ENDS ARE LIFE. 293 



which it subserves in the order of things, are its animating 

 principles. They are not abstractions, but spirits embodied in 

 works. They are not fluids, or solids, but human uses incarnate. 

 Above or beyond these there is no life in us ; but whatever is use- 

 ful or endful, God is with it, and that is its only life. If you look 

 for the life of friend or brother, it is the stature of himself work- 

 ing in his daily calling : no one part of him, but all parts and the 

 whole, kindling as he moves round his orbit of ends, into more 

 than the whole. Life is man and whatever is manly ; humanity 

 itself in the fire and work of development ; it is incapable of dis- 

 section, for it never can be seen but in play; whence the end of 

 anatomy is, to show that man cannot be anatomized. The desidera- 

 tum is, to see each portion of the body united with the whole in its 

 uses, when the life of the whole will come to the parts, and sum- 

 mon them to live. After which, that thing so often mentioned, 

 and so little conceived, namely, human anatomy as distinct from 

 cadaverous, will begin ; for the life of our lungs and liver is as 

 inalienably human, as the life of Shakspeare, or of the English 

 nation. And then, moreover, the science of the body will lose its 

 grossness, for the moral and spiritual powers will have their ana- 

 logues in every chamber of the organs, and cleanness and chastity 

 will be busy maids among the useful furnitures of the flesh. 



If life consists in ends, there is a soul to entertain them ; and 

 wants and desires imply mankind beforehand. For we assume the 

 soul, as also the existence of an imperishable humanity. It is a 

 venerable creed, like a dawn on the peaks of thought, reddening 

 their snows from the light of another sun — the substance of imme- 

 morial religions, the comfort of brave simplicity, but the doubt of to- 

 day, and the abyss of terrified science. Let it come, however, scien- 

 tifically, in the ghastliness of hypothesis, and let us work with it, 

 and see what it is worth; and treating the question of life under that 

 formula, let us proceed to the connection between the whole and the 

 part, or between the body and the soul. 



This is another branch of the same problem, which bewilders 

 speculation, because we go away from the meaning of human life, 

 thinking to attain to some indescribable life separate from our na- 

 ture. As we said when speaking of life, so we repeat in this new 



9** 



