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,""
3617,"","Whitman, James Q. The origins of reasonable doubt: theological roots of the criminal trial. Yale UP, 2008. p. 179. <Link to Google Books>
",2010-01-13 20:37:45 UTC,"2. Against a doubting conscience a man may not work but against a scrupulous he may. For a scrupulous conscience does not take away the proper determination of the understanding; but it is like a Woman handling of a Frog or a Chicken, which, all their friends tell them, can do them no hurt, and they are convinced in reason that they cannot, they believe it and know it ; and yet when they take the little creature into their hands, they shreek, and sometimes hold fast, and find their fears confuted, and sometimes they let go, and find their reason useless.
(p. 160)",,17674,"","""For a scrupulous conscience does not take away the proper determination of the understanding; but it is like a Woman handling of a Frog or a Chicken, which, all their friends tell them, can do them no hurt, and they are convinced in reason that they cannot, they believe it and know it ; and yet when they take the little creature into their hands, they shreek, and sometimes hold fast, and find their fears confuted, and sometimes they let go, and find their reason useless.""","",2010-01-13 20:38:13 UTC,"Book I, Chapter 6, Rule II"
7476,"",C-H Lion,2013-06-19 02:07:16 UTC,"'My very Brains (as Manichæus's Skin) are stuff'd with Chaff. I am ever sick of a Diabete; nor do I read but weed Authors, picking up cheap, and refuse Notes, and then with Domitian, retire into my Study to catch Flies.
'Were there any Metempsychosis, my Soul would want a Lodging, no single Beast could fit me; for I shou'd out of pure love to novelty change more Lodgings than ever Pythagoras's Soul did. Twice every day a thousand Fancies and Fegaries crowd into my Noddle so thick as if my Brain kept open-house for all the Maggots in nature.
(III, pp. 29-30)",,20994,"Fegaries? OED: ""A vagary, prank, freak; a whim, eccentricity."" (Word appears in Clarissa.)","""Twice every day a thousand Fancies and Fegaries crowd into my Noddle so thick as if my Brain kept open-house for all the Maggots in nature.""",Animals and Inhabitants and Rooms,2013-06-19 02:07:16 UTC,""