The instinct for food and drink, which in the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested service.

"Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"-- which will be probably never.
Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of man?
Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work evil and death.

Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity?
Fix your consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will feel a pricking sensation in it.

The mind directed intently to any part of the frame will produce a flow of blood there.

Any physician will tell you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.
Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws.