LIFE. 291 



which covers continents, and lives for epochs. There are then in 

 the mind's optics vitreous substances of different degrees, which 

 magnify more and more. For example, the businesses of the great 

 world, the organs of the social man, are one power of lens with 

 which we peer into those of the individual man. Anthropology, or 

 the knowledge of races, with their large types, characters and 

 functions, are a still higher power, and the body under this glass 

 shows like a world of man, and a point in universal history. 

 Under the moral glass again the body is governed by miracle and 

 prophecy, and we look through the flesh as a gallery of new forms, 

 the plastic statues of the virtues. According to our eyes, we see 

 the human frame, either as a congeries of dots and molecules, as 

 children see the stars, or as an infinitesimal mankind, constituting 

 the smallest complete humanity, which is a single human body. 



We are now on another landing on the stair of truisms, and wo 

 affirm that humanity is the greatest human body, and the likest of 

 all things to the least or individual body. It has its brains in those 

 who are the presiding influences of the social universe ; its lungs 

 are in those who are the practical intellect of the ages, and the 

 voice of truth to the world ) its heart is the thousandfold love that 

 carries the races to their goals, the poets whose bold blood licks up 

 toward heaven, and talks in tongue-like alphabets to our own ; its 

 belly is the whole schooling of mankind, all the men and means 

 that have ever grown up, that hunger arid thirst to receive infants 

 and savages, and convert them into angels. Its skin is in those who 

 are the bonds of their state, which are nothing more than the lines 

 and currents of the social freedom, but looked at from without as 

 decorous beauty, or inviolable law. In this organization, each mole- 

 cule is an individual man, the account of whose functions depends 

 upon the constitution of the whole. 



So far it will be perceived, that life is the main clement of our 

 wants in physiology; which accords with common sense, for who 

 does not desire to be alive, and more alive, in whatever he does and 

 thinks ? Yet nothing has so much agitated our science, as that 

 which ought to be its greatest blessing — Life ; nothing has seemed 

 so much beyond it as that life which is the first perception of in- 

 fantine reason, and the joy of even the beasts and birds; nothing 



