I find by experience that Writing is like Building, wherein the undertaker, to supply some defect, or serve some convenience which at first he foresaw not, is usually forced to exceed his first model and proposal, and many times to double the charge and expence of it.
DR. JOHN SCOTT.
Is man magnified or minified by considering himself as under the influence of the heavenly bodies,—not simply as being
Moved round in earth's dismal course
With rocks and stones and trees;1
but as affected by them in his constitution bodily and mental, and dependent on them for weal or woe, for good or evil fortune; as subjected, that is, according to astrological belief to
The Stars, who, by I know not what strange right,
Preside o'er mortals in their own despite,
Who without reason, govern those who most,
(How truly, judge from thence!) of reason boast;
And by some mighty magic, yet unknown,
Our actions guide, yet cannot guide their own.2
Apart from what one of our Platonic divines calls “the power of astral necessity, and uncontrollable impressions arising from the subordination and mental sympathy and dependence of all mundane causes,” which is the Platonist's and Stoic's “proper notion of fate;”3 apart, I say, from this, and from the Calvinist's doctrine of predestination, is it a humiliating, or an elevating consideration, that the same celestial movements which cause the flux and reflux of the ocean, should be felt in the pulse of a patient suffering with a fever: and that the eternal laws which regulate the stars in their courses, should decide the lot of an individual?
1 WORDSWORTH.