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.
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