The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
389). That the movement of the blood is also independent of the nervous system, at least of the cerebral nervous system, is shown by the fetus, which (according to Muller's Physiologie), without brain and spinal cord, has yet circulation of the blood.
And Flourens also says : " Le mouvement du cosur, pris en soi, et abstraction faite de tout ce qui n'est pas essentiellement lui, comme sa dure'e, son e'nergie, ne depend ni immMiatement, ni coinstantane'ment, du sysUme nerveux central, et consequemment c'est dans tout autre point de ce systtme que dans les centres nerveux eux-mimes, qu'il faut chercher le principe primitif et immtdiat de ce mouvement " (Annates des sciences naturelles p. Audouin et Brougniard, 1828, vol. 13).
Cuvier also says : " La circulation survit a la destruction de tout Vencdphale et de toute la raoelle epiniaire (Me'm. de Vacad. d. sc, 1823, vol. 6; Hist. d. I'acad. p. Cuvier," p. cxxx). " Cor primum vivens et ultimum moriens," says Haller. The beating of the heart ceases at last in death.
The blood has made the vessels themselves ; for it appears in the ovum earlier than they do ; they are only its path, voluntarily taken, then beaten smooth, and finally gradually condensed and closed up ; as Kaspar Wolff has already taught: " Theorie der Generation," § 30-35.
The motion of the heart also, which is inseparable from that of the blood, although occasioned by the necessity of sending blood into the lungs, is yet an original motion, for it is independent of the nervous system and of sensibility, as Burdach fully shows. " In the heart," he says, " appears, with the maximum of irritability, a minimum of sensibility " (loc. cit., § 769).
The heart belongs to the muscular system as well as to the blood or vascular system ; from which, however, it is clear that the two are closely related, indeed constitute one whole.
Since now the metaphysical substratum of the force which moves the muscle, thus of irritability, is the will, the will must also be the metaphysical substratum of the force which lies at the foundation of the movement and the formations of the blood, as that by which the muscles are produced. The course of the arteries also determines the form and size of all tha limbs ; consequently the whole form of the body is determined by the course of the blood. Thus in general the blood, as it nourishes all the parts of the body, has also, as the primary fluidity of the organism, produced and framed them out of itself.
And the nourishment which confessedly constitutes the principal function of the blood is only the continuance of that original production of them. This truth will be found thoroughly and excellently explained in the work of Eosch referred to above : " Ueber die Bedeutung des Blutes," 1839.
He shows that the blood is that which first has life and is the source both of the existence and of the maintenance of all the parts ; that all the organs have sprung from it through secretion, and together with them, for the management of their functions, the nervous system, which appears now as plastic, ordering and arranging the life of the particular parts within, now as cerebral, controlling the relation to the external world.
" The blood," he says, p. 25, " was flesh and nerve at once, and at the same moment at which the muscle freed itself from it the nerve, severed in like manner, remained opposed to the flesh.
Here it is a matter of course that the blood, before those solid parts have been secreted from it, has also a somewhat different character from afterwards ; it is then, as Eosch defines it, the chaotic, animated, slimy, primitive fluid, as it were an organic emulsion, in which all subsequent parts are implicite contained : moreover, it has not the red colour quite at the beginning.
This disposes of the objection which might be drawn from the fact that the brain and the spinal cord begin to form before the circulation of the blood is visible or the heart appears.
In this reference also Schultz says (System der Circulation, § 297) : " We do not believe that the view of Baumgarten, according to which the nervous system is formed earlier than the blood, can consistently be carried out; for Baumgarten reckons the appearance of the blood only from the formation of the corpuscles, while in the embryo and
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in the series of animals blood appears much earlier in the form of a pure plasma." The blood of invertebrate animals never assumes the red colour; but we do not therefore, with Aristotle, deny that they have any. It is well worthy of note that, according to the account of Justinus Kerner {Geschichte zweier Somnambulen, § 78), a somnambulist of a very high degree of clairvoyance, says : " I am as deep in myself as ever a man can be led ; the force of my mortal life seems to me to have its source in the blood, whereby, through the circulation in the veins, it communicates itself, by means of the nerves, to the whole body, and to the brain, which is the noblest part of the body, and above the blood itself."
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