parts of the body, the highest and the lowest, have a sympathy with one
another more intelligent than conscious intelligence can yet, or perhaps
ever will, conceive; that there is not an organic motion, visible or
invisible, sensible or insensible, ministrant to the noblest or to the
most humble purposes, which does not work its appointed effect in the
complex recesses of the mind, and that the mind, as the crowning
achievement of organization, and the consummation and outcome of all its
energies, really comprehends the bodily life."--MAWDESLEY, Body and Mind.

"It is an indisputable truth that what we call the material world is only
known to us under the forms of the ideal world, and, as Descartes tells
us, our knowledge of the soul is more intimate and certain than our
knowledge of the body."--HUXLEY.



INTRODUCTION.

S 1.


Many philosophers have asserted that the body is, as it were, the
prison-house of the spirit, holding it only too firmly to what is
earthly, and checking its so-called flight towards perfection. On the
other hand, it has been held by another philosophic school that knowledge
and virtue are not so much an end as a means towards happiness, and that
the whole perfection of man culminates in the amelioration of his body.

Both opinions [1], methinks, are one-sided. The latter system has
almost entirely disappeared from our schemes of ethics and philosophy,