Page:Devotions - Donne - 1840.djvu/164

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

nor where it is; but they must extort names from what it is like, what it resembles: and but in some one thing, or else they would lack names; for the wolf, and the canker, and the polypus are so: and that question, whether there be more names or things, is as perplexed in sicknesses as in any thing else; except it be easily resolved upon that side, that there are more sicknesses than names. If ruin were reduced to that one way, that man could perish no way but by sickness, yet his danger were infinite; and if sickness were reduced to that one way, that there were no sickness but a fever, yet the way were infinite still; for it would overload and oppress any natural, disorder and discompose any artificial, memory, to deliver the names of several fevers; how intricate a work then have they, who are gone to consult which of these sicknesses mine is, and then which of these fevers, and then what 1t would do, and then how it may be countermined. But even in ill, it is a degree of good when the evil will admit consultation. In many diseases, that which is but an accident, but a symptom of the main disease, is so violent, that the physician must attend the cure of that, though he pretermit (so far as to intermit) the cure of the disease itself. Is it not so in states too? Sometimes the insolency of those that are great put the people into commotions; the great disease, and the greatest danger to the head, is the insolency of the great ones; and yet they execute martial law, they come to present executions upon the people, whose commotion was indeed but a symptom, but an accident of the main disease; but this symptom, grown so violent, would allow no time for a consultation. Is it not so in the accidents of the diseases of our mind too? Is it not evidently so in our affections, in our passions? If a choleric man be ready to strike, must I go about to