252 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



CHAPTER V 



THE HUMAN SKIN. 



Of all the creatures of the natural world, man is intended as the 

 most finished, or, in other words, the most exquisitely finite, and the 

 skin is the instrument which first hems him in, and by limiting, com- 

 pletes and individualizes him. The skin is therefore his house and 

 stronghold ; the architecture of his frame; and this is the simple idea 

 of the numerous offices that it performs. Without this boundary, 

 the body would not contain its possessions, and would have no con- 

 tinence, outline and end, but be shed and dissipated in the univer, e. 

 Moreover the external skin is the outermost of a series of coverings 

 which extend to all parts of the frame, and to every particle of the 

 part. All these are skins, connected with the general skin, and as 

 we follow them through one depth of structure after another, we can- 

 not but arrive at the conception that they are the firmament in which 

 the organism is set, and that to take them away, would reduce the 

 body to an invisible essence, or at least to a fluid, to whose volume 

 we could no more assign a permanent shape than to the unsteady 

 atmosphere. The skin then contributes to the idea of life the com- 

 plementary functions of shape and form, which must pervade all 

 existences before they can take up any location, perform any act, or 

 become the organ, or object, of any faculty whatever. In a compre- 

 hensive sense, the skin, under a thousand forms, is the one vessel of 

 the human spirit; it is all that is tangent and tangible in us. With- 

 out it, the brains would have no receiver wherein to pour their in- 

 fluences ; the lungs would have no fulcrum whereupon to draw their 

 breaths ; and the heart, with the other parts, would redissolve into 

 their unbounded blood : in a word, as we said before, there would 

 be no body at all. 



