Nature & Animals Quote by Thomas Willis

A 17th-century scientist describing brain injury without the modern comfort of neurology’s vocabulary has to build his case the hard way: by watching bodies and naming effects. Thomas Willis’s line lands with a blunt, almost legal precision. “Great wound” and “concussion” sit side by side, collapsing the spectacular (visible trauma) and the invisible (shaken function) into the same category of consequence. The vivid specificity of “falling headlong from an high place” reads like a case history drawn from real accidents, not an abstract thought experiment. It’s early clinical writing, but it already knows the power of scene-setting: you can picture the fall, and that picture makes the conclusion feel inevitable.

Willis’s key move is the phrase “animal faculty,” a period concept that treats cognition as a bodily power rather than a purely spiritual gift. That’s the subtext: a quiet demotion of the mind from the heavens to the skull. He’s implying that “understanding” is not just refined character or moral will; it’s an embodied capacity that can be mechanically impaired. “Prejudice and weakness” is especially telling. “Prejudice” here suggests a pre-judging, a distortion of perception and reasoning that injury can impose, as if trauma edits the mind’s software. “Dulling the understanding” finishes the thought in plain sensory terms, as though intellect were a blade losing its edge.

Context matters: Willis is writing in the wake of the scientific revolution, when anatomy and observation are starting to outrank inherited doctrine. The intent isn’t poetic; it’s persuasive evidence that the brain governs thought, and that damage to it predictably damages reason.