ccusation by attributing his clear and prescient views of things to
the light aliments he lived on, never indulging in a variety of food.
"This mode of life has produced such a perspicuity in my ideas, that I
see as in a glass things past and future." We may, therefore, agree with
Bayes, that "for a sonnet to Amanda, and the like, stewed prunes only"
might be sufficient; but for "a grand design," nothing less than a more
formal and formidable dose.

Camus, a French physician, who combined literature with science, the
author of "Abdeker, or the Art of Cosmetics," which he discovered in
exercise and temperance, produced another fanciful work, written in
1753, "La Medecine de l'Esprit." His conjectural cases are at least as
numerous as his more positive facts; for he is not wanting in
imagination. He assures us, that having reflected on the physical
causes, which, by differently modifying the body, varied also the
dispositions of the mind, he was convinced that by employing these
different causes, or by imitating their powers by art, we might, by
means purely mechanical, affect the human mind, and correct the
infirmities of the understanding and the will. He considered this
principle only as the aurora of a brighter day. The great difficulty to
overcome was to find out a method to root out the defects, or the
diseases of the soul, in the same manner as physicians cure a fluxion
from the lungs, a dysentery, a dropsy, and all other infirmities, which
seem only to attack the body. This indeed, he says, is enlarging the
domain of medicine, by showing how the functions of intellect and the
springs of volition are mechanical. The movements and passions of the
soul, formerly restricted to abstract reasonings, are by this system
reduced to simple ideas. Insisting that material causes force the soul
and body to act together, the defects of the intellectual operations
depend on those of the organisation, which may be altered or destroyed
by physical causes; and he properly adds, that we are to consider that
the soul is material, while existing in matter, because it is operated
on by matter. Such is the theory of "La Medecine de l'Esprit," which,
though physicians will never quote, may perhaps contain some facts worth
their attention.

Camus's two little volumes seem to have been preceded by a medical
discourse delivered in the academy of Dijon in 1748, where the moralist
compares the infirmities and vices of the mind to parallel di