The origin of evil was a question upon which he never ventured. Here too, he said with Sir George Mackenzie, “as I am not able by the Jacob's Ladder of my merit to scale Heaven, so am I less able by the Jacob's Staff of my private ability to take up the true altitude of its mysteries:” and borrowing a play upon words from the same old Essayist, he thought the brain had too little _pia mater_, which was too curious in such inquiries. But the mysteries of his own profession afforded “ample room and verge enough” for his speculations, however wide and wild their excursions. Those mysteries are so many, so momentous, and so inscrutable that he wondered not at any superstitions which have been excogitated by bewildered imagination, and implicitly followed by human weakness in its hopes and fears, its bodily and its mental sufferings. As little did he wonder at the theories advanced by men who were in their days, the Seraphic and Angelic and Irrefragable Doctors of the healing art:—the tartar of Paracelsus, the Blas and Gas of Van Helmont, nor in later times at the animalcular hypotheses of Langius and Paullinus; nor at the belief of elder nations, as the Jews, and of savages every-where that all maladies are the immediate work of evil spirits. But when he called to mind the frightful consequences to which the belief of this opinion has led, the cruelties which have been exercised, the crimes which have been perpetrated, the miseries which have been inflicted and endured, it made him shudder at perceiving that the most absurd error may produce the greatest mischief to society, if it be accompanied with presumption, and if any real or imaginary interest be connected with maintaining it. The Doctor like his Master and benefactor Peter Hopkins, was of the Poco-curante school in politics. He said that the Warwickshire gentleman who was going out with his hounds when the two armies were beginning to engage at Edge-hill, was not the worst Englishman who took the field that day. Local circumstances favoured this tendency to political indifference. It was observed in the 34th Chapter of this Opus that one of the many reasons for which our Philosopher thought Doncaster a very likeable place of residence was that it sent no Members to Parliament. And Yorkshire being too large a county for any of its great families to engage lightly in contesting it, the Election fever however it might rage in other towns or other parts of the county, never prevailed there. But the constitution of the Doctor's mind secured him from all excitement of this nature. Even in the days of Wilkes and Liberty, when not a town in England escaped the general Influenza, he was not in the slightest degree affected by it, nor did he ever take up the Public Advertiser for the sake of one of Junius's Letters. CHAPTER CCXXXVIII.