Civilisation : its cause and cure and other essays / by Edward Carpenter.

  • Edward Carpenter
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Civilisation : its cause and cure and other essays / by Edward Carpenter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    over a long period their insubordination may be a necessary condition of human progress, yet during all such time they are at war with each other and with the central Will ; the man is torn and tor¬ mented, and is not happy. And when I speak thus separately of the mind and body, it must be remembered, as already said, that there is no strict line between them ; but probably every affection or passion of the mind has its correlative in the condition of the body—though this latter may or may not be easily. observable. Gluttony is a fever of the digestive apparatus. What is a taint in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human system. The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct threats, menaces made against the central authority—against the Man himself. For the man must rule or disappear ; it is impossible to imagine a man presided over by a Stomach—a walking Stomach, using hands, feet, and all other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve its assimila¬ tive mania. We call such a one an Hog. [And thus in the theory of Evolution we see the place of the hog, and all other animals, as fore-runners or off-shoots of special faculties in Man, and why the true man, and rightly, has authority over all animals, and can alone give them their place in creation.] So of the Brain, or any other organ ; for the Man is no organ, resides in no organ, but is the
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