NOR shall it any ways detract from the just reputation of this famous
sect that its rise and institution are owing to such an author as I have
described Jack to be, a person whose intellectuals were overturned and
his brain shaken out of its natural position, which we commonly suppose
to be a distemper, and call by the name of madness or frenzy. For if we
take a survey of the greatest actions that have been performed in the
world under the influence of single men, which are the establishment of
new empires by conquest, the advance and progress of new schemes in
philosophy, and the contriving as well as the propagating of new
religions, we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons
whose natural reason hath admitted great revolutions from their diet,
their education, the prevalency of some certain temper, together with the
particular influence of air 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 great turns are not always given by strong hands, but by lucky
adaptation 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 composition 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
original as those of the skies, yet the crop they produce differs both in
kind and degree, merely according to the soil. I will produce two
instances to prove and explain what I am now advancing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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