206 THE HUMAN HEART. 



mixing-vessel or chaos of the heart. Parentage and non-age have 

 both disappeared, and the area is equality and fraternity. The com- 

 mon feelings of man to man, philanthropy or the friendly affections, 

 are at work here ; those feelings which know of no distinctions, but 

 only of brotherhood, toleration, and even-handed intercourse. In 

 the family loves the tie is unequal, descending from parents to 

 children, but in no similar proportion reciprocated ; this being neces- 

 sary in the beginning of the circulation, in which progress as a 

 spring of pressure is the wheel that sets the rest in motion. In the 

 philanthropic passions, however, the tie is double, coming from both 

 sides ; hand grasps hand ; the muscular contraction of the organ is 

 closer ; the ventricle of our friendship is of twofold strength. Here 

 then we have the blood-population in the fiery palace of the heart, 

 themselves all feeling, with no distinction of high or low, old or 

 young, father or child, and what direction can the feelings take but 

 that of universal community, of friendship in its various phases ? 

 The mere apposition of lives in such a place, and under these cir- 

 cumstances of unrestraint, is sufficient to produce the relation that 

 throws down the walls of other distinctions between man and man. 

 We augur then that the friendly emotions play especially upon the 

 right ventricle; that it is there they are felt, and there they live, 

 and enter the blood, giving it this tie momentaneously, as a needful 

 element in the constitution of the bodily society. 



In these investigations let us never lose sight of the keeping of 

 the subject; of the fluid which we are pursuing, and which is both 

 blood and life ; and of the organ, which is Loth heart and feeling, 

 that is to say, heart in both senses. Blood in the heart is different 

 from blood in the head or the belly ; in the former case it is alive 

 with passion ; in the latter, it hungers and thirsts ; while in the 

 head it is subordinated to spirit. Each organ has its genius loci, 

 which possesses everything, even the most transient guest, in the 

 organ. To come then within the sphere of the heart, is to feel and 

 to be all that the heart is and means; for the heart is haunted 

 ground, and there is no escaping its influences. So it is that when 

 youth and maiden come under the grasp of the heart, or when 

 life carries them into the sexual auricle, they are not the same peo- 

 ple, nor have they the same names, as when under the parental 



