258 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



their naked summits and tiny vortical brains. It is so individual, 

 that we can put forth almost a single papilla, as it were a finger 

 from the finger, and play with a little agony of quest round atomical 

 objects.* The lines of thought and purpose meet it, and set it 

 moving in curved explorations. These three species of touch in 

 their union, make touch itself into a substance, and give it over to 

 the mind, which communicates with the skin, not at first hand, but 

 through the mind of the skin. 



The skin, so far as we have considered it, isolates the man, and 

 makes him world-tight. It is, however, necessary that the world's 

 goods should come into his house, and that his own produce, not to 

 say refuse and wear and tear, should be carried forth : nay more, 

 that he himself should go out and in with the common freedom that 

 a man requires. The skin is our abode, and not our prison. It 

 must therefore have bivalve doors and windows, opening inwards 

 and outwards, and these, as small as the supplies that are to come 

 from without, and collectively as large as the spirit that is to step 

 forth from within. In short, the skin, that is to say, the body, 

 must be porous. 



The cuticle or superficial layer is a very permeable membrane, 

 and the more closely it is examined, the more porous it appears. 

 Three orders of perforations are visible upon it to the naked eye; 



* It is not perhaps easy to realize this statement, seeing that all the layers are 

 perraanetly united to each other ; but so are the parts of the nervous system, 

 which yet may be functionally separated, and the action of the higher, or 

 the lower, stopped oif by the force of the mind. We may lay it down as a 

 rule, that the process by which nature unites is also inversely the process by 

 which she separates, or that all her syntheses contain analyses, and vice versa. 

 It is necessary also to take into account the existence of spheres of life as 

 well as spheres of substances ; for the life of a part extends beyond it, and can 

 come bare to the surface, abrogating for the time the hindrance of whatever 

 parts lie between it and its object. It must be remembered that we are not now 

 treating of dead layers but of three cooperating lives, each of which abstracts 

 itself from the others as use requires. Hence the prodigious sensibility of the 

 skin, and the naked tenderness of the feelings in many cases. The difference 

 between papillary tact and cuticular touch is but a difference of animation. In 

 all cases the inner can be separated from the outer, and itself become the outer, 

 under favorable circumstances. The soul can be separated from the body, viz., 

 at death, and this is the universal of powers of abstraction or separation existing 

 everywhere in the body itself. 



