Eu! Dei vices gerens, ipse Divus,
(Speak English, Friend!) the God Imperativus,
Here on this market-cross aloud I cry:
I, I, I! I itself I!
The form and the substance, the what and the why,
The when and the where, and the low and the high,
The inside and outside, the earth and the sky,
I, you and he, and he, you and I,
All souls and all bodies are I itself I!
All I itself I!
(Fools! a truce with this starting!)
All my I! all my I!
He’s a heretic dog who but adds Betty Martin!
Thus cried the God with high imperial tone;
In robe of stiffest state, that scoffed at beauty,
A pronoun-verb imperative he shone--
Then substantive and plural-singular grown
He thus spake on! Behold in I alone
(For ethics boast a syntax of their own)
Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye,
In O! I, you, the vocative of duty!
I of the world’s whole Lexicon the root!
Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight
The genitive and ablative to boot:
The accusative of wrong, the nominative of right,
And in all cases the case absolute!
Self-construed, I all other moods decline:
Imperative, from nothing we derive us;
Yet as a super-postulate of mine,
Unconstrued antecedence I assign
To X, Y, Z, the God Infinitivus!]
[Footnote 31: It would be an act of high and almost criminal injustice
to pass over in silence the name of Mr. Richard Saumarez, a gentleman
equally well known as a medical man and as a philanthropist, but who
demands notice on the present occasion as the author of “A new System
of Physiology” in two volumes octavo, published 1797; and in 1812 of
“An Examination of the natural and artificial Systems of Philosophy
which now prevail” in one volume octavo, entitled, “The Principles of
physiological and physical Science.” The latter work is not quite equal
to the former in style or arrangement; and there is a greater necessity
of distinguishing the principles of the author’s philosophy from his
conjectures concerning colour, the atmospheric matter, comets, etc.
which, whether just or erroneous, are by no means necessary
consequences of that philosophy. Yet even in this department of this
volume, which I regard as comparatively the inferior work, the
reasonings by which Mr. Saumarez invalidates the immanence of an
infinite power in any finite substance are the offspring of no common
mind; and the experiment on the expansibility of the air is at least
plausible and highly ingenious. But the merit, which will secure both
to the book and to the writer a high and honourable name with
posterity, consists in the masterly force of reasoning, and the
copiousness of induction, with which he has assailed, and (in my
opinion) subverted the tyranny of the mechanic system in physiology;
established not only the existence of final causes, but their necessity
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