The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings — John Shaqi
The Campaner Thal, and Other WritingsJean Paul
Philosophy
The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings
Jean Paul
German literature -- Translations into English
It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and
then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you
therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only
accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the
keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the
corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling
heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall,
anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the
inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_,
every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe,
and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of
poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the
sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its
harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the
cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this
valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God,
hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony
limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not
sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one;
how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology,
should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by
principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body
in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve
rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs
but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a
striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds
again without help from the body."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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