And so, all the world over, from the beginning, primitive man, in the lowest state of savagery and in the highest stage of civilization, has been accustomed to recognize the truth, and to employ the symbolisms of speech, which are in accordance with the latest advances of physiological and psychological science, and with the highest spiritual conceptions of biblical truth, in our nineteenth Christian century, concerning the mental, the moral, and the religious needs and possibilities of the human race. Man as he is needs a “new heart,” a new nature, a new life; and that need can be supplied by the Author of life, through that regeneration which is indicated, and which, in a sense, is realized in new blood which is pure at the start, and which purifies by its purging inflow. The recognition of this truth, and the outreaching of man in its direction, are at the basis of all forms of sacrifice in all the ages. And this wonderful attainment of primitive man everywhere, we are asked to accept as man’s mere natural inheritance from the sensory quiverings of his ancestral tadpole! “The knowledge of the ancients on the subject [of blood as the synonym of life] may, indeed, have been based on the mere observation that an animal loses its life when it loses its blood,” says the Speaker’s Commentary. But it does seem a little strange, that none of the ancients ever observed that man is very liable to lose his life when he loses his _brains_, and that few animals are actively efficient for practical service without a _head_; whereas both men and the lower animals do lose _blood_ freely without death resulting. It is true that in many parts of the world the _liver_ was made prominent as seemingly a synonym of life; but this was obviously because of the popular belief that the liver was itself a mass of coagulated blood. The idea seems to have been that as the heart was the blood-fountain, the liver was the blood-cistern; and that, as the source of life (or of blood, which life is,) was at the heart; so, the great receptacle of life, or of blood, was the liver. Thus, in the classic myth of Prometheus, the avenging eagle of Jupiter is not permitted to gnaw upon the life-giving heart itself of the tortured victim, but upon the compacted body of life in the captive’s liver; the fountain of life is not to be destroyed, but the cistern of life is to be emptied daily of all that it had received from the out-flowing heart during the preceding night. And in the symbolism of these two organs, the ancients seem to have been agreed, that “The heart is the seat of the soul [thumos (θυμός) the nobler passions]; the liver [is the seat] of desire;”[684] or, as again it is phrased, “The seat of the soul is unquestionably the heart, even as the liver is the seat of emotion.”[685]