and climate. Besides, there is something individual in human minds that easily kindles at the accidental approach and collision of certain circumstances, which, though of paltry and mean appearance, do often flame out into the greatest emergencies of life. For the great turns are not always given by strong hands, but by lucky adaption, and at proper seasons. And it is of no import where the fire was kindled, if the vapour has once got up into the brain. For the upper region of man is furnished like the middle. region of the air, the materials are formed from causes of the widest difference, yet produce at last the same substance and effect. Mists arise from the earth, steams from dunghills, exhalations from the sea, and smoke from fire, yet all clouds are the same in compositions, as well as consequences, and the fumes issuing from a jakes will furnish as comely and useful a vapour as incense from an altar. Thus far, I suppose, will easily be granted me; and then it will follow, that as the face of nature never produces rain but when it is overcast and disturbed, so human understanding, seated in the brain, must be troubled and overspread by vapours, ascending from the lower faculties, to water the invention and render it fruitful. Now, although these vapours (as it hath been already said) are of as various origins as those of the skies, yet the crops they produce differ both in kind and degree merely according to the soil. I will produce two instances to prove and explain what I am now advancing.

A certain great prince raised a mighty army, filled his coffers with infinite treasures, provided an invincible fleet, and all this without giving the least part of his design to his greatest ministers or his nearest favourites. Immediately the whole world was alarmed, the neighbouring crowns in trembling expectations towards what point the storm would burst, the small politicians everywhere forming profound conjectures. Some believed he had laid a scheme for universal monarchy; others, after much insight, determined the matter to be a project of pulling down the pope, and setting up the reformed religion, which had once been his own. Some again, of a deeper sagacity, sent him into Asia, to subdue the Turk, and recover Palestine. In the midst of all these projects and preparations, a certain statesurgeon, gathering the nature of the disease by these symptoms, attempted the cure; at one blow performed the operation, broke the bag, and out flew the vapour. Nor did anything want to render it a complete remedy, only that the prince unfortunately happened to die in the performance. Now is the reader exceeding curious to learn from whence this vapour took its rise, which had so long set the nations at a gaze? what secret wheel, what hidden spring, could put into motion so wonderful an engine? It was afterwards discovered that the movement of

*This was Harry the Great of France.

Ravillac, who stabbed Henry the Great in his coach.

this whole machine had been directed by an absent female, whose eyes had raised a protuberancy, and, before emission, she was removed into an enemy's country. What should an unhappy prince do in such ticklish circumstances as these? He tried in vain the poet's never-failing receipt of corpora quæque: For,

Idque petit corpus mens, unde est saucia amore; Unde feritur, eo tendit, gestitque coire.—Lucretia. Having to no purpose used all peaceable endeavours, the collected part of the semen, raised and inflamed, became a dust, converted to choler, turned head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain. The very same principle that influences a bully to break the windows of a woman who has jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies, and dream of nothing but sieges, battles, and victories.

Causa

Teterrimi belli

The other instance is, what I have read somewhere, in a very ancient author, of a mighty king,* 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, blunder, dragoon, massacre subject and stranger, friend and foe, male and female. It is recorded that the philo

* This is meant of the French king, Louis XIV.

menon.

sophers 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 phenoAt 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,* and gathering there into a tumour, left the rest of the world for that time in peace. Of such mighty consequence it is 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

* Paracelsus, who was so famous for chemistry, tried an experiment upon human excrement, to make a perfume of it, which when he had brought to perfection, he called zibeta occidentalis, or western civet, the back parts of man (according to his division mentioned by the author, p. 361) being the west.

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 farther examine in due place. Of this kind were Epicurus, Diogenes, Apollonius, Lucretius, Paracelsus, Descartes, and others, who, if they were now in the world, tied fast, and separate from their followers, would, in this our undistinguished 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. Epicurus modestly hoped that, one time or other, a certain fortuitous concourse of all men's opinions, after perpetual jostlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the round and the square, would, by certain clinamina, unite in the notions of atoms and void; as these did in the originals of all things. Cartesius reckoned to see, before he died, the sentiments of all philosophers, like so many lesser stars in his romantic system, wrapped