SUSPENDED ANIMATION. 117 



It is the interpolation of the higher life and endurance into the 

 organic movement; breathless but deathless moments set in the 

 midst of the wear and tear of the tissues; chemical moth and rust 

 ceasing their gnaw, and incorruptibility paramount in the corruptible. 

 So the body represents the proper mind ; the intellect sinks a shaft 

 into the flesh, making it dramatic of the moments that we live 

 beyond sense and passion. Man would not be embodied if that 

 which is best in him were not bodily set forth. The lungs then in- 

 troduce this transcendent representation, and the mOral virtues that 

 inhabit this order of intelligence commune with the organs through 

 their means. They put down the body, give it the lesson of death or 

 self-denial, and frame in it still windows of experience opening to the 

 timeless state. They emancipate the mind for the occasion from the 

 stimulus of the passions. In short, they embody the moral intel- 

 lect, or give the frame a hyper-animal life not lying in physical 



stances, the will thus brought into the topmost muscles (those of the eyes), and 

 which has riveted the feet, will begin to rivet the muscular attention from above 

 downwards. And although the eyes close, if the will be kept up, rigidity will 

 invade the jaws, then the arms, and then the legs — producing a state like cata- 

 lepsy. These facts are familiar to those who are acquainted with Mr. Braid's 

 admirable discoveries in Hypnotism. It is upon this principle that lockjaw, at- 

 tacking the high ranges of muscles about the jaw, runs down the inclined plane 

 of the muscular system, locking it as it goes, and bringing muscle after muscle 

 in tributary streams to constitute tetanus. And it is by acting on the still higher 

 point of the muscles of the eyes, that this disease may be commanded from 

 muscles loftier than its own origin. By the force of this inclined plane system, 

 the expressions of the face tend naturally to produce the gestures of the arm and 

 the postures of the body, which maybe looked upon as torrents of will, that have 

 come down at first in little streams from the mountain springs of fleshly action in 

 the countenance. 



Thus the muscular frame is all made for concurrence, and forces which act upon 

 one part of it, tend to be diffused through it, as through a contimtum, but with a 

 difference of function according to the regions. The expression of the face, which 

 is the dial plate of the general mind, is the mainspring and clockwork of the 

 active body. Upon this principle, we see that smiles precede laughs, that 

 clenched jaws go before clenched fists, and, in short, that expression not only 

 anticipates but also stirs action. 



These considerations furnish fresh evidence that the body is solidaire ; that 

 whatever the head does, the trunk does in its way, and the limbs in theirs: in 

 short, that man is so formed as to act only in wholes, each full size. In this way 

 we are constructed upon the principles of poetic unity, the mind and the body 

 being but one volume written out in the rhymes of the brain and the lungs. 



