252 DR. CARUS ON THE KINGDOMS OF NATURE, 



the fluids exist before tlie vessels, and that the direction of the vessels 

 is the necessary consequence of the direction of the fluids. 



Whilst through these general considerations we see how the move- 

 ments of the original fluids maintain reproduction in all parts of the 

 body, a due attention to the different polar directions of vascular 

 activity, according to the different natures of the several parts of the 

 body, will enable us also to perceive their differences of assimilation as 

 well as secretion, and the laws to which they are subject; but these in- 

 quiries we cannot here pursue further. We now turn our attention to 

 animal sensation, in order to observe the difference between it and the 

 receptivity of the plant. The animal, containing within itself the organ- 

 ism of the plant, its organic functions must, like those of the plant, 

 be liable to be modified by external influences. This property in the 

 plant we have termed irritability, because irritation immediately causes 

 and calls forth re-action. In the animal, however, the nervous life (as 

 the expression and type of unity, which embraces all the parts of the 

 organism and forms them into a whole.) stands between irritation 

 and re-action; and as each local irritation is communicated through 

 the nervous life to the whole organic unity, to the consciousness of the 

 animal, the perception of the irritation rises to a sensation, and thus it 

 depends more on the free will of the animal whether or not irritation 

 be followed by re-action. The more intense this consciousness is, (it 

 being the unity out of which the multiplicity of organic phenomena is 

 developed,) the purer and more varied must the sensation be, (because 

 a more marked individuality necessarily causes a more varied relation- 

 ship with external objects,) and the more free the action toward the 

 external world ; i. e. the less it will depend on external influence, and the 

 more it will be determined from within. We find therefore that the 

 lower animals, and indeed even the parts of the human body which are 

 less closely connected with the system of nerves proceeding from the 

 brain and spine, exhibit in a greater degree the irritability of the plant ; 

 while, on the contrary, the higher nervous life of the human organism 

 presents the flower (or perfection) of individual activity in psychical 

 life, in self-consciousness, the manifestation of which has often been 

 separated from the other branches of organic activity, no less erroneously 

 than its essence (according to the notion of the materialists) has been 

 considered as the sum or result of a certain corporeal mechanism*. 



We have already observed in our introductory remarks on the idea 

 of life, that the inward unity, or the highest idea of an individual or- 

 ganism, is by no means the effect or the result, but the ground and 

 cause, of external multiplicity, and this is also the case with the psy- 



* [Rather, — as the sum or result of the powers and properties, physical, vital 

 and sentient, with which the Creator has endowed the human frame. — Edit.] 



