No More Learning

In all perplexity
there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger. Not
able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful
intellect, they felt very positive,--but yet were not quite certain
that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an
unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the
occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had
written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that

Fair is foul, and foul is fair;

in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without
judgment, and were now about to censure without reason. [18]

That this conjecture is not wide from the mark, I am induced to believe
from the noticeable fact, which I can state on my own knowledge, that
the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different
person on some different poem. Among those, whose candour and judgment
I estimate highly, I distinctly remember six who expressed their
objections to the Lyrical Ballads almost in the same words, and
altogether to the same purport, at the same time admitting, that several
of the poems had given them great pleasure; and, strange as it might
seem, the composition which one cited as execrable, another quoted as
his favourite. I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same
experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in the well
known story of the picture, the result would have been the same; the
parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be
found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.

However this may be, it was assuredly hard and unjust to fix the
attention on a few separate and insulated poems with as much aversion,
as if they had been so many plague-spots on the whole work, instead of
passing them over in silence, as so much blank paper, or leaves of a
bookseller's catalogue; especially, as no one pretended to have found
in them any immorality or indelicacy; and the poems, therefore, at the
worst, could only be regarded as so many light or inferior coins in a
rouleau of gold, not as so much alloy in a weight of bullion. A friend
whose talents I hold in the highest respect, but whose judgment and
strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to revere,
making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects
of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were some few of
the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient
cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell as
an instance; "Nay," replied my friend with more than usual quickness of
manner, "I cannot agree with you there! --that, I own, does seem to me
a remarkably pleasing poem. " In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience
does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two
subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from different
individuals, every single poem extolled and reprobated, with the
exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem
to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me
diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished
by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the
opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it. The
seductive faults, the dulcia vitia of Cowley, Marine, or Darwin might
reasonably be thought capable of corrupting the public judgment for half
a century, and require a twenty years war, campaign after campaign, in
order to dethrone the usurper and re-establish the legitimate taste.
But that a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity,
prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and
a preference of mean, degrading, or at best trivial associations and
characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators, a company
of almost religious admirers, and this too among young men of ardent
minds, liberal education, and not

------with academic laurels unbestowed;

and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is
characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have
well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only, butt of
review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter
of wonder. Of yet greater is it, that the contest should still continue
as undecided as [19] that between Bacchus and the frogs in Aristophanes;
when the former descended to the realms of the departed to bring back
the spirit of old and genuine poesy;--

CH. Brekekekex, koax, koax.
D. All' exoloisth' auto koax.
Ouden gar est' all', hae koax.
Oimozet' ou gar moi melei.
CH. Alla maen kekraxomestha
g', oposon hae pharynx an haemon
chandanae di' haemeras,
brekekekex, koax, koax!
D. Touto gar ou nikaesete.
CH. Oude men haemas su pantos.
D. Oude maen humeis ge dae m'
oudepote. Kekraxomai gar,
kan me deae, di' haemeras,
eos an humon epikrataeso tou koax!
CH. Brekekekex, KO'AX, KOAX!

During the last year of my residence at Cambridge, 1794, I became
acquainted with Mr. Wordsworth's first publication entitled Descriptive
Sketches; and seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic
genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced. In the
form, style, and manner of the whole poem, and in the structure of
the particular lines and periods, there is a harshness and acerbity
connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might
recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms
rise out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich
fruit is elaborating. The language is not only peculiar and strong, but
at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength; while
the novelty and struggling crowd of images, acting in conjunction with
the difficulties of the style, demands always a greater closeness of
attention, than poetry,--at all events, than descriptive poetry--has
a right to claim. It not seldom therefore justified the complaint of
obscurity. In the following extract I have sometimes fancied, that I saw
an emblem of the poem itself, and of the author's genius as it was then
displayed. --

'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour,
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled, and every cheerful sight
Dark is the region as with coming night;
Yet what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.

The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as many
changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is remarkable
how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults and errors of
its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest compositions, are
the more obtrusive and confluent, because as heterogeneous elements,
which had only a temporary use, they constitute the very ferment,
by which themselves are carried off. Or we may compare them to some
diseases, which must work on the humours, and be thrown out on the
surface, in order to secure the patient from their future recurrence.
I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had the happiness of knowing Mr.
Wordsworth personally, and while memory lasts, I shall hardly forget
the sudden effect produced on my mind, by his recitation of a manuscript
poem, which still remains unpublished, but of which the stanza and tone
of style were the same as those of The Female Vagrant, as originally
printed in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads. There was here no
mark of strained thought, or forced diction, no crowd or turbulence of
imagery; and, as the poet hath himself well described in his Lines on
revisiting the Wye, manly reflection and human associations had given
both variety, and an additional interest to natural objects, which,
in the passion and appetite of the first love, they had seemed to him
neither to need nor permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen
from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had
almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary
and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so
distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will,
more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless
the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and
incongruity [21]. I did not perceive anything particular in the mere
style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such
difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's
mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then
opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than
could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common
defects, or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an
impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment.
It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance
of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying, the
objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone,
the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world
around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, for the common view,
custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew
drops.

This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or
less predominant, and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no
sooner felt, than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me
first to suspect,--(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties,
their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture
into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two distinct and
widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general
belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower
and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to
conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the
Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there
exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good
sense working progressively to desynonymize [22] those words originally
of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects supplied to the
more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the
same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of
different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first
and most important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly
distinct are confused under one and the same word, and--this done--to
appropriate that word exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme,
should there be one, to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case
in the arts and sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent
or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has already
begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a
highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally
different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the
faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term
'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as 'fancy. '
Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less
grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's

Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,

from Shakespeare's

What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; the theory of the fine
arts, and of poetry in particular, could not but derive some additional
and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch
of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet
himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into
power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the
product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle,
is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

It has been already hinted, that metaphysics and psychology have long
been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobby-horse, and to be vain of it,
are so commonly found together, that they pass almost for the same. I
trust therefore, that there will be more good humour than contempt,
in the smile with which the reader chastises my self-complacency, if I
confess myself uncertain, whether the satisfaction from the perception
of a truth new to myself may not have been rendered more poignant by the
conceit, that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time,
certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself, in the belief
that I had been the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the
diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the
faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent
volume of synonymes I have not yet seen [23]; but his specification of
the terms in question has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and
erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection
of his Poems. The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given,
will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps as our objects are
different. It could scarcely indeed happen otherwise, from the advantage
I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which
a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions
concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy
instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But
it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and
imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different
effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to
investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the
degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their
poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as
they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of
our common consciousness.

Yet even in this attempt I am aware that I shall be obliged to draw more
largely on the reader's attention, than so immethodical a miscellany as
this can authorize; when in such a work (the Ecclesiasical Polity) of
such a mind as Hooker's, the judicious author, though no less admirable
for the perspicuity than for the port and dignity of his language,--and
though he wrote for men of learning in a learned age,--saw nevertheless
occasion to anticipate and guard against "complaints of obscurity," as
often as he was to trace his subject "to the highest well-spring and
fountain. " Which, (continues he) "because men are not accustomed to, the
pains we take are more needful a great deal, than acceptable; and the
matters we handle, seem by reason of newness (till the mind grow better
acquainted with them) dark and intricate. " I would gladly therefore
spare both myself and others this labour, if I knew how without it
to present an intelligible statement of my poetic creed,--not as my
opinions, which weigh for nothing, but as deductions from established
premises conveyed in such a form, as is calculated either to effect a
fundamental conviction, or to receive a fundamental confutation. If I
may dare once more adopt the words of Hooker, "they, unto whom we shall
seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, because it is in their own
hands to spare that labour, which they are not willing to endure. " Those
at least, let me be permitted to add, who have taken so much pains to
render me ridiculous for a perversion of taste, and have supported the
charge by attributing strange notions to me on no other authority than
their own conjectures, owe it to themselves as well as to me not to
refuse their attention to my own statement of the theory which I do
acknowledge; or shrink from the trouble of examining the grounds on
which I rest it, or the arguments which I offer in its justification.




CHAPTER V

On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle to Hartley.


There have been men in all ages, who have been impelled as by an
instinct to propose their own nature as a problem, and who devote their
attempts to its solution. The first step was to construct a table of
distinctions, which they seem to have formed on the principle of the
absence or presence of the Will. Our various sensations, perceptions,
and movements were classed as active or passive, or as media partaking
of both. A still finer distinction was soon established between the
voluntary and the spontaneous. In our perceptions we seem to ourselves
merely passive to an external power, whether as a mirror reflecting the
landscape, or as a blank canvass on which some unknown hand paints it.
For it is worthy of notice, that the latter, or the system of Idealism
may be traced to sources equally remote with the former, or Materialism;
and Berkeley can boast an ancestry at least as venerable as Gassendi
or Hobbes. These conjectures, however, concerning the mode in which our
perceptions originated, could not alter the natural difference of Things
and Thoughts. In the former, the cause appeared wholly external,
while in the latter, sometimes our will interfered as the producing or
determining cause, and sometimes our nature seemed to act by a mechanism
of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against
it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes,
the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive
quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the
middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on
any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it;
and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the
metaphysician took the lead of the anatomist and natural philosopher. In
Egypt, Palestine, Greece, and India the analysis of the mind had reached
its noon and manhood, while experimental research was still in its dawn
and infancy. For many, very many centuries, it has been difficult to
advance a new truth, or even a new error, in the philosophy of the
intellect or morals. With regard, however, to the laws that direct the
spontaneous movements of thought and the principle of their intellectual
mechanism there exists, it has been asserted, an important exception
most honourable to the moderns, and in the merit of which our own
country claims the largest share. Sir James Mackintosh,--(who, amid the
variety of his talents and attainments, is not of less repute for the
depth and accuracy of his philosophical inquiries than for the
eloquence with which he is said to render their most difficult results
perspicuous, and the driest attractive,)--affirmed in the Lectures,
delivered by him in Lincoln's Inn Hall, that the law of association as
established in the contemporaneity of the original impressions,
formed the basis of all true psychology; and that any ontological or
metaphysical science, not contained in such (that is, an empirical)
psychology, was but a web of abstractions and generalizations. Of this
prolific truth, of this great fundamental law, he declared Hobbes to
have been the original discoverer, while its full application to the
whole intellectual system we owed to Hartley; who stood in the same
relation to Hobbes as Newton to Kepler; the law of association being
that to the mind, which gravitation is to matter.

Of the former clause in this assertion, as it respects the comparative
merits of the ancient metaphysicians, including their commentators, the
School-men, and of the modern and British and French philosophers from
Hobbes to Hume, Hartley, and Condillac, this is not the place to speak.
So wide indeed is the chasm between Sir James Mackintosh's philosophical
creed and mine, that so far from being able to join hands, we could
scarcely make our voices intelligible to each other: and to bridge it
over would require more time, skill, and power than I believe myself
to possess. But the latter clause involves for the greater part a mere
question of fact and history, and the accuracy of the statement is to be
tried by documents rather than reasoning.

First, then, I deny Hobbes's claim in toto: for he had been anticipated
by Des Cartes, whose work De Methodo, preceded Hobbes's De Natura
Humana, by more than a year. But what is of much more importance, Hobbes
builds nothing on the principle which he had announced. He does not
even announce it, as differing in any respect from the general laws of
material motion and impact: nor was it, indeed, possible for him so
to do, compatibly with his system, which was exclusively material and
mechanical. Far otherwise is it with Des Cartes; greatly as he too
in his after writings (and still more egregiously his followers De la
Forge, and others) obscured the truth by their attempts to explain it on
the theory of nervous fluids, and material configurations. But, in his
interesting work, De Methodo, Des Cartes relates the circumstance which
first led him to meditate on this subject, and which since then has been
often noticed and employed as an instance and illustration of the law.
A child who with its eyes bandaged had lost several of his fingers by
amputation, continued to complain for many days successively of pains,
now in this joint and now in that, of the very fingers which had
been cut off. Des Cartes was led by this incident to reflect on the
uncertainty with which we attribute any particular place to any inward
pain or uneasiness, and proceeded after long consideration to establish
it as a general law: that contemporaneous impressions, whether images
or sensations, recall each other mechanically. On this principle, as
a ground work, he built up the whole system of human language, as one
continued process of association. He showed in what sense not only
general terms, but generic images,--under the name of abstract
ideas,--actually existed, and in what consist their nature and power.
As one word may become the general exponent of many, so by association
a simple image may represent a whole class. But in truth Hobbes
himself makes no claims to any discovery, and introduces this law of
association, or (in his own language) discursion of mind, as an
admitted fact, in the solution alone of which, and this by causes purely
physiological, he arrogates any originality. His system is briefly this;
whenever the senses are impinged on by external objects, whether by
the rays of light reflected from them, or by effluxes of their finer
particles, there results a correspondent motion of the innermost and
subtlest organs. This motion constitutes a representation, and there
remains an impression of the same, or a certain disposition to repeat
the same motion. Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the
impressions that are left, (or in the language of Mr. Hume, the ideas,)
are linked together. Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which
constitute a complex impression, is renewed through the senses, the
others succeed mechanically. It follows of necessity, therefore, that
Hobbes, as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from
the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements
of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to
the one law of Time. But even the merit of announcing this law with
philosophic precision cannot be fairly conceded to him. For the objects
of any two ideas need not have co-existed in the same sensation in
order to become mutually associable. The same result will follow when
one only of the two ideas has been represented by the senses, and the
other by the memory.

Long however before either Hobbes or Des Cartes the law of association
had been defined, and its important functions set forth by Ludovicus
Vives. Phantasia, it is to be noticed, is employed by Vives to express
the mental power of comprehension, or the active function of the mind;
and imaginatio for the receptivity (via receptiva) of impressions, or
for the passive perception. The power of combination he appropriates
to the former: "quae singula et simpliciter acceperat imaginatio, ea
conjungit et disjungait phantasia. " And the law by which the thoughts
are spontaneously presented follows thus: "quae simul sunt a phantasia
comprehensa, si alterutrum occurrat, solet secum alterum representare. "
To time therefore he subordinates all the other exciting causes
of association. The soul proceeds "a causa ad effectum, ab hoc ad
instrumentum, a parte ad totum;" thence to the place, from place to
person, and from this to whatever preceded or followed, all as being
parts of a total impression, each of which may recall the other. The
apparent springs "saltus vel transitus etiam longissimos," he explains
by the same thought having been a component part of two or more total
impressions. Thus "ex Scipione venio in cogitationem potentiae Turcicae,
propter victorias ejus de Asia, in qua regnabat Antiochus. "

But from Vives I pass at once to the source of his doctrines, and (as
far as we can judge from the remains yet extant of Greek philosophy)
as to the first, so to the fullest and most perfect enunciation of the
associative principle, namely, to the writings of Aristotle; and of
these in particular to the treatises De Anima, and "De Memoria," which
last belongs to the series of essays entitled in the old translations
Parva Naturalia. In as much as later writers have either deviated from,
or added to his doctrines, they appear to me to have introduced either
error or groundless supposition.

In the first place it is to be observed, that Aristotle's positions on
this subject are unmixed with fiction. The wise Stagyrite speaks of no
successive particles propagating motion like billiard balls, as Hobbes;
nor of nervous or animal spirits, where inanimate and irrational solids
are thawed down, and distilled, or filtrated by ascension, into living
and intelligent fluids, that etch and re-etch engravings on the brain,
as the followers of Des Cartes, and the humoral pathologists in general;
nor of an oscillating ether which was to effect the same service for the
nerves of the brain considered as solid fibres, as the animal
spirits perform for them under the notion of hollow tubes, as Hartley
teaches--nor finally, (with yet more recent dreamers) of chemical
compositions by elective affinity, or of an electric light at once the
immediate object and the ultimate organ of inward vision, which rises
to the brain like an Aurora Borealis, and there, disporting in various
shapes,--as the balance of plus and minus, or negative and positive,
is destroyed or re-established,--images out both past and present.
Aristotle delivers a just theory without pretending to an hypothesis;
or in other words a comprehensive survey of the different facts, and
of their relations to each other without supposition, that is, a fact
placed under a number of facts, as their common support and explanation;
though in the majority of instances these hypotheses or suppositions
better deserve the name of upopoiaeseis, or suffictions. He uses indeed
the word kinaeseis, to express what we call representations or ideas,
but he carefully distinguishes them from material motion, designating
the latter always by annexing the words en topo, or kata topon. On the
contrary, in his treatise De Anima, he excludes place and motion from
all the operations of thought, whether representations or volitions, as
attributes utterly and absurdly heterogeneous.

The general law of association, or, more accurately, the common
condition under which all exciting causes act, and in which they may
be generalized, according to Aristotle is this. Ideas by having been
together acquire a power of recalling each other; or every partial
representation awakes the total representation of which it had been
a part. In the practical determination of this common principle to
particular recollections, he admits five agents or occasioning
causes: first, connection in time, whether simultaneous, preceding,
or successive; second, vicinity or connection in space; third,
interdependence or necessary connection, as cause and effect; fourth,
likeness; and fifth, contrast. As an additional solution of the
occasional seeming chasms in the continuity of reproduction he proves,
that movements or ideas possessing one or the other of these five
characters had passed through the mind as intermediate links,
sufficiently clear to recall other parts of the same total impressions
with which they had co-existed, though not vivid enough to excite that
degree of attention which is requisite for distinct recollection, or
as we may aptly express it, after consciousness. In association then
consists the whole mechanism of the reproduction of impressions, in the
Aristotelian Psychology. It is the universal law of the passive fancy
and mechanical memory; that which supplies to all other faculties their
objects, to all thought the elements of its materials.

In consulting the excellent commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the
Parva Naturalia of Aristotle, I was struck at once with its close
resemblance to Hume's Essay on Association. The main thoughts were
the same in both, the order of the thoughts was the same, and even the
illustrations differed only by Hume's occasional substitution of more
modern examples. I mentioned the circumstance to several of my literary
acquaintances, who admitted the closeness of the resemblance, and
that it seemed too great to be explained by mere coincidence; but
they thought it improbable that Hume should have held the pages of the
Angelic Doctor worth turning over. But some time after Mr. Payne showed
Sir James Mackintosh some odd volumes of St. Thomas Aquinas, partly
perhaps from having heard that he had in his Lectures passed a high
encomium on this canonized philosopher; but chiefly from the fact, that
the volumes had belonged to Mr. Hume, and had here and there marginal
marks and notes of reference in his own hand writing. Among these
volumes was that which contains the Parva Naturalia, in the old Latin
version, swathed and swaddled in the commentary afore mentioned

It remains then for me, first to state wherein Hartley differs from
Aristotle; then, to exhibit the grounds of my conviction, that
he differed only to 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

That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of Aristotle, is
neither tenable in theory, nor founded in facts.


Of 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, Maasz, and others, 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 propaideuma 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.

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 same 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 Hartley'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 coloured billiard-balls in
contact, so that when an object, the billiard-stick, strikes the first
or white ball, the same motion propagates itself through the red, green,
blue and black, 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 disposition 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 had acquired a habit of turning to the east, from the 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
philosophy? 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
oscillation 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 propagating 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 motions 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
mechanical effects. Conceive, for instance, a broad 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 form the main current of the moment, would
present an accurate image of Hartley's theory of the will.

Had this been really the case, the consequence would have been, that
our whole life would be divided between the despotism of outward
impressions, and that of senseless and passive memory. Take his law in
its highest abstraction and most philosophical form, namely, that every
partial representation recalls the total representation of which it was
a part; and the law becomes nugatory, were it only for 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 consequences must
result. Either the ideas, or reliques of such impression, 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 total 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, as at once causes and
effects, can satisfy those only who, in their pretended evidences 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 complete
light-headedness; and even to this it applies but partially, because the
will and reason are perhaps never wholly suspended.

A case of this kind occurred in a Roman Catholic town in Germany a year
or two before my arrival at Goettingen, 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 seized with a nervous
fever; during which, according to the asseverations of all the priests
and monks of the neighbourhood, she became possessed, and, as it
appeared, 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 a 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 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 a 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
learned, that the patient had been charitably taken by an old Protestant
pastor at nine years old, and had remained with him some years, even
till the old man's 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 favourite 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 identifying so many passages with those taken
down at the young woman's bedside, that no doubt could remain 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 reliques
of sensation may exist for an indefinite time in a latent state, in
the very same order in which they were originally impressed; and 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
celestial 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 the mysterious
hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in 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
loosened or lost from that living chain of causes, with all the links of
which, conscious or unconscious, the free-will, our only absolute Self,
is coextensive and co-present. 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 tois maede phantasteisin, os kalon to taes dikaiosynaes kai
sophrosynaes prosopon, kai oute hesperos oute eoos outo kala. To gar
horon pros to horomenon syngenes kai homoion poiaesamenon dei epiballein
tae thea, ou gar an popote eiden ophthalmos haelion, haelioeidaes mae
gegenaemenos oude to kalon an idae psychae, mae kagae genomenae--to
those to whose imagination it has never been presented, how beautiful is
the countenance of justice and wisdom; and that neither the morning nor
the evening star are so fair. For in order to direct the view aright,
it behoves that the beholder should have made himself congenerous and
similar to the object beheld. Never could the eye have beheld the sun,
had not its own essence been soliform," (i. e. 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. "




CHAPTER VII

Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of the original
mistake or equivocation which procured its admission--Memoria technica.


We will pass by the utter incompatibility of such a law--if law it may
be called, which would itself be a slave of chances--with even that
appearance of rationality forced upon us by the outward phaenomena 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, the function of
which it is to control, determine, and modify the phantasmal 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 cat-harpsichord, described in the Spectator. For these
did form a part of the process; but, to 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, os
emoige dokei, 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 esse of which is percipi? --an ens rationale, which
pre-supposes 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 ourselves to have surmounted, and "at one bound high
overleap all bound. " Yet according to this hypothesis the disquisition,
to which I am at present soliciting the reader's attention, may be as
truly said to be written by Saint Paul's church, as by me: for it is the
mere motion of my muscles and nerves; and these again are set in motion
from external causes equally passive, which external causes stand
themselves in interdependent connection with every thing that exists or
has existed. Thus the whole universe co-operates to produce the minutest
stroke of every letter, save only that I myself, and I alone, have
nothing to do with it, but merely the causeless and effectless beholding
of it when it is done. Yet scarcely can it be called a beholding; for
it is neither an act nor an effect; but an impossible creation of a
something nothing out of its very contrary! It is the mere quick-silver
plating behind a looking-glass; and in this alone consists the poor
worthless I! The sum total of my moral and intellectual intercourse,
dissolved into its elements, is reduced to extension, motion, degrees
of velocity, and those diminished copies of configurative motion, which
form what we call notions, and notions of notions. Of such philosophy
well might Butler say--

The metaphysic's but a puppet motion
That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
The copy of a copy and lame draught
Unnaturally taken from a thought
That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
And turns the eyes, like an old crucifix;
That counterchanges whatsoe'er it calls
By another name, and makes it true or false;
Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,
By virtue of the Babylonian's tooth.

The inventor of the watch, if this doctrine be true, 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 we act from rational resolves, or prudent motives, or from impulses
of anger, love, or generosity. In all these cases the real agent is a
something-nothing-everything, which does all of which we know, and knows
nothing of all that itself does.

The existence of an infinite spirit, of an intelligent and holy will,
must, on this system, be mere articulated 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 phaenomena 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 proceeding 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 principle or
results of the first. Nay, he assumes, as his foundations, ideas which,
if we embrace the doctrines 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 a heresy; but God only can know who is a heretic. It
does not, however, by any means follow that opinions fundamentally
false are harmless. A 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 neighbour 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,
When they within this gross and visible sphere
Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
Proud in their meanness; and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
Self-working tools, uncaus'd effects, and all
Those blind omniscients, those almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its God!

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 learned that we had eyes but by the process
of seeing; yet having seen we know that the eyes must have pre-existed
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 phaenomena 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, may aid 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 alight 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 colours 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 language, 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 the 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 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 condition of all association.
Seeing a mackerel, it may happen, that I immediately think of
gooseberries, because I at the same time ate mackerel with gooseberries
as the sauce. The first syllable of the latter word, being that which
had coexisted 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 before
me, though I had never seen the two birds together. In the first two
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 I am 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 opposite of time, is
therefore its measure. Nevertheless the accident of seeing two objects
at the same moment, and the accident of seeing them in the same place
are two distinct or distinguishable causes: 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 [25] 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
disposing 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 only Arts of Memory.




CHAPTER VIII

The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by
Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia
praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism--None of these systems, or any
possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
perception, or explains the formation of the associable.


To the best of my knowledge Des Cartes was the first philosopher who
introduced the absolute and essential heterogenity 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 impenetrability
is intelligible only as a mode of resistance; 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
possibility, 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, that
is, things having some common property; and cannot extend from one world
into another, its contrary. 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's
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.

The hypothesis of Hylozoism, on the other side, is the death of all
rational physiology, and indeed of all physical science; for that
requires a limitation 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 we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul by being told that we
have a million of 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.

But it is not either the nature of man, or the duty of the philosopher
to despair concerning any important problem until, as in the squaring of
the circle, the impossibility of a solution has been demonstrated. How
the esse assumed as originally distinct from the scire, can ever unite
itself with it; how being can transform itself into a knowing, becomes
conceivable on one only condition; namely, if it can be shown that the
vis representativa, or the Sentient, is itself a species of being;
that is, either as a property or attribute, or as an hypostasis or self
subsistence. The former--that thinking is a property of matter under
particular conditions,--is, indeed, the assumption of materialism; a
system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it
actually performed what it promises. But how any affection from without
can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has
hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has
aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object
from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial
object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous
with itself. Motion could only propagate motion. Matter has no Inward.
We remove one surface, but to meet with another. We can but divide
a particle into particles; and each atom comprehends in itself the
properties of the material universe. Let any reflecting mind make
the experiment of explaining to itself the evidence of our sensuous
intuitions, from the hypothesis that in any given perception there is
a something which has been communicated to it by an impact, or
an impression ab extra. In the first place, by the impact on the
percipient, or ens representans, not the object itself, but only its
action or effect, will pass into the same. Not the iron tongue, but
its vibrations, pass into the metal of the bell. Now in our immediate
perception, it is not the mere power or act of the object, but the
object itself, which is immediately present. We might indeed attempt to
explain this result by a chain of deductions and conclusions; but that,
first, the very faculty of deducing and concluding would equally
demand an explanation; and secondly, that there exists in fact no such
intermediation by logical notions, such as those of cause and effect. It
is the object itself, not the product of a syllogism, which is present
to our consciousness. Or would we explain this supervention of the
object to the sensation, by a productive faculty set in motion by
an impulse; still the transition, into the percipient, of the object
itself, from which the impulse proceeded, assumes a power that can
permeate and wholly possess the soul,

And like a God by spiritual art,
Be all in all, and all in every part.

And how came the percipient here? And what is become of the wonder-
promising Matter, that was to perform all these marvels by force of
mere figure, weight and motion? The most consistent proceeding of the
dogmatic materialist is to fall back into the common rank of soul-and-
bodyists; to affect the mysterious, and declare the whole process a
revelation given, and not to be understood, which it would be profane
to examine too closely. Datur non intelligitur. But a revelation
unconfirmed by miracles, and a faith not commanded by the conscience,
a philosopher may venture to pass by, without suspecting himself of any
irreligious tendency.

Thus, as materialism has been generally taught, it is utterly
unintelligible, and owes all its proselytes to the propensity so common
among men, to mistake distinct images for clear conceptions; and vice
versa, to reject as inconceivable whatever from its own nature is
unimaginable. But as soon as it becomes intelligible, it ceases to be
materialism. In order to explain thinking, as a material phaenomenon, it
is necessary to refine matter into a mere modification of intelligence,
with the two-fold function of appearing and perceiving. Even so did
Priestley in his controversy with Price. He stripped matter of all its
material properties; substituted spiritual powers; and when we expected
to find a body, behold! we had nothing but its ghost--the apparition of
a defunct substance!

I shall not dilate further on this subject; because it will, (if God
grant health and permission), be treated of at large and systematically
in a work, which I have many years been preparing, on the Productive
Logos human and divine; with, and as the introduction to, a full
commentary on the Gospel of St. John. To make myself intelligible as
far as my present subject requires, it will be sufficient briefly to
observe. --1. That all association demands and presupposes the existence
of the thoughts and images to be associated. --2. That the hypothesis of
an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications
of our own being, which alone, according to this system, we actually
behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally,
perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness
of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres,
the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own
brains. --3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor
precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the
percipient, which at the more than magic touch of the impulse from
without is to create anew for itself the correspondent object. The
formation of a copy is not solved by the mere pre-existence of an
original; the copyist of Raffael's Transfiguration must repeat more or
less perfectly the process of Raffael. It would be easy to explain a
thought from the image on the retina, and that from the geometry of
light, if this very light did not present the very same difficulty.
We might as rationally chant the Brahim creed of the tortoise that
supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the
world, to the tune of "This is the house that Jack built. " The sic
Deo placitum est we all admit as the sufficient cause, and the divine
goodness as the sufficient reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why
is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern.
It is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of
pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and commands
us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or
palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters
of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, and pointing
to the sky with self-complacent grin [26] have appealed to common sense,
whether the sun did not move and the earth stand still.




CHAPTER IX

Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
conditions? --Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the existence of
a tacit compact among the learned as a privileged order--The Author's
obligations to the Mystics--to Immanuel Kant--The difference between the
letter and the spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of prudence
in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt to complete the Critical
system--Its partial success and ultimate failure--Obligations to
Schelling; and among English writers to Saumarez.


After I had successively studied in the schools of Locke, Berkeley,
Leibnitz, and Hartley, and could find in none of them an abiding place
for my reason, I began to ask myself; is a system of philosophy; as
different from mere history and historic classification, possible? If
possible, what are its necessary conditions? I was for a while disposed
to answer the first question in the negative, and to admit that the sole
practicable employment for the human mind was to observe, to collect,
and to classify. But I soon felt, that human nature itself fought up
against this wilful resignation of intellect; and as soon did I find,
that the scheme, taken with all its consequences and cleared of all
inconsistencies, was not less impracticable than contranatural. Assume
in its full extent the position, nihil in intellectu quod non prius
in sensu, assume it without Leibnitz's qualifying praeter ipsum
intellectum, and in the same sense, in which the position was understood
by Hartley and Condillac: and then what Hume had demonstratively deduced
from this concession concerning cause and effect, will apply with equal
and crushing force to all the other eleven categorical forms [27], and
the logical functions corresponding to them. How can we make bricks
without straw;--or build without cement? We learn all things indeed by
occasion of experience; but the very facts so learned force us inward on
the antecedents, that must be presupposed in order to render experience
itself possible. The first book of Locke's Essay, (if the supposed
error, which it labours to subvert, be not a mere thing of straw, an
absurdity which, no man ever did, or indeed ever could, believe,) is
formed on a sophisma heterozaetaeseos, and involves the old mistake of
Cum hoc: ergo, propter hoc.

The term, Philosophy, defines itself as an affectionate seeking after
the truth; but Truth is the correlative of Being. This again is no way
conceivable, but by assuming as a postulate, that both are ab initio,
identical and coinherent; that intelligence and being are reciprocally
each other's substrate. I presumed that this was a possible conception,
(i. e. that it involved no logical inconsonance,) from the length of time
during which the scholastic definition of the Supreme Being, as actus
purissimus sine ulla potentialitate, was received in the schools of
Theology, both by the Pontifician and the Reformed divines. The early
study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA
PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius
Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the
"De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could
boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and
whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all
contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the
Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood,
but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most
natural.

Why need I be afraid? Say rather how dare I be ashamed of the Teutonic
theosophist, Jacob Behmen? Many, indeed, and gross were his delusions;
and such as furnish frequent and ample occasion for the triumph of
the learned over the poor ignorant shoemaker, who had dared think for
himself. But while we remember that these delusions were such, as might
be anticipated from his utter want of all intellectual discipline, and
from his ignorance of rational psychology, let it not be forgotten that
the latter defect he had in common with the most learned theologians
of his age. Neither with books, nor with book-learned men was he
conversant. A meek and shy quietest, his intellectual powers were never
stimulated into feverous energy by crowds of proselytes, or by the
ambition of proselyting. Jacob Behmen was an enthusiast, in
the strictest sense, as not merely distinguished, but as
contra-distinguished, from a fanatic. While I in part translate the
following observations from a contemporary writer of the Continent, let
me be permitted to premise, that I might have transcribed the substance
from memoranda of my own, which were written many years before his
pamphlet was given to the world; and that I prefer another's words to my
own, partly as a tribute due to priority of publication; but still
more from the pleasure of sympathy in a case where coincidence only was
possible.

Whoever is acquainted with the history of philosophy, during the last
two or three centuries, cannot but admit that there appears to have
existed a sort of secret and tacit compact among the learned, not to
pass beyond a certain limit in speculative science. The privilege of
free thought, so highly extolled, has at no time been held valid in
actual practice, except within this limit; and not a single stride
beyond it has ever been ventured without bringing obloquy on the
transgressor. The few men of genius among the learned class, who
actually did overstep this boundary, anxiously avoided the appearance of
having so done. Therefore the true depth of science, and the penetration
to the inmost centre, from which all the lines of knowledge diverge to
their ever distant circumference, was abandoned to the illiterate and
the simple, whom unstilled yearning, and an original ebulliency of
spirit, had urged to the investigation of the indwelling and living
ground of all things. These, then, because their names had never been
enrolled in the guilds of the learned, were persecuted by the registered
livery-men as interlopers on their rights and privileges. All without
distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those,
whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only
extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the
most part, poor copies and gross caricatures of genuine inspiration; but
the truly inspired likewise, the originals themselves. And this for no
other reason, but because they were the unlearned, men of humble
and obscure occupations. When, and from whom among the literati by
profession, have we ever heard the divine doxology repeated, I thank
thee, O Father! Lord of Heaven and Earth! because thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes
[28]. No; the haughty priests of learning not only banished from the
schools and marts of science all who had dared draw living waters from
the fountain, but drove them out of the very Temple, which mean time the
buyers, and sellers, and money-changers were suffered to make a den of
thieves.

And yet it would not be easy to discover any substantial ground for
this contemptuous pride in those literati, who have most distinguished
themselves by their scorn of Behmen, Thaulerus, George Fox, and others;
unless it be, that they could write orthographically, make smooth
periods, and had the fashions of authorship almost literally at their
fingers' ends, while the latter, in simplicity of soul, made their words
immediate echoes of their feelings. Hence the frequency of those
phrases among them, which have been mistaken for pretences to immediate
inspiration; as for instance, "It was delivered unto me; "--"I strove
not to speak;"-"I said, I will be silent;"--"But the word was in my
heart as a burning fire;"--"and I could not forbear. " Hence too the
unwillingness to give offence; hence the foresight, and the dread of the
clamours, which would be raised against them, so frequently avowed in
the writings of these men, and expressed, as was natural, in the words
of the only book, with which they were familiar [29]. "Woe is me that I
am become a man of strife, and a man of contention,--I love peace: the
souls of men are dear unto me: yet because I seek for light every one
of them doth curse me! " O! it requires deeper feeling, and a stronger
imagination, than belong to most of those, to whom reasoning and fluent
expression have been as a trade learnt in boyhood, to conceive with what
might, with what inward strivings and commotion, the perception of a
new and vital truth takes possession of an uneducated man of genius.
His meditations are almost inevitably employed on the eternal, or the
everlasting; for "the world is not his friend, nor the world's law. "
Need we then be surprised, that, under an excitement at once so strong
and so unusual, the man's body should sympathize with the struggles of
his mind; or that he should at times be so far deluded, as to mistake
the tumultuous sensations of his nerves, and the co-existing spectres of
his fancy, as parts or symbols of the truths which were opening on
him? It has indeed been plausibly observed, that in order to derive any
advantage, or to collect any intelligible meaning, from the writings
of these ignorant Mystics, the reader must bring with him a spirit and
judgment superior to that of the writers themselves:

And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?

--a sophism, which I fully agree with Warburton, is unworthy of Milton;
how much more so of the awful Person, in whose mouth he has placed it?
One assertion I will venture to make, as suggested by my own experience,
that there exist folios on the human understanding, and the nature
of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and
celebrity, if in the whole huge volume there could be found as much
fulness of heart and intellect, as burst forth in many a simple page of
George Fox, Jacob Behmen, and even of Behmen's commentator, the pious
and fervid William Law.

The feeling of gratitude, which I cherish toward these men, has caused
me to digress further than I had foreseen or proposed; but to have
passed them over in an historical sketch of my literary life and
opinions, would have seemed to me like the denial of a debt, the
concealment of a boon. For the writings of these Mystics acted in
no slight degree to prevent my mind from being imprisoned within the
outline of any single dogmatic system. They contributed to keep alive
the heart in the head; gave me an indistinct, yet stirring and working
presentiment, that all the products of the mere reflective faculty
partook of death, and were as the rattling twigs and sprays in winter,
into which a sap was yet to be propelled from some root to which I had
not penetrated, if they were to afford my soul either food or shelter.
If they were too often a moving cloud of smoke to me by day, yet they
were always a pillar of fire throughout the night, during my wanderings
through the wilderness of doubt, and enabled me to skirt, without
crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief.