ADAM LITTLETON'S STATEMENT THAT EVERY MAN IS MADE UP OF THREE EGOS,—DEAN YOUNG—DISTANCE BETWEEN A MAN'S HEAD AND HIS HEART.
Perhaps when the Reader considers the copiousness of the argument, he will rather blame me for being too brief than too tedious.
DR. JOHN SCOTT.
In the passage quoted from Adam Littleton in the preceding chapter, that good old divine enquired whether a man and himself were two. A Moorish prince in the most extravagant of Dryden's extravagant tragedies, (they do not deserve to be called romantic,) agrees with him, and exclaims to his confidential friend,
Assist me Zulema, if thou wouldst be
The friend thou seem'st, assist me against me.
Machiavel says of Cosmo de Medici that who ever considered his gravity and his levity might say there were two distinct persons in him.
“There is often times,” says Dean Young, (father of the poet) “a prodigious distance betwixt a man's head and his heart; such a distance that they seem not to have any correspondence; not to belong to the same person, not to converse in the same world. Our heads are sometimes in Heaven, contemplating the nature of God, the blessedness of Saints, the state of eternity; while our hearts are held captive below in a conversation earthly, sensual, devilish. 'Tis possible we may sometimes commend virtue convincingly, unanswerably; and yet our own hearts be never affected by our own arguments; we may represent vice in her native dress of horror, and yet our hearts be not at all startled with their own menaces: We may study and acquaint ourselves with all the truths of religion, and yet all this out of curiosity, or hypocrisy, or ostentation; not out of the power of godliness, or the serious purpose of good living. All which is a sufficient proof that the consent of the Head and of the Heart are two different things.”
Dean Young may seem in this passage to have answered Adam the Lexicographist's query in the affirmative, by shewing that the head belongs sometimes to one Self and the heart to the other. Yet these two Selves, notwithstanding this continual discord, are so united in matrimony, and so inseparably made one flesh, that it becomes another query whether death itself can part them.