Human physiology, with which is incorporated much of the elementary part of the Institutiones physiologicae of J.F. Blumenbach.

  • Elliotson, John, 1791-1868.
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Human physiology, with which is incorporated much of the elementary part of the Institutiones physiologicae of J.F. Blumenbach. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    While those are wrong who think there can be any thing hke an argument against a future life in another order of things, if de- clared by a revelation, it is strange that others should think it necessary to attempt rendering the pronunciations of scripture more probable, and that by an hypothesis which is at best but the remains of unenlightened times y, and should require any as- y The more uninformed the age, the greater the disposition to explain every thing. The savage personifies the winds and the heavenly bodies; the ancients fancied all matter endowed with a spirit — spiritus intus alit. Philo and Origen maintain that the stars are so many souls, incorruptible and immortal. In the older writings of the moderns, even in those of the father of experiment and observation — Lord Bacon, the properties of matter are referred to spirits: — from them and their motions principally proceed rarefaction, colliquation, con- coction, maturation, putrefaction, vivification, and most of the effects of nature; *' for tangible parts in bodies are stupid things, and the spirits do, in effect, all. (Natural History^ cent. i. 98.) — In fact, some authors believe in three souls — the vegetable, sensible, and natural— for vegetables, brutes, and man ; those which have the second having also the first, and those who have the third having all three. Paracelsus believed in four. These old writers, in providing a spirit for every thing, were more consistent than the moderns, who require it for only life and mind; because a subtle fluid or spirit is quite as necessary to explain the arrangement of saline particles into the regular form of a beautiful crystal. All these notions still exist among the vulgar; and the last remaining among the better informed, though it too is rapidly dying away, relates to mind. Those who upbraid others for refusing their assent to this hypothesis, may recollect that Anaxagoras and many more were accused of atheism and impiety, because they denied that the heavenly bodies were animated and intelligent. Even in the last reign but one, the Newtonian doctrines were thought irreligious by the Hutchin- sonian sect, to which Bishop Horne, the amiable writer on the Psalms, and Mr. Jones, the learned and ingenious writer in defence of the Trinity, belonged : and the Jesuits, in their edition of Newton, 1742, carefully disclaim all belief in his demonstration of the earth's motion, as this is decreed false by the Pope. Materialist is as good a word as any other for branding those from whom we differ; but materialism in its true acceptation signifies the doctrine of no first cause, or that all has been produced ex Jortuita atomorum collisione. The whole tenor of scripture implies that lue are bodies endowed with certain properties; and those passages from which our having a distinct immaterial substance is inferred, may be easily explained by the figurative style of the Bible, by the necessary adoption of the language of the times, and by the influence of the national opinions and prejudices of the writers on their modes of expression. With- out due allowance, we might deem it impious to deny that the round world cannot be moved; that the sun pursues its course round the earth; (Galileo was imprisoned for doing so, and yet, said the sage to himself while in prison, the earth does move—e^mr si muove:) that Naaman's leprosy (a condition of body) was a real substance, because we read that it left him and