⸺It happens otherwise—replied the opponents.⸺
It ought not, said they.
The more curious and intimate inquirers after nature and her doings, though they went hand in hand a good way together, yet they all divided about the nose at last, almost as much as the Faculty itself.
They amicably laid it down, that there was a just and geometrical arrangement and proportion of the several parts of the human frame to its several destinations, offices, and functions which could not be transgressed but within certain limits—that nature, though she sported⸺she sported within a certain circle;—and they could not agree about the diameter of it.
The logicians stuck much closer to the point before them than any of the classes of the literati;⸻they began and ended with the word Nose; and had it not been for a petitio principii, which one of the ablest of them ran his head against in the beginning of the combat, the whole controversy had been settled at once.
A nose, argued the logician, cannot bleed without blood—and not only blood—but blood circulating in it to supply the phænomenon with a succession of drops—(a stream being but a quicker succession of drops, that is included, said he).⸺Now death, continued the logician, being nothing but the stagnation of the blood⸺
I deny the definition⸺Death is the separation of the soul from the body, said his antagonist⸺Then we don’t agree about our weapons, said the logician—Then there is an end of the dispute, replied the antagonist.
The civilians were still more concise: what they offered being more in the nature of a decree⸺than a dispute.