"But,"
he says, "I constantly refused any subject which did not hold out a
promise. . . . of showing off my originality and providing great
results, for I cannot make up my mind to treat a subject already well
done by others." - Consequently, when he tries to originate he merely
imitates, or commits mistakes. His treatise on " Man" is a jumble of
physiological and moral common-places, made up of ill-digested reading
and words strung together haphazard,[6] of gratuitous and incoherent
suppositions in which the doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, coupled together, end in empty phraseology. "Soul and Body
are distinct substances with no essential relationship, being
connected together solely through the nervous fluid;" this fluid is
not gelatinous for the spirits by which it is renewed contains no
gelatin; the soul, excited by this, excites that; hence the place
assigned to it "in the brain." - His " Optics"[7] is the reverse of
the great truth already discovered by Newton more than a century
before, and since confirmed by more than another century of experiment
and calculation. On" Heat " and "Electricity" he merely puts forth
feeble hypotheses and literary generalizations; one day, driven to the
wall, he inserts a needle in a resin to make this a conductor, in
which piece of scientific trickery he is caught by the physicist
Charles.
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