'One fire burns out another's burning'—
'One desperate grief cures with another's languish'—
'Take thou some new infection to thine eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die.'
Romeo and Juliet.
'As fire drives out fire, so pity, pity;
And pity to the general wrong of Rome
Hath, done this deed _on Cæsar.'
Julius Cæsar.
for it is the larger form, which is the worthier, in that new department of mixed mathematics which this philosopher was cultivating.
'One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail:
Rights by rights fouler, strength by strengths do fail.'
Coriolanus.
And for history of cases, see the same author in Hamlet and other plays. [This philosopher's prose not unfrequently contains the key of the poetic paraphrase; and the true reading of the line, which has occasioned so much perplexity to the critics, may, perhaps, be suggested by this connection—'to set affection against affection, and to master one by another, even as we hunt beast with beast, and fly bird with bird.']
CHAPTER V.
THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY.—ALTERATION.
Hast thou not learn'd me how
To make perfumes? distil? preserve? yea, so,
That our great king himself doth woo me oft
For my confections? Having thus far proceeded,
(Unless thou think'st me devilish,) is't not meet
That I did amplify my judgment in
Other conclusions? Cymbeline.
Thus far, it is the science of Man, as he is, that is propounded. It is a scientific history of the Mind and its diseases, built up from particulars, as other scientific histories are; and having disposed, in this general manner, of that which must be dealt with by way of application, those points of nature and fortune, which he puts down as the basis and conditions to which all our WORK is limited and tied, we come now to that which IS within our power—to those points which we can deal with by way of ALTERATION, and not of application merely; and yet points which are operating perpetually on the human character, changing the will and appetite, and altering the conduct, by laws not less sure than those which operate in the occult processes of nature, and determine differences behind the scene, or out of the range of our volition.
And if after having duly weighed the hints we have already received of the importance of the subject, we do not any longer suffer ourselves to be put off the track, or bewildered by the first rhetorical effect of the sentence in which these agencies are introduced to our attention,—if we look at that rapid series of words, as something else than the points of a period, if we stop long enough to recover from the confusion which a mere string of names, a catalogue or table of contents, crowded into single sentence, will, of necessity, create,—if we stop long enough to see that each one of these words is a point in the table of a new science, we shall perceive at once, that after having made all this large allowance, this new allowance for that which is without our power, there is still a very, very large margin of operation, and discovery, and experiment left; that there is still a large scope of alteration left—alteration in man as he is. For we shall find that these forces which are within our power, are the very ones which are making, and always have been making, man what he is. Running our eye along this table of forces and supplies, with that understanding of its uses, we shall perceive at once, that we have the most ample material here, if it were but scientifically handled; untried, inexhaustible means and appliances for raising man to the height of his pattern and original, to the stature of a perfect man.