madness or frenzy. For if we take a survey of the greatest actions
that have been performed in the world under the influence of single
men, which are the establishment of new empires by conquest, the
advance and progress of new schemes in philosophy, and the
contriving as well as the propagating of new religions, we shall
find the authors of them all to have been persons whose natural
reason hath admitted great revolutions from their diet, their
education, the prevalency of some certain temper, together with the
particular influence of air and climate. Besides, there is
something individual in human minds that easily kindles at the
accidental approach and collision of certain circumstances, which,
though of paltry and mean appearance, do often flame out into the
greatest emergencies of life. For great turns are not always given
by strong hands, but by lucky adaptation and at proper seasons, and
it is of no import where the fire was kindled if the vapour has once
got up into the brain. For the upper region of man is furnished
like the middle region of the air, the materials are formed from
causes of the widest difference, yet produce at last the same
substance and effect. Mists arise from the earth, steams from
dunghills, exhalations from the sea, and smoke from fire; yet all
clouds are the same in composition as well as consequences, and the
fumes issuing from a jakes will furnish as comely and useful a
vapour as incense from an altar. Thus far, I suppose, will easily
be granted me; and then it will follow that as the face of Nature
never produces rain but when it is overcast and disturbed, so human
understanding seated in the brain must be troubled and overspread by
vapours ascending from the lower faculties to water the invention
and render it fruitful. Now although these vapours (as it hath been
already said) are of as various original as those of the skies, yet
the crop they produce differs both in kind and degree, merely