the doctrine may be essentially and substantially true; the vitality of the soul may be bound up with its power of expressing itself in material terms.  It may be that the soul-stuff, which we call life, has an existence apart from its material manifestation, and that individuality, as we see it, may be a mere phenomenon of the passage of a force, like the visibility of electricity under certain conditions; indeed it seems more probable that matter is a function of thought rather than thought a function of matter.  It is likely enough that animals have no conscious sense of any division of aims, any antagonism between physical and mental desires; but as the human race develops, the imagination, the sense of the opposition between the reason and the appetite, begins to emerge.  Man becomes aware that his will and his wish may not coincide; and thus develops the medieval theory of asceticism, the belief that the body is essentially vile, and suggests base desires to the mind, which the mind has the power of controlling.  That conception fitted closely to the feudal theory of government, in which the interests of the ruler and the subject did not necessarily coincide; the ruler governed with his own interests in view, and coerced his subjects if he could; but the new theory of government does not separate the ruler from the state.  The government of a state with democratic institutions is the will of the people taking shape, and the phenomena of rule are but those of the popular will expressing itself, the object being that each individual should have his due preponderance; the ultimate end being as much individual liberty as is consistent with harmonious co-operation.

That is a rough analogy of the doctrine of Walt Whitman; namely, that the individual, soul and body, is a polity; and that the true life is to be found in a harmonious co-operation of body and soul.  The reason is not at liberty to deride or to neglect the bodily desires, even the meanest and basest of them, because every desire, whether of soul or body, is the expression of something that exists in the animating principle.  Take, for example, the case of physical passion.  That, in its ultimate analysis, is the instinct for propagating life, the transmission and continuance of vitality.  The reason must not ignore or deplore it, but direct it into the proper channels; it may indicate the dangers that it incurs; but merely to thwart it, to regard it with shame and horror, is to establish an internecine warfare.  The true function is rather to ennoble the physical desire by the just concurrence of the soul.  But the essence of the situation is co-operation and not coercion; and each must be ready to compromise.  If the physical nature will not compromise with the reason, the disasters of unbridled passion follow; if the reason will not co-operate with the physical desire, the result is a sterile intellectualism, a life of starved and timid experience.  It was here, of course, that Walt