Science. Bodily Location of Human Happiness.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1923, 1 November 1884, Page 6

Science. Bodily Location of Human Happiness.

Dr. B. W. Eichardson, iv the Asclepiad, treating of felicity as a sanitary reseaich, observes : " The centre of the emotion of felicity is not in the brain. The centre is in the vital nervous system, in the great ganglia of the sympathetic, lying not in the cerebro- spinal cavities, but in the cavities of the body itself, near the stomach and in the heart. We know ■where the glow which indicates felicity is felt, and our poets have ever described it with perfect truthfulness as in the breast. It comes as a fire kindling there. No living being ever felt happy in the head ; everybody who has felt felicity has felt it as from within the body. We know, again, where the depression of misery is located ; our physicians of all time have defined that, and have named the disease of misery from its local seat. The man who ia miserable is a hypochondriac ; his affection is seated under the lower ribs. No man ever felt misery in the head. Every man who has felt misery knows that it springs from the body, speaks of it as an exhaustion, a sinking there. He is broken-hearted ; he is failing at the centre of life ; he is bent down because of the central failure, and his own shoulders, too heavy to be borne, feel as if oppressed by an added weight or burden, under which he bends as though all the cares of the world were upon him to bear him down." Commenting on this the Lancet Bays that, in other words, felicity is a physical result of a brisk and healthily full circulation of blood through the vessels supplying the ganglia of the great sympathetic system of nerves ; and whatever quickens and at the same time frees the flow of blood in these vessels particularly, engenders the feeling we call happiness. This is the fact, and we believe it explains the action of many articles of food and medicine and medical appliances. It, moreover, explains and confirms the truth of the maxim which -we have bo often recommended for general adoption : "Be briskly, not languidly, joyous if you would be well." This is the converse of the doctrine that happiness is an affair of the heart and stomach. A comfortable, as contrasted with an austere, mode of life is the most natural, and therefore the healthiest and the best. We sometimes wonder why those who live by rule,

and tremble as they live, laboring to eat and drink preoisely what is " good for them," and nothing else, are so weakly and miserable. The cause of failure is that such persons are over careful ; life is a burden to them. They have no " go " in their mode of existence. One-half of the " dyspeptics " we see, and whose sufferings we are asked to relieve, would be well if they were only happy. Everything in life and nature acts and reacts in a circle. Be happy, and your sympathetic gapglia will have the blood coursing through them with the bound of health ; and this quickening of the pulse, if it bo produced by "good cheer," whether at the table or on the mountain side, will, in its turn, produce happiness. Felicity is the outcome of a physical- state, and that state is itself enhanced, by the sort of cheerfulness which often consists in being happy in spite of circumstances.