PROGRESS OF IMPROVEMENT.
IN VourAntes Memoirs, he says that he remained at Berlin when FREDERICK had given him the best. reasons for departing, merely for the pleasure of laughing at a book MAUPERTUIS had just printed.
was the best of opportunities, for never had any thing appeared so ridiculous or absurd. The good man seriously proposed to travel directly to the two poles ; to dissect the heads of giants, and discover the nature of the soul by the texture of the brain ; to build a city and make the inhabitants all speak Latin ; to sink a pit to the centre of the earth ; to cure the sick by plastering them over with gum-resin ; and finally to prophesy, by enthusi- astically inflating the fancy." Three out of these six projects, extravagAncies to the mind of Von- TAIRE, have been the darling schemes of our age. Our Polar expe- ditions would have deliehted MAUPERTUIS ; though VOLTAIRE might, perhaps, have amused himself with the idea of Captain PARRY strug- gling heroically over the ice northwards, at only half the rate it was drifting southwards under him, and that great achievement in back- sliding at the peril of many lives! Then, in the discovery of the nature of the soul, by the texture of the brain, we have an idea parallel to the phrenology of late years; the phrenologists seeking those indications in the husk which MAUPERTHIS thought might be traced in the kernel. As for the last project, that of prophesying by enthusiasti- cally inflating the fancy, it, is just now coming into vogue in this coun- try, seine persons with a genius for absurdity having borrowed it from the Germans. A coterie, small as yet—and long may they be few, for the convenience of Bedlam—have taken into their heads that truth may be discovered by enthusiasm. The reasoning process is wholly dispensed with and despised, and notions are considered great and worthy, in proportion to their unintelligibility. What is called the pie of the printer would make a sublime scripture for this school. The less they understand the inure they admire.
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