624 THE MOUNTAIN. 



gression of death. Alas ! that this should be through pain 

 to the soul. Stupendous joke of nature ! tyrannous law of 

 unity ! to the eye of science there are no fixtures, no spe- 

 cialties, no abysses or secrets, no novelties or wonders, no 

 high, no low, no new, no old only despotic law, eternal 

 change, everlasting motion, and death itself, but a "multi- 

 plication of self!!" 



As this perfected instrument, this summit of nature's or- 

 ganic developments, the wondrous body of man, is itself but 

 a bag of water, a sack of fluids, quivering with million vibra- 

 tions, whirling with million vortices churnings of ponderable 

 and imponderable, flowings of organic mucus, heat, light, and 

 galvanism all possible conditions of that structure, from first 

 salient point of life to retrogression into primary infusoria 

 again, or death, health, disease, normal symmetry, abnormal 

 deformity, and dissolution, can only be the tragical dance of 

 identical ponderable and imponderable, identical inorganic, 

 organic, and identical cell, in the tissue, the organ, the or- 

 ganism. But this movement and progression of the organic, 

 "with its multifariously complicated ascending and de- 

 scending vibrations, is sustained in every case only by reno- 

 vation," which renovation is the phenomenon of rejuvenes- 

 cence, " profoundly [inseparably!'] connected with the 

 essence, and lying at the base of all natural life." There is 

 thus no possible rejuvenescence in nature, except that which 

 commences with the cell, or the only point from which it is 

 possible for any organism to exist at all. The cell is the divine 

 focus of renovation, the cell is the sempiternal fountain of reju- 

 venescence. The philosophy of rejuvenescence, which is the 

 restoration (renovation) of the original vitality or expansive 

 life- power of the cell, whether arrested, defectively developed, 

 or morbidly endowed, whether injured by disease, or ex- 

 hausted by old age, is the philosophy of the venerable and 

 thrice-blessed Art of Healing. The body of man is sick, 

 agonized by intense morbid action, (acute disease, phlogistic 

 destruction of important organs,) or jaded and attenuated by 

 long-continued morbid degeneration, (wilting out by chronic 



