196 THE HUMAN HEART. 



common speech, whether we be justified, and to what extent, in as- 

 signing feelings to the heart, and making a heart of the feelings ? 

 Whether the quickness of words be according to a method that the 

 structural heart has known and sanctioned? In short, whether com- 

 mon sense is a great instinctive anatomist, or not? Certainly, if it 

 could be shown that the passions belong to the heart, with all their 

 vocabulary; with the heat they receive from heaven, or summon 

 from the abyss; with the power they shoot through limb and brain; 

 with their play and balance at the core of society; with their issues, 

 circuitous and direct; with their countless insinuations, successions 

 and intermixtures; with their lava that lies at some depth under the 

 coldest action, and sustains the vaulted breast of man upon an oven 

 of flames; if they and their progeny, we say, could be charged upon 

 the heart, the scalpel would have new artifices to employ, to get a 

 sight of these wonderful natives, and the professors of death might 

 well be startled to see the children of fire walking among the sciences. 

 The question, therefore, becomes the more pregnant from the new 

 labors which an affirmative answer would enjoin, and from the alarm 

 which proof itself would cause to all but common people. 



What then is the nature of the evidence that the feelings live in 

 the heart? The evidence itself, we reply, if considered apart from 

 language, is a mere matter of feeling. Herein lies the strength and 

 weakness of the case, so far. The evidence, true to the organ, is 

 circular : the heart is a self-supplying knot of affirmations. Stat 

 pro ratione voluntas, is the heavy hammer of this logician. It is 

 because it is, is childish and hearty — a ring of wilful fire; there is 

 no reason in it any more than in the heart, which is a Yea, Yea, of 

 everlasting man, approving himself by living and by feeling. 



Feeling, however, thus affirmative and infinitely irritable, and in- 

 violable in its circle, gives no knowledge of the subject, and where 

 knowledge is in question, though feeling will not yield, yet of itself 

 it cannot conquer. If the case rested here, we could not infer, ex- 

 cept remotely, a constant connection between the heart and the emo- 

 tions. We might, or might not, remember the pulses of our own 

 passions; we might notice our acquaintances beating and striking 

 their breasts when the furies were at them ; and so a few violent 

 instances might fix themselves, iu which feeling and the heart were 



