[BNP/E3, 27²³ – 118]

On Doctors.

It is perhaps useless for me to tell the reader that doctors often disagree, he knows well that they always do. If Dr. Smith is positive that milk is not good for the stomach, Dr. Jones is quite as positive that nothing could be better. Dr. Jinks is of opinion that five meals a day are good for a man; Dr. Robinson will only say four; Dr. Tomson cannot but thinks that three meals make the best plan; Dr. O’Connor is quite sure that any more meals than two undermine a man’s digestion; Dr. Brown will have us eat once a day; and Dr. White seems to me to have discovered that we can live quite well without eating.

A man who intents to commit a crime must have some eagerness to do it; such eagerness however small, though it may not exclude calm thought, yet it renders impossible that passivity of mind upon which inspiration comes. It may be said that facts contradict this kind of argument – that very often when thinking of a thing eagerly, an inspiration comes to us regarding that thing. In the same manner, it may be said, a man striving to find a way of committing a crime, was exactly in this, the state for receiving an inspiration.

[118^v]

The word Mrs. needs to be struck out of the language.

Young maiden, a young wife, there are women which you call prostitutes who drag themselves through the streets, imploring, tempting, your future husbands, your husbands, to whom they were given a certain apprendizage inevitable and very useful; these women have been made so, either by their own will, through poverty, or through the irresistible instinct of vice, or by being seduced by some of these men, your future husbands, who fling them into causes of vice, many you and became wealthy husbands and fathers of your children. Of all this be because God’s will is done on earth as it is in Heaven; then, Heaven needs a Rousseau[1] to inaugurate a system of angelic socialism.

[1] needs a Rousseau ^{/is in need of a Reformation\}