Perspiration

“ But, furthermore, thought commences and corresponds with respiration. The reader has before attended to the presence of the heaving over the body; now let him feel his thoughts, and he will see that they too heave with the mass. When he entertains a long thought he draws a long breath; when he thinks quickly, his breath vibrates with rapid alternations; when the tempest of anger shakes his mind, his breath is tumultuous; when his soul is deep and tranquil, so is his respiration; when success inflates him, his lungs are as tumid as his conceits. ”

“ Again, to one who complained that with every breath he took he had to contradict himself, respiration being as necessary to his breathing as inspiration, just as in walking falling is as necessary as rising, we might properly and satisfactorily reply: "You are really alive, sir," and just this answer is also quite pertinent to any who might be disposed in their doubting to despair over the essential duplicity of human experience. ”

“ A keen sensation--pain--and you become aware. Subconscious processes then become consciously recognized. I bruise your lung for instance; you become conscious of that lung for the first time, and feel it. You gather it up from the general subconscious background into acute personal consciousness. Similarly, a word or mood may sting and stimulate some phase of your consciousness usually too remote to be recognized. Last night--regions of your extended Self, too distant for most men to realize their existence at all, contacted the consciousness of the Earth herself. ”

“ Consider first the relation of your soul to your body. That is infinitely mysterious, is it not? An emotion rises in your soul, and a flush of blood marks it. That is the subconscious mechanism of your body. ”

“ For the soul breathes.
The soul breathes.—Why not speak in metaphors?
Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world—he thought—which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made our own. ”

“ The contraction of the diaphragm and the expansion of the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles and the rotation of certain joints, are examples. We learn that the causes of such groups of feelings are multiple, and therefore we frame theories about the composition of the feelings themselves, by 'fusion,' 'integration,' 'synthesis,' or what not. But by direct introspection no analysis of the feelings is ever made. A conspicuous case will come to view when we treat of the emotions. Every emotion has its 'expression,' of quick breathing, palpitating heart, flushed face, or the like. ”

“ The body must be kept perfectly still and motionless for a long period—so that it may pass entirely out of consciousness—and the thoughts fixed on the regulated calm tide of respiration, to the complete exclusion of every other subject. ”

“ It was her brain that was active, racing and shuddering from one frightening mental picture to another, while her body, young, sound, healthful, fell deeper and deeper into torpor, dragging the quivering mind down to healing depths of oblivion. ”

“ These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty excites us. And these symptoms also result when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. ”

“ Is it the shining of the Psyche we perceive within ourselves when through aspiration the body becomes filled with interior light and consciousness is steeped in a brilliancy of many colours while the eyes are closed? ”

“ When fervent and rich affections are called forth, the heart-beats are heavier, and respiration is longer-drawn and deeper. Affections of a passionate nature set the blood and body as it were on fire. ”

“ Moreover, these cases, in which the production of feeling and thought is hindered by determining the nervous energy towards bodily movements, have their counterparts in the cases in which bodily movements are hindered by extra absorption of nervous energy in sudden thoughts and feelings. If, when walking along, there flashes on you an idea that creates great surprise, hope, or alarm, you stop; or if sitting cross-legged, swinging your pendent foot, the movement is at once arrested. From the viscera, too, intense mental action abstracts energy. ”

“ How do the "spirits" manipulate the nervous organism, and particularly the brain, of the medium? Upon what cells or centres do they operate? and how? Does the psychic constitution of the communicator affect the results—and if so, how? What is the condition of the communicator's mind while communicating? Is the medium's spirit entirely removed from the body during the process of communication? and if so, where is it, and what is it doing? How does the medium's mind affect the content of the communications—and to what extent? ”

“ Such knowledge we call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor. For by consciousness they meant, as usual, objective consciousness only. And from the cardiac plexus goes forth that strange effluence of the self which seeks and dwells upon the beloved, lovingly roving like the fingers of an infant or a blind man over the face of the treasured object, gathering her mould into itself and transferring her mould forever into its own deep unconscious psyche. ”

“ Thus in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions; as, on the other hand, it sometimes happens, that our impressions are so faint and low that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas. ”

“ There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology) , and these increase the assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. ”

“ When we tell a person that we love him “with all our heart,” this expression signifies, physiologically speaking, that his presence, or the recollection of him, awakens in us a nervous impression, which, transmitted to the heart by the pneumogastric nerve, causes in our heart a reaction of such a kind as to produce in the brain a sentiment or an emotion. In man, the brain, in order to express its feelings, is obliged to take the heart into its service. ”

“ We dissolve back, out of the upper consciousness, out of mind and sight and speech, back, down into the deep and massive, swaying consciousness of the dark, living blood. At the last hour of sex I am no more than a powerful wave of mounting blood. Which seeks to surge and join with the answering sea in the other individual. ”

“ And vice versa, a sudden word or thought may cause our heart to jump, check our breathing, or make our knees as water. There is a whole new literature growing up which studies the effects of our bodily secretions and our muscular tensions and their relation to our emotions and our thinking. ”

“ Our remoter spiritual, material, and social selves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glow and a warmth; for the thought of them infallibly brings some degree of organic emotion in the shape of quickened heart-beats, oppressed breathing, or some other alteration, even though it be a slight one, in the general bodily tone. ”

“ Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energy which seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, instead of soothing or calming, to awaken strange yearning agonies of pain, ghostly unquiet longings, and endless feverish, unrestful cravings. ”

“ General psychopathology.—In the light of all these well-known physiological effects of emotion it is apparent that when an idea possessing a strong emotional tone, such as fear or its variants, enters consciousness, it is accompanied by a complex of physiological reactions. In other words, fear, as a biological reaction of the organism to a stimulus, does not consist of the psychical element alone, but includes a large syndrome of physiological processes. 441We can, indeed, theoretically construct a schema which would represent the emotional reaction. ”

“ This early association of motions and sensations persists throughout life; the passion of fear produces a cold and pale skin, with tremblings, quick respiration, and an evacuation of the bladder and bowels, and thus constitutes the natural or universal language of this passion. ”

“ Under all these conditions one may have the liveliest subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, or of the more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central activity, with complete peripheral repose. Whether the subjective strength of the feeling be due in these cases to the actual energy of the central disturbance, or merely to the narrowing of the field of consciousness, need not concern us. ”

“ Tricks of speech and gesture, abnormal formations of the organs of the body, temper, emotion,—all transmitted in that tiny primordial atom! What has science done but induce us to believe the impossible? ”

“ Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each other at right angles, and moving to and fro. Our whole nervous organization is 'on-edge' at the thought; and yet what emotion can be there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that more of it may come? The entire fund and capital of the emotion here is the senseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse. This case is typical of a class: where an ideal emotion seems to precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing but an anticipation of the symptoms themselves. ”

“ Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one’s bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. ”

“ We have recognized two distinct mental states—the conscious and the unconscious—and have found them constantly pressing each on the other’s domain. Our study of consciousness reveals the normal in the aspects of sleeping and waking, also various abnormal states. Consciousness may become excited, depressed, confused, delirious, or insane. We shall consider later some of the mental workings that account for these abnormal expressions. At present let us examine the mind’s activities in sleep and in delirium. ”

“ And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder. ”

“ Visual sensations which, as co-ordinated, enable us to direct our movements, also, if vivid, raise the rate of respiration; while sensations of cold and heat, greatly depressing or raising the vital actions, serve also for purposes of discrimination. So, too, the feelings classed as emotions, which are not localizable in the bodily framework, act in more general ways, alike as guides and stimuli—having influences over the performance of functions more potent even than have most sensations. ”

“ But one little insidious tract, so difficult to control in all brains still young and human, showed a disposition to create startling and vivid pictures, to dream intensely, to cast up this woman’s face, fling it into his consciousness, with an automatic regularity that was like a diabolical challenge to his haughty will. ”

“ These impatient messages that are constantly coming up from every nerve and tissue in his body are registered in the brain, but they do not enter consciousness in their original form. Consciousness receives only an interpretation of them. ”

“ The contrasted emotions express themselves in similarly contrasted wise, by spasm and paralysis of the unstriped muscles, and for the most part alike in all the organs which are provided with them, as arteries, skin, and bronchial tubes. The contrast among the emotions is generally expressed by dividing them into exciting and depressing ones. It is a remarkable fact that the depressing emotions, like fear, horror, disgust, increase the contraction of these smooth muscles, whilst the exciting emotions, like joy, anger, etc., make them relax. ”

“ They pass through a physiological period of incubation, marked by palpitations and vaso-motor disturbances, rushes of heat to the head, headaches, præcordial anxiety, insomnia, agitation, fatigue, malaise, and undefined suffering. 2. The entrance into the psychological period is marked by the appearance of a fixed idea. Why one rather than another? This question will be examined later. The fixed idea, reigning as a tyrant in the consciousness, gives an aim to the tendency, determines its orientation. ”

“ We will call this soul psyche, the breath or shadow soul. It is a breath soul because it was the exhalation of the breath, perhaps, that first suggested these ideas; it is a shadow soul since it was the dream image, in particular, that gave to this soul the form of a shadowy, visible but intangible, counterpart of man. As a fleeting form, rapidly appearing and again disappearing, the shadow [Pg 206] soul is a variety of breath soul. ”

“ When they 'grow inattentive,' the feeling 'flies back' or 'jumps back,' to the stump. Every degree of consciousness, from complete and permanent hallucination down to something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they have. Indeed I have seldom seen a more plausible lot of evidence for the view that imagination and sensation are but differences of vividness in an identical process than these confessions, taking them altogether, contain. ”