other, the Anima ;)—as for the opinion, I say, of Borri ,—my father could never subscribe to it by any means; the very idea of so noble, so refined, so immaterial, and so exalted a being as the Anima , or even the Animus , taking up her residence, and sitting dabbling, like a tadpole all day long, both summer and winter, in a puddle,⸺or in a liquid of any kind, how thick or thin soever, he would say, shocked his imagination; he would scarce give the doctrine a hearing.
What, therefore, seemed the least liable to objections of any, was that the chief sensorium, or headquarters of the soul, and to which place all intelligences were referred, and from whence all her mandates were issued,—was in, or near, the cerebellum,—or rather somewhere about the medulla oblongata, wherein it was generally agreed by Dutch anatomists, that all the minute nerves from all the organs of the seven senses concentered, like streets and winding alleys, into a square.
So far there was nothing singular in my father’s opinion,—he had the best of philosophers, of all ages and climates, to go along with him.⸺But here he took a road of his own, setting up another Shandean hypothesis upon these cornerstones they had laid for him;⸺and which said hypothesis equally stood its ground; whether the subtlety and fineness of the soul depended upon the temperature and clearness of the said liquor, or of the finer network and texture in the cerebellum itself; which opinion he favoured.
He maintained, that next to the due care to be taken in the act of propagation of each individual, which required all the thought in the world, as it laid the foundation of this incomprehensible contexture, in which wit, memory, fancy, eloquence, and what is usually meant by the name of good natural parts, do consist;—that next to this and his christian-name, which were the two original and most efficacious causes of all;⸺that the third cause, or rather what logicians call the Causa sine quâ non , and without which all that was done was of no manner of