Part 21

Thirdly, I know nothing by which I can see more clearly my future reviewer's perplexity for want of _materia peccans_ to censure, than this, that he sticks to such pitiful trifles--in future--as the following evidently are, that I, e. g., have appended this Preface, that I have bound the work in four separate Parts, and by this fourth part have made, for an earlier possessor and bookworm, the sheet-worm[131] of the old edition wholly useless. From the like specimens and sayings, wherewith such a Spartan Ephor Emerepes will rob me of the fourth and highest string, which I stretch on my fiddle full of rising fifths, let the indulgent reader form an idea how the whole of the Review must look. I am ashamed to go on.

Fourthly, I find universally, that, if an author in his Preface charges himself with a slight fault, which, however, he himself hardly believes, then the critics forthwith adopt and double this charge, as, among the Romans, a suicide who failed to accomplish the act was afterward regularly executed. If the author, having his eyes thus opened, strikes into another line, and bestows upon himself, beforehand, some praise,--and that not apparent,--_this_ is not even accepted, not to say doubled. In that case the Devil may be speaker of the prologue!--

Meanwhile he seems also to be only Reviewer, and less a sly than a coarse customer. Many and really glaring incivilities, however, I willingly forgive my future reviewer, whereas I pardon nothing to a Gallic or British one, because he knows how one should treat people.--I play with him myself in this anticritique in no specially polite manner, nor do I, as the peasant doffs his hat before higher lightnings, doff mine before his. Besides, the judges after the Special Recension address the defendant as "thou." A mild (critical) winter is unwholesome to him upon whom it comes. For the rest, I simply wait and watch for the hour when I shall be celebrated and have on laurel-leaves: then I shall not, any more than other contemporaries who have now set up laurel-trees, suffer any one to find fault with me; and few will undertake it, just as on pictures which have been smeared with _laurel oil_ no flies alight.

Fifthly and finally. It is well known that the deceased authoress, Ehrmann, when the advocate Ehrmann had accepted and noticed with much approbation one of her works in the Strassburg Gazette, married him on account of the review. If the editor of some journal play his cards so adroitly that a female coadjutor in the magazine shall welcome and announce my Second Edition of Hesperus (or Star Venus) with the admiration which the First Edition universally receives on account of its charms; and if he will only tip me a wink as to the sex of my reviewer,--in which connection, however, _this_ must be looked to, that the critical person shall be, on the whole, still in the best blooming period of a reviewer's life, wherein one can still readily feel and impart and favorably review the fire of the Evening Star or Venus, and so much the more, as even in physics only green wood is a conductor of the electrical flame, but dry a nonconductor,--if the editor will see to and execute all this, then the author of this anticritique pledges himself with his signature to wait upon the coadjutress immediately after the receipt of the review, and with the usual ceremonies to marry her.

JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.

Hof in Voigtland, June 8, 1797.

NINTH INTERCALARY DAY.

VICTOR'S ESSAY ON THE RELATION OF THE SOUL TO THE ORGANS.

Victor was an enemy to the exclusive taste in philosophy quite as much as in poetry. On all systems--even of the heretics of Epiphanius and of Walch--the form of truth is imprinted, as the human form is in the bestial kingdom, although in bolder and bolder lines. No man can believe in nonsense proper, although he may speak it. Singular it is, that precisely the _consequent_ or consistent systems, without the atomic _Clinamen_[132] of feeling, deviate from each other the most widely. Systems, like the passions, only at the focal distance throw the brightest point of light upon the object;--how pitifully, e. g., does the great theory of self-subjugation run out of _Christianity_ over into _Stoicism_,--then into _Mysticism_,--then into _Monachism_, till the stream spreads out and oozes away into _Fohism_, as the Rhine loses itself in the sand!--The theory of Kant, with all logical systems, has this tendency to run into sand, and has that deflection[133] of feeling in common with the inconsequent ones, which brings together the wasting arms again to a renewing fountain-head. The two hands of the Pure Reason, which in the antinomy[134] scratched and beat each other, the Practical Reason peacefully joins together, and presses them, folded, to the heart, and says, here is a God, a Conscious Person, and an Immortality!----

Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered (not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration, microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of the book of nature to another, _whereby one gets its words indeed, but not their sense_. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to the _finding_, but to the _proving_ and confirming of truth; for which he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner.

* * * * *

THE ESSAY.

If I wrote it in Göttingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me. Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who want to transform my soul into my body.

The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and protecting bark of that tender pith.--And as all the changes of the world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of the fœtus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance, and ascends with--sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig is a tree in miniature, accordingly--for all this is not a correspondence of wit, but of nature--the nervous ganglia are fourth cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian[135] membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence, e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the nervous spirit, (or whatever one will assume--for after all it comes back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the two galleries of the two eyes would have to pass through the two prongs of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.

Consequently the image in the eye, ear, &c., if it is to serve any purpose, must be felt forward on the point of the nerve,--in one word, it is even more absurd to shut up the soul in the locker[136] of the fourth ventricle of the brain, i. e. in a pore of this tubercular plant, than it would be if one who, like me, ascribes an animating soul to the flower, should imprison the same in the ground-story of the dull kernel. Rather would I, surely, locate the soul in the finest honey-vessels of the senses, the eyes, than in the insensible brain, if I did not, in fact, believe that, like a Hamadryad, it inhabits and warms and stirs every nervous bough of this animal plant. The under-tied or severed nerve conveys, it is true, no further sensation, not however on account of the interruption of the connection with the soul and residence chamber in the brain, but because the nutritious spirit of life is cut off from it; for the nerves, like all finer organizations, need so much a continuous supply of food, that the arrested beating of heart and artery suspends in one minute all their powers.

I go further and say outright, beforehand,--by way of contradicting two errors: these organs do not feel, but are felt; secondly, the organs are not the condition of all feeling in general, but only of a certain kind.

The last first: as the organ (i. e. its changes), which is as much a body as any gross object, whose own changes it brings in contact with the soul, is nevertheless felt by the spiritual nature immediately and without a _second_ organ: accordingly all corporeal substances give the spiritual essence sensations as well as the nerves do, and an unembodied soul is not possible, for the simple and sole reason, that in case of the dissolution of the body it would then wear the whole material universe as a heavier one.

My first assertion was, one should not say the _perceptive_, but the _perceived_ organization. The nerves do not feel the object, but only change the place where it is felt, and their changes and those of the brain are only _objects_ of sensation, not _instruments_ thereof, nor in fact sensation itself. But wherefore?--

I have more than one Therefore. A body is capable only of motion, although, to be sure, that motion is only the show of the aforementioned combination and the result of the powers concealed in simple parts. The string, the air, the auditory ossicles, the auricular nerves, vibrate; but the vibration of the latter no more explains the sensation of a tone than the vibration of the string could, if the soul were chained to that. Thus, despite all images in the eye and brain, the _discernment_ of them is still not yet made out or explained; or will you say, perhaps, that for some such reason as this, because the senses are _mirrors_ full of images, therefore the spiritual _eye_ is dispensed with or made good? And does not the change of the nerve presuppose a second in a second essence, if it is to be perceived? Or does another motion in this essence represent the first motion?

This brings me to the brain. That greatest and grossest nerve--the sounding-board of all the others--shows up to the soul the delineations of those images which are introduced by the rest. Upon the whole, I am of opinion that the brain serves more the nerves of the muscles, the veins of the limbs, which meet in the hand of the soul, and all, in fact, more as nourishing root, than it serves as a case of instruments to the pictorial soul. As most of our ideas are served up on visual images, and take from them their ground color, it is probable we think more with the optic nerve than with the brain. Why is it, as Bonnet has observed, that deep-thinking wearies the eyes and sharp-seeing the brain? Why do certain excesses blunt at the same time the memory and the eyes? The fever-images playing their antics outside of the eyes of the sick and people of lively fancy, like Cardan, who saw in the dark whatever he thought vividly and glowingly, are explained in my hypothesis.

In regard to the brain there are two errors; but Heaven save my friends only from one of them. For from the other Reimarus can guard them, who has fully proved that the brain is no Æolian harp with trembling strings, nor a camera-obscura with sliding pictures, nor a barrel-organ with pins for every idea, which the spirit turns, in order of itself to play to and from itself its ideas. If now not even the pre-established _harmony_ of the brain and the mind, nor the mutual _accompaniment_ of the two, is conceivable, so is their _identity_ absolutely impossible; and this is precisely the error from which the abovementioned Heaven has to keep my friends. The materialist must first set up all that which Reimarus has overthrown; he must petrify in the brain-pap the millions of picture-cabinets of seventy years, and yet again make them movable like _Eidophysica_,[137] and deal out the shuffled card-images to every second of time; he must see to it that these _animated_ dancing images are forced into rank and file. And then, after all, and only then, does his difficulty properly begin; for now--even if we grant him that the images see themselves, the thoughts think themselves, that every imagination darkly mirrors all others, and even the conscious "I," as a monad, does the universe--now (we say) he must first get him a generalissimo who shall command and array this immeasurable, fluctuating host of ideas, a compositor who shall set up the idea-book from an unknown manuscript, and, when dreams, fevers, passions, have shaken all the letter-cases into _pi_, shall rearrange all the letters alphabetically. This ruling unity and power--without which the _symmetry of the microcosm_ is as inexplicable as that of the _macrocosm_, that of _the ideal world_ as that of the _actual_--is precisely what we call a spirit. To be sure, by this unknown power neither the origin nor the succession of ideas is _mediated_ or explained, but, assuming only the known force of matter, motion, all that is not only incredible, but absolutely impossible; and Leibnitz can more easily explain motion by dark imaginings, than the materialist can imaginings by motions. In the former case motion is only semblance, and exists only in the second contemplating being, but in the latter the representation would be show and would exist in the second--_representing_ substance.

I have often quarrelled with men of the world who make good observations and miserable conclusions, because in case of the least dependence of the soul upon the body--e. g. in old age, intoxication, &c.--they made the one a mere repeating-work of the other; nay, I have even said, no dancing-master was so stupid as to conclude: "Inasmuch as I dance awkwardly in leaden shoes, more nimbly in wooden ones, and best of all in silk ones, I see clearly from this, that the shoes have special springs to communicate rapidity; and as with leaden shoes I can hardly lift my feet, if I were barefoot I could hardly make out a single _Pas_." The soul is the dancing-master, the body the shoe.

We cannot conceive any action either of bodies upon bodies or of monads upon monads; consequently, of the organs upon the conscious being, still less. This we know, that the cohesion and community of goods between soul and body is always the same, or at most greater at the times when others would expect it to be less; for the greatest depth of thought, the holiest emotion, the highest flight of fancy, are precisely what need the waxen wing-work of the body most, as its consequent exhaustion also gives assurance; the more incorporeal the object of the ideas is, so much the more corporeal hand-and-draught-services are necessary to the holding of it fast, and at most the periods of stupid sensuality, of spiritual enervation, of blear imbecility, are the ones with which we must make coincide the periods of liberation from the chains of the body. Even the moral power with which we trample down wanton, upshooting bodily impulses works with bodily crows and tools; and the soul in this case merely summons the brain against the stomach.--Add to this, that the limits and hindrances to such fettering and unfettering are as little to be assigned as the causes of the same. Still less can the bonds of the soul, as some think, grow looser and longer in dream. Sleep is the rest of the nerves, not of the whole body. The involuntary muscles, the stomach, the heart, keep on working therein, not much less than when one lies down awake. Only the nerves and the brain, i. e. thinking and perceiving, are suspended. Hence slumber refreshes men while riding and driving, who therefore rest nothing but the nerves. Hence weak-nerved patients, whom all rest wearies, are refreshed by dreamless sleep. By the way, without the theory of _disorganization_ which assumes negative and positive nervous electricity, the phenomena of sleep are inexplicable;--e. g. it is inexplicable in that case, why opium, wine, manipulation, animality, childhood, plethora, nourishing food, perfumes, on the one hand, are precisely what promote sleep; while, on the other hand, torture, exhaustion, old age, temperance, pressure on the brain, winter, loss of blood, fear, grief, phlegm, fat, spiritual enervation, also provoke it.----At most in deep sleep, when the nerve-body rests, could we suppose the soul loosed from earthly chains; in dream, on the contrary, it should rather be supposed the more closely fastened, because dreaming, as well as deep thinking, which also locks the gates of the five senses as well, is surely no sleeping. Hence dreams wear out the nerves, to the inner overstrainings of which they add outer impressions. Hence morning lends both the brain and our dreams equal animation. Hence the sleeping animal--except the effeminate tame dog--has no unhealthy dreams. Hence even Aristotle assigns unusual dreams as forerunners of the sick-nurse. Hence--I have now dreamed enough, and the reader has slept enough.--

37. DOG-POST-DAY.

The Amoroso at Court.--Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.--Defence of Courtly Back-bending.

On the morning after that great night Victor took leave of this consecrated burial-ground of his fairest days with unconcealed tears. Often he looked back on these ruins of his Palmyra, till nothing of them was left standing except the mountain-ridge as a fire-proof wall. "When I come back hither four weeks hence," thought he, "it will only be to see the death-angel lay my Emanuel on the altar and under the sacrificial knife." He bethought himself how dearly he paid for this feast of tabernacles by the death of a friend;[138] and how the latter, without such compensation, suffered just as great a loss. For he felt that the frightful word "scoundrel" had now come in as an eternal wall of rock between their sundered souls.--He called to mind, indeed, and right gladly, what there was to acquit his late friend, particularly his being hounded on by Matthieu and his listening when _he_ swore eternal love to Clotilda; nay, he even suspected that the Evangelist had perhaps let poor Flamin see far in the background peculiar motives (these suggested by the Apothecary) for a love, by whose object the favor of the Prince was to be secured,--but his _feelings_ incessantly repeated to him: "He still ought not to have _believed_ it!--ah, hadst thou only," said he with emotion, at the sight of the city, "pierced me with balls or with other terms of contempt, that I might have easily forgiven thee!--But that thou shouldst have done it with just this ever-gnawing venomous sound!"--He is right; the injury of honor is not therefore the less, because the other inflicts it from full conviction of right.--For the conviction is precisely the offence; and the honor of a friend is something so great, that a doubt of it should hardly dare to arise except by its own confession. But thus do separations easily grow out of little concealments, as from March _clouds_ July _tempests_. Only a perfected noble soul can forbear to try any longer the tried friend,--can believe when the enemies of the friend deny,--can blush as at an impure thought, when a dumb, flying suspicion soils the gracious image,--and when at last the doubts are no more to be conquered, can still banish them for a long time from one's actions, willing rather to fall into an economical improvidence than into the heavy sin against the Holy Spirit in man. This firm confidence is easier to deserve than to have.

In the noisy foundery and mill of the city he felt as if in a dreary forest. Accustomed as he was to tender souls, the city ones appeared to him all so thorny and unpolished; for love had, like tragedy, purified his passions in exciting them. All hung over so ruinous and moss-grown as if on the verge of a collapse, whereas the clean mirror-walls of Maienthal rose firm and radiant. For love is the only thing which fills the heart of man to the brim, although with a nectar-foam that soon sinks again; it alone composes a poem of some thousand minutes without the rattling repetitions of the letter R, as the Dominican Cardone[139] executed a poem upon it quite as long under the name _L' R_-- _sbadita_[140] without a single R,--hence, like crabs, it is finest in the months without an R in their name.

The first thing he had to do in Flachsenfingen was to write to Clotilda. For as the Evangelist Matthieu would now in all probability go out into all the world and preach the gospel of the pistol-duel between the two friends to all people, there was nothing else to do for the sacred reputation of his beloved than to transform her into a betrothed by a publicly declared engagement. Flamin's newly kindled passion could not be considered at all in comparison with Clotilda's justification. The exclamation, "Thou art my brother," which the convulsions of anguish had wrung from Clotilda, had of course been incomprehensible to Flamin, and had fallen unheeded on his ear; but for the listening Mat it had become a grand text and _dictum probans_ of his doctrinal system respecting their being brother and sister.--In the letter, therefore, Victor besought his friend for a tacit assent to his suit; he left it to her, by his silence, to guess the most disinterested motives of his prayer.