1. THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, CONSIDERED ANATOMICALLY, PHYSICALLY, AND PHILOSOPHICALLY.

PART I. THE VISCERA OF THE ABDOMEN, OR THE ORGANS OF THE INFERIOR REGION.

PROLOGUE.

NOTHING whatever is more to be desired, or more delightful than the light of truth; for it is the source of wisdom. When the mind is harassed with obscurity, distracted by doubts, rendered torpid or saddened by ignorance or falsities, and truth emerges as from a dark abyss, it shines forth instantaneously, like the sun dispersing mists and vapors, or like the dawn repelling the shades of darkness. For truths in the intellect or rational mind are analogous to lights and rays in ocular vision; falsities that have the appearance of truth are analogous to unreal or phosphoric lights; doubts, to clouds and shadows; and ignorance itself is thick darkness and the image of night: thus one thing is represented in another.

859.(207) We have advanced so far that at the present day we have skill enough to exalt the sensations of the ear and eye far above themselves, or above their natural acumen, by artificial organs or instruments: it now remains for us correspondingly to exalt the mind, or the rational hearing and sight. But the only way to accomplish this, is by the philosophy we have pointed out. This philosophy however, must be deduced from a perpetual intuition of causes in causes and effects; a work truly requiring an immense exercise of the rational faculty, and a profound abstraction from those things that, as superinduced, affect the lower faculties. Indeed I do not recommend, when it is commenced, that anything should be finally committed to it until it be in fact matured. For unripe investigations, which have not been brought to an end, and evidently involve consequents and conclusions in antecedents, cannot fail to attach themselves to the grosser notions of things perceived by sense, and which, as being proper to generals or compounds, require to be abstracted; the want of which has given birth to error, confusion, verbal disputes, and the wranglings and dust of the schools on all high subjects.