Chapter 4
The Life Instinct Acts In Extension
375. A principal property of the life instinct's mode of operation is its action in the continuous, extended element. This property is shown by the fact that animal feeling naturally diffuses itself in a continuum, as we have seen. The feeling principle therefore acts in all points of the felt continuum (cf. 94-103). We note that the action of the life instinct must be simultaneous and without the least interval of parts in its term, because the continuum cannot exist unless its assignable parts are contemporaneous and without any interval between them.(175)
We see therefore that the nature of animal feeling requires the action of the life instinct to be simultaneously, not successively, diffused in a given extension, because the life instinct is precisely that which is generated by feeling throughout the whole extension occupied by feeling.
376. This fact is important, and explains many phenomena of animal activity.
For example, if we grant for certain that the tonicity of the capillary vessels
carrying the blood to the skin is an effect of the life instinct of the soul,
such an effect will be contemporaneous, not successive. Pallor, for instance,
as an effect of fright, does not appear first at one point on the face and then
gradually spread; it appears simultaneously over the whole face or in an
extended part of it, because the frightened soul removes simultaneously, not
successively, the capillaries' force to carry the blood to the extremities.
In the same way we understand how different limbs of a living body can all
undergo variation and change in the same place simply by the soul's change of
action, which is unimpeded by the mutual distance of the limbs.(176)
Notes
(175) The action under discussion can indeed restrict itself to a more or less extended continuum.
(176) Serious consideration of this would have prevented the introduction of strange hypotheses to explain the action exercised by the soul in different parts of the body. According to these theories the soul acts at a distance, which is a contradiction in terms. Moreover, there is here, under the form of excessive spiritualism, a material concept, because action at a distance presupposes real proximity and distance of place between soul and body. But relationships of this kind can exist only between bodies or extended elements. Johann Jakob Hentsch published a dissertation, Meditationes de harmonia mentis humanae cum corpore sibi juncto, cujus causae exquiruntur, whose principal thesis is the following: `The human mind is endowed with a force or energy to move the fluid matter in the nerves of the body by means of ACTION AT A DISTANCE without any energy passing into the body' (cf. the Leipzig Acta, 1759).