THE HEART'S PASSION FOR THE BLOOD. 203 



corresponds to the love of human life by its everlasting grasps and 

 embracings of human blood. By its deeds we know it. 



It may however be said of this reason, that when we see other 

 persons acting, we infer that they have feelings of a particular kind, 

 because in similar actions of our own we experience these feelings 

 ourselves : but that the works of our hearts are not a parallel case, 

 and therefore we cannot argue that hearts have feelings. To this 

 we answer, first, that hearts, as we proved before, have feelings, and 

 we will not be dispossessed of a truth which we have got. More- 

 over we are not arguing that question, but are investigating how 

 hearts show their feelings ; and we have now found that they do 

 this as we ourselves do. But secondly, we do not say that the case 

 between our feelings and theirs is parallel, but correspondent and 

 like ) and of the attribution of feelings and life in this way, com- 

 mon sense gives many examples. Why do we attribute passions 

 to the tiger or the dog, or gentle feelings to the lamb, but because 

 we know that passion and feeling may descend many stages beneath 

 our consciousness, and alter so that we can never experience them, 

 and yet be passion and feeling still ? All we contend for is, that 

 the heart is similarly circumstanced ; that it is in no sense dead, 

 but as the old anatomists said, " the animal in the animal ;" in 

 which case we treat it as we treat the animal kingdom, and infer 

 life, feeling, instinct, ends, as the account of its operations. Our 

 own experience and faculties are therefore as fair an organon for 

 our study of the heart and the other viscera, as for the investi- 

 gation of natural history, to all whose subjects, feeling and thought 

 give their own lives, in the certainty that they will fit, and more 

 than fit, the case. And in proportion as the feeling is broad and 

 common, and the thought scientific, the better does this method 

 succeed in exploring the actions and habits of the lower creatures. 

 We design then here at first to show, that we may safely, and must 

 inevitably, transplant that life which we understand, into the heart, 

 as we have already carried it into zoology. 



Dismissing this general sign, of the heart's eagerness, passion or 

 love for the blood, and noticing that it is common to all the four 

 chambers, we have now to come to details, or to the specific auricles 

 and ventricles. 



