286 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



thing, than adoption, or rejection is involved. Consciousness, for 

 this purpose as well as others, is largely porous, or full of blanks 

 and oblivions for what is not agreeable. Sleep is its great hole or 

 mouth through which stuff is put away, and a thousand slumbers 

 to one thing and wakings to another, vacancies, forgetfulnesses, and 

 assumed ignorances, are the pores by which it rids itself of thoughts 

 and memories, and refuses them a longer footing in the mind. By 

 consciousness also we stand in the universe of mind, and feel it in 

 all forms and structures, as though mind were matter, and nature 

 the caprice and building of a grand idealism. 



In the state the skin-principle is the sense of right, which implies 

 the former principles, space, nature, self and mind, and is the citi- 

 zen's motive of self-defence, for we are jealous of our rights as of 

 our skins. These rights are our social selves, our honors and shin- 

 ing parts, which make the faces of freemen lustrous, and are plain 

 manliness in the state. Courtesy and manners are the dyes of this 

 social skin. Moreover, according to his rights the citizen is mea- 

 sured, for they are his stature j where they are small he is small, 

 and where they are absent no citizen is seen. At any given period, 

 there is only a certain quantity of social space or room, whence each 

 right is compressed by its fellows, yet the world of rights is we 

 know not how elastic, and the state can expand, or make new rights, 

 as fresh worlds introduce new spaces, and as self engenders other 

 selves. This sense of right is the limit, defence, and reformer of 

 the citizen ; it sifts the state continually to eliminate old laws and 

 habitudes, and opens it to allow for new : and moreover it is sur- 

 rounded unwittingly by the rights of new eras, which it is one day 

 to embrace ; for its nature is the gradual assumption of all virile 

 togas from the wardrobes of liberty in the state. 



like them because they are pleasant ? This, we reply, is not a question, but a 

 question and answer, and wants no further answer. But if it be said, Why are 

 they pleasant? that is a different matter, but involves only your account of your 

 own pleasure. The ground of the soul's doings is, because it likes to do : and 

 the ground of the body's doings is, because it qtfasi-likes, or acts as a material 

 soul : this is its intelligible magnetism. 



Let us then bear in mind, that the self-knowledge of consciousness, and the 

 self-examination of conscience, are the lights of the eliminatory and purificatory 

 offices of the skin. When the figures are thus obtained, we revert to the dead 

 algebra, and find plain numbers underlying it throughout. 



