Previous - next
informations and discoveries, that in the inside they are good for
nothing. The two senses to which all objects first address
themselves are the sight and the touch; these never examine farther
than the colour, the shape, the size, and whatever other qualities
dwell or are drawn by art upon the outward of bodies; and then comes
reason officiously, with tools for cutting, and opening, and
mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of
the same consistence quite through. Now I take all this to be the
last degree of perverting Nature, one of whose eternal laws it is to
put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to save the
charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do
here think fit to inform the reader that in such conclusions as
these reason is certainly in the right; and that in most corporeal
beings which have fallen under my cognisance, the outside hath been
infinitely preferable to the in, whereof I have been further
convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman
flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person
for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a beau to be
stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to find so many
unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his
brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly perceived at every
operation that the farther we proceeded, we found the defects
increase upon us, in number and bulk; from all which I justly formed
this conclusion to myself, that whatever philosopher or projector
can find out an art to sodder and patch up the flaws and
imperfections of Nature, will deserve much better of mankind and
teach us a more useful science than that so much in present esteem,
of widening and exposing them (like him who held anatomy to be the
ultimate end of physic). And he whose fortunes and dispositions
have placed him in a convenient station to enjoy the fruits of this
noble art, he that can with Epicurus content his ideas with the
films and images that fly off upon his senses from the superfices of
things, such a man, truly wise, creams off Nature, leaving the sour
and the dregs for philosophy and reason to lap up. This is the
sublime and refined point of felicity called the possession of being
well-deceived, the serene peaceful state of being a fool among
knaves.
But to return to madness. It is certain that, according to the
system I have above deduced, every species thereof proceeds from a
redundancy of vapour; therefore, as some kinds of frenzy give double
strength to the sinews, so there are of other species which add
vigour, and life, and spirit to the brain. Now it usually happens
that these active spirits, getting possession of the brain, resemble
Previous - next
