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Even the idealist Berkeley owed much of his theory to his iridescent tar-water; while surely the greater ethicists are those who have not only been dialecticians, but moral forces in the world of men. In such ways, then, I would justify the thesis that civics is no abstract study, but fundamentally a matter of concrete and descriptive sociology perhaps the greatest field of this.
The reader, I think, will scarce need to be informed that the writer I mean is the late bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland, and the discovery that of the virtues of tar-water.
Here a re-perusal of Bishop Berkeley's Siris, which had been recalled to his memory by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox, "the inimitable author of the Female Quixote," set him drinking tar-water with apparent good effect, except as far as his chief ailment was concerned.
The sacred profession has, it is true, returned the favor by giving the practitioner of medicine Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tar-water," and the invaluable prescription of that "aged clergyman whose sands of life" but let us be fair, if not generous, and remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel Boylston the credit of introducing the practice of inoculation into America.
I have selected four topics for this lecture, the first three of which I shall touch but slightly, the last more fully. They are The Royal cure of the King's Evil, or Scrofula. The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism.
Sure there is no bound to the trustingness of women. Look at Arria worshipping the drunken clodpate of a husband who beats her; look at Cornelia treasuring as a jewel in her maternal heart the oaf her son; I have known a woman preach Jesuit's bark, and afterwards Dr. Berkeley's tar-water, as though to swallow them were a divine decree, and to refuse them no better than blasphemy.
For my delivery from this I well knew I must be again obliged to the trochar; and that if the tar-water did me any good at all it must be only by the slowest degrees; and that if it should ever get the better of my distemper it must be by the tedious operation of undermining, and not by a sudden attack and storm.
Leibnitz, Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Spinoza, Bishop Berkeley, were once clothed with a "brief authority;" but Berkeley ended his metaphysical theory with a treatise on the healing properties of tar-water, and Hegel was an inveterate snuff-taker. The circumlocution and cold categories of Kant fail to improve the conditions of mortals, morally, spiritually, or physically.
Just now he is revelling in Called Back and The House on the Marsh, which are being read aloud to him by his private secretary. Mr. ARTHUR PONSONBY, M.P., the Democratic Controller, is a confirmed fruitarian, and attributes his robust health to a diet of Morella cherries and Carlsbad plums, washed down with Stockholm tar-water. Mr.
The Weapon Ointment, and its twin absurdity, the Sympathetic Powder. The Tar-water mania of Bishop Berkeley. The History of the Metallic Tractors, or Perkinism. The first two illustrate the ease with which numerous facts are accumulated to prove the most fanciful and senseless extravagances.
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