CHAPTER TWO
THEN, positively, there is nothing in the question,that
I can see, either good or bad.-Then let me tell you, Sir,
it was a very unseasonable question at least,-because it
scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business
it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the
HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place
destined for his reception.
The HOMUNCULUS, Sir, in however low and ludicrous
a light he may appear, in this age of levity. to the eye of folly
or prejudice: -to the eye of reason in scientific research,
he stands confessed-a BEING guarded and circumscribed
with rights: -The minutest philosophers, who, by the bye,
have the most enlarged understandings, (their souls being in-
versely as their enquiries) shew us incontestably, That the
HOMUNCULUS is created by the same hand,- engendered
in the same course of nature,-endowed with the same loco-
motive powers and faculties with us:-That he consists as
we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments,
nerves, cartilages, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals,
humours, and articulations;-is a Being of as much activity,
-and, in all senses of the word, as much and as truly our
fellow-creature as my Lord Chancellor of England.-He
may be benefited,-he may be injured,-he may obtain
redress;-in a word, he has aH the claims and rights of
humanity, which Tully, Puffendorff, or the best ethic writers
allow to arise out of that state and relation.
Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in
his way alone?-or that, through terror of it, natural to so
young a traveller, my little gentleman had got to his jour-
ney's end miserably spent;-his muscular strength and
virility worn down to a thread;-his own animal spirits
ruffled beyond description,-and that in this sad disordered
state of nerves, he had laid down a prey to sudden starts, or
a series of melancholy dreams and fancies for nine long,
long months together.-I tremble to think what a founda-
tion had been laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body
and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher
could ever afterwards have set thoroughly to rights.


For a digression on parents.

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