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All our working hours we are aware of hunger, satiety or indifference, of a desire to empty the intestine or bladder, or of a lack of necessity of doing so, of a state of tranquillity of the blood-vessels and sweat glands, or of a perturbation of them, of a varying tensity of even the muscles that are, as we say, under the control of the will, of the state, in fact, of all the elements of the vegetative complex.
It germinates, then, as the Vegetative, as the Sensitive, and as the Rational, and it branches out through the virtues or powers of all of them, guiding all those to their perfection, and sustaining itself in them always, even to the point when, with that part of our Soul which never dies, it returns to the highest and the most glorious Sower of the seed in Heaven; and it expresses this in that first part which has been mentioned.
In this stage it is no longer a god that causes and directs each of the various agencies of nature: it is a power, or a force, or an occult quality, considered as real existences, inherent in but distinct from the concrete bodies in which they reside, and which they in a manner animate. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has become a Plastic Force, and still later, a Vital Principle.
When there is a conflict between two or more instincts, between pressures of energy flowing in different directions, there may be compromise and normality, or a grinding of the gears and abnormality. Where does the brain come in, in all this? As the servant of the vegetative apparatus.
Thus the comfortable, healthy, happy, well-balanced, progressive, constructive, virile personality is one in whom there is a continuously harmonious reduction of the intravisceral pressures in the environment called society. For in a gregarious creature, like man, fellow beings are the most powerful determinants of negative and positive vegetative pressures.
The activity of children thus left to themselves has rarely a good result; it does not aid development, save as regards the physical advantage of general nutrition, that is, of the vegetative life. Their movements become ungraceful; they invent unseemly capers, walk with a staggering gait, fall easily, and break things.
First, a tiny rock, rising lonely from the blue brilliantly blue waves; then a yellow crag of sandstone, looking like a haystack; and then a whole group of wild and fantastic islands, evidently of volcanic origin, and varying in rough peaks and abrupt cliffs of the strangest colours brick-red, purple-black, grey, and yellow utterly bare and desolate: "Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower, Nor aught of vegetative power, The weary eye may ken,"
He has touched again the vegetative stupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the "blooming buzzing confusion" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have in all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures?
All the sternness of it is softened by vegetative beauty wherever it can possibly be thrown in; and there is not here, so strongly as along Windermere, evidence that human art has been helping out Nature. I wish it were possible to give any idea of the shapes of the hills; with these, at least, man has nothing to do, nor ever will have anything to do.
Many animals probably have this form of experience; they are not wholly submerged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern what they love or fear. Yet all this is still a disordered apparition that reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Now gorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the landscape brightens and fades with the day.
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