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public with fitter qualifications of body and mind for the
propagation of a new religion. Oh, had those happy talents,
misapplied to vain philosophy, been turned into their proper
channels of dreams and visions, where distortion of mind and
countenance are of such sovereign use, the base, detracting world
would not then have dared to report that something is amiss, that
his brain hath undergone an unlucky shake, which even his brother
modernists themselves, like ungrates, do whisper so loud that it
reaches up to the very garret I am now writing in.
Lastly, whoever pleases to look into the fountains of enthusiasm,
from whence in all ages have eternally proceeded such fattening
streams, will find the spring-head to have been as troubled and
muddy as the current. Of such great emolument is a tincture of this
vapour, which the world calls madness, that without its help the
world would not only be deprived of those two great blessings,
conquests and systems, but even all mankind would unhappily be
reduced to the same belief in things invisible. Now the former
postulatum being held, that it is of no import from what originals
this vapour proceeds, but either in what angles it strikes and
spreads over the understanding, or upon what species of brain it
ascends, it will be a very delicate point to cut the feather and
divide the several reasons to a nice and curious reader, how this
numerical difference in the brain can produce effects of so vast a
difference from the same vapour as to be the sole point of
individuation between Alexander the Great, Jack of Leyden, and
Monsieur Des Cartes. The present argument is the most abstracted
that ever I engaged in; it strains my faculties to their highest
stretch, and I desire the reader to attend with utmost perpensity,
for I now proceed to unravel this knotty point.
There is in mankind a certain . . . Hic multa . . . desiderantur. .
. and this I take to be a clear solution of the matter.
Having, therefore, so narrowly passed through this intricate
difficulty, the reader will, I am sure, agree with me in the
conclusion that, if the moderns mean by madness only a disturbance
or transposition of the brain, by force of certain vapours issuing
up from the lower faculties, then has this madness been the parent
of all those mighty revolutions that have happened in empire, in
philosophy, and in religion. For the brain in its natural position
and state of serenity disposeth its owner to pass his life in the
common forms, without any thought of subduing multitudes to his own
power, his reasons, or his visions, and the more he shapes his
understanding by the pattern of human learning, the less he is
inclined to form parties after his particular notions, because that
instructs him in his private infirmities, as well as in the stubborn
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