The liver: Biological sentinel against the pursuit of artificial perfection

“ The final destruction of that precious crucible of human existence, the individual personality, cannot be thought without contradiction. Everything in man is a drive toward being. If he is sane, man aims at becoming more and more himself, and to break the human fabric is to betray humanity itself. The Dead do not die, cries the old Roman in Belloc. But what can testify to this inner conviction when the senses themselves seem to mock the exigency of human nature for survival? ”

“ The liver is the chief fundament of kindly virtue, and greatest helper of the first digestion in the stomach, and the liver maketh perfectly the second digestion in the stomach, in the hollowness of its own substance, and departeth clean and pured, from unclean and unpured, and sendeth feeding to all the members, and exciteth love or bodily lust, and receiveth divers passions. ”

“ It is this--that a man is not what his rearing, his schooling, his beliefs, his principles make him, he is what his liver makes him; that with a healthy liver he will have the clear-seeing eye, the honest heart, the sincere mind, the loving spirit, the loyal soul, the truth and trust and faith that are based as Gibraltar is based, and that with an unhealthy liver he must and will have the opposite of all these, he will see nothing as it really is, he cannot trust anybody, or believe in anything, his moral foundations are gone from under him. ”

“ I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system. Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. ”

“ Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection—for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery—then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion. ”

“ Put a halter on a horse's head, a string through a bullock's nose,—that is the artificial.
"Therefore it has been said, do not let the artificial obliterate the natural; do not let will obliterate destiny; do not let virtue be sacrificed to fame. Diligently observe these precepts without fail, and thus you will revert to the divine."
If man does not set himself in opposition to God, the result will be Tao. ”

“ The liver, I say, then, is the nutrient organ of the body in which it is found; the mamma is the same of the infant, and the placenta of the embryo. And just as the mother forms more milk from her food than is requisite to sustain her own flesh and blood, which milk is digested and elaborated in the mamma; so do those animals, furnished with a placenta, supply to the fœtus nourishment which is purified in that organ. ”

“ Even as the umbilical veins absorb the nutritive juices from the fluids of the egg and transport them for the nutrition and growth of the chick, in its embryo state, so do the meseraic veins suck up the chyle from the intestines and transfer it to the liver; and why should we not maintain that they perform the same office in the adult? For all the mooted difficulties vanish when we cease to suppose two contrary motions in the same vessels, and admit but one and the same continuous motion in the mesenteric vessels from the intestines to the liver. ”

“ Sugar is an important source of energy for the muscles, and provision is made for a sufficiency of it always to be in [Pg 96] the blood circulating through them, and the storehouse from which it is derived is the liver. When the liver and muscles contain enough glycogen to keep the blood supplied with it, the excess of sugar is converted into fat, and is reconverted into sugar when there is a demand for it.
Mechanics of Digestion in the Intestines.—The intestinal movements, like those of the stomach, have recently been studied by means of the x-rays. ”

“ The principal organs which comprise the kinetic system are the brain, the thyroid, the adrenals, the liver, and the muscles. The brain is the great central battery which drives the body; the thyroid governs the conditions favoring tissue oxidation; the adrenals govern immediate oxidation processes; the liver fabricates and stores glycogen; and the muscles are the great converters of latent energy into heat and motion. ”

“ Some workers hold that the action of the pancreatic internal secretion is to control the sugar formation in the various sugar-forming organs, of which the liver is the chief, others that it dominates the utilization of sugar as a source of energy by the muscles. ”

“ We have thus far considered the normal roles played by the brain, the adrenals the liver, the muscles, and the thyroid in transforming latent into kinetic energy in the form of heat and motion as an adaptive response to environmental stimuli. ”

“ Myxedema subjects show a loss of physical and mental energy which is proportional to the lack of thyroid. Deficiency in any of the organs of the kinetic chain causes alike loss of heat, loss of muscular and emotional action, of mental power, and of the power of combating infections—the negative evidence thus strongly supports the positive. By accumulating all the evidence we believe we are justified in associating the brain, the adrenals, the thyroid, the muscles, and the liver as vital links in the kinetic chain. Other organs play a role undoubtedly, though a minor one. ”

“ Then the liver is a noble and precious member, by whose alteration the body is altered, and the liver sendeth feeding and virtues of feeding to the other members, to the nether without mean, and to the other, by mean of the heart.
Some men ween, that the milt is cause of laughing. For by the spleen we are moved to laugh, by the gall we are wroth, by the heart we are wise, by the brain we feel, by the liver we love. ”

“ When we see so many hepatic and splenetic patients whose temper depends entirely on the state of their abdominal functions, we feel disposed to forgive the materialism of the ancients, who placed the seat of so many passions in the liver; we remember unwillingly the Fervens difficili bile tumet jecur, the jecur ulcerosum of Horace, as synonymous of jealousy and violent love, and we understand how they could say that men splene rident, felle irascunt, jecore amant, pulmone jactantur, corde sapiunt. ”

“ All the faculties which we call the soul are nothing but functions of this gray substance, of this mass of intestines. The brain secretes thoughts, as the liver does bile. The orator concluded by saying that while humanity is ignorant of these truths it can not rise from its present state of barbarism. ”

“ Hence when a public dancing girl has screamed herself hoarse in the exercise of her calling, the leader of the troop makes her eat some of these worms, in the belief that thus she will regain her voice and will, after swallowing them, be able to scream as shrilly as ever.441 The people of Darfur, in Central Africa, think that the liver is the seat of the soul, and that a man may enlarge his soul by eating the liver of an animal. “Whenever an animal is killed its [pg 148] liver is taken out and eaten, but the people are most careful not to touch it with their hands, as it is considered sacred ”

“ Art, you say, spoils the graces, and corrupts the heart of woman; and at best can produce only a cold model of perfection; which though perhaps strictly conformable to rule, can never touch the soul, or please the unprejudiced taste, like one simple stroke of genuine nature.
I have often observed, dear Julia, that an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both. ”

“ Through this has come the limitless unhealthy folly of high living, in which human labor and time and skill are wasted in producing what is neither pure food nor pure pleasure, but an artificial performance, to be appreciated only by the virtuoso. Lower living could hardly be imagined than that which results from this unnatural race between artifice and appetite, in which body and soul are both corrupted. ”

“ Attacking the brain, they warp the judgment, and weaken the power of restraint. Avoid what is called good living: it is madness to allow the pleasures of the table to corrupt and corrode the human body. ”

“ Poor dear old Minister used to say, ‘Sam, you must instruct your conscience; for an ignorant or superstitious conscience is a snare to the unwary. If you think a thing is wrong that is not, and do it, then you sin, because you are doing what you believe in your heart to be wicked. It is the intention that constitutes the crime.’ Those sour crouts therefore, by creating artificial and imitation sin in such abundance, make real sin of no sort of consequence, and the world is so chock full of it, a fellow gets careless at last and won’t get out of its way, it’s so much trouble to pick his steps. ”

“ We are subject to a repletion of humours, useless and dangerous: whether of those that are good (for even those the physicians are afraid of; and seeing we have nothing in us that is stable, they say that a too brisk and vigorous perfection of health must be abated by art, lest our nature, unable to rest in any certain condition, and not having whither to rise to mend itself, make too sudden and too disorderly a retreat; and therefore prescribe wrestlers to purge and bleed, to qualify that superabundant health) , or else a repletion of evil humours, which is the ordinary cause of sickness. ”

“ Nothing at first can appear more difficult to believe than that the more complex organs and instincts should have been perfected, not by means superior to, though analogous with, human reason, but by the accumulation of innumerable slight variations, each good for the individual possessor. Nevertheless, this difficulty, though appearing to our imagination insuperably great, cannot be considered real if we admit the following propositions, namely,—that gradations in the perfection of any organ or instinct, which we may consider, either do now exist or could have existed, each good of its kind,—that all organs and instincts are, in ever so slight a degree, variable,—and, lastly, that there is a struggle for existence leading to the preservation of each profitable deviation of structure or instinct. ”

“ There will be a sluggishness of the liver and other vital organs, and a tendency to anemia, constipation, general lack of muscular tone and low vitality.
Active occupations exercise the natural processes of the body and create a necessity for the action of Innate in all parts of the body. Activity keeps the muscles in tone and makes the processes of elimination more active. Activity is one of Nature’s laws and is essential in the vital expressions of life in the body. ”

“ But if a perfect place for the fit, how hard a place is this world for the lazy, the ignorant, the stubborn, the weak, the physically and spiritually ill! So hard that a torpid liver is almost a mortal handicap, the stars in their courses 24 fighting against the bilious to defeat them, to drive them to take exercise, to a copious drinking of water, to a knowledge of burdock and calomel—to obedience and understanding. ”

“ On the other hand we guard against the vain pretension, which even here would fain assert itself: that man is the great arrière pensée of organic evolution! He is by no means the crown of creation, beside him, every other creature stands at the same stage of perfection.... And even in asserting this we go a little too far; for, relatively speaking, man is the most botched and diseased of animals, and he has wandered furthest from his instincts. ”

“ HOW THE PERFECT MAN TREATS THE BODY AND THE THINGS OF THE WORLD.
Those, then, who run down created existence and vilify the body are wrong; not considering that the frame of man was formed erect for the contemplation of heaven, and that the organization of the senses tends to knowledge; and that the members and parts are arranged for good, not for pleasure. Whence this abode becomes receptive of the soul which is most precious to God; and is dignified with the Holy Spirit through the sanctification of soul and body, perfected with the perfection of the Saviour. ”