[Review of works on medical ethics / by Thomas Percival and others. Anon.

  • John Brown
Date:
1850]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Review of works on medical ethics / by Thomas Percival and others. Anon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in subtlety and in sense, in solid living thought, in clear and passionate utterance, in everything that makes thought felt, and feeling under¬ stood, and both motive and effectual. Then would we hurry over the dreary interval of the middle passage of the deserts of sand—where Aristotle’s blind children of the mist might be seen spinning ropes, not out of themselves, like the more intelligent and practical spider, but out of the weary sand—ropes, signifying nothing; and we might see how, having parted with their senses, they had lost themselves, and were vox et prceterea nihil. But we must shorten our trip. We would cool ourselves, and visit old Hobbes of Malmesbury, in his arctic, cave, and see him sitting like a polar bear, muttering protests against the universe, nursing his wrath as the only thing with which to warm and cheer that sullen heart, and proclaiming that self-love is every kind of love, and all that in man is good. We would wonder at that palace of ice, symmetrical, beautiful, strong—but below zero. We would come away before we were benumbed, admiring much his intrepid air, his keen and clean teeth, his clear eye, his matchless vigour of grip, his redeeming love for his cubs, his dreary mistake of absolute cold for heat, — frozen mercury burning as well as molten gold. Leaving him, after trying to get him to give up his cold fishy diet, his long winters of splendid darkness, and come and live with us like a Christian, we would go to an English country- house, to Lady Masham’s, at the Oates, the abode of comfort, cheer¬ fulness, and thoughtful virtue; and we would there find John Locke communing with the man within the breast,” and listening rever¬ ently, but like a man; and we would carry off from her table her ladyship’s father’s huge magazine of learning, strong intellect, and lofty morality—his treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality.” Then we might call for Locke’s pupil. Lord Shaftesbury, the great man and the courtier, but the philosopher too, having glimpses of better things, and coming very close to what we are in search of—a special moral faculty; and we would find our friend, Dr Henry More, in his laboratory, dreaming in his odd Platonic way, of a honiform facuity. Next, we would set sail across the Atlantic, and reach in the evening, the mild skies of the vex’t Bermoothes,” and there find the beautiful-souled Berkeley dreaming of ideal universities in the far west—of a new world, peopled with myriads as happy, as intelligent, as virtuous as himself; dreaming, too, of his pan- cratic Tar Water,” and in his Siris” ascending from it, by a Jacob’s ladder of easy grade, to Plato’s heaven. And, being in the neighbourhood, we might as well visit New England, and among its hedge-rows and elms, and quiet old villages, forget we are in New Hampshire—not in Old—and see in his study a country clergyman, with a thoughtful, contented look, and an eye rich with a grave en¬ thusiasm—Jonathan Edwards—^Svhose power of subtle argument, perhaps unmatched, eertainly unsurpassed, among men, was joined
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