interior.  Can we conceive the mysterious inhabitant as forming a part of its own habitation?  The tenant and the house are so inseparable, that in striking at any part of the dwelling, you inevitably reach the dweller.  If the mind be disordered, we may often look for its seat in some corporeal derangement.  Often are our thoughts disturbed by a strange irritability, which we do not even pretend to account for.  This state of the body, called the fidgets, is a disorder to which the ladies are particularly liable.  A physician of my acquaintance was earnestly entreated by a female patient to give a name to her unknown complaints; this he found no difficulty to do, as he is a sturdy asserter of the materiality of our nature; he declared that her disorder was atmospherical.  It was the disorder of her frame under damp weather, which was reacting on her mind; and physical means, by operating on her body, might be applied to restore her to her half-lost senses.  Our imagination is higher when our stomach is not overloaded; in spring than in winter; in solitude than amidst company; and in an obscured light than in the blaze and heat of the noon.  In all these cases the body is evidently acted on, and re-acts on the mind.  Sometimes our dreams present us with images of our restlessness, till we recollect that the seat of our brain may perhaps lie in our stomach, rather than on the pineal gland of Descartes; and that the most artificial logic to make us somewhat reasonable, may be swallowed with “the blue pill.”  Our domestic happiness often depends on the state of our biliary and digestive organs, and the little disturbances of conjugal life may be more efficaciously cured by the physician than by the moralist; for a sermon misapplied will never act so directly as a sharp medicine.  The learned Gaubius, an eminent professor of medicine at Leyden, who called himself “professor of the passions,” gives the case of a lady of too inflammable a constitution, whom her husband, unknown to herself, had gradually reduced to a model of decorum, by phlebotomy.  Her complexion, indeed, lost the roses, which some, perhaps, had too wantonly admired for the repose of her conjugal physician.

The art of curing moral disorders by corporeal means has not yet been brought into general practice, although it is probable that some quiet sages of medicine have made use of it on some occasions.  The Leyden professor we have just alluded to, delivered at the university a discourse “on the management and cure of the disorders of the mind by application to the body.”  Descartes conjectured, that as the mind seems so dependent on the disposition of the bodily organs, if any means can be found to render men wiser and more ingenious than they have been hitherto, such a method might be sought from the assistance of medicine.  The sciences of Morals and of Medicine will therefore be found to have a more intimate connexion than has been suspected.  Plato thought that a man must have natural dispositions towards virtue to become virtuous; that it cannot be educated—­you cannot make a bad man a good man; which he ascribes to the evil dispositions of the body, as well as to a bad education.