Filopanti, in the _Dio Liberale_, places his father Berillo, a
carpenter, and his mother Berilla among the demigods. He discovered
three Adams, and gives a minute narrative, year by year, of the actions
of each. Cordigliani prepared to insult the Chamber of Deputies in order
to obtain an annuity from the Government, and thought this action much
to his own credit. Guiteau thought he was saving the Republic by the
murder of the President, and had himself called a great lawyer and
philosopher. In the same way Passanante, after having preached the
abolition of capital punishment, condemns the guilty members of the
Assembly to death; and, after having given orders to “respect the forms
of government,” insults the monarchy, makes an attempt at regicide, and
proposes to “abolish all misers and hypocrites.”
A physician, S----, prints a statement that blood-letting exposes to an
excess of light, another announces in two thick volumes, that _diseases
are elliptical_.
Critics have said, referring to the works of Démons, that his Dialectic
Quintessence and sextessence are a true quintessence of absurdity.[339]
Gleizes affirms that flesh is atheistical. Fuzi (a theologian) asserts
that the menstrual blood has the property of quenching conflagrations.
Hannequin, who used to write in the air with his fingers, and had an
_aromal trumpet_, by means of which he communicated with the spirits
dispersed through the air, declares that in the future age many men
shall become women and demigods.
Henrion, at the Académie des Inscriptions, advanced the theory that Adam
was forty feet in height, Noah twenty-nine, Moses twenty-five, &c.
Leroux, the celebrated Paris Deputy, who believed in metempsychosis and
the cabbala, defined love as “the ideality of the reality of a part of
the totality of the Infinite Being,” &c., and wished to insert the
principle of the _triad_ in the preamble of his Constitution.
Asgill maintained that men might live for ever, if only they had faith.
It is true that, here and there, some new and vigorous notion emerges
from the chaos of such minds, because the only symptom of genius
developed in them by psychosis is a less degree of aversion to novelty,
or, to employ my own terminology, of misoneism.[340] Thus, for example,
amid the most absurd opinions, Cianchettini has some very fine passages:
“All animals have the instinct of self-preservation, with the minimum of
fatigue, of escaping from troublesome thoughts, and of enjoying the
delights of life; and to obtain these things, liberty is indispensable
to them.
“All animals, except man, gratify and always have gratified these
instincts, and perhaps will always continue to do so. Mankind alone,
constituted as a society, find themselves fettered, and in such a Way
that no one has ever succeeded, not merely in bringing them into a state
of peace and liberty, but even in showing how they may attain this end.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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