THE COMMUNION OF THE FEELINGS. 215 



But we have to notice further a point touched on in the preceding 

 pages, viz., the mixture by emissary rills of the blood in the various 

 cavities (p. 189). On our principles, it is a psychological necessity, 

 and must suggest long trains of experiments. Nothing, we know, 

 can be more mixed or miscible than the great primordial feelings, 

 and the mixtures can never take place without mixtures between 

 the blood of the contiguous chambers. To instance only the case 

 of the conjugal and parental relations, how could these subsist unless 

 by the most liberal communications? The parental love generally 

 contains the conjugal, and vice versa. The feelings, as four pure 

 atoms, would be as barren as nature's chemistry if it consisted only 

 of simple substances. In fact we may say that the main office of 

 the heart consists in blendings; in the intertwinement of private 

 and public life ; in making countless binary, tertiary and other com- 

 pounds of the feelings. In proportion to the combination, life 

 arises, rich, delicate and lovely from the ground of a few simple 

 elements, and fair kingdoms adorn what would otherwise be a stony 

 level. On the purely moral side, the object of all existence and 

 circumstance, is to produce single-heartedness throughout the rela- 

 tions; to universalize every feeling by tincturing it with the rest; 

 to absorb the egotism and correct the weakness of each through 

 something of a wider love inserted into each from the others; in 

 short, to give the heart its last unity, by impregnating the private 

 with the public, and carrying the former into developments, and the 

 latter into exactitudes, that neither could attain on its own account. 

 Therefore in the feeling heart, which is the true fleshly heart in con- 

 tradistinction to the stony, mixture or communion are the law of 

 life; and we arrive at the deduction that the heart is a high forum 

 of intercommunication. The chambers are exclusive enough to con- 

 stitute separate ends, but not to realize that fancied independence 

 and unneighborliness which nature abhors. For nothing is so fluid 

 as feeling; nothing knows so little of walls as love; of barriers as 

 ambition ; of difficulties, whether fire or water, as friendship ; or of 

 time's weary limits, as family joy. And thus we conclude on this 

 side that the truths of communion are those which are proper to the 

 heart ; and that they are greater than the truths of trade or circula- 

 tion, which are proper to the arteries. 



