The most rebellious of his generals was the one who commanded the uterine district. There it was in vain that the articles of war were constantly read,—that solitary confinement and prison-diet were resorted to. Its constant mutinies not only demanded the utmost vigilance, but it was no easy matter to prevent its dangerous influence from contaminating the other branches of the service; and treasonable correspondences were not unfrequently discovered with the staff of the brain. This rebellious province, indeed, excited incessant apprehension, constantly agitated the entire commonwealth, and, on the plea of national welfare and liberty, it hoisted at times a standard of defiance, and precipitated the country in all the miseries of civil war; the more to be dreaded, as it always put forth the most specious pleas, destroying with words of peace.
This whimsical doctrine is not unlike the Platonic theories, and resembles the naturism or ενορμον of Hippocrates, and the autocracy of the soul, of Stahl. Van Helmont not only established his archei in animals, but in plants, and even in our food. The archeus of man he sometimes called ens seminale, ens spirituale, impetum faciens, aura vitalis. Well aware that the most powerful despot cannot reign without rival powers, Van Helmont admitted certain imperia in imperio: for instance, there was a troublesome minister in his own cabinet, whom the archeus frequently could not control,—one pylorus rector, or master of the ceremonies; then he had to apprehend the power of a secret faculty possessed by the stomach and spleen, which he called a duumvirate,—jus duumvirat’. The sensitive and immortal soul was another check on his sway; while the spirit of life residing in the blood was not easily managed. All these vexations occasioned frequent attacks of illness in the monarch, and Van Helmont has described these several affections; for, although he possessed the power of conceiving and executing plans of disease, like many physicians, he did not know how to cure himself.
When we consider that systems similar to this absurd doctrine, if not more extravagant, have ruled the medical schools for centuries with a despotic sway, can we marvel that medicine should have incurred the invectives of scepticism, or the scurrility of wits? In the very ratio of their absurdity have these flitting systems been maintained with scholastic fury; their proselytes would have vied in excesses with monastic persecutors, had they been able to assume a religious mask. It is painful to observe that unbelief and impious ridicule in theologic matters may be referred to the same causes as medical scepticism,—the vain and presumptuous endeavour of man to explain that which the Creator has most probably willed to remain inexplicable. Instead of wisely referring all that is mysterious to the Almighty Power that knows no limit, man has sought to explain and comment upon human principles, nay upon human motives; and when they could no longer attribute evil to God, they crossed the pons asinorum to call in the Devil. In like manner, when they proudly fancied that they had regulated all the functions of the animal economy in that harmonious manner that they were modest enough to call admirable and wondrous, they endeavoured to account for a derangement of this equilibrious condition, either by the introduction of some evil spirit, or the unmanageable rebellion of some organ, some principle, some agency, and for this purpose they gave individuality and specific vitality to those agents, each of the dramatis personæ having a particular part to perform in bringing on a tragic catastrophe or a happy denouement of the drama of life.
Let not the learned doctors of modern schools exclaim, that these were the errors of former days and of dark ages. They themselves are grovelling and groping in the dark whenever they pretend to fly from the trammels of empiricism, and, like our forefathers, account for what is unaccountable. But, above all, let them be meek and modest (if they can) in passing judgment upon others, and inscribe upon the doors of their splendid libraries the saying of the olden sage, “All that we know is our own ignorance.”
MONSTERS.
Philosophers have puzzled their brains to no purpose in endeavouring to account for the unnatural formation of animals. The ancients, amongst whom we may name Democritus and Epicurus, attributing all organization to an atomic aggregation, fancied that matter was endowed with an elective faculty and certain volition in attaining this organism; and considered monstruosities as mere experiments on the part of these atoms to produce some other species or races. This chimera was of a par with the archeus and his satellites of the preceding article. There is no doubt, however, that in the myriads of organized creatures various circumstances may tend to affect most materially the regularity of these developments, in the same manner as the properties and peculiar qualities of their organs may depend in a great measure upon similar influences. Conservation and reproduction are in the ratio of this perfection and imperfection. It is true, generally speaking, that the healthy and the best organized are less liable to engender an ill-conformed offspring; yet parents of this description have been known to produce monsters. Still the fortes creantur fortibus of Horace has become a proverbial expression; and some fanciful wanderers in the mazes of imagination framed rules for their megalanthropogenesy, or the art of creating illustrious men and distinguished women by uniting the learned and the witty.
Generation is a wondrous mystery. Many casual circumstances may check the mechanism of its action, (if I may be allowed the expression,) and affect its results. Any sudden physical or moral impression acting violently might produce this result; although, despite the theories and experiments of philosophers, it has not been proved that conception depends in the slightest degree upon the passions, being an act of nature totally independent of the control of mental emotions or bodily sufferings. This fact is clearly proved in cases of brutal violence.
The ideas entertained by several naturalists, that organized beings were cast in a certain mould, were not altogether visionary, or unfounded in observation. The great resemblance between children, and their hereditary mal-conformation and defectuosities in whole families, would seem to a certain degree to warrant this conclusion; but it is more probable that imagination may have some influence in this irregularity, although at the time we may be unconscious of the relative action of moral agency on physical functions. The supporters of the existence of this plastic mould in which organized matter is cast, would then maintain that the mind having once influenced the conformation of the matrix, it would ever after preserve this deviation from nature’s general laws.
It is evident that different species of animals and vegetables have disappeared on the face of the earth, some within the memory of man. We neither know how these species have ceased to exist, nor whether all that possibly can be created has hitherto been brought into being; neither can we form any idea regarding the perpetuity of the races that surround us. Perpetuity and eternity (as far as regards this world) are conventional terms: races were supposed to be perpetuated by the successive evolutions of germs, as I have observed in a former article. To a certain extent this doctrine is correct, and is rendered evident in the evolutions of plants arising from their seed. Preternatural conditions are merely irregularities in this germination. The doctrine, that at each creation a true generation and gradual formation of a new conception from the formless genital matter takes place, does not appear to me reconcileable with sound physiology, nor supported by observation; for, were this the case, it is more than probable that preternatural formations would be more frequent. It was upon this doctrine that the learned Blumenbach founded his nisus formativus, an expression that he thus explains: “The word nisus I have adopted chiefly to express an energy truly vital, and therefore to distinguish it as clearly as possible from powers merely mechanical, by which some physiologists formerly endeavoured to explain generation. The point upon which the whole of this doctrine respecting the nisus formativus turns, and which is alone sufficient to distinguish it from the vis plastica of the ancients, or the vis essentialis of Wolff, and similar hypotheses, is the union and intimate co-exertion of two distinct principles in the evolution of the nature of organized bodies,—of the PHYSICO-MECHANICAL with the purely TELEOLOGICAL;—principles which have hitherto been adopted, but separately, by physiologists in framing theories of generation.”