{nage property, the madman is withheld from it; incapable of ideas suitable to society, he is shut out from it; if he be dangerous, he is confined altogether; and if he be furious, they bind him. Sometimes he is cured by the baths, by bleeding, and by regimen. This man is not however deprived of ideas; he frequently possesses them like other men, and often when he sleeps. We might inquire how the spiritual and immortal soul, lodged in his brain, re On the invention of scissars, which are certainly not of the very highest antiquity,ceives all its ideas correctly and diswhat was not said of those who pared their nails and cut off some of their hair that was hanging down over their noses? They were undoubtedly considered as prodigals and coxcombs, who bought at an extravagant price an instrument just calculated to spoil the work of the creator. What an enormous sin to pare the horn which God himself made to grow at our fingers' ends! It was ab-them? solutely an insult to the Divine Being If this simple and eternal substance himself. When shirts and socks were enjoys the same properties as the souls invented, it was far worse. It is well which are lodged in the sagest brains, it known with what wrath and indignation ought to reason like them. Why does it j the old counsellors, who had never worn not? If my madman sees a thing red, socks, exclaimed against the young ma- while the wise men see it blue; if when gistrates who encouraged so dreadful and my sages hear music, my madman hears fatal a luxury. the braying of an ass; if when they attend a sermon, he imagines himself to be listening to a comedy; if when they understand yes, he understands no; then I conceive clearly that his soul ought to think contrary to their's. But my madman having the same perceptions as they have, there is no apparent reason why his soul, having received all the ne tinctly, without the capacity of judgment. It perceives objects, as the souls of Aris{totle, of Plato, of Locke, and of Newton, perceived them. It hears the same sounds, and possesses the same sense of feeling-how therefore, receiving impressions like the wisest, does the soul of the madman connect them extravagantly, and prove unable to disperse MADNESS. WHAT is madness? To have erroneous perceptions, and to reason correctly from them? Let the wisest man, if he would understand madness, attend to the succession of his ideas while he dreams. If he be troubled with indigestion during the night, a thousand in-cessary materials, cannot make a proper coherent ideas torment him; it seems as if nature punished him for having taken too much food, or for having injudiciously selected it, by supplying involuntary conceptions; for we think very little during sleep, except when annoyed by a bad digestion. Unquiet dreams are inrenton. reality a transient madness. Madness is a malady which necessarily hinders a man from thinking and acting like other men. Not being able to ma use of them. It is pure, they say, and subject to no infirmity; behold it provided with all the necessary assistance; nothing which passes in the body can change its essence;-yet it is shut up in a close carriage, and conveyed to Cha This reflection may lead us to suspect, that the faculty of thought, bestowed by God upon man, is subject to derange ment like the other senses. A madman is an invalid whose brain is diseased, I am! You are not of the highest rank, The learned may say to the madman, -My friend, although deprived of common sense, thy soul is as pure, as spiritual, and as immortal, as our own; but our souls are happily lodged, and thine not so. The windows of its dwelling are closed; it wants air, and is stifled. The madman, in a lucid interval, will reply to them,-My friends, you beg the question, as usual. My windows are as wide open as your own, since I can perceive the same objects and listen to the same sounds. It necessarily follows, that my soul makes a bad use of my senses; or that my soul is a vitiated sense, a depraved faculty. In a word, either my soul is itself diseased, or I have no soul. One of the doctors may reply,-My brother, God has possibly created foolish souls, as well as wise ones. The madman will answer,-If I believed what you say, I should be a still greater madman than I am. Have the kindness, you who know so much, to tell me why I am mad? Supposing the doctors to retain a little sense, they would say,-We know nothing about the matter. Neither are they more able to comprehend how a brain possesses regular ideas, and makes a due use of them. They call themselves sages, and are as weak as their patient. N. B. I regret that Hippocrates should have prescribed the blood of an ass's colt for madness; and am still more sorry, that the Manuel des Dames asserts, that it may be cured by catching the itch. Pleasant prescriptions these, and apparently invented by those who were to take them! MAGIC. MAGIC is a more plausible science than astrology and the doctrine of genii. As soon as we began to think that there was in man a being quite distinct from matter, and that the understanding exists after death, we gave this understanding a fine subtle aerial body, resembling the body in which it was lodged. Two quite na{tural reasons introduced this opinion; the first is, that in all languages the soul was called spirit, breath, wind. This spirit, this breath, this wind, was therefore very fine and delicate. The second is, that if the soul of a man had not retained a form similar to that which it possessed during its life, we should not have been able after death to distinguish the soul of one man from that of another. This soul, this shade, which existed, separated from its body, might very well show itself upon occasion, revisit the place which it had inhabited, its parents and friends, speak to them and instruct them. In all this there is no incompatibility. As departed souls might very well If the interval of reason of the mad-teach those whom they came to visit the man lasts long enough, he will say to secret of conjuring them, they failed not them,-Miserable mortals, who. neither to do so; and the word Abraxa, proknow the cause of my malady, nor how nounced with some ceremonies, brought to cure it! Tremble, lest ye become al-up souls with whom he who pronounced together like me, or even still worse than it wished to speak. I suppose an Egyp It is true, that the magician so pushed might say,-My science extends not so far as to extinguish a pile without water, and to kill my judges with words. I can only call up spirits, read the future, and change certain substances into others; my power is bounded; but you should not for that reason burn me at a slow fire. It is as if you caused a physician to be hanged who could cure fever, and not a paralysis. The judges might, however, still reasonably observe,-Show us then some secret of your art, or consent to be burned with a good grace. tian saying to a philosopher,-I descend All that we can do, is to say to hir,— in a right line from the magicians of My friend, we do not burn you as a true Pharaoh, who changed rods into serpents, sorcerer, but as a false one; you boast and the waters of the Nile into blood; of an admirable art which you possess one of my ancestors married the witch of not; we treat you as a man who utters Endor, who conjured up the soul of false money; the more we love the good, Samuel at the request of Saul; she com- the more severely we punish those who municated her secrets to her husband, give us counterfeits; we know very well who made her the confidant of his own; that there were formerly venerable conI possess this inheritance from my father į jurors, but we have reason to believe that and mother; my genealogy is well at- you are not one, since you suffer yourself tested; I command the spirits and ele- to be burnt like a fool. ments. The philosopher, in reply, will have nothing to do but to demand his protection; for if disposed to deny and dispute, the magician will shut his mouth by saying,-You cannot deny the facts; my ancestors have been incontestibly great magicians, and you doubt it not; you have no reason to believe that I am inferior to them, particularly when a man of honour like myself assures you that, he is a sorcerer. The philosopher, to be sure, might say to him,-Do me the pleasure to conjure up a shade; allow me to speak to a soul; change this water into blood, and this rod into a serpent. The magician will answer,-I work not for philosophers; but I have shown spirits to very respectable ladies, and to simple people who never dispute; you should at least believe that it is very possible for me to have these secrets, since you are forced to confess that my ancestors possessed them. What was done formerly can be done now; and you ought to behieve in magic without my being obliged to exercise my art before you. These reasons are so good, that all nations have had sorcerers. The greatest sorcerers were paid by the state, in order to discover the future clearly in the heart and liver of an ox. Why, therefore, have others so long been punished with death? They have done more marvellous things; they should, therefore, be more honoured; above all, their power should be feared.} Nothing is more ridiculous than to condemn a true magician to be burnt; for we should presume that he can extinguish the fire and twist the necks of hi. judges. MALADY-MEDICINE. I WILL Suppose that a fair princess who never heard speak of anatomy, is ill either from having eaten or danced too much, or having done too much of what several princesses occasionally do. I suppose that her physician says to her,-Madam, for your health to be good, it is necessary for your cerebrum and cerebellum to distribute a fine, well-conditioned marrow, in the spine of your back down to your highness's rump; and that this marrow should equally animate fifteen pair of nerves, each right and left. It is necessary that your heart should contract and dilate itself with a constantly equal force; and that all the blood which it forces into your arteries should circulate in all these arteries and veins about six hundred times a-day. This blood, in circulating with a rapidity which surpasses that of the Rhone, ought to dispose on its passage of that which continually forms the lymph, urine, PRINCESS. What! all these secrets for purifying the blood, of which my ladies have spoken to me; this Baume de Vie of the Sieur bile, &c., of your highness-of that which furnishes all these secrctions, which insensibly render your skin soft, fresh, and fair, that without them would be yellow, grey, dry, and shrivelled, like old parch-de Lievre; these packets of the Sieur Arnauld; all these pills so much praised by femmes de chambre ment. PRINCESS. PHYSICIAN. Well, sir, the king pays you to attend to all this fail not to put all things in Are so many inventions to get money, their place, and to make my liquids cir-and to flatter patients, while nature alone culate so that I may be comfortable. I warn you that I will not suffer with impunity. PHYSICIAN. Madam, address your orders to the author of nature. The sole power which made millions of planets and comets to revolve round millions of suns, has directed the course of your blood. PRINCESS. What! are you a physician, and can you prescribe nothing? PHYSICIAN. acts. PRINCESS. But there are specifics? PHYSICIAN. Yes, madam, like the water of youth in romances. PRINCESS. In what, then, consists medicine? PHYSICIAN. I have already told you, in cleaning and keeping in order the house which we cannot re-build. PRINCESS. There are, however, salutary things, and others hurtful? PRYSICIAN. Eat No, madam; we can only take away from, we can add nothing to nature. Your servants clean your palace, but the architect built it. If your highness has You have guessed all the secret. eaten greedily, I can cleanse your entrails moderately that which you know by exwith cassia, manna, and pods of senna: perience will agree with you. Nothing it is a broom which I introduce to cleanse is good for the body but what is easily your inside. If you have a cancer, I digested. What medicine will best assist must cut off your breast, but I cannot digestion. Exercise. What best recruit give you another. Have you a stone in your strength? Sleep. What will diyour bladder? I can deliver you from it. minish incurable ills? Patience. What I can cut you off a gangrened foot, leav-change a bad constitution? Nothing. In ing you to walk on the other. In a word, all violent maladies, we have only the we physicians perfectly resemble teeth-recipe of Molière, seignare, purgare;' drawers, who extract a decayed tooth, and, if we will,clisterium donare.' without the power of substituting a soundThere is not a fourth. All, I have told one, quacks as they are. PRINCESS. you, amounts only to keeping a house in order, to which we cannot add a peg. You make me tremble; I believed that All art consists in adaptation. physicians cured all maladies. already buried forty of his physicians, as many chief physicians, besides physicians of the establishment and others. PRINCESS. And, truly, I hope to bury you also. MAN. To know the natural philosophy of the human race, it is necessary to read works of anatomy, or rather to go through a course of anatomy. in his earliest infancy. Until fifteen, he shall have the lightness of a butterfly; in his youth, the vanity of a peacock. In manhood, he must undergo the labours of a horse. Towards fifty, he shall have the tricks of a fox; and in his old age, be ugly and ridiculous like an ape. This, in general, is the destiny of man. Remark further, that notwithstanding these bounties of Jupiter, the animal man has still but two or three and twenty years to live, at most. Taking mankind in general, of this a third must be taken away for sleep, during which we are in a cer To be acquainted with the man we call moral,' it is above all necessary to have lived and reflected. Are not all moral works contained in these words of Job?tain sense dead; thus there remain fifteen, "Man that is born of a woman hath but a few days to live, and is full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not." and from these fifteen we must take at least eight for our first infancy, which is, as it has been called, the vestibule of life. The clear product will be seven years, and of these seven years the half at least We have already seen, that the human is consumed in grief of all kinds. Take race has not above two-and-twenty years three years and a half for labour, fatigue, to live, reckoning those who die at their and dissatisfaction, and we shall have none nurses' breasts, and those who for a hun-remaining. Well, poor animal, wilt thou dred years drag on the remains of a mi- still be proud? serable and imbecile life. It is a fine apologue, that ancient fable of the first man who was at first destined to live twenty years at most, and who reduced it to five years by estimating one life with another. The man was in despair, and had near him a caterpillar, a butterfly, a peacock, a horse, a fox, and an ape. Unfortunately, in this fable Jupiter forgot to dress this animal as he clothed the ass, horse, peacock, and even the caterpillar. Man had only his bare skin, which, continually exposed to the sun, rain, and hail, became chapped, tanned, and spotted. The male in our continent was disfigured by spare hairs on his body, which rendered him frightful without Prolong my life, said he to Jupiter; I covering him. His face was hidden by am more worthy than these animals; it these hairs. His skin became a rough is just that I and my family should live soil which bore a forest of stalks, the long to command all beasts. Willingly, roots of which tended upwards, and the said Jupiter; but I have only a certain branches of which grew downwards. It number of days to divide among the whole was in this state and in this image, that of the beings to whom I have granted life. } this animal ventured to paint God, when I can only give to thee by taking away in course of time he learnt the art of defrom others; for imagine not, that be- scription. cause I am Jupiter, I am infinite and allpowerful; I have my nature and my Îimits. Now I will grant thee some years more, by taking them from these six animals, of which thou art jealous, on condition that thou shalt successively assume their manner of living. Man shall first be a caterpillar, dragging himself along The female being more weak, became still more disgusting and frightful in her old age; and, in short, without tailors and mantua-makers, one half of mankind would never have dared to show itself to the other. Yet, before having clothes, before even knowing how to speak, some ages must have passed away,—a truth |