View report page

49
Half of the whole field of its distribution is untouched. If streets or sides of
streets, serve as an illustration in its behalf, exactly the same demonstration
can be put forward in contradiction; and if localities be selected as the scenes
of special visitation during the pestilence, then streets after streets, and
masses of people abutting in each infected neighbourhood, will be found
almost entirely to have escaped. I put aside for the moment the fact of
what were the drinking hahits, which, strange to say, by the advocates of
the water dogma, are never sought after within the limits of the contagion,
as though a simply a residence was sufficient. If a higher altitude, again, be
said to explain the immunity, together with a better class of inhabitants, as at
Stamford Hill and round about, this surely cannot apply to the other extreme
of the compass, amongst the poor and labouring classes, at the lowest
elevation, of Silver Town and North Woolwich.
There is just one point in closing which must not be forgotten: the necessity
for every doctrine, no matter what, in all its divisions to be consistent
in order to be complete. We are told ever whole has its parts, and the parts
cannot be more or less, but they must be equal. It is indifferent to what this
proposition refers—to a mountain, a gnat's wing, or, to diverge for the moment
to an abstraction—the consistency of an hypothesis. The division and the
aggregation must be equal. For instance, a figure divided into 12 equal
parts, say, a black figure, the 12 black parts are requisite to make up the
whole figure. Take 11 black parts and 1 white, and the outline may be
similar, but the unity is imperfect; the 12 black parts are essential to a perfect
whole, and the 11 black parts and 1 white no more go to make up a
black, than in the familiar fact that 44 two blacks don't make a white." And
exactly the same uuity is required of all the properties of matter, in order
to ensure its consistency as a whole. What was white yesterday is white
to-day, will be to-morrow, and to all time, under the same conditions.
Neither can a thing at the same time be hot and cold, bitter and sweet; nor
can matter, nor any operation upon matter, be under the same circumstances
both fast and slow. So necessary is it to have the consistency of the parts to
establish an identity and a whole ; and this is equally applicable to the concrete
or the abstract, to the black figure or what not, or to the divisions or
parts of a doctrine that has startled the learned and astounded the ignorant, in
order to prove its completeness as a whole.