitrates may cause valvular
insufficiency and "break" a heart more effectively than any catastrophe
in one's sentimental life.
=The Heart is a Respectable Organ.= The choice of the heart as the
organ of the emotions, in particular of the love emotion, is certainly
due to the fact that it is such a faithful registering apparatus and
also to a "displacement upward" frequently observed in modern civilised
thought.
We do not willingly mention the abdomen and therefore have rechristened
it the stomach. We have read many times the appalling statement that a
woman carries her child "under her heart." The seat of the mind which
materialist physicians of ancient Greece located in the intestines,
rose later to the level of the solar plexus and with Descartes finally
reached the pineal gland. Likewise the part of the body where love
cravings receive their physical satisfaction having become taboo, the
seat of love has been raised from the pelvis to the thorax, from the
primary genital region to the breast, which bears secondary sexual
characteristics.
After which, the popular imagination has established an arbitrary
contrast and antagonism between the mysterious clocklike organ in the
chest and the mysterious soft mass in the skull.
=The Antithesis Head-heart= is one which literature is not likely
to abandon for years to come. We read that women "follow the dictates
of their heart" while men are not so prone "to lose their head." The
head is represented as the well-spring of reason while the heart is a
fount of tenderness, if not of foolishness.
Modern scientific research has demonstrated that the brain is nothing
but an apparatus for burning sugar which is transformed into electric
current which the nervous systems distribute throughout the body.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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