13 



Motion then, being inadmissible in proof of painful sen- 

 sation, let us next examine that speculation of the French 

 physiologist, to which allusion has been made, which has 

 not been, so far as I know, pressed into this service, 

 and which it is therefore somewhat generous to start 

 for the service of one's adversary. That the organic 

 sensibility, that by which the heart contracts upon 

 the blood, and the viscera on their contents, is the same 

 in hind as the animal sensibility, and so requires no par- 

 ticular order of nerves, was the doctrine of Bichat, an- 

 nounced in a sufficiently remarkable passage, which the 

 medical reader, at least, will not be sorry, from its great 

 ingenuity, to have again placed before him. " There 

 are two kinds of sensibility (says this eminent writer) ; 

 one purely organic, and the other the sensibility of rela- 

 tion. The organic sensibility is that inherent property by 

 virtue of which an organ receives an impression. Thus, 

 glands are sensible, in this sense only, to the stimulus of 

 blood which circulates in them ; and thus excretory ducts 

 react upon the fluids which they convey ; so that upon 

 this kind of sensibility depend the functions of circula- 

 tion, respiration, digestion, secretion, absorption, in a 

 word, all the functions of organic life. But the sensi- 

 bility of relation is that by which our organs are not 

 only impressionable to stimuli, but are enabled to trans- 

 mit, as well as to receive impressions, to a sensorium 

 commune. It is by this sensibility that the animal holds 

 communion with surrounding objects ; upon it de- 

 pend the phenomena of the brain and senses; it is its 

 peculiar province, and exclusive prerogative, to preside 

 over external, or, as it has been called, (for animals 

 alone possess it,) animal life the other kind of sensi- 



tolernbly painful, (as in spasms) still it is probable that we suffer by 

 the nerves of sensation, not by any abnormal exercise of the nerves 

 of motion, but even allow that this order of nerves were capable 

 of painful sensation or any sensations, this could only be true, pro- 

 vided there were a brain to which to transmit them. 



