Solid body

“ Would any one have believed, unless taught by experience, that in the soft seed alike in all its parts there was deposited such a variety and number of great powers, or of masses, which in this way arise and become consolidated—I mean of bones, and nerves, and cartilages, of muscles too, and flesh, and intestines, and the other parts of the body? ”

“ Sound, Touch, Form, Taste and Smell. These Principles work through their counterpart-organs of the physical body which is composed of the five remaining Principles, viz., the Five Elements—Ether, Air, Fire, Water and Earth.
Now let us see how the physical body is composed of the five Elements. The vigor of our father and the blood of our mother, of which our physical body is made, are formations of assimilated food. Every kind of foodstuff, vegetable or animal, is but condensed form of earth's juice; earth-juice is earth. ”

“ Every physiologist knows that all the parts which compose the human body—solids as well as liquids—are successively absorbed and deposited. Hence ensues a perpetual renovation of them, regulated by the nature of our food and general habits. ”

“ But I must go still further, and affirm that in the eye of science the animal body is just as much the product of molecular force as the chalk and the ear of corn, or as the crystal of salt or sugar. Many of the parts of the body are obviously mechanical. Take the human heart, for example, with its system of valves, or take the exquisite mechanism of the eye or hand. ”

“ NOURISHMENT
The human body is constantly undergoing change. Atoms of bone, tissue, flesh, muscle, fat and fluids are constantly being worn out and removed from the system, and new atoms are constantly being manufactured in the wonderful laboratory of the body, and then sent to take the place of the worn-out and discarded material. ”

“ Now, to aid this, the whole organic structure must be taken into consideration—the limbs, senses, lungs, stomach, and above all, the condition of the spine; for each and all of those organs must be in a perfectly healthy state, and must perform their functions properly, or the brain will not be in a condition to receive and retain the impressions transmitted to it.
Nature is always beneficent, and is ever striving to correct and amend the evils inflicted upon the body by the vicious habits which are almost universally indulged in. ”

“ Augments and nourishes the human frame,
'Tis thine to know our veins and blood and bones
And thews are formed of particles unlike
To them in kind; or if they say all foods
Are of mixed substance having in themselves
Small bodies of thews, and bones, and also veins
And particles of blood, then every food,
Solid or liquid, must itself be thought
As made and mixed of things unlike in kind--
Of bones, of thews, of ichor and of blood.
Again, if all the bodies which upgrow
From earth, are first within the earth, then earth
Must be compound of alien substances. ”

“ The muscular, vascular and nervous tissues are each composed of chemical elements peculiar to themselves; and their atoms are so arranged, mechanically, as to form the muscles, arteries, veins, nerves, etc.
The human body is not only a compound physical structure, with all these tissues, organs, cells, etc., but life is added to all the other wonderful properties, which it possesses. ”

“ The physical apparatus of the body are preserved in the aggregate state and form, which are necessary for the performance of their functions by a definite chemical composition of the organs and the fluids which saturate them; and the source of the power required by the living body for its movements is to be sought for in the destruction of the compounds of which it is composed. ”

“ But precisely the same objection might be made by a chemist to the possibility of our fleshly bodies retaining their integrity and compactness: for the human body, taken as a whole, is known to be an impossible chemical compound, except for the vitality which upholds it ”

“ The natural world is so constituted that it can provide the material necessary for the formation of the body; materials for the skin, the bones, the flesh and blood, the nerves, and the nervous fluids. ”

“ We know such forces to be abundant in nature, and life is sustained by them. To find the substances in the body that causes them to act and how to act, has been the object of my journey as an explorer. If they give us health when normal action prevails and disease only when [Pg 67] abnormal, then we are admonished to form a more intimate acquaintance with the qualities, and with all the products, when formed in this great laboratory which compounds and qualifies each substance to fill its mission of force, construction, purity and action. ”

“ The molecules of these residual tissues which form the storehouse of energy in the body are rearranged in simpler forms, thereby giving up a portion of the energy which holds them together in the state in which they exist in the tissues, and this energy thus set free appears as muscle force, mental activity, glandular work and various other forms of functional activity. ”

“ Has not your acquaintance with the human body opened your mind's eye to observe that in the laboratory of the human body, the most wonderful chemical results are being accomplished every day, minute and hour of your life? Can that laboratory be running in good order and tolerate the forming of a gall or bladder stone? Does not the body generate acids, alkalies, substances and fluids necessary to wash out all impurities? ”

“ The existence of our bodies, and of external objects, is however held in uncertainty by every unprejudiced reasoner; for what is that extension of length, breadth, and thickness, which we call our body, and which seems to be so much our own, but as it relates to our senses? What are even the material organs of those senses, but so many conformities with the objects that affect them? ”

“ So the vital property is the primum mobile to which we must ascend, whether we consider the phenomena of respiration, of digestion, of secretion, circulation, inflammation, fevers, &c.—In giving existence to every body, nature has imprinted upon it a certain number of properties, that particularly characterize it, and by means of which it contributes in its own manner, to all the phenomena that are developed, succeed, and continually connect themselves in the universe. ”

“ And we know that a man’s leg, like all the cells of his body, is [19] largely compound of inert matter such as food products and waste products, besides being nine-tenths water—an inorganic substance. ”

“ The principle of life is always associated with organic bodies, examples of which are animals and plants. Quite a number of inorganic substances go to make up the human body,—to wit: Water, air, lime, magnesia, iron, potassium, sulphur, sodium, phosphorous, and many more. ”

“ When the idea of solidity is excited, as above explained, a part of the extensive organ of touch is compressed by some external body, and this part of the sensorium so compressed exactly resembles in figure the figure of the body that compressed it. Hence, when we acquire the idea of solidity, we acquire at the same time the idea of FIGURE; and this idea of figure, or motion of a part of the organ of touch, exactly resembles in its figure the figure of the body that occasions it ”

“ The mere outer form is a minor consideration, though also an important one, but this too is part of the work of the elemental. If the man has deserved the limitation of deformity in his physical body or of weakness in some of its organs — the heart, the lungs, the stomach — it is through the elemental that his karma is adjusted. Its instructions (if we may use such a term) are to build a body of a certain kind and degree of strength, and with certain characteristics brought into prominence. ”

“ Don’t you know that physiologists themselves admit that the human body is composed of eighty-five per cent water and fifteen per cent ordinary salts? Can such a combination have intelligence and sensation? Do you still believe that life is dependent upon lungs, stomach, or liver? ”

“ That the construction and organization of the human frame is in all men essentially the same. They have similar solids and fluids, viz., bones, cartilages, tendons, nerves, muscles, veins, arteries, flesh, blood, and other juices, body and parts, or members. ”

“ Does he mean that the untold millions of organic particles which make up a man all rushed together from the four quarters of the compass, and proceeded, spontaneously or by virtue of some divine sorcery, to aggregate themselves into the infinitely complex organs and tissues of the human body, with all their wondrous and well-defined aptitudes? ”

“ It is claimed that this work has been examined by learned scientific men, skilled in anatomy and physiology, and not a line or lineament of the skin surface of the human body has been omitted in this delicate, intricate carving. ”

“ The principal components of the body will naturally indicate and classify the topics for discussion in dealing with the subject of physical education. The body may be roughly described as an organisation of bones and muscles, permeated by blood, covered with skin, and containing a breathing and digestive apparatus.
The chief process by which life is maintained, and health and strength developed, is the receiving of food. That over-feeding and under-feeding are both bad is a truism. ”

“ These are called the base of all things, and upon this base the four bodies of man are raised, each from its own element. Thus the physical body is raised from the earth. The vital body is raised from the water, the emotional body from the fire, and the mental body from the air. ”

“ Only slight study is sufficient to reveal the fact that each organ performs a work which benefits the body as a whole. In other words, just as the organ itself is a part of the body, the work which it does is a part of the necessary work which the body has to do. ”

“ It is known that the source from which this portion of force is derived, is chiefly, or entirely, the force evolved in the processes of chemical composition and decomposition which constitute the body of nutrition; the force so liberated becomes a fund upon which every muscular and even every merely nervous action, as of the brain in thought, is a draft. ”

“ Your body—that which we all call our body—that which Flora Buttercup believes to be her body (for in this matter she does believe) will turn itself, through the prolific chemistry of nature, into various productive gases by which other bodies will be formed. ”

“ This is plainly self-evident; but when we consider how far-reaching are the facts thus obtained in promoting our understanding of the laws of growth of the human body, of the relationships of the various physiologically active and inactive tissues, of their development, of the character and extent of their activity, and of all the variations incident to pathological conditions, we see at once the great importance of this knowledge in aiding us to a rightful interpretation of physiological laws. ”

“ For the body itself is "fearfully and wonderfully made." Supported by over two hundred bones, which are welded together by ligaments and ten­dons, and again overlaid by hundreds of muscles—the bands and pulleys by which action and locomotion become possible—permeated by thousands of nerves which give sensibility and vitality to the living mass, and clothed by a soft and flexible skin which charms at once the eye and the touch. ”

“ In the physical man water constitutes three-fourths of the weight of the body. This being so we realize why, notwithstanding our sense of solidity and weight, chemical changes occur quite as readily in our organism as in the substances we see about us. ”

“ This single illustration covers a wider ground than the special function to which it belongs. We are learning that the chemistry of the body must be studied, not simply by its ingesta and egesta, but that there is a long intermediate series of changes which must be investigated in their own light, under their own special conditions. ”

“ The physical body of man is equipped with a corresponding order of microbic life which acts as an organic interpreter, translating the elements of food into blood, nerve, fibre, tissue and bone agreeably to the laws of their being. ”

“ The reader will thus be enabled to picture to himself his body, with its vital organs, clearly as in a mirror; he will become familiarized with its composition and twelve principal tissues, as well as with the sixteen elements of which they consist.
Man is a unit, and the human body an accumulation of millions of separate cells, which are centres of life and which, in different groupings and combinations, form the various organs that render existence possible. ”

“ A body lives as long as there is a proper renewal of the interior medium through exchanges with its environment.
Mechanical principles are operative in every part of the body—in the heart, in the arteries, in the limbs, in the joints, in the bowels, in the muscles; and chemical principles are operative in the lungs, in the stomach, in the liver, in the kidneys; but to all these things do we not have to add something that is not mechanical or chemical to make the man, to make the plant? ”

“ The physiological chemist has at length discovered that the human body, and every organ of that body consists of a certain number of chemical elements, which appear in different parts in different aggregations. These aggregations, however, repeat themselves in the various parts or organs. ”

“ By reading a book on anatomy you can learn just exactly the proportions of the substances in the human body.
All these chemicals are formed in the shape of little cells, myriads of which are in the body. These cells are constantly being destroyed and new ones made to take their place. ”