work_id,theme,provenance,created_at,text,reviewed_on,id,comments,metaphor,dictionary,updated_at,context
6572,"",Reading,2009-07-09 00:00:00 UTC,"Here it may not be amiss to add a few words upon the laudable practice of wearing quilted caps; which is not a matter of mere custom, humour, or fashion, as some would pretend, but an institution of great sagacity and use; these, when moistened with sweat, stop all perspiration, and by reverberating the heat prevent the spirit from evaporating any way but at the mouth: even as a skilful house-wife, that covers her still with a wet clout, for the same reason, and finds the same effect. For, it is the opinion of choice virtuosi, that the brain is only a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and therefore cling together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's Leviathan, or like bees in perpendicular swarm upon a tree, or like a carrion corrupted into vermin, still preserving the shape and figure of the mother animal; that all invention is formed by the morsure of two or more of these animals, upon certain capillary nerves, which proceed from thence, whereof three branches spread into the tongue, and two into the right hand. They hold also, that these animals are of a constitution extremely cold; that their food is the air we attract, their excrement phlegm; and that what we vulgarly called rheums, and colds, and distillations, is nothing else but an epidemical looseness, to which that little commonwealth is very subject from the climate it lies under. Further, that nothing less than a violent heat can disentangle these creatures from their hamated station of life, or give them vigour and humour to imprint the marks of their little teeth. That, if the morsure be hexagonal, it produces Poetry; the circular gives Eloquence; if the bite hath been conical, the person, whose nerve is so affected, shall be disposed to write upon Politics; and so of the rest.
(pp. 134-5)",,17456,"I've included four times: Teeth and Claws, Bees, Vermin, Leviathan. See A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. by A. Ross and D. Woolley, (Oxford UP, 1990), 134.","""For, it is the opinion of choice virtuosi, that the brain is only a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and therefore cling together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's Leviathan, or like bees in perpendicular swarm upon a tree, or like a carrion corrupted into vermin, still preserving the shape and figure of the mother animal; that all invention is formed by the morsure of two or more of these animals, upon certain capillary nerves, which proceed from thence, whereof three branches spread into the tongue, and two into the right hand.""",Animals and Inhabitants,2014-07-11 15:38:51 UTC,""
7488,"",Searching in C-H Lion,2013-06-28 03:02:35 UTC,"When the Prefacer tells us, in his very first Paragraph; that Homer is universally allow'd to have had the greatest Invention of any Writer whatever, he is so far from telling us, at the same Time, what Invention is, that he plainly discovers that he knows nothing of it. For he seems to take it for a peculiar Faculty of the Mind, distinct from Memory, Imagination, and Judgment; whereas it is the Effect and Result of the confederate Powers and Operation of all the three. We have a faint Image of these Operations in Hawking: For Memory may be justly compar'd to the Dog that beats the Field, or the Wood, and that starts the Game; Imagination to the Falcon that clips it upon its Pinions after it; and Judgment to the Falconer, who directs the Flight, and who governs the whole. But P. as has been said, takes it for a distinct Faculty; he opposes it to Judgment in this very Paragraph; and in the last Paragraph of the third Page, [Edit. 2.] he calls it the strong and the ruling Faculty.
(p. 22)",,21230,"","""We have a faint Image of these Operations in Hawking: For Memory may be justly compar'd to the Dog that beats the Field, or the Wood, and that starts the Game; Imagination to the Falcon that clips it upon its Pinions after it; and Judgment to the Falconer, who directs the Flight, and who governs the whole.""",Animals and Inhabitants,2013-06-28 03:02:35 UTC,""