A LITTLE ADVICE BESTOWED UPON THE SCORNFUL READER IN A SHORT INTERCHAPTER. No man is so foolish, but may give another good counsel sometimes; and no man is so wise, but may easily err, if he will take no other counsel but his own. BEN JONSON. THE DOCTOR, &c. CHAPTER CLXXII. DESCARTES' NOTION CONCERNING THE PROLONGATION OF LIFE. A SICILIAN PROPOSAL FOR BREEDING UP CHILDREN TO BE IMMORTAL. ASGILL'S ARGUMENT AGAINST THE NECESSITY OF DYING. O harmless Death! whom still the valiant brave, The wise expect, the sorrowful invite; And all the good embrace, who know the Grave A short dark passage to eternal light. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. Sir Kenelm Digby went to Holland for the purpose of conversing with Descartes, who was then living in retirement at Egmont. Speculative knowledge, Digby said to him, was no doubt a refined and agreeable pursuit, but it was too uncertain and too useless to be made a man's occupation, life being so short that one has scarcely time to acquire well the knowledge of necessary things. It would be far more worthy of a person like Descartes, he observed, who so well understood the construction of the human frame, if he would apply himself to discover means of prolonging its duration, rather than attach himself to the mere speculation of philosophy. Descartes made answer that this was a subject on which he had already meditated; that as for rendering man immortal, it was what he would not venture to promise, but that he was very sure he could prolong his life to the standard of the Patriarchs. Saint-Evremond to whom Digby repeated this, says that this opinion of Descartes was well known both to his friends in Holland and in France. The Abbé Picot, his disciple and his martyr, was so fully persuaded of it that it was long before he would believe his master was dead, and when at length unwillingly convinced of what it was no longer possible to deny or doubt, he exclaimed, _que c'en étoit fait et que la fin du Genre humain alloit venir!_ A certain Sicilian physician who commented upon Galen was more cautious if not more modest than Descartes. He affirmed that it was certainly possible to render men immortal, but then they must be bred up from the earliest infancy with that view; and he undertook so to train and render them,—if they were fit subjects.—Poor children! if it had indeed been possible thus to divest them of their reversionary interest in Heaven. A much better way of abolishing death was that which Asgill imagined, when he persuaded himself from Scripture that it is in our power to go to Heaven without any such unpleasant middle passage. Asgill's is the worst case of intolerance that has occurred in this country since persecution has ceased to affect life or member.