Nothing more absurd was ever asserted, and yet it has been said by the author of the "Provincial Letters." It is sufficient to give men of sense the ague.
INFLUENCE.
Everything around exercises some influence upon us, either physically or morally. With this truth we are well acquainted. Influence may be exerted upon a being without touching, without moving that being.
In short, matter has been demonstrated to possess the astonishing power of gravitating without contact, of acting at immense distances. One idea influences another; a fact not less incomprehensible.
I have not with me at Mount Krapak the book entitled, "On the Influence of the Sun and Moon," composed by the celebrated physician Mead; but I well know that those two bodies are the cause of the tides; and it is not in consequence of touching the waters of the ocean that they produce that flux and reflux: it is demonstrated that they produce them by the laws of gravitation.
But when we are in a fever, have the sun and moon any influence upon the accesses of it, in its days of crisis? Is your wife constitutionally disordered only during the first quarter of the moon? Will the trees, cut at the time of full moon, rot sooner than if cut down in its wane? Not that I know. But timber cut down while the sap is circulating in it, undergoes putrefaction sooner than other timber; and if by chance it is cut down at the full moon, men will certainly say it was the full moon that caused all the evil. Your wife may have been disordered during the moon's growing; but your neighbor's was so in its decline.
The fitful periods of the fever which you brought upon yourself by indulging too much in the pleasures of the table occur about the first quarter of the moon; your neighbor experiences his in its decline. Everything that can possibly influence animals and vegetables must of course necessarily exercise that influence while the moon is making her circuit.
Were a woman of Lyons to remark that the periodical affections of her constitution had occurred in three or four successive instances on the day of the arrival of the diligence from Paris, would her medical attendant, however devoted he might be to system, think himself authorized in concluding that the Paris diligence had some peculiar and marvellous influence on the lady's constitution?
There was a time when the inhabitants of every seaport were persuaded, that no one would die while the tide was rising, and that death always waited for its ebb.