The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
History
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
It often happens, that the slave himself has neither the power nor the
wish to be free. He is then brutified; but this apathy is the dire
effect of slavery, and so far from being a justifying cause, that it
contains the grounds of its bitterest condemnation. The Carlovingian
race bred up the Merovingi as beasts; and then assigned their
unworthiness as the satisfactory reason for their dethronement. Alas!
the human being is more easily weaned from the habit of commanding than
from that of abject obedience. The slave loses his soul when he loses
his master; even as the dog that has lost himself in the street, howls
and whines till he has found the house again, where he had been kicked
and cudgelled, and half starved to boot. As we, however, or our
ancestors must have inoculated our fellow-creature with this wasting
disease of the soul, it becomes our duty to cure him; and though we
cannot immediately make him free, yet we can, and ought to, put him in
the way of becoming so at some future time, if not in his own person,
yet in that of his children. The French, you will say, are not capable
of freedom. Grant this;--but does this fact justify the ungrateful
traitor, whose every measure has been to make them still more incapable
of it?
CIRCULATION OF THE BLOOD.
The ancients attributed to the blood the same motion of ascent and
descent which really takes place in the sap of trees. Servetus
discovered the minor circulation from the heart to the lungs. Do not the
following passages of Giordano Bruno (published in 1591) seem to imply
more? I put the question, 'pauperis forma', with unfeigned
diffidence.
'"De Immenso et Innumerabili,"' lib. vi. cap. 8.
'Ut in nostro corpore sanguis per totum circumcursat et recursat, sic
in toto mundo, astro, tellure.
Quare non aliter quam nostro in corpore sanguis Hinc meat, hinc
remeat, neque ad inferiora fluit vi Majore, ad supera a pedibus quam
deinde recedat:--'
and still more plainly, in the ninth chapter of the same book,
'Quid esset Quodam ni gyro naturae cuncta redirent Ortus ad proprios
rursum; si sorbeat omnes Pontus aquas, totum non restituatque perenni
Ordine; qua possit rerum consistere vita? Tanquam si totus concurrat
sanguis in unam, In qua consistat, partem, nec prima revisat Ordia, et
antiquos cursus non inde resumat.'
It is affirmed in the "Supplement to the Scotch Encyclopædia
Britannica," that Des Cartes was the first who in defiance of Aristotle
and the Schools, attributed infinity to the universe. The very title of
Bruno's poem proves, that this honour belongs to him.
Feyjoo lays claim to a knowledge of the circulation of the blood for
Francisco de la Reyna, a farrier, who published a work upon his own art
at Burgos, in 1564. The passage which he quotes is perfectly clear.
'Por manera, que la sangre anda en torno, y en rueda por todos los
miembros, excluye toda duda.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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