In this investigation these gentlemen have not the least share, nor
do they so much as pretend or desire to have any. But while they are
sinking and depressing their contemplative part into the body, and
dragging it down by their sensual and intemperate appetites, as by so
many weights of lead, they make themselves appear little better than
hostlers or graziers that still ply their cattle with hay, straw, or
grass, looking upon such provender as the properest and meetest food
for them. And is it not even thus they would swill the mind with the
pleasures of the body, as hogherds do their swine, while they will
not allow it can be gay any longer than it is hoping, experiencing,
or remembering something that refers to the body; but will not have it
either to receive or seek for any congenial joy or satisfaction
from within itself? Though what can be more absurd and unreasonable
than--when there are two things that go to make up the man, a body and
a soul, and the soul besides hath the perogative of governing--that the
body should have its peculiar, natural, and proper good, and the soul
none at all, but must sit gazing at the body and simper at its passions,
as if she were pleased and affected with them, though indeed she be all
the while wholly untouched and unconcerned, as having nothing of her own
to choose, desire, or take delight in? For they should either pull off
the vizor quite, and say plainly that man is all body (as some of them
do, that take away all mental being), or, if they will allow us to have
two distinct natures, they should then leave to each its proper good and
evil, agreeable and disagreeable; as we find it to be with our senses,
each of which is peculiarly adapted to its own sensible, though they all
very strangely intercommune one with another. Now the intellect is the
proper sense of the mind; and therefore that it should have no congenial
speculation, movement, or affection of its own, the attaining to which
should be matter of complacency to it, is the most irrational thing in
the world, if I have not, by Jove, unwittingly done the men wrong, and
been myself imposed upon by some that may perhaps have calumniated them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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