234 THE HUMAN HEART. 



are objects of touch to the whole of the viscera; anxiety exists in 

 the mind as a trouble and a knot, which the consistent stomach 

 makes a knot in itself in order to feel. The viscera shape them- 

 selves upon the mental models that they may sensate the mental 

 states, as the hand makes itself into a cube or a sphere, to feel a 

 cube or a sphere. Thus the body is a set of sensories constantly 

 palpating the mind, by assuming forms which answer to the mental 

 states. It feels the ghosts of thought and passion, not by trying to 

 grasp them, but by making itself like them, and thus experiencing 

 the immaterial by representing it in a correspondent form. 



Providence also uses the sensorialness of the body as a means to 

 guide and shape our lives. For much arises in us without apparent 

 cause ; dictates, suggestions, feelings, calm, seeming to come from 

 afar, and influencing us in important respects. Such vibrations 

 arise from within, and are the passions of passions and the motions 

 of motions. But motions in the organs, however produced, become 

 our own, whether their causes are internal or external to our being. 

 Within our being, work Providence and his ministers, and fate, in- 

 stinct, and succession of thought, are the play of the supreme 

 agencies, not unaccountable since we are all made of sensories, which 

 in their veriest ground are in contact with a higher life than our 

 own. The harp of a thousand strings is a good metaphor for this 

 human frame touched into melody by such divers hands, and espe- 

 cially by Him named of David, the Chief Musician. And as the 

 viscera are so constructed as to hear for us the whispers of the wis- 

 dom of Providence, it is not surprising that their feelings also are 

 the source of many presentiments, or that coming events cast their 

 shadows before, through these trembling fleshly groves; for the 

 main actors in life are already beyond time and history, and put 

 their fatal forethought into the piece, which then speaks, sometimes 

 audibly, of the future as present, and of the distant as here. It 

 was therefore by a remote application, that the augurs consulted 

 entrails as the voices of the gods, and interpreted oracles from the 

 sacrificial quiverings. For the intestine parts are telegraphic of 

 what is and was and shall be, as it were wires for the electricity of 

 ends, which runs by wisdom's way, from the future to the present. 

 These deeply-buried natures are even as the Vala awakened by Odin 



