This from a section of a letter from John Adams to Benjamin Rush: If We take a survey of the greatest Actions which have been performed in the World, which are the establishment of new Empires by Conquest, and the Advance and progress of new Schemes in Phylosophy, We shall find the Author’s of them all to have been persons, whose Brains had been shaken out of their natural position. For the Upper region of Man is furnished like the middle region of the Air. Mists arise from the Earth, steams from dunghills, exhalations from the Sea and smoke from fire; yet all Clouds are of the same, in composition as well as consequences; and fumes issuing from a Jakes will furnish as comely and usefull a vapour as incense from an Altar. As the face of nature never produces rain, but when it is overcast and disturbed; so human Understanding, seated in the brain, must be troubled and overspread by Vapours, ascending from the lower faculties to water the invention and render it fruitful. Two Instances may be produced to prove and explain this Theory, the first is that of Henry the fourth of France, whose whole project of universal Empire, as well as that of subduing the Turk and recovering Palestine, arose from an absent female, whose Eyes had raised a protuberancy, and before emission she was sent into an Ennemy’s country. The collected part of the semen, raised and inflamed became a dust, converted to choler, turned head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain. The very same principle that influences a bully, to break the Windows of a whore that has jilted him, naturally stirrs up a great Prince to raise mighty Armies, and dream of nothing but seiges, battles and Victories. In this plan I cannot avoid introducing a reflection by Way of digression. What a pity it is that our Congress had not known this discovery, and that Alexander Hamiltons project of raising an Army of fifty thousand Men, ten thousand of them to be Cavalry and his projectes of Sedition Laws and Alien Laws and of new Taxes to support his army, all arose from a superabundance of secretions which he could not find Whores enought to draw off? and that the same Vapours produced his Lyes and Slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his Life in the field of honor.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Apr 2014 17:31:43 +0000