The Works of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift ...

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C. Bathurst, W. Strahan, 1784

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Page 226 - The two senses to which all objects first address themselves are the sight and the touch. These never examine farther than the colour, the shape, the size, and whatever other qualities dwell, or are drawn by art upon the outward of bodies ; and then comes reason officiously with tools for cutting, and opening, and mangling, and piercing, offering to demonstrate that they are not of the same consistence quite through.
Page 285 - So that, in short, the question comes all to this; whether is the nobler being of the two, that which, by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride...
Page 281 - Things were at this crisis when a material accident fell out. For upon the highest corner of a large window there dwelt a certain spider, swollen up to the first magnitude by the destruction of infinite numbers of flies, whose spoils lay scattered before the gates of his palace, like human bones before the cave of some giant.
Page 282 - ... defence. In this mansion he had for some time dwelt in peace and plenty, without danger to his person by swallows from above, or to his palace by brooms from below : when it was the pleasure of fortune to conduct thither a wandering bee, to whose curiosity a broken pane in the glass had discovered itself, and in he...
Page 226 - Now, I take all this to be the last degree of perverting nature; one of whose eternal laws it is, to put her best furniture forward. And therefore, in order to save the charges of all such expensive anatomy for the time to come, I do here think fit to inform the reader, that in such conclusions as these, reason is certainly in the right, and that in most corporeal beings, which have fallen under my...
Page 141 - These postulata being admitted, it will follow in due course of reasoning that those beings, which the world calls improperly suits of clothes, are in reality the most refined species of animals ; or, to proceed higher, that they are rational creatures, or men.
Page 117 - In the Attic commonwealth it was the privilege and birthright of every citizen and poet to rail aloud and in public...
Page 107 - ... seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.
Page 284 - You boast, indeed, of being obliged to no other creature, but of drawing and spinning out all from yourself ; that is to say, if we may judge of the liquor in the vessel by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful store of dirt and poison in your breast...
Page 339 - Too intense a contemplation is not the business of flesh and blood; it must by the necessary course of things, in a little time let go its hold and fall into matter. Lovers, for the sake of celestial converse, are but another sort of Platonics who pretend to see stars and heaven in ladies...

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