reckon among their high points of wisdom the art of exposing weak
sides and publishing infirmities--an employment, in my opinion,
neither better nor worse than that of unmasking, which, I think, has
never been allowed fair usage, either in the world or the playhouse.

In the proportion that credulity is a more peaceful possession of
the mind than curiosity, so far preferable is that wisdom which
converses about the surface to that pretended philosophy which
enters into the depths of things and then comes gravely back with
informations and discoveries, that in the inside they are good for
nothing. The two senses to which all objects first address
themselves are the sight and the touch; these never examine farther
than the colour, the shape, the size, and whatever other qualities
dwell or are drawn by art upon the outward of bodies; and then comes
reason officiously, with tools for cutting, and opening, and
mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of
the same consistence quite through. Now I take all this to be the
last degree of perverting Nature, one of whose eternal laws it is to
put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to save the
charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do
here think fit to inform the reader that in such conclusions as
these reason is certainly in the right; and that in most corporeal
beings which have fallen under my cognisance, the outside hath been
infinitely preferable to the in, whereof I have been further
convinced from some late experiments. Last week I saw a woman
flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person
for the worse. Yesterday I ordered the carcass of a beau to be
stripped in my presence, when we were all amazed to find so many
unsuspected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his
brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly perceived at every