no LIFE AND HABIT. 



and of whom we know no more, until some miscon- 

 duct on our part, or some confusion of ideas on theirs, 

 has driven them into insurrection, than we do of the 

 habits and feelings of some class widely separated 

 from our own. 



These component souls are of many and very dif- 

 ferent natures, living in territories which are to them 

 vast continents, and rivers, and seas, but which are yet 

 only the bodies of our other component souls ; coral reefs 

 and sponge-beds within us ; the animal itself being a 

 kind of mean proportional between its house and its 

 soul, and none being able to say where house ends and 

 animal begins, more than they can say where animal 

 ends and soul begins. For our bones within us are 

 but inside walls and buttresses, that is to say, houses 

 constructed of lime and stone, as it were, by coral 

 insects ; and our houses without us are but outside 

 bones, a kind of exterior skeleton or shell, so that we 

 perish of cold if permanently and suddenly deprived 

 of the coverings which warm us and cherish us, as the 

 wing of a hen cherishes her chickens. If we consider 

 the shells of many living creatures, we shall find it 

 hard to say whether they are rather houses, or part of 

 the animal itself, being, as they are, inseparable from 

 the animal, without the destruction of its personality. 



Is it possible, then, to avoid imagining that if we 

 have within us so many tributary souls, so utterly dif- 

 ferent from the soul which they unite to form, that 

 they neither can perceive us, nor we them, though it 

 is in us that they live and move and have their being, 

 and though we are what we are, solely as the result of 



