Note 67 — PREFACE TO AN ABRIDGMENT OF ABRAHAM TUCKER’S LIGHT OF NATURE PURSUED

These persons who have been so long on the rack of incomprehensible theories and captious disputes, whose minds have been stretched on the Procrustes’ bed of metaphysical systems, till they have acquired a horror of any thing like common sense or familiar expression, put me in mind of what is said of those who have been really put to the rack: they can bear their unnatural distorted state tolerably well; it is the return of sense and motion which is death to them.