———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 confess’d—a BEING
guarded and circumscribed with rights.——The minutest philosophers, who
by the bye, have the most enlarged understandings, (their souls being
inversely as their enquiries) shew us incontestably, that the
HOMUNCULUS is created by the same hand,—engender’d in the same course
of nature,—endow’d 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
benefitted,—he may be injured,—he may obtain redress; in a word, he has
all the claims and rights of humanity, which _Tully, Puffendorf_, or
the best ethick 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 journey’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 disorder’d
state of nerves, he had lain 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 foundation 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.