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raise mighty armies and dream of nothing but sieges, battles, and
victories.
The other instance is what I have read somewhere in a very ancient
author of a mighty king {127a}, who, for the space of above thirty
years, amused himself to take and lose towns, beat armies and be
beaten, drive princes out of their dominions, fright children from
their bread and butter, burn, lay waste, plunder, dragoon, massacre
subject and stranger, friend and foe, male and female. It is
recorded that the philosophers of each country were in grave dispute
upon causes natural, moral, and political, to find out where they
should assign an original solution of this phenomenon. At last the
vapour or spirit which animated the hero's brain, being in perpetual
circulation, seized upon that region of the human body so renowned
for furnishing the zibeta occidentalis {127b}, and gathering there
into a tumour, left the rest of the world for that time in peace.
Of such mighty consequence is it where those exhalations fix, and of
so little from whence they proceed. The same spirits which in their
superior progress would conquer a kingdom descending upon the anus,
conclude in a fistula.
Let us next examine the great introducers of new schemes in
philosophy, and search till we can find from what faculty of the
soul the disposition arises in mortal man of taking it into his head
to advance new systems with such an eager zeal in things agreed on
all hands impossible to be known; from what seeds this disposition
springs, and to what quality of human nature these grand innovators
have been indebted for their number of disciples, because it is
plain that several of the chief among them, both ancient and modern,
were usually mistaken by their adversaries, and, indeed, by all,
except their own followers, to have been persons crazed or out of
their wits, having generally proceeded in the common course of their
words and actions by a method very different from the vulgar
dictates of unrefined reason, agreeing for the most part in their
several models with their present undoubted successors in the
academy of modern Bedlam, whose merits and principles I shall
further examine in due place. Of this kind were Epicurus, Diogenes,
Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Des Cartes, and others, who, if
they were now in the world, tied fast and separate from their
followers, would in this our undistinguishing age incur manifest
danger of phlebotomy, and whips, and chains, and dark chambers, and
straw. For what man in the natural state or course of thinking did
ever conceive it in his power to reduce the notions of all mankind
exactly to the same length, and breadth, and height of his own? Yet
this is the first humble and civil design of all innovators in the
empire of reason.
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