CHAPTER IV. 



OF ORGASM AND IRRITABILITY. 



It is not the special affection called orgasm that we are now about to 

 discuss, but the general condition known under the same name and 

 characteristic of the supple internal parts of animals during life ; a 

 condition which is natural to them, since it is essential to their pre- 

 servation, and which necessarily comes to an end at or soon after death. 



It is certain that, among the solid internal parts of animals, those 

 that are supple are animated throughout life by an orgasm or pecuhar 

 kind of erethism, from which they derive the faculty of collapsing 

 and being promptly restored on the receipt of any impression. 



An analogous orgasm also exists in the most supple of the solid parts 

 of plants, so long as they are alive ; but it is so faint that the parts 

 endowed with it do not derive therefrom any faculty for immediate 

 restoration, after the impressions that they have received. 



The orgasm of the supple internal parts of animals contributes to 

 some extent to the production of their organic phenomena ; it is 

 maintained by an invisible, expansive, penetrating fluid (possibly 

 several), which slowly passes through the parts affected and produces 

 in them the tension or sort of erethism just mentioned. The orgasm 

 resulting from this state of things in the parts, is maintained 

 throughout life with a strength that is proportional to the favour- 

 able disposition of the parts ; it is the stronger according as they 

 are more supple and less dried up. 



It is this same orgasm, the necessity for which has been recognised 

 for the presence of life in a body, that some modern physiologists 

 have looked upon as a kind of sensibihty ; hence they have alleged 

 that sensibihty is a property of all living bodies, that such bodies 

 are both sensitive and irritable, that all their organs are impregnated 

 with these two necessarily co-existing faculties, in short that they 

 are common to every living thing both animal and plant. Cabanis, 

 who shared this opinion with M. Richerand and apparently others, 

 said indeed that sensibility is the general fact of living nature. 



