Anatomy of the Brain

myself, I at length awoke sad, as if called out of a peaceful dream; I was ashamed, to be sure, to have been a philosopher only by permission, and to have beguiled my hearers and myself with a certain poetic physics, which by its novelty and by conjectures that fit together skillfully and neatly, acted upon both of us like an enchantment or trickery.

Wherefore, putting aside all delay, I resolve seriously with myself to enter upon another path immediately, and I apply myself to this one thing, that henceforth I should not depend upon the accepted dogmas of others, nor upon the suspicions and auguries of my own mind, but upon the faith of Nature and autopsy (direct observation). Therefore, I am henceforth entirely devoted to anatomical study: and when I inquired most especially into the functions and uses of the Brain and its nervous appendix, I devoted myself to the frequent opening of heads of every kind, and to an inspection of their contents that was as serious and diligent as I could make it; so that after the figure, site, and processes of the whole and of each individual part, and their respects and relationships to other bodies were exactly weighed, something supported by truth might at last be elicited concerning the exercise, defects, and anomalies of the animal economy; and thus a firm and stable basis might be laid, upon which not only a more certain Physiology, than that which I am bound to profess in the Schools, but also the Pathology of the Brain and the nervous kind, which I had long meditated, might be built.

But indeed, for the more accurate completion of this work, since I possessed neither sufficient leisure nor, perhaps, by my own strength alone, sufficient