4 THE BODY AT WORK 



the relation of the personality to the animal machine which it 

 occupies and operates ? For a few minutes a heart removed 

 from the body continues to beat. In a physiological sense it 

 is alive, although the body from which it was removed is dead. 

 Yet the personality does not reside in the heart, as many 

 generations of philosophers believed. It is merely an accident 

 that the body dies when the co-ordinating mechanism, the 

 heart, ceases to pump blood through its vessels. Nor is the 

 personality limited to the brain. Without the sense-organs 

 which place the brain in relation with the body, and owing 

 to the movements of the body by which the sources of 

 sensations of smell, sight, hearing are ascertained with the 

 world of which it forms a part, there would be no personality, 

 no Ego. Is it, then, coextensive with the body which exhibits 

 it ? A soldier returning crippled from the wars does not 

 finish out his days with his personality curtailed. We are no 

 nearer than was Plato to a definition of life. Such a discus- 

 sion soon takes us out of the realm of science. Science is 

 limited to the sphere in which the whole is greater than the 

 part. Take away consciousness, and personality ceases. 

 Guarantee that consciousness shall never return. The animal 

 is dead. When considering the propriety of vivisection we 

 must regard life and consciousness as inseparable. There can 

 be no question of right or wrong in regard to experiments on a 

 dead animal, even though a sensitive mind, from association, 

 shrinks from contemplating them. A person who dislikes the 

 idea of dissecting a dead animal is influenced by purely sub- 

 jective and personal considerations ; nor is he prompted by 

 sympathy with an unconscious animal when he recoils from the 

 spectacle of its still moving organs. The term " vivisection " 

 conveys too large a meaning. A negative term is needed, some 

 word which will hold the emotion of pity in check. Pity is mis- 

 placed when devoted to the unconscious subjects of physio- 

 logical experiment ; and, happily for animals, as for Man, 

 anaesthetics suspend conscious life. Only a person who has 

 undergone a surgical operation can understand how resolutely 

 the intellect declines to adopt as part of itself things which have 

 not come within its own experience. The nurse's testimony, 

 that a long interval separated the placing of the mask upon 

 the face and the commencement of that dull half-consciousness 



