177 



DIVI BOTANICI j 



OR, SKETCHES OF BOTANISTS WHOSE MERITS AKE COMMEMORATED 

 IN THE APPELLATIONS OF PLANTS. 



Article the Third. 



Without being used in a figurative acceptation, magnanimous 

 pusillanimity might well express that form of disintegrity in the 

 mental manifestations, where a person has lost his power of exercis- 

 ing the heroism of virtuous fortitude in enduring unsurmountable 

 misfortunes or miseries, and recklessly seizes the hardihood of des- 

 perate cowardice in escaping from his wretchedness by desertion of 

 his duties and a defiance of the Deity, in rushing headlong into 

 self-destruction. Such a procedure, in all its sources and bearings, 

 is utterly repugnant to the natural instincts which maintain the 

 desire and care of existence originally implanted, by the Creator, in 

 the first of every animated race for transmission to its latest pro- 

 geny ; and such a procedure also is irreconcilably adverse to the 

 innate faculties of mind that intuitively encourage man in cultivat- 

 ing its pure moral and religious principles; and such a procedure 

 moreover constitutes a most outrageous transgression of the all- 

 righteous precepts instituted and revealed by the Divinity himself 

 in the Sacred Scriptures, for advancing the perfectibility of his in- 

 telligent and amenable offspring. Hence, in the mere act of self- 

 destruction, independent of all other circumstances, there is evidence 

 both manifest and conclusive, that the forlorn suicide had become 

 misconscious of his pride or despair, that he had lost ability to obey 

 the highest of his feelings and sentiments and rational energies, 

 that he had been thrown by his malady into the state that required 

 him to be considered as partially insane, though not in all cases ir- 

 responsible. While then, with all fairness, it should be concluded 

 that an act — in its three-fold character, unnatural, impious and irra- 

 tional — must absolutely result from the causes of derangement in 

 the mental manifestations ; with equal fairness and strength of tes- 

 timony, it may also be concluded that, when it is perpetrated by 

 sages and saints, by individuals eminently distinguished for the sub- 

 limities of wisdom and the excellencies of piety, the same act origi- 

 nates from the causes of disorder in the functions of some or many 

 of the mental faculties, while the rest remain unaffected or imper- 

 ceptibly disturbed. Well and most wofully confirmed is this doc- 

 VOL VIII., NO. XXIV. 23 



