§ 3. Only with respect to plants, less affection than sympathy. are moved the minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson that we have from the Mariner of Coleridge, and yet more truly and rightly taught in the Heartleap Well, "Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride, With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels;" and again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that anguish of our own "Is tempered and allayed by sympathies, Aloft ascending and descending deep, Even to the inferior kinds." So that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole Theoretic faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect, than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself, cat, tiger, serpent, chaetodon, and alligator in one; and gathers into one continuance of cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that brutes sparingly and at intervals use against each other for their necessities. As we pass from those beings of whose happiness and pain we are certain, to those in which it is doubtful, or only seeming, as possibly in plants, (though I would fain hold, if I might, "the faith, that every flower enjoys the air it breathes,") yet our feeling for them has in it more of sympathy than of actual love, as receiving from them in delight far more than we can give; for love, I think, chiefly grows in giving; at least its essence is the desire of doing good, or giving happiness. Still the sympathy of very sensitive minds usually reaches so far as to the conception of life in the plant, and so to love, as with Shakspeare always, as he has taught us in the sweet voices of Ophelia and Perdita, and Wordsworth always, as of the daffodils, and the celandine: "It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold. But its necessity in being old :" and so all other great poets1; nor do I believe that any mind, however rude, is without some slight perception or acknowledgment of joyfulness in breathless things, as most certainly there are none but feel instinctive delight in the appearances of such enjoyment. proportioned to the appearance of Energy in the Plants. For it is matter of easy demonstration, that setting the characters § 4. Which is of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form is in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy. In a rose-tree, setting aside all the considerations of gradated flushing of colour, and fair folding of line, which its flowers share with the cloud or the snow-wreath, we find, in and through all this, certain signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and strength in the plant. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be constantly exercising that function, and as it seems, solely for the good and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that reflection will show us that the plant is not living for itself alone, that its life is one of benefaction, that it gives as well as receives; but no sense of this whatsoever mingles with our perception of physical beauty in its forms. Those forms appear to be necessary to its health; the symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant's own happiness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they give us pleasure in our sympathizing with that of the plant; and if we see a leaf withered, or shrunk, or worm-eaten, we say it is ugly, and feel it to be painful, not because it hurts us, but because it seems to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and disease and failure of life in it. That the amount of pleasure we receive is in exact proportion to the appearance of vigour and sensibility in the plant, is easily proved by observing the effect of those which show the evidences of it in the least degree, as, for instance, any of the cacti not in flower. Their masses are heavy and simple, their growth slow; their various parts, if they are ramified, jointed on one to another, as if they were buckled or pinned together instead of growing out of each other: and the fruit imposed upon the body of the plant, so that it looks like a swelling or disease. All these circumstances so concur to deprive the plant of vital evidences, that we receive from it more sense of pain than of beauty; and yet, even here, the sharpness or the angles, the symmetrical order and strength of the spines, the fresh and even colour of the body, are looked for earnestly as signs § 5. This sympathy is unselfish, and does not regard utility. of healthy condition; our pain is increased by their absence, and indefinitely increased if blotches, and other appearances of decay, interfere with that little life which the plant seems to possess. The same singular characters belong in animals to the crustacea, as to the lobster, crab, scorpion, &c., and in great measure deprive them of the beauty which we find in higher orders; so that we are reduced to look for their beauty to single parts and joints, and not to the whole animal. Now I wish particularly to impress upon the reader that all these sensations of beauty in the plant arise from our unselfish sympathy with its happiness, and not from any view of the qualities in it which may bring good to us, nor even from our acknowledgment in it of any moral condition beyond that of mere felicity; for such an acknowledgment belongs to the second operation of the Theoretic faculty (compare § 2.), and not to the sympathetic part which we are at present examining; so that we even find that in this respect, the moment we begin to look upon any creature as subordinate to some purpose out of itself, some of the sense of organic beauty is lost. Thus, when we are told that the leaves of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its happiness is gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure. The bending trunk, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us.' The same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost its beauty. It serves as a bridge, it has become useful; and its beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent on its lines and colours, not on its functions. Saw it into planks, and, though now adapted to become permanently useful, its beauty is lost for ever, or to be regained only when decay and ruin shall have withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand of nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides with hues of life. 1 "Exiit ad cœlum ramis felicibus arbos." There is something, I think, peculiarly beautiful and instructive in this unselfishness of the Theoretic faculty, and in its abhorrence of all utility to one creature which is based on the pain or destruction of any other; for in such services as are consistent with the essence and energy of both it takes delight, as in the clothing of the rock by the herbage, and the feeding of the herbage by the stream. with respect to animals. But still clearer evidence of its being indeed the expression of § 6. Especially happiness to which we look for our first pleasure in organic form, is to be found in the way in which we regard the bodily frame of animals of which it is to be noted first, that there is not anything which causes so intense and tormenting a sense of ugliness as any scar, wound, monstrosity, or imperfection which seems inconsistent with the animal's ease and health; and that although in vegetables, where there is no immediate sense of pain, we are comparatively little hurt by excrescences and irregularities, but are sometimes even delighted with them, and fond of them, as children of the oak-apple, and sometimes look upon them as more interesting than the uninjured conditions, as in the gnarled and knotted trunks of trees; yet the slightest approach to anything of the kind in animal form is regarded with intense horror, merely from the sense of pain it conveys. And, in the second place, it is to be noted that whenever § 7. And it is we dissect the animal frame, or conceive it as dissected, and sub- evidences of stitute in our thoughts the neatness of mechanical contrivance for mechanism. the pleasure of the animal; the moment we reduce enjoyment to ingenuity, and volition to leverage, that instant all sense of beauty ceases. Take, for instance, the action of the limb of the ostrich, which is beautiful so long as we see it in its swift uplifting along the Desert sands, and trace in the tread of it her scorn of the horse and his rider, but would infinitely lose of its impressiveness, if we could see the spring ligament playing backwards and forwards in alternate jerks over the tubercle at the hock joint. Take again the action of the dorsal fin of the shark tribe. So long as we observe the consistent energy of motion in the whole frame, the lash of the tail, bound of body, and instantaneous lowering of the dorsal, to avoid the resistance of the water, as it turns, there is high sense of organic power and beauty. But when we dissect the dorsal, and destroyed by § 8. The second cerned with life, is justice of moral judgment. find that its superior ray is supported in its position by a peg in a notch at its base, and that, when the fin is to be lowered, the peg has to be taken out, and, when it is raised, put in again; although we are filled with wonder at the ingenuity of the mechanical contrivance, all our sense of beauty is gone, and not to be recovered until we again see the fin playing on the animal's body, apparently by its own will alone, with the life running along its rays. It is by a beautiful ordinance of the Creator that all these mechanisms are concealed from sight, though open to investigation; and that in all which is outwardly manifested, we seem to see his presence rather than his workmanship, and the mysterious breath of life rather than the adaptation of matter. If therefore, as I think appears from all evidence, it is the sense of felicity which we first desire in organic form, those forms will be the most beautiful (always, observe, leaving typical beauty out of the question) which exhibit most of power, and seem capable of most quick and joyous sensation. Hence we find gradations of beauty, from the impenetrable hide and slow movement of the elephant and the rhinoceros, from the foul occupation of the vulture, from the earthy struggling of the worm, to the brilliancy of the moth, the buoyancy of the bird, the swiftness of the fawn and the horse, the fair and kingly sensibility of man. Thus far then, the Theoretic faculty is concerned with the happiness of animals, and its exercise depends on the cultivation of the faculty, as con- affections only. Let us next observe how it is concerned with the moral functions of animals, and therefore how it is dependent on the cultivation of every moral sense. There is not any organic creature but, in its history and habits, will exemplify or illustrate to us some moral excellence or deficiency, or some point of God's providential government, which it is necessary for us to know. Thus the functions and the fates of animals are distributed to them, with a variety which exhibits to us the dignity and results of almost every passion and kind of conduct: some filthy and slothful, pining and unhappy; some rapacious, restless, and cruel; some ever earnest and laborious, and, I think, unhappy in their endless labour; creatures, like the bee, that heap up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them, and others employed, like angels, in endless |