108 THE ARREST OF THE BODY. 



It is not he who is there, he cannot be there, or any- 

 where, for he is everywhere. The material part of 

 him is reduced to a symbol ; it is but a link with the 

 wider framework of the Arts, a belt between ma- 

 chinery and machinery. His body no longer gener- 

 ates, but only utilizes energy ; alone he is but a tool, 

 a medium, a turncock of the physical forces. 



Now with what feelings do we regard all this ? Is 

 not the crowning proof of the thesis under review that 

 we watch this evidence accumulating against the body 

 with no emotion and hear the doom of our clay 

 pronounced without a regret ? It is nothing to aspir- 

 ing Man to watch the lower animals still perfecting 

 their mechanism and putting all his physical powers 

 and senses to the shame. It is nothing to him to be 

 distanced in nimbleness by the deer : has he not his 

 bullet? Or in strength by the horse: has he not bit 

 and bridle ? Or in vision by the eagle : his field-glass 

 out-sees it. How easily we talk of the body as a 

 thing without us, as an impersonal it. And how nat- 

 urally when all is over, do we advertise its irrelevancy 

 to ourselves by consigning its borrowed atoms to the 

 anonymous dust. The fact is, in one aspect, the body, 

 to Intelligence, is all but an absurdity. One is almost 

 ashamed to have one. The idea of having to feed it, 

 and exercise it, and humor it, and put it away in the 

 dark to sleep, to carry it about with one everywhere, 

 and not only it but its wardrobe — other material 

 things to make this material thing warm or keep it 

 cool — the whole situation is a comedy. But judge 

 what it would be if this exacting organism went on 

 evolving, multiplied its members, added to its in- 

 tricacy, waxed instead of waned ? So complicated is 



