210 THE HUMAN HEART. 



the public or arterial sides of the heart, but it might seem as if 

 this left auricle and the passion that lives in it were both of them 

 of an intensely private character. Let there be a great distinction 

 noted then between private and secret functions. A friendship that 

 is noticed by all the world is not the less a private friendship, 

 whilst a marriage consummated in the most secret bower, and in 

 the bosom of midnight, is public and regular notwithstanding. 

 The council-chambers of nations are most secret, and yet most 

 public in their relations ; they resume the state in a concentrated 

 form. Hence the public chambers, or left side of the heart, retire 

 from view to transact the public business of the feelings ; the pri- 

 vate business is comparatively open and forward, and is not meddled 

 with because it is known. 



But is the sexual relation arterial, aerial, or public ? Philoso- 

 phers discuss at great length the me and the not me, and the rela- 

 tion between them. There is no such instance of this as sex, which 

 is me and not me reciprocally ; each incommunicable to the other, 

 and each fitting and enjoying the other. Man's most external world 

 (for he has several) is woman, the living mould of himself and his 

 faculties. In her he first knows that there must be real size in the 

 feelings, or two beings, who may be conjoined, but cannot be iden- 

 tified, could not be together there. In short, sex or distinction is the 

 beginning of breadth and body, of resisting spaces which can never 

 sink into each other, but must lie side by side. Moreover the sex- 

 ual distinction is the most manifest between human beings, and the 

 dress which makes it secret makes it public also. 



We repeat then that the left auricle is that in which the analogue 

 of love proper is introduced into the blood, and where, by the laws 

 of harmony, that love is physically felt in the blood which is doing 

 its work infinitesimally. The reasons of this in brief are, that the 

 first adolescence of the blood is passed here, and love crops existence 

 in its bloom ; that it moves with the right or family auricle, there 

 being a co-existence of the conjugal and parental ties; that it leads 

 into the patriotic heart or left ventricle; the state being the congre- 

 gate of all the broad or spacious relations, of which marriage is the unit 

 and the beginning; finally, though at the top of the public impulses, 

 it is the most secret of the chambers, and is not merely the house, 



