The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, Volume 3Browne, Thomas, Sir
Religion
The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, Volume 3
Browne, Thomas, Sir
Christianity; Ethics; Religion and medicine
And although it seems not impossible, that impregnation may succeed from
seminal spirits, and vaporous irradiations containing the active
principle, without material and gross immissions; as it happeneth
sometimes in imperforated persons, and rare conceptions of some much
under pubertie or fourteen. As may be also conjectured in the coition of
some insects, wherein the female makes intrusion into the male; and from
the continued ovation in Hens, from one single tread of a cock, and
little stock laid up near the vent, sufficient for durable
prolification. And although also in humane generation the gross and
corpulent seminal body may return again, and the great business be acted
by what it caryeth with it: yet will not the same suffice to support the
story in question, wherein no corpulent immission is acknowledged;
answerable unto the fable of the _Talmudists_, in the storie of
_Benzira_, begotten in the same manner on the daughter of the Prophet
_Jeremie_.
2. The Relation of _Lucillius_, and now become common, concerning
_Crassus_ the grand-father of _Marcus_ the wealthy _Roman_, that he
never laughed but once in all his life, and that was at an Ass eating
thistles, is something strange. For, if an indifferent and unridiculous
object could draw his habitual austereness unto a smile, it will be hard
to believe he could with perpetuity resist the proper motives thereof.
[SN: _Laughter. What kind of Passion it is._] For the act of Laughter
which is evidenced by a sweet contraction of the muscles of the face,
and a pleasant agitation of the vocal Organs, is not meerly voluntary,
or totally within the jurisdiction of our selves: but as it may be
constrained by corporal contaction in any, and hath been enforced in
some even in their death, so the new unusual or unexpected jucundities,
which present themselves to any man in his life, at some time or other
will have activity enough to excitate the earthiest soul, and raise a
smile from most composed tempers. Certainly the times were dull when
these things happened, and the wits of those Ages short of these of
ours; when men could maintain such immutable faces, as to remain like
statues under the flatteries of wit and persist unalterable at all
efforts of Jocularity. The spirits in hell, and _Pluto_ himself, whom
_Lucian_ makes to laugh at passages upon earth, will plainly condemn
these Saturnines, and make ridiculous the magnified _Heraclitus_, who
wept preposterously, and made a hell on earth; for rejecting the
consolations of life, he passed his days in tears, and the uncomfortable
attendments of hell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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