were understood to be better disposed for the admission of those
oracular gusts, as entering and passing up through a receptacle of
greater capacity, and causing also a pruriency by the way, such as
with due management has been refined from carnal into a spiritual
ecstasy. And to strengthen this profound conjecture, it is further
insisted that this custom of female priests is kept up still in
certain refined colleges of our modern AEolists {122}, who are
agreed to receive their inspiration, derived through the receptacle
aforesaid, like their ancestors the Sybils.

And whereas the mind of man, when he gives the spur and bridle to
his thoughts, does never stop, but naturally sallies out into both
extremes of high and low, of good and evil, his first flight of
fancy commonly transports him to ideas of what is most perfect,
finished, and exalted, till, having soared out of his own reach and
sight, not well perceiving how near the frontiers of height and
depth border upon each other, with the same course and wing he falls
down plump into the lowest bottom of things, like one who travels
the east into the west, or like a straight line drawn by its own
length into a circle. Whether a tincture of malice in our natures
makes us fond of furnishing every bright idea with its reverse, or
whether reason, reflecting upon the sum of things, can, like the
sun, serve only to enlighten one half of the globe, leaving the
other half by necessity under shade and darkness, or whether fancy,
flying up to the imagination of what is highest and best, becomes
over-short, and spent, and weary, and suddenly falls, like a dead
bird of paradise, to the ground; or whether, after all these
metaphysical conjectures, I have not entirely missed the true
reason; the proposition, however, which has stood me in so much
circumstance is altogether true, that as the most uncivilised parts