----It happens otherwise--replied the opponents.----
It ought not, said they.
The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings,
though they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided
about the nose at last, almost as much as the Faculty itself.
They amicably laid it down, that there was a just and geometrical
arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to
its several destinations, offices, and functions which could not be
transgressed but within certain limits--that nature, though she
sported----she sported within a certain circle; --and they could not
agree about the diameter of it.
The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the
classes of the literati; ------they began and ended with the word Nose;
and had it not been for a _petitio principii_, which one of the ablest
of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole
controversy had been settled at once.
A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood--and not only
blood--but blood circulating in it to supply the phænomenon with a
succession of drops--(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops,
that is included, said he). ----Now death, continued the logician, being
nothing but the stagnation of the blood----
I deny the definition ----Death is the separation of the soul from the
body, said his antagonist ----Then we don’t agree about our weapons,
said the logician --Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the
antagonist.
The civilians were still more concise: what they offered being more in
the nature of a decree----than a dispute.
Such a monstrous nose, said they, had it been a true nose, could not
possibly have been suffered in civil society----and if false--to impose
upon society with such false signs and tokens, was a still greater
violation of its rights, and must have had still less mercy shewn it.
The only objection to this was, that if it proved anything, it proved
the stranger’s nose was neither true nor false.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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