Contemporaries have explained them after
their own manner, and have thus, like their posterity, under
similar circumstances, given a proof that mortals possess neither
senses nor intellectual powers sufficiently acute to comprehend
the phenomena produced by the earth's organism, much less
scientifically to understand their effects. Superstition,
selfishness in a thousand forms, the presumption of the schools,
laid hold of unconnected facts. They vainly thought to comprehend
the whole in the individual, and perceived not the universal
spirit which, in intimate union with the mighty powers of nature,
animates the movements of all existence, and permits not any
phenomenon to originate from isolated causes. To attempt, five
centuries after that age of desolation, to point out the causes of
a cosmical commotion, which has never recurred to an equal extent,
to indicate scientifically the influences, which called forth so
terrific a poison in the bodies of men and animals, exceeds the
limits of human understanding. If we are even now unable, with
all the varied resources of an extended knowledge of nature, to
define that condition of the atmosphere by which pestilences are
generated, still less can we pretend to reason retrospectively
from the nineteenth to the fourteenth century; but if we take a
general view of the occurrences, that century will give us copious
information, and, as applicable to all succeeding times, of high
importance.
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