err; and next, as the result, to show, by what influences of the choice and judgment the associative power becomes either memory or fancy; and, in conclusion, to appropriate the remaining offices of the mind to the reason and the imagination. With my best efforts to be as perspicuous as the nature of language will permit on such a subject, I earnestly solicit the good wishes and friendly patience of my readers, while I thus go" sounding on my dim and perilous way." CHAPTER VI. ject, the billiard-stick, strikes the first or white bal the same motion propagates itself through the red green, blue, black, &c. and sets the whole in motion No! we must suppose the very same force, which constitutes the white ball, to constitute the red or black; or the idea of a circle to constitute the idea of a triangle; which is impossible. But it may be said, that, by the sensations from the objects A and M, the nerves have acquired a dispo sition to the vibrations a and m, and therefore a need only be repeated in order to re-produce m. Now we will grant, for a moment, the possibility of such a disposition in a material nerve; which yet seems scarcely less absurd than to say, that a weather-cock That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aris- had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the totle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts. Or Hartley's hypothetical vibrations in his hypothetical oscillating ether of the nerves, which is the first and most obvious distinction between his system and that of Aristotle, I shall say little. This, with all other similar attempts to render that an object of the sight which has no relation to sight, has been already sufficiently exposed by the younger Reimarus, Maasse, &c. as outraging the very axioms of mechanics, in a scheme, the merit of which consists in its being mechanical. Whether any other philosophy be possible, but the mechanical; and again, whether the mechanical system can have any claim to be called philosophy; are questions for another place. It is, however, certain, that as long as we deny the former, and affirm the latter, we must bewilder ourselves, whenever we would pierce into the adyta of causation; and all that laborious conjecture can do, is to fill up the gaps of fancy. Under that despotism of the eye, (the emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first ponαidevri ov of the mind) under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless, because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only our visual organs were sufficiently powerful. wind having been so long in that quarter: for if it be replied, that we must take in the circumstance of life, what then becomes of the mechanical philoso phy? And what is the nerve, but the flint which the wag placed in the pot as the first ingredient of his stone-broth, requiring only salt, turnips, and mutton, for the remainder? But if we waive this, and pre-suppose the actual existence of such a disposition, two cases are possible. Either, every idea has its own nerve and correspondent oscillation, or this is not the case. If the latter be the truth, we should gain nothing by these dispositions; for then, every nerve having several dispositions, when the motion of any other nerve is propagated into it, there will be no ground or cause present, why exactly the ascillation m should arise, rather than any other to which it was equally pre-disposed. But if we take the former, and let every idea have a nerve of its own, then every nerve must be capable of propegating its motion into many other nerves; and again, there is no reason assignable, why the vibration m should arise, rather than any other ad libitum. It is fashionable to smile at Hartley's vibrations and vibratiuncles; and his work has been re-edited by Priestley, with the omission of the material hypothesis. But Hartley was too great a man, too coherent a thinker, for this to have been done either consistently or to any wise purpose. For all other parts of his system, as far as they are peculiar to that system, once removed from their mechanical basis, not only lose their main support, but the very motive which led to their adoption. Thus the principle of contemporaneity, which Aristotle had made the common condition of all the laws of association, Hartley was constrained to represent as being itself the sole law. For to what law can the action of material atoms be subject, but that of proximity in place? And to what law can their motion be subjected, but that of time? Again, from this results inevitably, that the will, the reason, the judgment, and the understanding, instead of being the determining causes of association, must needs be represented as its creatures, and among its From a hundred possible confutations, let one suffice. According to this system, the idea or vibration a from the external object A becomes associable with the idea or vibration m from the external object M, because the oscillation a propagated itself so as to re-produce the oscillation m. But the original impression from M was essentially different from the impression A: unless, therefore, different causes may produce the saine effect, the vibration a could never produce the vibration m; and this, therefore, could never be the means by which a and m are associated. To understand this, the attentive reader need only be reminded, that the ideas are themselves, in Hart-mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad ley's system, nothing more than their appropriate configurative vibrations. It is a mere delusion of the fancy to conceive the pre-existence of the ideas, in any chain of association, as so many differently colored billiard-balls in contact, so that when an ob stream, winding through a mountainous country with an indefinite number of currents, varying and running into each other according as the gusts chance to blow from the opening of the mountains. The temporary union of several currents in one, so as to other. Of the Hebrew, a small portion only could be traced to the Bible; the remainder seemed to be in the rabbinical dialect. All trick or conspiracy was out of the question. Not only had the young woman ever been an harmless, simple creature, but she was evidently labouring under a nervous fever. In the town in which she had been resident for many years, as a servant in different families, no solution presented itself. The young physician, however, determined to trace her past life step by step; for the patient herself was incapable of returning a rational answer. He, at length, succeeded in discovering the place where her parents had lived; travelled thither, found them dead, but an uncle surviving; and from him learnt, that the patient had been charitably taken in by an old protestant pastor at nine years old, and had re form the main current of the moment, would present an acccurate image of Hartley's theory of the will. Had this really been the case, the consequence would have been, that our whole life would be divided between the despotism of the outward impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, viz: that every partial representation recalls the total representation of which it was a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only from its universality. In practice it would, indeed, be mere lawlessness. Consider how immense must be the sphere of a total impression from the top of St. Paul's church; and how rapid and continuous the series of such total impressions. If, therefore, we suppose the absence of all interference of the will, reason, and judgment, one or other of two con-mained with him some years, even till the old man's sequences must result. Either the ideas, (or relicts of such impressions,) will exactly imitate the order of the impression itself, which would be absolute delirium; or any one part of that impression might recall any other part, and, (as from the law of continuity there must exist, in every total impression, some one or more parts, which are components of some other following impression, and so on ad infinitum,) any part of any impression might recall any part of any other, without a cause present to determine what it should be. For to bring in the will, or reason, as causes of their own cause, that is, at once causes and effects, can satisfy those only who, in their pretended evidence of a God, having, first, demanded organization as the sole cause and ground of intellect, will, then, coolly demand the pre-existence of intellect as the cause and ground-work of organization. There is, in truth, but one state to which this theory applies at all, namely, that of cornplete lightheadedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the will and reason are, perhaps, never wholly suspended. death. Of this pastor the uncle knew nothing, but that he was a very good man. With great difficulty, and after much search, our young medical philosopher discovered a niece of the pastor's, who had lived with him as his house-keeper, and had inherited his effects. She remembered the girl; related, that her venerable uncle had been too indulgent, and could not bear to hear the girl scolded; that she was willing to have kept her, but that, after her patron's death, the girl herself refused to stay. Anxious inquiries were then, of course, made concerning the pastor's habits, and the solution of the phenomenon was soon obtained. For it appeared, that it had been the old man's custom for years, to walk up and down a passage of his house, into which the kitchen door opened, and to read to himself, with a loud voice, out of his favorite books. A considerable number of these were still in the niece's possession. She added, that he was a very learned man, and a great Hebraist. Among the books were found a collection of rabbinical writings, together with several of the Greek and Latin fathers; and the physician succeeded in identi in any rational mind, concerning the true origin of the impressions made on her nervous system. This authenticated case furnishes both proof and instance, that relics of sensation may exist, for an indefinite time, in a latent state, in the very same A case of this kind occurred in a Catholic town in fying so many passages with those taken down at the Germany, a year or two before my arrival at Gottin-young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain gen, and had not then ceased to be a frequent subject of conversation. A young woman of four or five and twenty, who could neither read nor write, was scized with a nervous fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests and monks of the neighborhood, she became possessed, and, as it ap-order in which they were originally impressed; and, Deared, by a very learned devil. She continued incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in very pompous tones, and with most distinct enunciation. This possession was rendered more probable, by the known fact that she was or had been an heretic. Voltaire humorously advises the devil to decline all acquaintance with medical men; and it would have been more to his reputation if he had taken this advice in the present instance. The case had attracted the particular attention of a young physician, and, by his statement, many eminent physiologists and psychologists visited the town, and cross-examined the case on the spot. Sheets full of her ravings were taken down from her own mouth, and were found to consist of sentences coherent and intelligible each for itself, but with little or no connection with each as we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact, (and it would not be difficult to adduce several of the same kind,) contributes to make it even probable, that all thoughts are, in themselves, imperishable; and that, if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization, the body ce lestial instead of the body terrestrial, to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this-this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in whose mysterious hieroglyphics every idle word is recorded! Yea, m the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be esse of which is percipi? An ens rationale, which presupposes the power, that by perceiving creates it! The razor's edge becomes a saw to the armed vision and the delicious melodies of Purcell or Cimarosa might be disjointed stammerings to a hearer, whose partition of time should be a thousand times subtler than ours. But this obstacle too, let us imagine loosened, or lost, from that living chain of causes, to all whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free will, our only absolute self, is co-extensive and copresent. But not now dare I longer discourse of this, waiting for a loftier mood, and a nobler subject, warned from within and from without, that it is profanation to speak of these mysteries* roîs μndéñore φανταςθεῖςιν, ὡς καλὸν τὸ τῆς δικαιοςύνης καὶ σωφροςύνης | ourselves to have surmounted, and “at one bound πρόςωπον, καὶ ὡς ἔτε ἓςπερος ὔτε ἔωος ὅτω καλὰ. Τὸν γάρ ὁρῶντα πρὸς τὸ ὁρώμενον ςυγγενὲς καὶ ὁμοιον ποιηςαμενον δεῖ ἐπι βάλλειν τῆ ἐα· ἐν γὰρ ἂν πώποτε εἶδεν Οφθαλμος Ηλιον ήλιοείδης μὴ γεγενήμενος, ἔδε το Καλον ἂν ἴδη Ψύχη μὴ κάλε γενομένη. CHAPTER VII. PLOTINUS. of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian theory-Of the original mistake or equivocation which procured admission for the theory-Memoria Technica. We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law, (if law it may be called, which would itself be the slave of chances, with even that appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phenomena of human conduct, abstracted from our own consciousness. We will agree to forget this for the moment, in order to fix our attention on that subordination of final to efficient causes in the human being, which flows of necessity from the assumption, that the will, and with the will all acts of thought and attention, are parts and products of this blind mechanism, instead of being distinct powers, whose function it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasma chaos of association. The soul becomes a mere ens logicum; for as a real separable being, it would be more worthless and ludicrous, than the Grimalkins in the Catharpsichord, described in the Spectator. For these did form a part of the process; but in Hartley's scheme the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked, while the very squeals or purring are produced by an agency wholly independent and alien. It involves all the difficulties, all the incomprehensibility (if it be not indeed, ús potys doket, the absurdity) of intercommunion between substances that have no one property in common, without any of the convenient consequences that bribed the judgment to the admission of the dualistic hypothesis. Accordingly, this caput mortuum of the Hartleian process has been rejected by his followers, and the consciousness considered as a result, as a tune, the common product of the breeze and the harp: though this again is the mere remotion of one absurdity, to make way for another equally preposterous. For what is harmony but a mode of relation, the very high overleap all bound! Yet, according to his "The metaphysics but a puppet motion Miscellaneous Thoughts. The inventor of the watch did not in reality invent it; he only looked on, while the blind causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves. So must it have been too with my friend ALLSTON, when he sketched his picture of the dead man revived by the bones of the prophet Elijah. So must it have been with Mr. SOUTHEY and LORD BYRON, when the one fancied himself composing his "RODERICK," and the other his "Childe Harold." The same must hold good of all systems of philosophy; of all arts, governments, wars by sea and by land; in short, of all things that ever have been or that ever will be produced. For, according to this system, it is not the affections and passions that are at work, in as far as they are sensations or thoughts. We only fancy that from impulses of anger, love, or generosity. In all we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or so fair. For, in order to direct the view aright, it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and these cases the real agent is a something-nothingsimilar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have be-every-thing, which does all of which we know, and held the sun, had not its own essence been soliform," (that knows nothing of all that itself does. is, pre-configured to light by a similarity of essence with that of light,)" neither can a soul not beautiful attain to an intuition of beauty." "To those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is the countenance of justice and wis dom; and that neither the morning nor the evening star are The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will, must, on this system, be mere artica tated motions of the air. For as the function of the human understanding is no other than merely (to appear to itself) to combine and to apply the phenomena of the association; and as these derive all their reality from the primary sensations; and the sensations again all their reality from the impressions ab extra; a God not visible, audible, or tangible, can exist only in the sounds and letters that form his name and attributes. If in ourselves there be no such faculties as those of the will, and the scientific reason, we must either have an innate idea of them, which would overthrow the whole system, or we can have no idea at all. The process, by which Hume degraded the notion of cause and effect into a blind product of delusion and habit, into the mere sensation of proceding life (nisus vitalis) associated with the images of the memory; this same process must be repeated to the equal degradation of every fundamental idea in ethics or theology. Far, very far, am I from burthening with the odium of these consequences the moral characters of those who first formed, or have since adopted the system! It is most noticeable of the excellent and pious Hartley, that in the proofs of the existence and attributes of God, with which his second volume commences, he makes no reference to the principles or results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his foundation, ideas which, if we embrace the doctrine of his first volume, can exist no where but in the vibrations of the ethereal medium common to the nerves and to the atmosphere. Indeed, the whole of the second volume is, with the fewest possible exceptions, independent of his peculiar system. So true is it, that the faith, which saves and sanctifies, is a collective energy, a total act of the whole moral being; that its living sensorium is in the heart; and that no errors of the understanding can be morally arraigned, unless they have proceeded from the heart. But whether they be such, no man can be certain in the case of another, scarcely, perhaps, even in his own. Hence it follows, by inevitable consequence, that man may perchance determine what is an heresy; but God can only know who is a heretic. It does not, however, by any means follow, that opinions fundamentally false are harmless. An hundred causes may co-exist to form one complex antidote. Yet the sting of the adder remains venomous, though there are many who have taken up the evil thing; and it hurted them not! Some indeed there seem to have been, in an unfortunate neighbor-nation at least, who have embraced this system with a full view of all its moral and religious consequences; some who deem themselves most free, Such men need discipline, not argument; they must be made better men, before they can become wiser. The attention will be more profitably employed in attempting to discover and expose the paralogisms, by the magic of which such a faith could find admission into minds framed for a nobler creed. These, it appears to me, may be all reduced to one sophism as their common genus; the mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence; and the process by which we arrive at the knowledge of a faculty, for the faculty itself. The air I breathe is the condition of my life, not its cause. We could never have learnt that we had eyes but by the process of seeing; yet having seen, we know that the eyes must have preexisted in order to render the process of sight possible. Let us cross-examine Hartley's scheme under the guidance of this distinction; and we shall discover, that contemporaneity (Leibnitz's Lex Continui) is the limit and condition of the laws of mind, itself being rather a law of matter, at least of phenomena considered as material. At the utmost, it is to thought the same as the law of gravitation is to loco-motion. In every voluntary movement we first counteract gravitation, in order to avail ourselves of it. It must exist, that there may be a something to be counteracted, and which by its re-action, aids the force that is exerted to resist it. Let us consider what we do when we leap. We first resist the gravitating power by an act purely voluntary, and then by another act, voluntary in part, we yield to it in order to light on the spot which we had previously proposed to ourselves. Now, let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; and he will find the process completely analogous. Most of my readers will have observed a small water insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow, fringed with prismatic colors, on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical lan guage, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of faculty, joined to a superior voluntary control over it.) Contemporaneity then, being the common condition of all the laws of association, and a component element in all the materia subjecta, the parts of which are to be associated, must needs be co-present with all. Nothing, therefore, can be more easy than to pass off on an incautious mind, this constant companion of each, for the essential substance of all. But if we appeal to our own consciousness, we shall find that even time itself, as the cause of a particular act of association, is distinct from contemporaneity, as the con dition of all association. Seeing a mackerel, it may happen that I immediately think of gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with goose CHAPTER VIII. berries as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter The system of Dualism, introduced by Des Cartes-Refined first by Spinoza, and afterwards by Leibnitz, into the doc trine of Harmonia præstabilita-Hylozoism-MaterialismNeither of these systems, on any possible theory of associa tion, supplies or supersedes a theory of perception, or er plains the formation of the associable. word, being that which had co-existed with the image of the bird so called, I may then think of a goose. In the next moment the image of a swan may arise Defore me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the two former instances, I am conscious that their co-existence in time was the circumstance that enabled me to recollect them; and equally conscious am I, that the latter was recalled to me by the joint operation of likeness and contrast. So it is with cause and effect; so too with order. So am I able to distinguish whether it was proximity in time, or continuity in space, that occasioned me to recall B on the mention of A. They cannot be indeed separated from contemporaneity; for that would be to separate them from the mind itself. The act of consciousness is indeed identical with time, considered in its essence. (I mean time per se, as contra-distinguished from our notion of time; for this is always blended with the idea of space, which, as the contrary of time, is therefore its measure.) Nevertheless, the accident of seeing two objects at the same moment, acts as a distinguishable cause from that of having seen them in the same place; and the true practical general law of association is this: that whatever makes certain parts of a total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest, will determine the mind to recall these, in preference to others equally linked together by the common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself, by confining and intensifying* the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes, which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, as the habitual subordination of the individual to the species, and of the species to the genus; philosophical knowledge of facts under the relation of cause and effect; a cheerful and communicative temper, that disposes us to notice the similarities and contrasts of things, that we may be able to illustrate the one by the other; a quiet conscience; a condition free from anxieties; sound health, and, above all, (as far as relates to passive remembrance,)| a healthy digestion; these are the best-these are the all physical science; for that requires a limitation of only ARTS OF MEMORY. To the best of my knowledge, Des Cartes was the first philosopher who introduced the absolute and essential heterogeneity of the soul as intelligence, and the body as matter. The assumption, and the form of speaking, have remained, though the denial of all other properties to matter but that of extension, on which denial the whole system of dualism is grounded, has been long exploded. For since im penetrability is intelligible only as a mode of resist. ance, its admission places the essence of matter in an act or power, which it possesses in common with spirit; and body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may, without any absurdity, be supposed to be different modes or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum. To this pos sibility, however, it was not the fashion to advert. The soul was a thinking substance; and body a space-filling substance. Yet the apparent action of each on the other pressed heavy on the philosopher, on the one hand; and no less heavily, on the other hand, pressed the evident truth, that the law of causality holds only between homogeneous things, i. e. things having some common property, and cannot extend from one world into another, its opposite. A close analysis evinced it to be no less absurd, than the question, whether a man's affection for his wife lay north-east or south-west of the love he bore towards his child? Leibnitz's doctrine of a pre-established harmony, which he certainly borrowed from Spinoza, who had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes' animal machines, was in its common interpretation too strange to survive the inventor-too repugnant to our common sense (which is not indeed entitled to a judicial voice in the courts of scientific philosophy; but whose whispers still exert a strong secret influence.) Even Wolf, the admirer, and illustrious systematizer of the Leibnitzian doctrine, contents himself with defending the possibility of the idea, but does not adopt it as a part of the edifice. I am aware that this word occurs neither in Johnson's Dictionary, nor in any classical writer. But the word "to intend," which Newton and others before him employ in this sense, is now so completely appropriated to another meaning, that I could not use it without ambiguity while to paraphrase the sense, as by render intense, would often break up the sentence, and destroy that harmony of the position of the words with the logical position of the thoughts, which is a beauty in all composition, and more especially desirable in a close philosophical investigation. I have therefore hazarded the word intensify; though I confess it sounds uncouth to my own ear. The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all rational physiology, and, indeed, of terms, and cannot consist with the arbitrary power of multiplying attributes by occult qualities. Besides, it answers no purpose; unless, indeed, a difficulty can be solved by multiplying it, or that we can ac quire a clearer notion of our soul, by being told that we have a million souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a sediment, indeed, at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid. |