"So that when she has locked up the doors of this Laboratory the Body, she may be busie in augmenting, repairing, and regenerating all the Organs and Utensils within, and painting and plaistring the Walls without."
— Power, Henry (1623-1668)
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed by T. Roycroft, for John Martin and James Allestry
Date
1664
Metaphor
"So that when she has locked up the doors of this Laboratory the Body, she may be busie in augmenting, repairing, and regenerating all the Organs and Utensils within, and painting and plaistring the Walls without."
Metaphor in Context
Thus are the Phaenomena of Sense and Motion best salved, whilst we are awake; now what happens when we sleep, is a matter of further enquiry: Some have defined Sleep to be a migration of all the Spirits out of the Brain, into the exteriour parts of the Body; whereas by our former Observations, it may rather seem to the contrary; that is, The retraction of the Spirits into the Brain, or at least a restagnation of them in the nervous parts, does (till Nature being recruited by a new supply and regeneration of them in the Brain) direct them into the Spinal Marrow and Nerves, which being replenished with them again, they run their current as before; so the whole Animal thereby is made capable of feeling the Impulses of any external object whatever (which we call, Walking) and during this Interval and Non-tearm of sensation (for so we may without a Complement call Sleep) why may not the Soul be retracted, and wholly intent upon, and busied about, her Vegetative and Plastical Operations? So that when she has locked up the doors of this Laboratory the Body, she may be busie in augmenting, repairing, and regenerating all the Organs and Utensils within, and painting and plaistring the Walls without. This I am sure we observe to be the greatest part of her obscure employment in the Womb, where the Embryo for the most part sleeps, whilst the Soul is in full exercise of her Plastick and Organo-Poïetical Faculty.
(pp. 70-71)
(pp. 70-71)
Categories
Provenance
Reading Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 261.
Citation
Only 1 entry in ESTC (1664).
Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy, in Three Books Containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical: With Some Deductions, and Probable Hypotheses, Raised from Them, in Avouchment and Illustration of the Now Famous Atomical Hypothesis. (London: Printed by T. Roycroft, for John Martin and James Allestry, 1664). <Link to EEBO-TCP>
Henry Power, Experimental Philosophy, in Three Books Containing New Experiments Microscopical, Mercurial, Magnetical: With Some Deductions, and Probable Hypotheses, Raised from Them, in Avouchment and Illustration of the Now Famous Atomical Hypothesis. (London: Printed by T. Roycroft, for John Martin and James Allestry, 1664). <Link to EEBO-TCP>
Date of Entry
07/28/2014
