Pernety - A Treatise On The Great Art.pdf - cyjack.com

The Great Art page 35“Our Life is short and tedious, and in the death of a man there is no remedy: neither was thereany man known to have returned from the grave.“For we are born at all adventure: and we shall be hereafter as though we had never been; forthe breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark, in the moving of our heart:“Which, being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish asthe soft air . . . .“Come on, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present: and let us speedily use thecreatures like as in youth . . . .“Such things they did imagine, and were deceived: for their own wickedness hath blindedthem.“As for the mysteries of God, they knew them not: neither hoped they for the wages ofrighteousness, nor discerned a reward for blameless souls.“For God created man to be eternal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity."One sees clearly in this chapter the distinction between mind and soul. The former is an igneousvapour, a spark, a fire, which gives animal life and movement to bodies, and vanishes in the air whenthe organs are destroyed. The Soul is the principle of the actions of the will and of reason, andsurvives the destruction of the body and the dissolution of the mind.Consequently this chapter explains these words of the same author, (Ecclesiast. chap. III, v. 19):“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the onedieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man has no preeminence over a beast:for all is vanity.” This igneous vapour, this spark of light animates the body of Man and puts in playall its resources. In vain will one seek for the particular place where the soul makes its residence,while it commands as a master. It is the particular abode of this spirit which it would be necessary toseek; but vainly would one wish to determine it. All the parts of the body are animated by it; it isdiffused everywhere. If the pressure of the pineal gland, 28 or the callous body, arrests the action ofthis spirit, it is not because it dwells there in particular, but because the resources which the spiritemploys to put in play the machine, end there mediately or immediately. Their action is hindered bythis pressure; and the spirit, although diffused everywhere, can no longer make them act.The tenuity of this igneous vapour is too great to be apparent to the senses, except by its effects.The minister of God and of the Soul in Man, it follows in the animals only the impressions and lawswhich the Creator has imposed upon it in order to animate them, to give them the movementconformable to their species. It accommodates itself to all, and is specified in man and the animalsaccording to their organs. Whence comes the conformity which is noticeable in a great number of theactions of men and beasts. God uses it as an instrument by means of which the animals see, taste,smell and hear. He has constituted it under His orders the guide of their actions. He specifies it ineach of them according to the different functions which it has pleased Him to give to their organs.Whence the difference of their characters, and their different manners of acting, yet always uniformas to each one in particular, taking always the same road to arrive at the same aim, when no obstaclesare found in it.28 Descartes placed the seat of the soul in the brain, in the small gland Glandula pinealis, situated between the OpticThalimi and Corpora quadrigemina.E.B.