Moral vices or infirmities, which originate in the state of the body, may be cured by topical applications.  Precepts and ethics in such cases, if they seem to produce a momentary cure, have only moved the weeds, whose roots lie in the soil.  It is only by changing the soil itself that we can eradicate these evils.  The senses are five porches for the physician to enter into the mind, to keep it in repair.  By altering the state of the body, we are changing that of the mind, whenever the defects of the mind depend on those of the organization.  The mind, or soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited, independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body.  A man becomes stupified when the circulation of the blood is impeded in the viscera; he acts more from instinct than reflection; the nervous fibres are too relaxed or too tense, and he finds a difficulty in moving them; if you heighten his sensations, you awaken new ideas in this stupid being; and as we cure the stupid by increasing his sensibility, we may believe that a more vivacious fancy may be promised to those who possess one, when the mind and the body play together in one harmonious accord.  Prescribe the bath, frictions, and fomentations, and though it seems a round-about way, you get at the brains by his feet.  A literary man, from long sedentary habits, could not overcome his fits of melancholy, till his physician doubled his daily quantity of wine; and the learned Henry Stephens, after a severe ague, had such a disgust of books, the most beloved objects of his whole life, that the very thought of them excited terror for a considerable time.  It is evident that the state of the body often indicates that of the mind.  Insanity itself often results from some disorder in the human machine.  “What is this MIND, of which men appear so vain?” exclaims Flechier.  “If considered according to its nature it is a fire which sickness and an accident most sensibly puts out; it is a delicate temperament, which soon grows disordered; a happy conformation of organs, which wear out; a combination and a certain motion of the spirits, which exhaust themselves; it is the most lively and the most subtile part of the soul, which seems to grow old with the BODY.”

It is not wonderful that some have attributed such virtues to their system of diet, if it has been found productive of certain effects on the human body.  Cornaro perhaps imagined more than he experienced; but Apollonius Tyaneus, when he had the credit of holding an intercourse with the devil, by his presumed gift of prophecy, defended himself from the accusation by attributing his clear and prescient views of things to the light aliments he lived on, never indulging in a variety of food.  “This mode of life has produced such a perspicuity in my ideas, that I see as in a glass things past and future.”  We may, therefore, agree with Bayes, that “for a sonnet to Amanda, and the like, stewed prunes only” might be sufficient; but for “a grand design,” nothing less than a more formal and formidable dose.