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.

There are, unquestionably, constitutional moral disorders; some
good-tempered but passionate persons have acknowledged, that they cannot
avoid those temporary fits to which they are liable, and which, they
say, they always suffered "from a child." If they arise from too great a
fulness of blood, is it not cruel to upbraid rather than to cure them,
which might easily be done by taking away their redundant humours, and
thus quieting the m