282 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



In the realm of growth the same skin-principle has a new name, 

 and there we call it nature, the expression and limit of growth, or 

 the vegetable term. This is the end of that kingdom, which clips 

 it in and gives it bounds. The nature of trees is, to rise so high, 

 and no higher; to be fast in their places ; to be immiscible with other 

 trees; to be attached to climates and fostered by seasons; to be limit- 

 ed by each other, and to be annual or perennial, and die when their 

 vegetable space and time are passed. Their nature also is growth 

 itself; the bud transpires through the bark and unfolds into the 

 leaves, and the flowers transpire and unfold in their turn, like ver- 

 durous skies steaming out of the brown earth, and brilliant vapors 

 collecting into petals like little suns in the cope. For their nature 

 is to live in space and represent it, ranging minutely from its head 

 to its feet. Furthermore, by the nature of the vegetable kingdom, 

 the tendencies that it cannot hold, escape it, and the animal king- 

 dom is evolved on its outside, created among its unbounded parts ; 

 and this nature is the end of development. For all is developed 

 from growth as all lives from life. The animals are as apparitions 

 to the trees and herbs; they come and go out of the dead spaces 

 by no vegetable law ; and by nature the science of stiff stumps avers 

 that animals are illusions, but that birdless and beastless wilder- 

 nesses are vegetable orthodoxy and truth. 



We are now upon another skin-principle, a third space and a se- 

 cond nature, namely that of animals, and the name of this principle 

 is Self, which is the limit of the love of pleasure or animal heart 

 (p. 248) ; for the beasts love only those pleasures that please them- 

 selves. They assimilate what suits themselves ; they go whither 

 they will ; they breathe for themselves ; their instincts are for them- 

 selves; in a word, wherever they run they are contracted to them- 

 selves, which is the same as to say that self bounds them, or 

 is their skin. Self, however, is the surface and slumber of every 

 animal passion; for passions, or the life that " suffers itself" to be 

 provoked, begin from the skin. Hence self-defence, in which nature 

 seconds passion, and gives shaggy hair to one, horns and hoofs to 

 another, beak and claws to a third. And as self is a faculty highly 

 jealous, it incites every part for its own, that is to say, for self-defence. 

 Again, when self is touched by pleasure, it opens and lets in the 



