"With all the extravagance," said he, "to
which they push their several systems, they are not unsuccessful in
practice, for habitual caution, and an instinctive regard for human
life, which they never can extinguish, checks them in carrying their
hypotheses into execution: and if I might venture to give an opinion on
a subject of which I know so little, and there is so much to be known, I
would say, that the most common error of theorists is to consider man as
a machine, rather than an animal, and subject to one set of the laws of
matter, rather than as subject to them all.
"Thus," he continued, "we have been regarded by one class of theorists
as an hydraulic engine, composed of various tubes fitted with their
several fluids, the laws and functions of which have been deduced from
calculations of velocities, altitudes, diameters, friction, &c. Another
class considered man as a mere chemical engine, and his stomach as an
alembic. The doctrine of affinities, attractions, and repulsions, now
had full play. Then came the notion of sympathies and antipathies, by
which name unknown and unknowable causes were sought to be explained,
and ignorance was cunningly veiled in mystery. But the science will
never be in the right tract of improvement, until we consider,
conjointly, the mechanical operations of the fluids, the chemical agency
of the substances taken into the stomach, and the animal functions of
digestion, secretion, and absorption, as evinced by actual observation.
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