The capital defect of cold, arid natures is the
want of animal spirits. They seem a power incredible, as if God
should raise the dead. The recluse witnesses what others perform by
their aid with a kind of fear. It is as much out of his possibility,
as the prowess of Coeur-de-Lion, or an Irishman's day's work on the
railroad. 'Tis said, the present and the future are always
rivals. Animal spirits constitute the power of the present, and their
feats are like the structure of a pyramid. Their result is a lord, a
general, or a boon-companion. Before these, what a base mendicant is
Memory with his leathern badge! But this genial heat is latent in all
constitutions, and is disengaged only by the friction of society. As
Bacon said of manners, "To obtain them, it only needs not to despise
them," so we say of animal spirits, that they are the spontaneous
product of health and of a social habit. "For behavior, men learn it,
as they take diseases, one of another."
But the people are to be taken in very small doses.
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